Essential Wholeness Meditation and Psychotherapy
Putting the Pieces of the Puzzle Together
Essential Wholeness Meditation and Psychotherapy has evolved out of forty years of practicing meditation and psychotherapy. It recognises that different people and traditions hold different pieces of the puzzle and when we can bring them all together we get a more complete understanding of how to help ourselves and others realise our human and spiritual potentials.
Ken Wilber, in his comprehensive attempt to define an integral psychology starts with one major rule:
Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody—including me—has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honoured, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace… But every approach, I honestly believe, is essentially true but partial, true but partial, true but partial.[i]
In studying and applying spiritual teachings and psychotherapeutic methods to my own life and through assisting my clients, I have sought to understand what works best with whom and why. As psychotherapy has evolved, the gap between these fields—spiritual enquiry and psychotherapy—has narrowed.
The gaps exist, I feel because of major differences in the contexts in which spiritual enquiry and psychotherapy are set and in the jargon each uses. Essential Wholeness is the result of following paths of integration through the learning and application of various psychotherapeutic orientations including: Ericksonian Hypnosis and Psychotherapy, NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), Self Relations Therapy, Solution Focused Therapy, Systemic Family Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), Somatic Psychotherapies, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique, TFT (Thought Field Therapy), NeuroSemantics and Jungian Psychotherapy.
My exploration in the field of psychotherapy has coincided with my journeying through the three schools of Buddhism: Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana. I’ve been an avid student of A Course in Miracles, been touched deeply by the teachings of Carlos Castaneda, Osho, Adyashanti and, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, Ramana Maharshi, Gangaji and Eli Jaxon Bear.
Most teachings on the Enneagram do their best to describe a coherent integration of modern psychology with traditional spiritual teachings, usually from mystical Christian, Sufi and/or Buddhist perspectives. Like Wilbur, in this book I build on the foundations of all of these spiritual and psychotherapeutic traditions and try to articulate what are the common factors, what are the most accurate descriptions and useful methods and how do they all fit into an integrated model.
In my study of Buddhism, I noted that Buddha, like a skilled psychotherapist, understood that different people require different teachings and methods to free themselves from suffering and realize their potential. While the three major vehicles for realization are Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana, most Buddhist and Western psychotherapy integrations appear to be drawn primarily from the Hinayana and Mahayana traditions.
However, with the deeper teachings of the Vajrayana school there is an opportunity to help people realize the fullness of their deeper nature by directing their attention to not only the objects of mindfulness (breath, body sensations, emotions, thoughts and external sensory perceptions), but also towards that which is noticing all those things.
As Lama Ole Nydahl says, “The radiance of mind itself is much richer than the conditioned experiences of joy we all strive for. The best moments in life are are actually gifts and appear when beings forget themselves. There are situations where feelings of separation disappear, like being in the arms of our loved ones—the timeless moment of ‘being one’.”[ii] As Sogyal Rinpoche says, meditation is the mind turned inward resting in its own true nature[iii]. Or as Ramana Maharshi, speaking on working with the mind said, “Let what comes come, let what goes go; find out what remains.” I like to add, “And rest as that.”
In his explorations into the nature of consciousness, psychiatrist Milton Erickson discovered for himself and passed on to his clients the experience of “being nobody, doing nothing, in the middle of nowhere.” This is the experience of what
Almaas refers to as the void, or the Buddhists refer to as Nirvana. It occurs when you go into deep sleep, but you’re not awake to notice. It is what Ken Wilber refers to as the causal realm or the One Taste. That formless space of awareness is always present whether we are awake, asleep, dreaming, aware of our senses or engaged in thinking. In mindfulness approaches, it is what we are learning to perceive from, when we allow everything to be as it is.
In searching for what relieves suffering and what helps people realize their potential, many therapists have recognized the importance of helping people access the essential ground of being. Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is an integration of approaches which grew from modeling the work of psychotherapists Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and linguist Noam Chomsky . NLP-trained Brandon Bays[iv] has created a therapy known as “The Journey” that guides people to the qualities of being through the direct experience of emptiness, using what NLP calls Drop Through Technique.[v] Very similar work is described in The Void, by A.H. Almaas.[vi] Connie Ray Andreas[vii] developed an NLP technique of accessing core states of being by dialoging with alienated parts of one’s psyche.
Spirit, Matter and Essential Wholeness Meditation
There is form and there is formlessness, otherwise known as matter and spirit. We call ourselves human beings. Our humanity is the world of form, of things coming into existence and going out of existence. Our body comes and goes, our activities come and go and our thoughts and feelings come and go. All the comings and goings of our lives happen in the pregnant space of existence—sometimes referred to as emptiness. In Sanskrit, it is called Shunyata and in other traditions: Presence, Spirit or Being. It is the ground of awareness. It’s not personal, it is universal.
Gregory Bateson described Mind as being immanent, not located in individual; rather individual human beings, like all other forms of the universe, are constantly coming into form. We “play around” for a while before dissolving, dying or disintegrating. All forms are impermanent and always changing, evolving or falling into decay. Whereas the space in which all happens remains unchanged. We have a sense of this on a personal level when we open our eyes in the morning. There is a sense that whatever is looking out through our click to continue reading