“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life.”

Excerpt From: Herman Melville. Moby-Dick.

 

Last week after many moons of struggle and dissatisfaction with my professional identity I finally decided not to call myself a talking therapist anymore. I decided to let go of my attachment to working within the known and safe realms of traditional psychotherapy. I decided to let go of the illusion of safety I was holding on to, in exchange for salvaging myself from living a horrifying “half-known life”.

 

– To my clients:

After studying Psychology for nearly a decade in the US and the UK’s top universities, the process of detaching from my assigned professional identity and surrendering into the unknown began a couple of years ago around the same time as I started my private practice as a psychotherapist in the City of London area. Time and time again I would welcome clients in my therapy room, mostly highly driven and burnt-out City lawyers and stock brokers, with similar grievances: “I don’t find life interesting anymore”, “I feel stressed and depleted”. Time and time again, drawing on my various psychological trainings, I would offer them cognitive interventions such as “let’s explore the negative beliefs which are holding you back” or “what coping strategies do you have? have you considered exercising and meditating for 10 minutes a day?”. But what I urgently wanted to know was different. My burning, albeit rhetorical, questions were “When have you stopped listening to your soul whispering to you through your heart’s true desires?”, “How long have you been ignoring your body’s wisdom signalling you to rest and self-reflect?”, “When did you start prioritising your long to-do lists and planned achievements over the outcries of your soul craving for you to take your body out in Nature, step barefoot on grass and smell the freshness of the woodland?” and finally “How ultimately cruel have you been to yourself, chasing after someone else’s dreams? perhaps of becoming a doctor, lawyer or of having a 6-figure income? And here you are hoping that I, a psychologist with a “proper” educational background, would give you yet another thing “to do”, a miraculous technique that would make it all better, so you can carry on staying in the rat race.

 

No. I am sorry, I am no longer willing to betray your soul and mine! by offering plasters for deep wounds of materialistic capitalist ideals. But truly, I am not sorry to stop colluding with you in staying stuck in a system which only sees you as a profit-making machine. I will not be reducing both of us from the multi-dimensional powerful creators that we are to norm-abiding one-dimensional soul-lost achievement-hungry limited beings. I will not betray us like that anymore. The love I have for both of us simply will not allow me to do so.

 

– To my colleagues:

As Einstein once famously said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

In doing the research for my doctoral thesis, through dissecting the literature and discussions with my colleagues and supervisors (i.e., psychologists and psychotherapists), I became painfully aware of how we have narrowed down healing options for our clients through viewing them and us alike as “talking heads”. Quite often, clients show up with numbed out emotionally suppressed bodies and depleted dull souls; recurring hyper-analytical heady conversations can dominate the sessions. Through embodied projections onto the therapists, clients may experience temporary relief, and if not aware, therapists may over time experience compassion fatigue for carrying those projections. This process poses a serious concern for the healing and integration of unconscious wounds that clients carry. We cannot heal what we are not willing to feel. Plus, patterns that are embedded in our bodies can only be released through the body. In my doctoral thesis I talk about the fear of the body in psychotherapy. The two interlinked cultures, one within the psychotherapy profession and the other in the wider society, might have contributed to the fear of the body in psychotherapy. Restrictive and rigid views of what it means to be “professional”, fear of lawsuits, concerns about being judged by colleagues, and the fear of entering the unknown and rather chaotic world of the body, are amongst the potential reasons why there is not enough engagement with the body in psychotherapeutic trainings and practices. Working with the body, and dare I say the soul, in therapy can act as an antidote to the dominant patriarchal culture of privileging verbal and rational knowledge over embodied intuitive knowing and the messy chaotic world of the embodied souls.

 

For those of us who have encountered the divine in the chaos of the body, it is no longer an option to turn away from the real and the juicy, towards the mind-created entanglements and endless analytic discussions of the talking heads. For those of us who have resided, even momentarily, in the vastness of that “insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy”, of the embodied soul, battling with and tricking the mind against itself is akin to revisiting primary school methods of learning while you are graduating from university. I get it, I have been there myself and heard my skeptical inner dialogue: “…but I am not spiritual, I don’t believe in hocus pocus, I want to only learn scientific proven methods….”. I am not here to convince anyone to do otherwise!

My deepest desire; however, is to invite a more open accepting dialogue with the embodied soul, that is with the totality of your being, free from what you believe is true or not. Changing, contradicting, battling or trying to push away and ignore our beliefs and unwanted thoughts are all the ways we might only be feeding what we do not wish to grow. Mind can only take you so far; at some point you have to leave it behind, with all your beliefs, ideas and assumptions about what the Truth is. You have to surrender.

 

– A personal note and an invitation:

Of course, I struggle with limiting beliefs as well. The old “not good enough” story pops up every now and then. I have had a total of 4 years in therapy, and yes, I had a deeply transformative experience with one of my therapists. But not because he had clever interpretations or offered state of the art techniques but because he was there for me in his totality, as an embodied soul, in a dynamic relationship with all of me. I can guarantee that did not happen because he had a fancy degree on his wall, but it happened because he met my soul. I am not apprehensive about using the word soul anymore, since I stopped fitting in as a talking therapist and moved away from breathless heady stagnant conversations about ways to trick the mind. I have found my way to my embodied soul through intensive training in Breathworks, Yoga, Shamanic and energy healing practices. After I started working with the breath and shamanic methods, I lost count of the number of clients who came to see me in my consulting room and all the while as they were talking, I kept thinking I know and see your suffering but until you open yourself up to receive and hear your soul and enter the unknown messy and dynamic territory of your body, I cannot help you. I value and love myself and the clients too much to carry on with dead heavy disembodied conversations with the hope that somewhere somehow down the line we can solve the problem with the same mind that created it in the first place.

 

So here is my invitation to you whether you are a client or a therapist or just an embodied soul without a label:

 

Be courageous, take the jump, leave your beliefs behind, the world is not changed by your beliefs but only by your embodied example. Step into an unimaginably beautiful and unfathomably healing journey; the journey of re-discovering your soul through your body. The invitation is always there, waiting for you. Until you breathe and until you feel the sacred in your bones, you have not ignited the full fire of your human potential. Zorba the Buddha, Osho’s ideal human, does not have to be a distant fantasy: a truly abundant, earthly grounded, passionately sensual being who is also deeply compassionate and inexplicably in love with the sacred in every moment, is a collective dream waiting to come true!

 

(image licensed by Adobe Stock)

 

Get in Touch, I would love to hear from you:

https://www.facebook.com/GaiaMysticHolisticHealing

Online School:

https://gaiaholistichealing.learnworlds.com

 

And here is the link for the Breathwork training:

http://www.first-breath.co.uk