meditation as psychotherapy

[Rajan Arulganesan]

Is it harmful in the long run for one's spiritual development to use yoga and meditation techniques as psychotherapeutic tools? I have always been tempted to seek out a yoga instructor or meditation advisor to calm my psychological and emotional unbalance, but,been fearful that this may simply treat the superficial 'existential' crisis and create a false sense of well being. The doctors are always Prozac happy and I do not want to go down this route. Is it better, in the long run to persevere with the various psychological phenomena that plagues you so that you may eventually work out what you are about? Any thoughts are welcome.

[Michael Larkin]

Hi Rajan,

There are possible medical implications in your query, Rajan, and I for one wouldn't feel competent to address those.

I know that decades ago when I had a severe depressive episode, I took myself off to the doctor, and duly swallowed the pills he dispensed (not Prozac!) for as long as he advised me so to do. I'm very glad I did, and they definitely helped me recover. There wouldn't have been any point trying to tough it out - for all I know, I could still be doing that without his help.

As I mentioned in a reply to you elsewhere, there are all sorts of things that come at us. It's very useful to have as objective a viewpoint as possible, and understand what each thing is. Sometimes it’s a psychological issue, sometimes an “animal” issue, sometimes a spiritual issue, and if we’re not careful, we’ll mix them up and deal with them inappropriately.

The observing self is something that helps one develop commonsense – or maybe, commonsense helps one develop the observing self. Or both reciprocally. We need to keep our feet on the ground even when our heads seem to be in the clouds...

[Rajan Arulganesan]

Thank you Michael, it is more difficult when one 'discovers' spirituality at a stage when they are not psychologically grounded and this is very true of me because as you mentioned, I am not able to differentiate among the various mind states that I go through. Despite this, I am not completely debilitated by this, its just confusion I don't think its clinical and I am going to try and be calm and observational.

[Mike MacLeod]

One of the most troubling aspects of the Path these days is that modern life is so hypnotic that often the most desperate people wind up on the doorstep to it. This makes real problems for groups.

As one of them, I had decades of therapies of one sort or another. My view now is that A.H. Almaas is correct that addressing psychological issues is essential to liberation, and in fact working on oneself is of a piece rather than handling different issues.

I have had dozens of different drugs, legal and otherwise, in pursuit of some stability. In my case Zoloft made it possible for me to hold my job longer than I would have otherwise, but the real problem is finding work I can do that doesn't require drugging myself to get through it. Not much luck on that front. I've been out of work since February.

In passing, it seems that doctors are not sure what their drugs do. Zoloft is classed as an antidepressant, but it actually works by buffering all signalling between nerves (an SSRI). So it is an anti-mania drug as well, and cured my vasomotor rhinitis as well.

VR is a funny little disorder where the lining of your nose is hypersensitive to stimuli such as cold, heat, odors, and so forth. And sneezing, so I would get these sessions where I would sneeze two or three dozen times in a row. It's like a sneezing version of hiccups.

The Zoloft interrupts this; I can feel the irritation and the sneeze is triggered, but the impulse dies out before the end of the cycle. A graphic illustration of what Selective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitors do.

Now that I'm not working, though, I don't have to take it to carry on and I don't.

[Kareana Kee]

