Psychotherapy and Incarnational Spirituality: A Sketch

Psychology, which properly includes everything in the human mind and experience, can seem like the Blob from the old sci fi movie of that name. Psychology will absorb into itself whatever it encounters–from economics and cooking to astrology and energy healing. This is why therapists of all stripes keep adding stripes. We take courses and trainings and we keep learning and using new perspectives. If it’s good for humans, we’ll take it! And we’ll blend it into our work. So of course psychotherapists, like other healers, apply Incarnational Spirituality to the therapeutic situation.

As a psychologist in full time private practice, I have been enormously helped and inspired by I.S. But then (full disclosure) I met David in 1983 and my training in Clinical Psychology only began in 1986. I was already fruitfully challenged by several perspectives, including Anthroposophy, energy healing (Brugh Joy!) and Zen Buddhism, that would not be found in my psychological textbooks. I.S. has continued to enrich my own development personally; it informs how I co-create the therapeutic field with my patient; it gives content that I sometimes offer explicitly to the patient.

There are at least three distinctive features of I.S. that are of both theoretical interest and practical help in therapy: 1) the Living Environment, 2) the Self-Creating Self, and 3) the Instreaming of Improvisation.

1. Living Environment

Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Family Systems, as well as current movements like Internal Family Systems, Neurofeedback, EFT and EMDR, have little to say about the non-human surround. I.S. takes this surround very seriously, and directs us to the life within the man-made environment as well as the kingdoms and processes of nature. So it involves us in the earth, in the world, but not the world as understood by natural science alone.

The “life” of the I.S. living environment is the energetic life that is aware and intentional at various levels, and that is not necessarily co-extensive with the biological processes or even the physical presence of the elements of the earth. When English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott contemplated his death, he found himself praying, “Let me be alive when I die!” He meant a kind of life that includes consciousness even if the physical body is on its way out or gone altogether.

This elemental life of our surround can be felt quite directly and simply by many people, perhaps by everyone. It overlaps with the chi of Tai Chi, the energy of the chakras, elemental beings, and the sense children often have that there really is no inanimate matter. It can be derided as anthropomorphism or animism, but it is simply there, and I.S. offers exercises and perspectives that bring this ambient life to life for us.

It matters for therapy because, above all, it means that human beings are never as alone and alienated as the dominant physicalist, materialist perspective on the universe would have us believe. Becoming alert to the life in our immediate environment gives us an anchor and an interlocutor at all times, and a felt sense that life is something co-created between ourselves and a responsive surround. When we feel into what is going on around us, in the furniture, the plants, the air, the landscape, we can help to move the flow of events in a positive direction. The living universe is one in which we are active rather than passive, and activity is a key to health–even if it is the activity of slowing down, noticing and releasing mental habits, and smelling the roses. Well-being begins in participatory activity.

In our time, nature is threatened as never before, a process in which we are all victims and perpetrators. Climate anxiety now accompanies or underlies many of the issues patients face, and this is a trend that is on the rise. There is no one right way to respond to these anxieties in oneself or one’s patients. Yet when we become aware of the subtle life around us, we can collaborate with it in new and surprising ways that enhance the healing, wholeness, and creativity of the earth. This sensitivity to not-exclusively-biological life is part of our possible response to climate change issues as they grow ever more evident.

The living environment has a particular application in the therapeutic setting. An I.S.-informed practitioner is likely to work toward a healing and holding environment, an energetic chalice that promotes the therapeutic process. Also, this living environment of I.S. is tipped toward positivity and potential (an open system). It is good, while the patient may too often feel that existence itself is a closed and hostile system. Exercises like the Touch of Love, Innocence, and Soma to Aura, point the therapist, and may point the patient, toward this life-filled, life-giving direction.

Here’s an example.

Since COVID, I have conducted therapy sessions while walking in the woods near my home in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts. Sometimes patients walk with me. More often, I am walking alone and talking to the patient on my cell phone. But I am not alone. The woods around me are filled with life and presence. I greet this presence and am grateful for it. It helps me in what I say or how I listen to the patient. At times, I all but disappear and it feels as if it is the forest itself, or me-plus-forest, that is speaking with the patient on the other end of the line. Most patients appreciate it, and some get inspired to come and walk with me.

2. The Self-Creating Self

In most schools of psychology and even spirituality, there is either a self to be found or a supposed ultimate absence of self.

The self to be discovered in classical psychoanalysis and contemporary trauma theory tends to be a damaged and scarred self. A narrative of uncovering accompanies this idea of a broken person. Strangely enough, uncovering and over-asserting the broken persona is similar in structure to what happens in some spiritual orientations if they look to discover an eternal and glorious self. The common denominator is the idea that the self is already there, and we just have to go and find it. Or find it and put it through its paces to heal it.

In a slightly mis-understood Buddhism, slogans like “no self” (anatta) may suggest that there is no individual identity at all; there is no one ultimately at home; we are just karmic processes working their way out. This is close in structure to a completely physicalist take on human individuality as an illusion or an epiphenomenon from brain activity which operates according to physical laws.

But there is another way, a more radically empowering way. A different take on the idea of “anatta” or “no self” may point more in this direction, similar to what is suggested in I.S., and that is the self that creates itself.

