1) You believe that by thinking positively or by saying affirmations, life will follow your whims and dictates. In psychology, we call this ‘magical thinking.’ In reality, it takes a lot of hard work to accomplish your dreams, to live the life to which you aspire. Thinking right is an important part of the process, but it is only the very beginning.

2) You take the idea that ‘you create your own reality’ a little too far. I see people who are full of self-blame and loathing because they hate themselves for their childhoods or for the way their lives have turned out. This line of taking full responsibility can be helpful, but there are limits. A world outside of us exists. Many cancers are caused by toxins in the environment. The children in the Sudan who had their arms chopped off in the war weren’t creating that reality for themselves – someone very cruel was forcing it on them.

3) You believe that the light can exist without the dark, or that the light is the only thing of value. Many people are searching for a simple solution to become happy all the time which can lead them to deny their more difficult feelings, such as grief or anger, thinking them to be ‘not spiritual.’  On the contrary, these more difficult feelings serve a purpose, often letting us know when we are off track, when we have hurt someone, or when a change in our behavior is needed. The attitude of discounting the dark can lead to addiction – always looking for a high.

4) You don’t do your psychological work because you believe it will just go away if you’re spiritual enough. You believe that meditating more will cure your depression, or that doing more yoga will cure your relationship problems. You don’t understand the difference between psychology and spirituality, or that freeing yourself of your personal blocks can actually accelerate your spiritual growth. There are therapists who specialize in psychotherapy for spiritual people like here at The Transpersonal Counseling Center. Getting the help you need from a psychotherapist who understands the special needs of the spiritual path can be a life-changing step on your personal journey.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

Kyle is late on his rent again, and can’t be sure he’s not overdrawn. It’s always this chaos, every month. That reservation he made for the weeklong meditation retreat was more than he could afford – but maybe he’ll get some answers there.

Jennifer and Kyle are examples of what we call spiritual bypass: when a person’s spiritual intentions and aspirations are sincere, but their unfinished business is holding them back.

People become attracted to spirituality in the hope it will solve life’s problems and relieve pain and suffering, but it’s not quite that simple. A popular misconception is that spiritual practice will in and of itself resolve psychological issues.  Best-selling books advocate that by ignoring our discomfort and focusing on the Light, or on what we wish to manifest, we can get everything we want. This idea of positive thinking, or the law of attraction, can divert us from our real issues.

You can’t make progress on the spiritual path if you’re ignoring your pain. Pain, in fact, is an indication of where you need to grow – by pretending we’re happy all the time, we miss the lessons our suffering and humanity are trying to teach us. As Alan Cohen says in Wisdom of The Heart, “If you desire to know where your spiritual work lies, look to your emotional pain.”

When we have unmet needs, they will clamor for our attention and divert us from what we want to be our path. Hence, we end up battling addictions, psychological issues, and not living our right life, rather than making the spiritual progress we hoped. Failing to discriminate between pseudo-spirituality and true inner transformation, we can get lost for years or life times.

Kyle and Jennifer and others like them are sincere spiritual seekers, but not dealing with their psychological issues is stunting their spiritual growth. Jen needs to get help from an eating disorder therapist, or depending on the severity of her problem, spend some time in a treatment program. Kyle needs to understand that being on a spiritual path doesn’t negate needing to learn how to handle money. Working with a psychotherapist who specializes in understanding the pitfalls of the spiritual path could make all the difference in the world.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

The human need for Love and Belonging is for friends, a lover, a family, and to be a vital member of the community. If you feel isolated and unloved, the pain will cause one to be stuck here in their personal development until these needs are met. I often think of how primitive humans existed in small tribes, and I don’t think we’ve evolved out of this need for being part of a small group. In our lonely cities, many are struggling to feel connected, and new communities are springing up online.

Esteem needs are the next level of Maslow’s pyramid, which means needing respect from others, a certain degree of status, self-confidence, achievement, independence, self-respect. The word on the street is that this should all come from within, but it’s a human need to want to be acknowledged by one’s community.

