Psychotherapy and Spirituality

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Psychotherapy and Energy Work

The advantage of doing energy work with psychotherapy is doing so gives access to your soul and letting the soul tell you what you need to work on and to direct the work itself. I use the word soul here to mean that part of each of us that lives beyond our bodies and our personalities. You could call it the part of you that is one with God, or call it your higher self. It doesn’t matter what word you use, it’s the same part of each of us.

When I do energy work with my clients, I prefer to ask the client’s soul to direct the light to create and maintain the highest good and greatest growth available to the client at that time. That is exactly what happens, and it is immensely valuable to be able to access that – regardless of what the original goals were for the person. I have never had anything but helpful, positive results from this work with my clients.

I prefer to combine this kind of energy work with traditional psychotherapy. This is because the person will utilize the energy work best when they have their mind and emotions in line with what is best for them; when their resources are set up to work with and for themselves, not against themselves.

Some people do spiritual work without doing their own personal work and I find that doing that leaves us humans kind of lop-sided….making sometimes serious mistakes and not adding good to the world and the people around us despite our spiritual sophistication. I don’t want to add to that. I what I do to assist people in being more able to do their spiritual / cosmic work to make our world better for everyone.

I think of our spiritual jobs as the task of cleaning up the piece of humanity’s mess that we were handed down from our less than perfect parents. That means doing your own personal therapy work. When I was well on my way to doing the most of that for myself, I experienced a celebration in my spiritual home. The celebration wasn’t for me, personally, it was for the whole group of us. Some work had been done, or was at least a chuck of humanity’s mess (my mess) was well on it’s way to being cleaned up. Now I get to try to help others accomplish the same in their lives. What a worthwhile, joyful thing to pursue. I do so with great humility as I stumble across my limitations and foibles every day.

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Transpersonal Psychotherapy

I have been a psychotherapist for 40 years and have done energy work for most of that time. Now, as a Holy Fire III Reiki Master, I am letting the Madison community  know that I enjoy combining Reiki healing work with psychotherapy for many of my clients who are open and interested in both.

Usually people are happy to put forth “to my highest good” as their intention in their energy work, and therefore the energy work expands on the psychotherapy they are presently involved in and enhances their growth. Because the source of the information that is made available is beyond what I or my clients consciously are aware of, these sessions can be especially provocative and useful.

I have also been helpful for people have difficulties with illnesses, injuries and ongoing health problems.  I am happy to accept clients who are only looking for energy healing and not interested in taking on a  course of psychotherapy.

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Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Pursuit

I think it is everyone’s job, everyone’s spiritual job, to clean up the human mess your parents left you and not spread any more dysfunctional hurt around to any other people. So I think it is your job to do your own personal therapy so you don’t continue the mistakes your parents made with you – and I mean this not only with your own children, but first and primarily with your own children. Then with everyone you have contact with in your life.

Another way of saying the same  thing is that I think  it is everyone’s spiritual job to be the best version of themselves that they can be.  I don’t (at all ) mean doing this at every minute of every day, with a perfectionist pressure, but rather to become the best person you can be. That creates  another very competent, moral, high functioning person (in whatever way that is for you), so that you are making your personal best contribution to the world around you. You might  then be the best man in a construction crew – doing very good construction work and  being a good human being, kind, honest and decent, to those around you. Or perhaps you are a lawyer and could be unscrupulous and out to make the most money you can, or you could be  touching people’s lives, or a corporation’s life, with integrity that profits everyone involved. The world and all the people in it, need those of us who are in  the lucky enough position of having the money and time to indulge ourselves in personal growth – to do it.

I realize that doesn’t have to take the form of psychotherapy. But it is one path.

 

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Simple Energy Work Exercise

Practicing Mindfulness keeps your awareness of yourself and your immediate surroundings keen. Meditating on your breath, as Zen practitioners and others do, will increase your ability to focus your mind and your ability to make self awareness a habit.

Using The Observing Ego is a similar function although as you get more skilled, it can go deeper.  You can get adept  at knowing  about what your emotions are at any given time, by learning to read your own body energy.

Both of these functions encourage us to have a part of our awareness be located in the body where emotions reside and can be known: if you feel into a sensation in your body and keep your focus “smack dab” in the center of that sensation you will soon be able to identify what emotion that sensation represents. You can test your conclusion by making a simple statement and feeling what the energy does. For example – perhaps you notice a tightness  in your  throat and a heaviness in your solar plexus ( the area that is located just below your sternum).  You say to yourself or out loud “I’m sad about my job” and if nothing changes in your body energy you try “I’m sad about my dog”. When you say  the right thing, your energy will drop down and that is the affirmation that what you said is true.

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Traditional and Transpersonal Psychotherapy

I often have clients ask me “What is Transpersonal Therapy?” and I respond “It’s therapy that goes beyond the personal level – to the spiritual level.”  This article, written about me and published in Natural Awakenings Magazine, offers a nice explanation about the ways I offer Transpersonal Therapy to enhance traditional talk therapy. A link to the article is here.

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Spirit as Healer

There is a way to bring your your soul, or higher self,  into your  growth progress.  I call this work attunement because it allows  your personal self, ( your every day self) to  attune with your soul’s choices for you. Specifically, your soul guides a meditation process that is your soul’s choice of what you should be working on now – at the moment of the attunement.  Neither you nor I know where we will be lead and what material of yours will be attended to in the attunement.

If you are familiar with meditation you will likely find this process fairly easy to follow inside your self, in your energy field. If you are not at all familiar with meditation I will direct your attention to the places in your body where the work is occurring. Most people readily learn to follow the process and to ” read” their own energy.

Your job is to feel the process as it moves inside you.  My job is to act as a conduit to bring in sufficient universal light (or energy) for the process to occur, and to keep you informed as to what is happening. I occasionally will suggest something for you to say, out loud or silently, that brings your personal self into line with the directives of your soul.

The outcome of the work is  to create more inner ‘space’ in your ‘consciousness’ for new ways of being to emerge. These words may sound foreign to you now,  but once you have had the  experience of the attunement, you will experience, and therefore understand, what the words mean.

Contact me if you are interested and we will set up an hour appointment for your first attunement.

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JOYFULNESS IN YOUR EVERYDAY

Being so absorbed in something that you are beyond judgment or effort.

Being so in tune with what you are doing that everything flows.

Being able to feel without impediment.

Being able to act out of free choice.

Not needing names, acceptance.

Feeling love while you are experiencing it for another

I drove to work the other day and I was going my normal route,  worried about something.  I  exhaled to shake off my worrying.  At a stop sign, my car was facing a leafless tree  standing across the road from me (which I must have driven past a thousand times).  Suddenly I saw the tree. It  was  lit up in sunshine and was perfect in it’s shape. I was  stunned by its beauty. I had never seen it before.

I would like you to add your experiences and definitions of JOY to this blog.     Thanks, Ann