Catherine Auman, MFT

People can get really crazy with this stuff, but it does benefit you to cleanse your body from time to time.  Body purification processes are good to learn about and practice. The idea is that we all have stuff that has not been completely eliminated clogging up our bodies and our colons and it needs to come out. This blockage is partially due to the diets we eat today, which have everything to do with tasting good and little to do with nutrition, and also to the nature of things – things get dirty and need to be cleaned.

It’s like you never cleaned your house or your car and all that gunk kept building up. When you go on a cleanse and release old toxic matter that has been in you for decades, you will also release the emotions that have been trapped. The toxic matter often contains the energy of what was going on that we held onto, sometimes sadness, or anger, or other emotional stuckness that needs release. All this trapped stuff inside is toxic build-up; it affects your emotions and makes your attitude negative.  Concurrent psychotherapy can be very helpful with the release process.

Spring (“spring cleaning”) or summer when the weather is hot are the best times to go on a cleanse. Most involve eating lighter on the food chain, or eating only alkaline foods, or fasting, plus eliminative herbs. Most involve cleansing processes like colonics and/or enemas. You have to get over your distaste for this; it will be good for your acceptance of your and other people’s bodies. The main teaching on a Tantric level is getting over your revulsion to the body’s natural processes.

Personally, I love the Arise & Shine program and have done it at least a dozen times. It involves eating only fruits, vegetables, and alkaline grains plus herbs for a month, and then if you’re ready, fasting on juice and water for an intensive week. You learn a lot about your body when you see how much stuff comes out of you when you’re not eating, I mean, where is that stuff coming from? Gross, but certainly it is better out of the body than in.

When you are cleaned out, you will experience new levels of clarity, well being, and health. For awhile, you will have lost your cravings for addictive foods, but only until you start eating them again. You will bring to yourself and all you meet a new clean shining awareness without all that toxicity standing between you.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

Back when I was studying for my NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) Certification, we were taught that if one person can do something well, anyone can figure out their strategy and replicate it for themselves. NLP’ers were busy systematizing all kinds of strategies for excellence: better golf swings, improved eyesight, weight loss, and successful business applications. All fine and good, I thought, but why aren’t we codifying something important, like how to increase levels of compassion?

Buddhists offer a variety of techniques for increasing compassion: various mantras, meditations, remembrances, and so forth. I’m sure many people derive benefit from these practices. The problem is, it’s preaching to the choir. Anyone who would spend time every day practicing techniques to increase their compassion is probably already high on the scale of open heartedness.

It seems to me that the Universe itself contains an inbuilt strategy for increasing our compassion whether we want it or not, and whether or not we recognize it as such. When we suffer, which is an inevitable part of the human condition, our hearts break, and in that breaking is the possibility of the growth of compassion. When we hear about the suffering of others – the birds damaged by the BP oil spill, the victims of Haiti or Hurricane Katrina, the Tibetan nuns and monks tortured and murdered by the Chinese – the pain can seem unbearable. And then on a personal level, we all experience grief and loss, maybe when a love affair ends or through the death of a loved one. We feel overcome with pain because we don’t want anything to end, including our own lives. No one on this planet escapes having their heart broken.

The message in America seems to be to avoid suffering at all costs – take a pill, drink alcohol, eat a bunch of carbs and zone out, watch TV – anything other than allow this inherent process of compassion expansion to work its magic. When our main goal is to not feel bad, we miss this natural maturation process that teaches us to love and care for our fellow human beings.

When we learn to stop fighting the fact of suffering, we can accept it as a purposeful process in our lives. When we allow our hearts to break, we become more open and loving towards those close to us and to the whole world. Go ahead and experience the cracking of your own heart, and then let it break open some more. Allow the walls that keep it small and selfish to expand until you include all and everything in your love.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

Philip Larkin, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, famously wrote:

“Your mum and dad, they fuck you up,

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the fears they had,

And add some extra just for you.”

Everyone could benefit from identifying where their parents “f*cked them up” and working through it. In fact, being clear of non-useful parental programming is an essential milestone on the psychological and spiritual path. If you’re stuck with pain, upset, or wishing anything were different about your childhood, you can’t progress to a space of having more interesting problems to solve.

In one of the Castaneda books, Don Juan instructed his apprentice, Carlos, “You have to kill your parents.” People are willing to move clear across the country, if not the world, to create distance between themselves and their parents and ‘kill’ their presence in their lives, but it’s really internal distance they are seeking: separation from expectations, a separate identity, and freedom from parental do’s and don’ts.

Helping people get unstuck from their parents is one of the things we do in psychotherapy. In some cases, it can be completed relatively quickly; in others, it takes lengthy excavation work, depending on the severity of the trauma suffered, and how deeply it is lodged in the cells and tissues of the body. It’s more complicated, of course, if there’s been abuse, but everyone must separate themselves from the parts of the parent’s message that is not them. When the work is successful, a new person emerges who is uniquely one’s self, taking the best that the parents gave them, and released from what doesn’t fit. It can be hard work, but freedom is worth every iota of effort and commitment.