The top level is Self Actualization which Maslow said only 2 % of people achieve. Here an individual is enjoying the desire to fulfill their potentials, to be all that one can be, to become one’s most complete, fulfilled self. These people tend to enjoy solving problems rather than finding them burdensome, have a great degree of acceptance of self and others, and tend to have increased spontaneity, nonconformity, and creativity.

Self Actualize-ers also tend to have what are called Peak Experiences, or moments that make you feel One with God or nature. There is a feeling of being part of the Infinite and Eternal, and people having this experience report being changed forever for the better. Sometimes these peaks are called mystical experiences, sometimes they are found through drugs, and they are part of many religious traditions.

People who live in prosperity can devote time to their growth and development and can progress to a point where their lower needs are met. Then there is a possibility to move up to levels that involve having experiences that teach them about spirituality and the Infinite. Maslow posited that this our biological destiny, and a life force that drives us.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

Maslow theorized that there is an order that human needs must be met: for example, if you’re still lacking food and shelter, it’s going to be hard to think about optimizing your creativity. You will need to concentrate on finding food first. Likewise, if you’re feeling like you don’t have enough love in your life, it’s going to be hard to focus on achievement and what you’d like to give to the world.

If you recall, The Hierarchy of Needs is shaped like a pyramid, with the bottom rung being Physiological Needs (survival: food, water, sleep, etc.), followed by Safety Needs (security of the body, employment, resources, family, health, comfort). When these needs have been satisfied, we begin to consider Love/Belonging (friendship, family, sexual intimacy), the need for Esteem (confidence, achievement, respect for and by others). Some people actually develop to the point of reaching Self Actualization (creativity, spontaneity, problem solving), and on the top some add the need for Peak Experiences (ecstasy, sense of Oneness).

Here’s the Wikipedia link if you want to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

As people lucky enough to have been born in the West, very few of us are grappling with Physiological Needs. Most of us don’t need to spend our days looking for food like some in Africa or deep in the Amazon jungle. Most of us are lucky enough to have employment, which is a different level concern than that of the right employment which is our higher need for Self Actualization. Many people who come to therapy are working on the level of Esteem Needs, especially if they grew up in difficult families where their esteem was not allowed to flourish or was broken by abuse.

When people come in for a therapy consult, one thing the therapist might look at is where their concerns are on the pyramid. Is this a person who has trouble providing basic care for herself? Is he able to feel safe in the world? Is it relationship problems? Or an existential question of what it all means? Each of these concerns would take different efforts for resolution.

The promise of technology was that people would be freed from the lower level needs to be able to focus on the higher. However, it seems that in America, we have become trapped trying to solve the same needs over and over. It is helpful to think of moving to the higher levels after the lower have been met: self actualization, and peak experiences, which is really spiritual search. I’ll be covering this in a later article.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

The others in the group recoiled. They thought I was making a value judgment and being mean, but I’m around mental illness all day when I’m working as a therapist so it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. Also, for twelve years I worked in mental hospitals so I don’t have any beef with mental illness. Sometimes it’s not wrong at all.

Here’s a shortlist of people who suffered from severe mental illness and still made significant contributions to humanity:

Ezra Pound
Sylvia Plath
Beethoven
Kurt Cobain
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda
Ernest Hemingway
Vincent Van Gogh
Virginia Woolf

These folks gave great gifts to the world with their significantly different ways of perceiving. They were able to step outside the mainstream long enough to nurture their own uniqueness.

In this culture, we are sold an image of what constitutes sanity that is extremely superficial and soul-less. The healthy person is supposed to be robotically “happy” all the time, constantly productive and striving toward material success – outwardly focused, extroverted, socially slick, and looking the way we’re all are aware we’re supposed to look. If your nature is different than this, something is wrong with you that needs to be fixed.

People who are, say, sensitive, isolative, and introspective, are often are led to believe they are defective in some way. I meet people all the time who think there is something wrong with them when the only thing wrong is not accepting their own humanity.

I’m not trying to suggest that having a mental illness is not a painful way to live, nor am I of the school that romanticizes it, like the filmmakers of the 60’s who tried to convince us that the people inside the asylum were sane and those outside were crazy – that’s just not true. There are states of consciousness that do not allow one to adequately care for oneself, have loving relationships, or enjoy one’s life, and if that is the case, psychotherapy can help.

