Richard Harvey
connecting psychotherapy and spiritual growth for human awakening
Follow me on:
Your Questions on Therapy and Spirituality
Richard Harvey answers your questions about therapy, spirituality and spiritual growth. These have been grouped for ease of reading.
If you have a question you would like to ask Richard, please fill in the form in the right column. He will normally email you an answer to your question within a fortnight and post it on this page, if appropriate.
Spiritual Growth
- What role do you think the ancient spiritual teachers have today?
- What do you think of contemporary spiritual teachers?
- Do you think soul and spirit are separate? Or the same thing?
- Does the soul transmigrate?
- How do I know I am awakening?
- Is Self-Realization a one-off rather than an ever-unfolding process, and is therapy always the first step?
Counseling and Psychotherapy
- What is the difference between counseling and psychotherapy?
- How do you work with emotions in therapy?
- I am a long time sufferer of depression. I only recently turned to therapy. Why are more people than ever suffering from depression?
- What exactly is personal transformation? And how does it differ from change?
- How do you deal with the physical blocks of emotional expression?
- I feel very alone with a strange feeling of not belonging. Can you give me some advice?
Spiritual Growth
What role do you think the ancient spiritual teachers have today?
Gurus and spiritual teachers of the past are essentially of two kinds. First, there are the ones who have related their experience, and that’s what it is, their experience, for our entertainment and instruction. These accounts comfort, help and guide; we may even become attached to the authors, either through the written word or from accounts of their lives.
But the second kind is the more important to us. Here, the lives, biographies and/or writings and teachings are written from the point of view of the Absolute. They are therefore not personal. The lives of such beings challenge us and confront us with our humanness. They provide more than an account of personal experience; they embody divinity and are synonymous with the reality of transcendence itself. We may still feel in some kind of relationship to these authors, gurus and teachers, but their personality is merely the envelope, the outer ritual around the inner substance.
What do you think of contemporary spiritual teachers?
My criticism of many contemporary spiritual teachers is that they don’t adequately address the complexities of the human psyche—specifically the Western psyche. And what I mean by that is that we are embroiled in our small petty self, which is the product of ego, to the degree that, as many spiritual seekers know very well, the spiritual search is continually compromised by self-importance, acquisition and self-concern. That concern is based on emotional-behavioral patterns which are mostly unconscious; we may not even be aware of them, let alone know how to deal with them, or release ourselves from them.
When people are trying to raise consciousness, practice awareness and be better people, selfless and loving and so on, the lure of spiritual teachings can be so strong that it may be used to avoid the fundamental work of addressing the issues of our personality directly and healing our historical, emotional hurt, which is the work of personal therapy, as a necessary prelude to the spiritual journey.
Do you think soul and spirit are separate? Or the same thing?
This really depends on what discipline you are following, or what book you’re reading. I like Rudolf Steiner’s account whereby soul forces connect us to the world through the senses; it is how we experience things, how we connect inner and outer. Joseph Campbell also said something helpful when he indicated that primitive peoples looked downwards to the otherworldly and when we became more sophisticated (let’s not say civilized, but it coincides with urbanization) we looked up; downwards is the direction of the soul forces and upwards the direction of the spirit.
On the other hand, in translations of the Upanishads for instance the soul seems to be synonymous with the spirit. Taking it a step further, we have the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, or no-self, whereby neither soul nor spirit is ultimately real. Now, all of this is in the realms of theory, and other people’s accounts of the inner world. What is ultimately important to you is that these terms are meaningful, because they indicate something real, without that they’re not really of any use.
So, I would say to you what a Zen master once said to me when I asked him what the point of life was. He said, “I know what the point is for me, you have to find out what the point is for you.” Don’t get bogged down in description and theory; find out what the soul and the spirit are for you.
Does the soul transmigrate?
I believe the soul participates in many levels—individual, group, universal—and in the highest of these levels the soul is one with universal consciousness, as everything is. At death the soul returns to the undifferentiated sphere of consciousness out of which our individual awareness is a reflection. I like the illustration of the droplet and the ocean: parted momentarily from the vast body of water the droplet perceives itself as separate until it falls and merges with the sea.
How do I know I am awakening? I hear so much about it, but I don't seem to feel anything inside me changing. I'm sad because of this. I'm so sad.
Awakening is a process, rather than a single event. It is highly complex and many facets of the overall process must be in place at any one time. See my article on on the three stages of awakening for a summary of psycho-spiritual awakening for the modern seeker. Unless you have a therapist-guide and unless you are fully engaged and committed really very little can happen. Therefore you will not feel anything changing, because nothing is changing. Finally, feeling sad is one of the precursors and motivators for taking the journey and, as such, it should be honored and understood. The opportunity is here waiting for you to respond intelligently.