If asked, “Who are you?” one good answer offered years ago by Georg Kuehlewind was, “I am the one speaking to you now.” This brings the speaker radically into the present possibilities of the moment, and foregrounds the speaker’s self-ownership in a world of meaning and relating.

On this view, you are the non-localized orchestrator of your current presence and activity on earth. You are that which, or the one who, aligns and harmonizes and extends your past, your ancestry, your body, your physical and energetic surround, your soul’s essence, your connections to humanity and nature, your future potentials.

There is something quite self-less about this self. To undertake exercises like Self-Light or Presence, even though they are all about “you,” is to move immediately away from the patterns of negativity and worry, in fact from all the patterns, by which we normally know ourselves to be the same person each day. Instead, we take ourselves in hand and begin.

Who we become in these practices has no fixed characteristics, but is the invoker and inventor of characteristics. Anything said of this self-performing self would be an underestimation. It is nothing less than the local face of the Generative Mystery itself.

I.S. exercises like Standing, Self-Light and Presence are occasions for this self to heft its capacity for self-manifestation. As we deepen our practice of creative inclusion in these and related exercises, we find there is in principle no upper limit: we can grow ever more and more actively present and engaged.

How refreshing this perspective is for patients (that is, all of us) who are caught in repetitive patterns, shame over who we imagine ourselves to be, and all too often a loss of any sense of home, identity, or agency.

Here’s an example.

A man whose schizophrenic mother had no time for him now has trouble with his narcissistic ex-wife who will not live up to the custody arrangements of his divorce. In her presence, as in his mother’s presence when he was little, he becomes paralyzed. He cannot think, can hardly move. He enters into a frozen state of being. We were walking together during his session one day, and I started to tell him about the principles of sovereignty and self-orchestration. We stopped and I guided us both through the Standing exercise. He felt the benefits immediately, took it up as a regular practice, and now can meet his ex with less in the way of “fight, flight or freeze.” He is coming into self-possession and self-direction. His career has taken off too!

3. Instreaming Improvisation

In a living environment, where we are capable of current self-performance, we naturally make ourselves available to needed intuitions. Rather than operating out of techniques and beliefs, we open to whoever and whatever might accompany us in our current situation.

For some, this takes the form of a dialogue with subtle colleagues and friends who may offer their own perspectives. Perhaps more generally available are simply ideas and fresh impulses that enhance one’s capacities.

The living world is continually radiant with its intuitions, its realities, its fields of possibilities. Normal awareness filters this incoming world so that we receive almost nothing of it. Yet all our understandings, all our perceptions, all our free actions, depend on our getting something of the available radiance. Sparks start to fly through every conversation between self and environment.

For the therapist as for the patient, health depends on some further opening to this possible world, the instreaming improvisations of which we are capable.

Freud and Breuer, in their groundbreaking Studies in Hysteria (1895), noted that “our hysterics suffer from reminiscences.” Today, we might say that “the body keeps the score,” or simply that mental and emotional trouble tends to be repetitive. There is something fixed about thoughts, emotions, body and behavior in any psychological problem. The antidote tends to be freshness, invention, some kind of news from beyond the apparently closed system of the mind. Through I.S.’s emphasis on a conversational world in which “God happens at the boundaries” between beings, we can have access to the right medicine for the given patient and moment.

Exercises that focus on our personal Pit Crew field or representative and on Alliance Space can open our minds and energies to the manna of the fleeting moment. It gives new life for the journey, but it can’t be stored! (Exodus 16:19) There is always collaboration and nourishment available, which sometimes seems to come from outside us, sometimes from inside us; sometimes from the intertwingling of these two.

Here is an example:

A patient with a terrible trauma history was caught in a dangerous and self-destructive spiral. She was self-harming in various ways. We were sitting by a lake outdoors (in my new style of walk-and-talk therapy), and I was in some distress about how to help her. Without any preconceived model for it, I suddenly got the idea to offer her the world to take care of. Together we pictured the whole earth, complete with its atmosphere and oceans, as a sphere about 5 feet in diameter floating between us. I suggested she draw it into her heart and care for it there. That was months ago, and she is still improving, no longer self-harming, and still taking care of that inner earth.

Fine as it is at times to have healing intuitions for our patients, it is also deeply gratifying when we see them have healing intuitions of their own that completely surprise us. This happens to many clinicians, I.S.-inspired or otherwise. For example, patients often come into a session grateful for the previous session, but it turns out what they appreciated in that previous session was not an idea from the therapist, but a new take on things that developed quite within themselves. It is a delight when patients experience themselves as sources: of insight, wisdom, love, and creative action in their world.

Patients come to psychotherapy for so many reasons, often having to do with habits of behavior or relationship, feeling or thinking, that they want to change. I.S. can help with these problems by shifting the perspective and placing the human being in a wider field of concern and interest. This wider field includes elements of the person–such as subtle energies–but more radically also elements of the whole world as a living and engaged collective. So a newly-understood human individual integrates into a newly-understood world. This work of harmonizing, integrating, and connecting–which is both to the benefit of the individual and of the world as a whole–tends to right-size personal troubles while also giving the patient new experiences of agency and fresh arenas for love.