Why stigmatize people who have mental illness as any worse than people with physical illness? I say embrace the unique emanation that is you, and reject the constant pressure to be like Tony Robbins or Cameron Diaz. Plenty of people have already got that down. Maybe we need another introspective soulful poet, or a wildly flamboyant fiction writer. We need people with out-of-the-mainstream views. If the pain of the way you are is too much, get help. But we surely wouldn’t want to make you sane.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

The couple had found me through Google as a ‘transpersonal’ therapist, or one who has had training in assessing and treating what is called “spiritual emergency.” For although their friend has a history of severe mental illness, many of her symptoms are the same or similar as those of spiritual awakening.

She was also experiencing evidence of a broader spiritual understanding, of increased compassion, of expansiveness, of the knowledge that everything is made of swirling energy, and that she has an important role to play on earth. Unfortunately, since this was mixed up with her psychotic symptoms, her friends weren’t sure what to do.

They didn’t want her to be just medicated and thrown into the hospital again. Conventionally trained mental health professionals are not taught how to distinguish between mental illness and spiritual awakening, which can at times resemble a psychotic break. Since Freud, there has been a bias against spirituality in mainstream psychology, and so, many people are understandably reluctant to seek the treatment they need.

Their friend was long ago diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her mother had suffered from schizophrenia. The friend had been hospitalized for her illness in the past, got on medication, and improved significantly. Like many people, she went off the meds that were helping her so much due to the side effects, and because she believed she didn’t need them anymore. But something else of great import was happening also.

One of the things I learned in graduate school that has been a useful rule of thumb is that the mentally ill person is drowning in the sea while the mystic is treading water. They are both in the same sea, however. One of the ways we distinguish between the two states is to assess how stable the person has been able to be in their life – have they been able to care for their activities of daily living, provide shelter and food for themselves, for example.

As I said to the concerned couple on the phone, we need to first do a full assessment, then treat the mental illness and support the spiritual awakening.

It is important to find a therapist with special training in Spiritual Emergency. If you are not in the LA area, you can find one through the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP) website at http://atpweb.org/Professional/ProfDir.asp

© 2009 Catherine Auman

We took the Underground everywhere, also known as the Tube, London’s clean and efficient rapid transit system. The Tube was great for people watching – nearly everyone looked puffy and as if they didn’t eat many fresh vegetables. There were signs posted all over that said Mind the Gap — a safety reminder for people to watch their step as they traversed from the platform to the train.

It seemed a bit more metaphysical to me.

Buddhists practice a meditation of watching the breath. It can be quite powerful to sit and observe the long inhale as it draws in, chest and lungs expanding, hopefully the abdomen and belly, too. Then to watch the long exhale, with its calming effect. When you sit with the breath long enough, you may experience an eerie sensation that you are not breathing at all — something is breathing you. In fact, it seems more accurate to say we are being “breathed.”

Osho, the great Tantra Master, however, said it’s really about watching for the gap between the outgoing and ingoing breath. It takes a little awareness but you can locate it if you slow way down, and if you look closely, you’ll notice a space between each inhale and exhale where nothing is happening. There’s a gap, a silence, a doorway to another reality. It’s like the silence between words, the white space on the page, the background murmur rather than the foreground conversation. That’s the gap, Osho said, where who you are really exists.

Another of my favorite memories of London was touring the Globe Theater, and our guide whose raucous stories split our sides with laughter. But the thing I loved most about London was these spiritual reminders appearing everywhere, all over underneath the town. Mind the Gap. Remember to find out who you really are.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

When we breathe, we can feel our feelings, both pleasurable and difficult. In this culture, however, we are taught to do whatever we can to avoid feeling bad. Anything unpleasant, and we are expected to will it away, or dispense of it through alcohol, food, or positive thinking. Holding one’s breath is quite effective at stopping feelings. It works.