Hi Rajan and Michael,

I think this is a very good question you ask and relates well to thoughts I have also been having. Actually i raised this question of sorts to my teacher who reminded me "the group" was not therapy. Well at least as I understand it not the kinda of therapy where we talk about how we feel and get loads of empathy and understanding (oh god i miss those days:)). Cause that isnt how the 'real' world works. It is interesting after years of therapy i noticed my therapist gently set me free and show to me she trusted me to stand on my own two feet emotionally, but I always knew she was there if i needed it, but found myself increasingly trusting myself to calm and soothe myself or reach for what was needed. Interestingly though I have found the Sufi practice and the way seems to fly a little in the face of what I learnt in therapy and a lot of self doubt and despair have returned and I feel unhinged a lot of the time. I will give an example. One of the things I spent years learning in therapy was a flight response. It was very difficult for me to recognise and leave abusive or exploitative situations. Know I find myself in a sprititual group with a person to whom i have a history that I have felt hurt and betrayed by. Everytime I attend the group i feel intense humiliation, or if I am able to tune that person out enough not to notice them, I then feel "bad" like im not being a very good person; im abusing them by ignoring them. Of course 9 out of 10 times I drive home in tears and wonder why i keep going back there!!! And I titter on ringing my therapist, but I'm worried she will tell me "get out of there" (and she may not). Yet there is a part of me that know's my learning lies in staying, in taking responsibility for myself and not flying away.

Meditation seems to give us access and presence to our shadow side and that by it's nature is not going to be a pleasant experience. Having said that only we can hold our feet to the flame. I dont think I could have done this prior to my years of therapy. What ive learnt is that it's not the having of emotions that is problematic but the ability to accept and tolerate them. Sufism certaininly unceremoniously teaches you how to do this. I also think teachers generally choose students who they assess as being up for it.

Since doing practice's I find my sensitivity is magnified 100 fold, I often cry which funnily i dont see as such a bad thing anymore, i didnt use to be able to cry. And I go through phases of not wanting to socialise or leave the house but just be alone with myself, which is the opposite to before of not being able to stand to be alone.

At the end of the day you are the best judge.

And everything passes.

[Kareana Kee]

Hi mike we must have been posting at the same time...yes I know what you mean about finding the kinda job that you dont have to drug yourself for. Id be tempted to go on a rant about the capitalist, consumer cuolture we live in that dehumanises everyone and places incredible pressures on people to have to live a certain way that is far removed from our intuitive selves. But it is probably enough to say I think I know what you mean! I guess that is where trying to be in the world but not of it comes in...easier said then done.

[Mike MacLeod]

Hi Kareana,

I agree about the dehumanization. It's reached an appalling level in the USA.

I agree that groups are not therapy; it's more that therapy is the pre-group work necessary to be able to work in that environment.

In all these years I have yet to get to that level. I simply can't interact with other people, which was the root of my problems at work all these years. What is even stranger is that I don't understand why this is. To me, human relationships are often laced with cruelty, lies, arrogance, and other poisons. I have never been able to shake these off, or recover easily from them, though I return to more or less normal in hours or days rather than years, as was the case up until I was about 40.

[Michael Larkin]

For those who like to think of themselves as being “a seeker”, there is a subtle trap, and one that I admit to having fallen into in the past. We may not like to think that our problems are psychological, but that they are spiritual. We aren’t just encountering a psychological issue, such as a neurosis, but a significant spiritual challenge. So what do we do? Maybe we hie ourselves hence to yoga classes, meditate or read self-help books or whatever. Whilst seeking therapy, we kid ourselves we are seeking nirvana.

Trying to fix a problem in itself is fine, but we can’t cure the nose with a remedy for the ear. There is no substitute for discerning what the problem actually is. Having said that, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the problem, whether it’s psychological or spiritual, needs attending to. And here’s one thing: even if we tackle a problem in the wrong way, it may not be entirely useless. At some point, there’s the chance one will realise the diagnosis and remedy is wrong. It may take years, but it can happen. And it’s through this process of finding things out the hard way that we may learn the art of discernment. It may sometimes be the only feasible way, in fact.

If I sound sometimes like I have long been in some lofty state where I can clearly see what is what, that’s not the case. I’ve spent years and years learning the hard way to discern one thing from another. Looking back, I see that that was more or less inevitable. We all start off with the particular hand we are dealt with, and have little choice but to play it. It doesn’t help that our societies are as clueless as we are about things. No two experts in the fields of psychology and psychiatry will entirely agree. In religion and spirituality, there is also much diversity, much that seems diametrically opposed.

