A reflective monologue exploring how psychological therapy and spiritual practice complement each other in personal life and therapeutic work. The speaker argues that psychology fosters deep curiosity about personal experience and emotional states, while spirituality provides higher values (compassion, peace, truth); integrating both prevents the dangers of prioritizing one at the expense of the other.
You've lived your life exploring a lot of spiritual paths, spending time in that world at the same time in your life. You're trained as a therapist, a psychologist. What do the two bring to your practice, to your approach to people? What do they each contribute? How do they work together inside you? The therapy part has mostly supported an endless curiosity and love for the personal experience, both inside me and with people I'm close to and interact with. And psychology has taken such an interest in one's emotional state and internal experience and has been such a contribution to go underneath the surface of one's personality and actually look at a deeper layer of the human psyche and what might be called the ego. The benefits of that are that we are always encouraged to just drop inside ourselves and take interest. What's my experience now? And let's share where we are and what's your experience now? And I'm interested in listening and communicating with you as to where you are. So that's endlessly valuable. Spiritual life in general has contributed a higher sense of values and principles where compassion and peace and love of the truth and trust is really at the forefront of why we're alive. The higher principles are really central. So the combination of the two is really kind of the golden center of life. Where if we go too far into spirituality, we'll end up going for principles and we'll bury our personal experience. And then we're dangerous. Because if we go unconscious personally, even if we have higher principles, then we're going to do all kinds of things that are really dangerous to humanity. On the other hand, if we go too far into psychology and we're just talking about our personal experiences all the time, we're going around in circles, just talking about, gee, I feel frightened, I feel angry. And we're not really recognizing that the way that we create benefit and a sense of well being in the world is actually to open our hearts, is actually to develop our capacity to be compassionate. So the integration of the two as two kinds of principles, two kinds of inquiries, is just intuitively obvious at a certain point of living. How could you possibly want to bury your personal experience? How could you possibly want to bury the highest values that exist inside us? And the answer is, of course, we need to embrace them both.
