The core intention of my counseling practice is to help you achieve your goals for healing and for gaining wisdom and awareness. The following is a brief outline of the basic philosophy underlying my practice.
How We Lose Awareness
All of us go through painful and confusing experiences from the very start of our lives. Our minds attempt to sort through and digest these experiences as they happen, but in order to do so we need the support of other minds that are operating outside of the distress that we are experiencing. The human mind is designed to heal within the context of a loving relationship with other minds. This is why a child will run to it’s mother when hurt, and cry in her arms until the hurt is dispelled. This is why we have the instinct to turn to the people who love us most when we are having problems, in the hopes that we will find healing there. This is a natural and effective process if it is able to take it’s full course. Unfortunately, this healing process is usually not able to take it’s full course. Something else happens instead.
Most of the time we are not able to find minds that are able to hold a clear, loving awareness around the issues we are seeking to resolve. And when we are unable to do so, our minds resort to a back-up plan: they store the hurts outside of our conscious awareness so that we can at least go on functioning, until such time that we find the loving awareness that we need to truly heal. Unfortunately, most of us go through an entire lifetime storing up hurts and confusing experiences, and doing very little of the sorting and healing that we need to keep our minds clear and flexible. Our minds weren’t designed to store hurts perpetually, nor operate effectively under a heavy backlog of unprocessed experiences. Eventually our minds pay a heavy price for storing hurts this way. Unprocessed experiences get added layer after layer, until the brilliant, alive, loving, trusting, joyful person we were as children becomes buried underneath a pile of painful and confusing impressions.
Most of us give up, to varying degrees, on finding the loving awareness that we need in order to heal, and so we stay in a defended stance against our pain. By the time we are adults, our defenses are so habitual and chronic that we no longer even notice that we are defended. This is happening on a global “pandemic” level, and yet it is one of the most unrecognized problems facing human beings.
A further complication is that groups of similar people tend to share the same general hurts, and because people in those groups have all lost awareness around the same issues, there are precious few clear minds in those groups to help other members heal. This is why we are often able to see clearly the irrational patterns in people who are quite different from us, but we have a hard time seeing our own irrational patterns, or the irrational patterns in people very similar to us. Because we so easily see other people’s confusion, but not our own, we tend to offer judgment instead of the loving awareness others need to heal from their confusion.
This process of shutting down our minds in order to avoid experiencing our hurts is happening all around the world all the time, and it severely limits the brilliant potential of our entire species. The more we shut down our minds, the more we lose the ability to think flexibly and brilliantly in the moment. It is behind all the irrational human behavior that we see in the news each day; the wars, the greed, the despoiling of the earth, etc.
The Silver Lining
Fortunately, our true human nature is never damaged by painful experiences. Although it can become obscured, it is always possible to recover our inherently good, loving, brilliant, pleasurable and happy-to-be-alive selves. And as a bonus, our wisdom will have been enriched by our journey. Furthermore, none of this is our fault. It is merely an unfortunate result of the way our minds work that we get so easily bogged down with painful experiences, lose touch with our own brilliant goodness, and then act accordingly… Fortunately, we can free ourselves of old hurts and reconnect with our true human nature. It does take work, but it is worth every step.
For thousands of years people have been seeking a way out of the problem described above, most often through spirituality. Although spirituality is invaluable at showing us the beauty and truth of higher levels of reality, it often does not directly address and heal the hurts and confusions we have experienced here in this reality, as human beings. Furthermore, our minds, already habituated to going unconscious around our pain, often uses spirituality as just another mechanism to further hide from our hurts, instead of healing them. I highly recommend a spiritual path to everyone, but as an addition to, not a replacement for emotional healing work. In fact I consider emotional healing work to be the most important, because it is the most immediate.
A Bright Future
In recent times, many societies around the world have had enough surplus time and resources to allow healers to start examining this problem in a new way. Powerful new healing paradigms have sprung up all around the world which attempt to sort through and remove the old, hurtful experiences we carry. Many of these new healing paradigms are very effective, and when we take on this healing work, our minds are able to embrace new life, to regain flexibility, joy and the pleasure in being alive.
It remains true that we need the help of other minds to heal, and that is where my counseling practice can be of help. By listening deeply to my clients, and skillfully assisting them to explore and shed the hurts of the past, I provide the clear, loving awareness that we all need to heal. It is also true that the more we heal ourselves, the more clarity our minds have to help others heal. This is why I continue to be committed to my own healing work in my private life, so that I can continue to grow and expand as an ally to others. We are all in this together.