With doubtless a few exceptions, in the end, only we ourselves can come to discern what the real issue is and hence how to deal with it. We may have a friend, physician or guru who can tell us in so many words what it is, but the words may never really sink in until we verify them through experience. We all have to make our own mistakes, and there’s no way round that.

Very occasionally, it does happen that someone will say the right thing to us at precisely the right time, and all of a sudden the scales will fall from our eyes. But more often than not, when the scales do fall, we realise belatedly that words spoken (or even thought by ourselves) years earlier, had we truly been able to listen to them, would have been able to liberate us.

In the end, I think it’s a spectrum. Physical, psychological and spiritual are on the same continuum. However, like the electromagnetic spectrum, it’s very useful to be able to differentiate the regions - visible, infra-red, radio, microwave, ultra-violet, and so on. Very useful, as it were, to be able to sit inside a isolating chamber with an aperture over which we can place different kinds of filtering device to determine the nature of incoming radiation and deal with it appropriately. This is one very crude analogy of the still centre, the observer or witness. We are always there, but the aperture is large and everything enters unfiltered. No wonder sometimes we are confused!

[Michael Larkin]

Mike,

I suppose there may be individual differences, but in my case, therapy in the psychological sense has been a by-product of my spiritual seeking. If you seek therapy with a bone-fide therapist, I suppose you might get it, and I'm not denying that. But if you seek therapy whilst kidding yourself you're seeking spirituality, you seem to get neither. On the other hand, if you truly seek spirituality (or maybe Truth is a better word), you sometimes get therapy without understanding how or why you got better.

This is my one reservation about Almaas. He seems to place quite a lot of emphasis on what appears essentially to be a psychotherapeutic approach. Maybe that works for some, I can't say, but for me, it seems it could possibly be putting the cart before the horse, at least when one's ultimate aim is spiritual rather than therapeutic.

[Kareana Kee]

Maybe this is a case of all paths lead to Rome? I sought therapy through having no where left to turn, somewhere along this path I came to understand a 'reality' beyond me and my ego and for the first time it seemed possible there was some meaning to all this sufferring or maybe more accurately all this sufferring was largely self imposed. It is interesting for at the time many of my friends were following a Buddhist path and were a little bit scornful of my self indulgent therapy. We often laugh about it know, because they have all hung up their robes are in therapy and im following a spirtual practice. There can be no doubt somehow these things are inter related. It seems to me the psychological issues we have to deal with do impact on our ability to be present with the One, and meditation will bring all of that to the surface. yet it also seems that being present with Allah, or at least the intention of it, seems to somehow have a healing effect. Some how grasping our human situation in it's entirety and remembering who we are changes everything. It is an interesting dilemma thought. I am a big fan of a guy who writes in the way of being human, that we must be careful not to collapse the various realms, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual etc that each dimension needs to be dealt with in that dimension and that becoming fully human is about embracing all theses parts of ourselves. I will include an exert here:

In order to understand the “self” and its connection to the underlying reality, I realized that “we” must first acknowledge that we are human. Understanding first and foremost our full human nature becomes important if we wish to stabilize our awareness of the void which is the underlying unity of our Quantum nature.