Dear Richard, I read your article about the Three Stages of Awakening and although I can see the valuable message you want to spread I think it makes some statements that can be very easily misunderstood by a person who doesn’t have a direct experience of what you are talking about. One example is that the way the final stage is described it sounds that it is a one-off rather than an ever-unfolding process. Another is when you mention that the first step is therapy. Awareness and self-introspection are not exclusive to therapy. What is your view?
Thank you for your question and observations. I will take into account what you have said, because it is important to me that what I write is understood and I wish to be clear. So your comments will inform any future rewrite of my article – thank you.
The Three Stages of Awakening is a model derived from 35 years of psycho-spiritual work with individuals, couples, groups and communities. I have written a book about this (see Human Awakening), so the article is a brief summary.
Taking your second example first, I consider psychotherapy essentially the specialist method towards developing and achieving awareness, personal authenticity and self-transcendence. Self-introspection in itself doesn’t concern me because it is a neutral term, which may be open to different interpretations. My experience and research leads me to conclude that at no other time throughout history—Eastern religions and Western philosophies included—has there been such a convergence of traditions and modern thought as the one that has led us to the refined and potent tools and methodologies of psycho-spiritual psychotherapy. Therefore I am happy to make the informed assumption that the first step in awareness for the modern seeker should be therapy with a skilled and capable therapist (which is in itself a further discussion of course).
Please understand that I do not say that therapy is the exclusive way, simply that it is the most advanced and specialist way. People will continue to grow and develop awareness by other means of course. But others will delude themselves, as people have always done. More than anything I would point out that we are living in an era of individualism where spirituality is blocked by the separate individual sense and this has become so entwined with spiritual endeavor that it has to be addressed as an issue in itself, something that even mystical spirituality is unable to speak of deeply enough. In psycho-spiritual psychotherapy we have a specific meeting of the personal and the transpersonal. My contribution has been to describe in detail exactly how the two processes are connected.
Your first example—the ever-unfolding idea of spiritual development—relates to the personality of the seeker, of the relationship of the individual character to the divine. While this is inevitably an ever-unfolding process, since it can never be completed, it has been used as an avoidance of the real issue, which is how to not ever really make the leap into Self-realization, which is itself outside of space, time and personality. Therefore the ever-unfolding process model of spiritual development is like the ever-unfolding process of character exploration which justifies never-ending personal therapy and neither is tenable in my view.
Counseling and Psychotherapy
What is the difference between counseling and psychotherapy?
This is a sticky question, but I think we basically agree that counseling is associated with symptomatic material with a possibly short-term commitment, while psychotherapy deals with root causes and longer commitment. Having said this, any individual counselor may be working on very deep levels, which certain psychotherapists may shy away from. However, when we talk about depth psychotherapy—open-ended sustained exploration of the psyche over a period of years—we are definitely drawing a distinction.
How do you work with emotions in therapy?
With a great deal of respect for what they reveal. Emotions are key in anyone’s therapy. Generally we allow the emotions to surface, accept them and let them change, intensify and signify events and trauma in your life and then through this process allow them to flow or release. We have to let them go, not get too attached to them, or to what they reveal or what they hide.
Emotions are not an end in themselves, however compulsive they may be. Essentially, because most of us are stuck in some past dynamics and limited and controlled by the influence of past experience, our emotional center is inauthentic, which is a way of saying that we are creating projections of past events, because we have trained ourselves to perceive them in everything and everybody.
So for example, a woman whose father was aggressive finds herself repeatedly attracted to angry men, in spite of the trouble they cause her; or a person whose self-esteem took a battering in early life seems unable to empower themselves to progress in their career.
The interesting thing about people who complete their personal therapy is that they locate their emotions in a whole new center of spontaneity and depth, where their emotions become present and vivid, rather than the product of conditioning and habitual responses.
I am a long time sufferer of depression. I only recently turned to therapy. Why are more people than ever suffering from depression?
Depression is becoming more prevalent as people look inward in search of a sense of meaning when they feel that there is no depth and significance in their outer life. Depression manifests as low moods, misery, despair, hopelessness, futility, lack of meaning, low energy, tiredness, lack of interest, lack of pleasure.
It may be triggered by stress from losing a job, the end of a relationship, illness, side effects of medication or recreational drug-taking, feelings of guilt or inadequacy. If you are in a job that seems pointless to you, if your relationship is not growing, if you are a young person training for a career that you don’t consider important, or if you reach middle years and look back without a sense of pride or relevance or effectiveness about what you’ve done in your life, you may feel depressed. And these feelings can lead you to despair, dejection and profound disillusionment.