People often hold their breath when faced with something uncomfortable. It can be as simple as encountering a driver with road rage, to as complex as trauma from childhood abuse. But habitually stopping one’s feelings can become chronic patterns of which a person is entirely unaware. Chronic holding means that some of us never take a full, deep breath anymore. Tension is locked in the body anywhere that breath will not go.

Leonard Orr’s Rebirthing and Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork are two techniques that involve having the client relax in the presence of a coach or partner and begin to take full deep breaths. This can induce all kinds of effects: recall of traumatic events, muscle tetany, crying and screaming, streaming bliss states. Orr believed that a basic series of ten sessions would be enough to “unlock” the breath and create profound and lasting change. When emotions are released that were previously stopped with the breath, there is often a corresponding release of vitality. It takes a lot of energy to keep those emotions repressed in the body.

The yogis have given us many breathing techniques for optimum health and wellbeing. Tantrikas, bodyworkers, and energy healers use the breath to process out old stuck emotions and induce higher states of consciousness. In my practice, I often teach my patients how an anxious, unhappy breath is shallow and rapid, filling only the top part of the lungs. Together we will practice a relaxed breath, deep and slow and full into the belly.

So go ahead, take a nice deep slow inhale, bringing the breath all the way down to your tailbone. Now, let it out slowly, slower still. Who knew feeling blissful was this easy? Or that it is available at every moment, every day of your life.

© 2009 Catherine Auman

I love it! Dynamic Meditation is the best way to let go of old stuff, renew myself, enter into stillness and get fit, all at the same time. – Lokita Carter

Dynamic is like having Nuclear Energy for breakfast! – Abhi-Irena

Osho created the active meditations because he said the Western mind is too active to go directly into silence. This meditation is not only fun and ecstatic, it clears plenty out plenty of psychological rubbish.

I usually park in the parking structure on 2nd Street between SM and Broadway, opposite what used to be Exhale, because its free for 2 hrs and I don’t have to bother about coins or tickets etc. and it’s not that long a walk to the beach because there is a foot overbridge right between Santa Monica and Broadway on Ocean Park that takes you straight to the beach and to the spot where we are meeting.

Bring something to share for a potluck breakfast afterwards.

This is a FREE event.

Time: Sunday mornings, 7:00am

Location: 3rd lifeguard post north of Santa Monica Pier

Questions? 310-460-9399

2) Writing as a Spiritual Practice was the name of a workshop I once attended. The leader was a Zen nun with a severe grey crewcut and three-hour-a-day habit which she executed whether she felt like it or not, unlike me. When you write about painful material from the past, she taught us, the psychological issue will be fully resolved when the piece is complete.

3) “The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest preoccupation of man,” Patti Smith rants on Easter.

4) Another seminar I attended, this one called River Stories, co-led by Kirsten Linklater, originator of the famed voice method, and Carol Gilligan, the distinguished Harvard psychologist, was attended by forty female actors and me. As one of the exercises, we wrote a song, a poem, a dialog, and a scene for four poignant moments of our lives. After I performed for the group my vignettes that had been transformed into ‘art,’ I felt better about my life than ever before. By that time I’d acquired a long resume I could’ve been proud of, but it meant nothing to me because I’d never planned on a corporate career nor did I value it. Creating stories, transforming the garbage into something worth sharing; I acknowledged for the first time the bravery of one little life.

5) “I don’t know why to finish my book,” I struggled. “Metaphysically it makes no difference if I finish it or not.” Andy Couturier, writing midwife and decent person extraordinaire, raised his hands to his heart in the namaste gesture, then widened his arms, palms up, out into the world, bringing tears to my eyes.

6) After eight years, I’ve finished my book. I apologize in advance if it adds to the pollution of the world. Personally I found that working with life events and turning them into fiction, fiction with its arc and mythic aspiration, liberated me from the quiet cell those emotions had entrapped me in for years. When the book was finished I could move on, and not a day before. Suddenly, the past no longer owned the best days of my life; now it was now; the best days are the present. Freedom, it spelled freedom. So I have learned: do your art; create your thing; write your book. It’s some of the best therapy in the world. Then widen your arms and let it spread out, offering a tear to the worldwide heart.

© 2009 Catherine Auman