All too often in the past, i first sought my quantum nature by following psycho-spiritual disciplines, only to be “pulled out” or “forward “into and by my human nature. In fact, many paths of knowledge suggest it is our human nature that gets in the way of discovering and experiencing the underlying reality of our quantum nature. In Yoga-land for instance, emotions such as anger, jealousy, greed, lust and hatred are referred to as the five enemies. According to Buddah all pain arises because of desire. The dilemma seems to be that it is human nature to desire. In fact more pain is caused by resistence to desiring. After all what is desire but an impulse that comes as the EMPTINESS or underlying unity pulsates and contracts to become something. Quantum psychology sees pain as being caused by substituting biological desires, which are “have to’s” for psychological ‘wants’.
However in many spiritual systems, the body’s myriad emotions and basic human experiences (which are wired into the bodies flight/fight nervous system) are seen as undesirable, even bad and something to be gotten rid of, transformed and healed, thus implying they take us further away from our universal nature, commonly called God, the VOID, UNDIFFERENTIATED CONSCIOUSNESS or the SELF.
What i discovered however was the opposite. Emotional and psychological states are part of being human. States of compassion and unconditional love are qualities of our ESSENCE. This understanding led me to see that within the underlying unity of Emptiness there are different dimensions of manifestation, with different functions. And although each dimension is connected to and can influence other dimensions, each has its own function.
Briefly these eight dimensions are: One the external world, two the thinking world, three the emotional world, four the biological or animal world, five Essence, six, the no state of I AM, seven archetypes of collective UNCONSCIOUS, and eight the not I I.
How are some problems created? Unfortunately our awareness of the different functions of the dimensions becomes confused. When this occurs, we confuse one dimensions function with another dimensions function. This causes confusion and pain. For example attempts to change the thinking or emotional dimensions: trying to make them more unconditional loving, compassionate and forgiving, confuses the function of these dimensions. Rather these are the qualities of ESSENCE. Therefore we must understand the different dimensions of consciousness and their functions.
In this way we can allow each dimension of humanness to have its function, without trying to change, override, overcome, or trade in favour of the other. To illustrate it is the function of my hand to write, my mouth to take in food. Obviously my mouth and are connected as they are part of my body but have different functions. In the same way we often try to reform our animal nature (lust) or emotional dimension (anger) by being celibate or unconditionally loving. We can see that it rarely works. Why not? Because being unconditionally loving is not part of our animal or emotional nature, rather it is a function of our essence.
No dimension can be overcome or gone beyond in favour of another.....
Quantum physics has shown us beautifully that everything is made of the same substance. With this knowledge, how can anything be inherently bad, something to be gotten rid of, or something that can lead us away from our true nature? We must therefore appreciate all of our dimensions of being human with the understanding that each dimension has a function, and let each dimension work according to its nature. This means not substituting or trying to overcome one dimension, like using ESSENCE to overcome the emotional dimension. This is the way of the Human, to understand and allow all the dimensions to function, without resistance, they way they were meant to function. This can be called the development of a FUNCTIONAL AWARENESS. FUNCTIONAL AWARENESS can be defined as the ability to place awareness on any one dimension, all dimensions simultaneously, or no dimensions, until awareness itself disappears in the VOID, rather than having awareness habitually fixated on only one or two dimensions.
Nisargadatta Maharaj once asked a man: “Why are you coming to see me?” “Because the guru takes away the negative and gives us our true nature,” he said. Maharaj replied: “There is nothing anyone can take away from you or give to you which you are not already since there is only THAT ONE CONSCIOUSNESS.”
All this considered I am proposing that as humans we have an animal nature, a thinking nature, an emotional nature that contains feelings, and an ESSENCE with its essential qualities, etc. Awareness “unfortunately” seems to get fixated on one or two dimensions. These dimensions need to BE without interference in order to liberate awareness which might help to discover who you are. Stated another way, Quantum psychology defines spirituality as the realisation that there is only ONE substance, then true spirituality must include everything from emotions, to thoughts and from fantasies to the physical body – since there is only THAT ONE SUBSTANCE.

[Michael Larkin]

Kareana,

Nice to see that someone else agrees with me about the need to differentiate one thing from another, but at the same time, honour the different aspects of what is essentially the same substance. Who was it said it, incidentally?

Pedro,

A lovely story. I recognise the underlying structure of the process being described; I think it goes on inside us, with one part playing the mad prince, and the other the wise man. For me, the wise man is, once again, the observer. It gets to know us more and more intimately, and challenges our self-perception. We're all mad princes playing at being chickens in a mad, mad world. As we put on the pants and shirt, and so on, we gradually evolve, become that bit more human, and that's where I think the therapeutic by-product arises - allegorised by feeling warmer, etc.