It’s possible to come to a place where there’s no pain left, no more anger or resentment, no heat, no charge. Once you ‘kill’ your parents and your unhealthy attachment to them, you become free to love them for the first time, to meet them as one adult to another rather than as a child to parent. To progress along life’s path, you must come to a place where you’re not afraid of anything that’s inside any more. And that is possible for you.

Leonard Orr, the inventor of Rebirthing, said, “If you don’t hate your parents, you haven’t even started.” Is it time for you to complete this stage of your development once and for all?

© 2010 Catherine Auman

People often ask me how transpersonal therapy differs from mainstream counseling. It differs in three major ways: how transpersonal therapists are trained, the context in which we hold therapy, and in some cases, the techniques we use or recommend to facilitate change.

Transpersonal therapists receive training in the same mainstream psychology as other therapists that is necessary to pass licensing exams. However, we are not satisfied with that as we don’t believe the modern West has all the answers, so we acquire additional training into the psychologies of other cultures: Eastern religions, Native peoples,  LSD research and other altered states of consciousness, mysticism, and the esoteric aspects of all religions which Aldous Huxley dubbed “the perennial philosophy.”

This context we offer is open to spirituality and alternate ways of knowing, making the space safe for people who identify as ‘spiritual,’ i.e. those for whom spiritual search is an integral and compelling part of their life. Spiritual people are often reluctant to enter mainstream therapy with good reason, as few conventional therapists know how to honor what is outside their own mindset. Spiritual people want to be able to talk with their therapists about their experiences with altered states of consciousness, their thirst for higher knowledge and abilities. They want to be understood for wanting to be free, truly free, even if it means challenging the status quo of the mainstream culture. They want help to untangle unhelpful patterns from the past the same as other clients, but they want it from people who have gotten free themselves.

The transpersonal context is one of support for alternate ways of knowing, of understanding that a person may not want to adapt themselves to a culture that is itself sick, and that ours is not the highest state of evolution possible. It’s knowing that sometimes the greatest things humans can know come from the heart rather than the mind, that compassion may be a greater value than consumerism, that striving to reach to one’s potential is more fascinating than owning and wearing the right logos. The truly transpersonal embraces the logos too, why not? But for people who have glimpsed a reality beyond that beckons and won’t let them go, it becomes of utmost importance to remove the blocks that stand in the way of resting in the quiet space where lies the Truth of who we really are.

Techniques that transpersonal therapists utilize may include meditation, energy work, or other alternative modalities. The most important thing however is sound clinical skills, the ability to really ‘get’ the client, and the therapist’s commitment to their own ongoing growth.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

It’s true there are charlatans and egomaniacs in the guru biz. The media delights in dramatic stories of crazed followers doing odd  and dangerous things, like that guy who had everyone drink the purple Kool-Aid, or those folks who committed mass suicide while wearing brand new Nikes when the Hale-Bopp comet whizzed by. We shake our heads at such ignorance and smugly reject the notion that people surrender themselves to anything at all.

In the West, we’re prejudiced against gurus. Here, ego reigns supreme, and the ego’s first tenet is ‘nobody knows better than me.’ Granted, there’s a lot to be said for how Americans distrust authority, question pomposity, and demand to ferret out the truth for ourselves. But by our closed-mindedness, we miss knowing about higher states of consciousness known to the East that aren’t necessarily promoted on our nightly menu of sexy sitcoms and reality TV.

I got broken open to all this by amazing human beings I met in India. Although I had been studying personal and spiritual growth for decades, nothing had prepared me for the shock of the energy phenomena in their presence. It was like I had taken psychedelic drugs when I hadn’t: the room began to swirl, the lights bending and warping. My breathing changed like it does when you’re having sex – gasping for air, tingling all over. My mind became blessedly silent – everything okay, perfect, just the way it is.

Okay, maybe you’re thinking it was something I ate, or a weird brain fugue or something. I can only explain it as these persons manifest at a higher frequency than we do, that in their presence, our bodies go haywire. It became irrefutable that there’s more going on than Western culture has given us a context for, and that higher levels of human development exist and are available.

The tradition in the East is to surrender to the Guru, and the media is quick to point out abuses. What isn’t shown is the advantage of surrendering one’s belief that ‘I already knows everything and no one can teach me anything.’ The benefit is immeasurable in one’s becoming teachable, of the ego humbling itself in the presence of something so far beyond it.

In the East, it’s believed that the Guru points the Way. We get confused because we think it’s about following another person’s weird dictates, like ‘give me all your money’ or ‘drink this potion’. Osho, a well-known guru, once explained it by saying, “Don’t look at my finger; look where I’m pointing.”

My experience is that absorbing the radiance of a person of higher frequency is in itself uplifting and healing. Sitting in the presence of an Awakened Being will do more for your spiritual growth than years of working on yourself.

© 2010 Catherine Auman