22 Oct It’s Hard to be Creative When You’re Hungry
Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? I think about it a lot when I try to explain to people what Transpersonal Psychology is, or what it is that a transpersonal therapist does that is different from traditional counseling.
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.
© 2014 Catherine Auman This article is an excerpt from Catherine’s book Shortcuts to Mindfulness: 100 Ways to Personal and Spiritual Growth
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