How you respond to depression is crucial, because it can be a key to deep personal exploration. Feelings that have been held down in the psyche often emerge initially in negative form. Depression is a call to descend into the inner realms and uncover long-held fears, needs and anger that may have been resisted for a long time.
What exactly is personal transformation? And how does it differ from change?
When you have persisted in personal therapy to the point where you know yourself more or less inside out and there are no surprises left you have undergone what I have called theJourney Around the Self”. At this point, because you may have become so invested in the search for yourself, the temptation is to go round again, to take a further ride.
This is a big mistake and yet the personal growth industry and therapists in individual and group practices are somewhat invested in this for obvious reasons. If you are fortunate enough to have wise counsel, someone who can discern what needs to be done rather than what you want to do, then the way is now open for personal transformation.
Transformation, in the way I use the term, is distinct from change. Changes take place throughout personal therapy; some major, some minor, some have lasting effect, some give fleeting pleasure. But transformation depends on you reaching the point of personal wholeness and then going further. There is very little ego reward in this, so people are inclined to go round again with another therapist, or using another discipline or method, or quit therapy and inner work altogether. But if they persist and take a further step they encounter the very edges of themselves where their authenticity lies.
So, the transformation, which is utterly permanent and qualitatively different from any previous change in personality work, is the emergence of the authentic self. This authenticity enables us to relate genuinely, and in a heart-felt way to others and the world, because our personal issues are now resolved and we have love and attention to spare.
How do you deal with the physical blocking of emotional expression in the body, for example, the diaphragm, the sternum, the lower back?
Contractions in particular areas of the body relate to the overall system of physical energy. So I deal with them with an awareness of the bigger picture or total flow that the specific blockings are inhibiting. Particular emotions or constellations of emotions are specifically associated with these areas you mention. I would rather not say what they are, or may be, because it is important and essential that clients discover these as far as possible for themselves.
Methods to unblock physical contractions of emotional expression and experience include body awareness, catharsis, allowing, bodywork in the form of “hands on”, resistance, empathetic feeling (feeling together with the therapist), visualization (what the block or contraction looks like, what texture, shape or color it is), breathing to gently clear the block and in time allow a full flow of feeling awareness, exploration of historical as well as contemporary causes or associations with the armoring or protection from full feeling experience.
Hello Richard, at this moment in my life I feel very alone and do not know who to talk to about my interior feelings. In my work I can solve the problems of others but I can not solve my own. Right now I feel like everything I've learned along the way has vanished. I'm not depressed; it’s a strange feeling of not belonging to this dimension that gives me a feeling of being in a “stalemate”. Sometimes doing nothing can be a remedy, but daily life must go on. Have you ever gone through moments like this? If you can give me some advice I would be grateful!
I encourage you to speak to someone you trust, a practitioner who is perhaps further along the road than you or who at least you respect. It is surely a rule of therapy and healing that our own inner issues are stimulated and intensified to compel us to do for ourselves the very thing we encourage in others—to heal and become clear. The issues you write of are in some cases advanced ones for healers—feeling alone, acting for others but not ourselves, vanishing certainties, not belonging. In my experience it is a call to the healer in you to serve humankind more deeply and more purely by taking care of yourself first! Find someone you can confide in, love yourself enough to devote time to this process of inner clearing and you will become a more wonderful practitioner than you are even today! And yes I and all of us who heal have most definitely experienced times like these.
Thanks Richard, your words comfort me. I tried to confide in friends, therapists, psychologists, but they almost laughed, saying, but how do you do your job when you don’t know the solutions? Actually they looked at the problem only from a psychological point of view, not from the spiritual point of view. That's why I confided in you. Is it that why we have to take these steps through suffering? Thank you.
Suffering is key, yes. But more important is our attitude to suffering, or what role it takes in our lives. Suffering is blessing, because it shows us where we are stuck, where we are hanging on and so it provides us with the means to let go. For the mature healer suffering is to be met with willingness, honor and gratitude—and this is what she must teach others.
Right, the suffering is the key! I am afraid of suffering, the trauma I experienced as suffering through the disease of my parents and friends. Perhaps this is why suffering appears often in my life, now about myself, physically and spiritually. Suffering is static, impotence. So far I have kept it at bay by helping others not to suffer, perhaps like you said, it's time to deal with it, make it a point of strength and give more attention to myself. I think that awareness is the first step toward healing. I am so grateful to you, thank you.
Share this page
To Receive Updates to these Questions:
RSS Subscribe Subscribe by Email
Real Inner Change and World Change
Ask your question
Please keep your question brief (maximum 200 characters).
Your question will be emailed back to you at the email address you entered, and the answer will be emailed you, normally within a fortnight.
Required fields*
Please note that by submitting your question you are agreeing to both your question and the answer being posted anonymously on this site.
Your email address will not be given to any third parties (see our privacy statement).