Why I Am A Psychotherapist; The Yang Rationale

Theres always a yin and a yang in the stuff we do and live and breathe and feel. Here's the yang rationale for why I have chosed to spend much of my professional life as a broad-spectrum (integrative/integral) psychotherapist.

In order for me to feel at home in my skin I have to be Kosmically congruent.

 I often look at the Kosmic involutionary process through the lens of Indian Tantric cosmology  which is an itemisation of different states of coagulation occurring in the wake of the ontologically primordial Shiva/Shakti coupling. As  they lie back in the bed puffing on the post-coital cigs, Ishvara, the fairy godmother who narrates the film and who brought these Two together  in the first place determines their entwined although separate destinies as a continual state of sexual tension (ever-fractallising duality) which continues as they get dressed and ride the elevator from their lofty Penthouse down through all the levels of molecular subtlety...which, incidentally, they are creating in the process of descent.... to alight at street level, the material plane of manifestation, the playground made of bhutas and tanmatras.

My conceptual penthouse begins with broad orientating generalisations. These are lifted straight out of Ken Wilber's SES Part One..nothing to top that stuff in my books. Riding the elevator downwards I reach the plane of personal, Kosmically-aligned values which for me lie in the Mahavrata or Bodhisattvic Ideal; i.e. The best way of using Manjushri's sword to chop through those Gordian-Knotted  ever-fractallising dualities  is to attenuate the primary duality of self/other  by retraining the mind into world/Kosmocentrism... this will scotch the seeds of narcissism very nicely and lend me hard-wearing gloves so I can climb back up the elevator cable like Bruce Willis in Die Hard 1 (Die ego wiv an evolutionary vengefulness).

So; how best to enact the Bodhissatvic ideal?  Live fully as an exemplar. Love fiercely and sweetly. Change the world in the most effective way possible.

How to do this?

Back to KWilber again...his argument that Right Action is elicited by the Right Understanding of Worldcentric Principles and their application in the I- We- and It-spaces..and that this Understanding arises from upSpiral migration ..and that this is only possible as a set of permanent  traits through meditation practice.

Okay, so now I get in 1-2 hours vipassana meditation on a daily basis..

So to be an effective bodhissatva, I need to teach meditation to the largest body of people in the fastest way possible. Hmmm....to balance the fast track (Vajrayana Buddhism, unless you carry some heavy-duty samskaras in some other tradition) with the number of willing adherents...and then to package it up in a user-friendly way that generates an income....
Okay so I can plan that, its just that....well...people give up cos their backs, knees and ankles give out..

So that's okay I have been teaching yoga for 17 yrs...all that asana work helps this particular cookie crumble..or not crumble in pain, sorry about the crap analogy....

But only a few have the tenacity of Bruce Willis to Die Hard and ride that elevator cable.

What stops them?

In the early 1990's, I began to notice how my beginner Yogasana students were, for the most part ,unable to fully listen to me, to varying degrees and at different times...how at other times, their energy suggested that they were With Me and In The Zone with me....and why is that? Well, it could be something about the way I transmit yoga but most feedback is that I enunciate instructions and philosophy clearly and certainly do not discourse with the kind of dense polysyllabic text I am beginning to  newly enjoy myself with here in Zaadz...no their lack of full receptiveness, I began to realise, reflected some sort of intrapsychic static generated by verbal and preverbal messages they were giving themselves from the shadow side of the first four fulcrums.

Personal example; I should not exist in the first place (Preverbal message gleaned through paucity of physical holding in first few weeks of life...for an examination of the quality of early physical contact or "vitality affects", see Daniel Sterne's "Interpersonal World of the Infant")
                                   Also; I should not succeed (mother places toys in front of me..I reach out...she moves the toys out of reach...again and again...)
                                   But ;I will be okay with myself as long as I don't show my emotions ( ongoing nonverbal reinforcing process at home and school, personal processes of caregivers scared of their own emotions couples with societal injunctions about Big Boys Not Crying..)
                                  And I have to please everybody (same reinforcing processes plus pre and postverbal fantasies about rejection and abandonment)
                                 
..and the natural tendency of the psyche is to cycle and recycle these internal, infernal experiences by unconsciously setting things up across all quadrants of life so that these messages remain reinforced...this is the cellulite scaffolding of the Shadow (sapped out with all kinds of related beleifs, fantasies and repressed memories)

It's a complex tapestry; four levels of shadow-stuff swimming out of the shark cages into the pool of  self-awareness, different kinds of shark grown in the Shadow tanks and set to do the bidding of the mechanical Shadowmaster (Gurdjieff; "All that is evil is simply mechanical").

How to deal with this shadow-stuff which diaspores out of the shadow part of the first four levels of UL to pollute the rest of the AQAL tenement like so much yoghourt in the Kosmic milk of human kindness?

 (...oh I so love mixed analogies, but if I am not being clear, does this make me a less effectual bodhissatva? Do say.)...

So I became a psychotherapist. I have been trained..and train myself..to deal with these several different species of shark as they manifest themselves in any one moment  in the therapeutic matrix, not by taking a knife to them as James Bond did in Thunderball but in a dharma-warrior way, transducing those teeth into flowers usually by the power of vipassana-augmented sheer contactfulness....take out the shadow (and the shadow is, I think, finite; I agree with M. Scott Peck in this regard) and the client frees up, leaves the therapy room, becomes more creative, is more liable to be caring because more internally and externally connected, is more liable to meditate, migrates upSpiral and acts to change the world.....thus generating increasing degrees of worldcentric harmony, phagocytosing the projected self-hatred of  premodern fundamentalism..

This, for me, is taking the thorn out of the Kosmic Paw rather than waste valuable time administering short-term physiotherapeutic or haematological solutions to the resultant problems of fanatical limping or schizmogenetic sociopolitical blood poisoning

And this is what I do four days a week with lots of  essentially wonderful people menaced by their own sharks. I pay my mortgage (not a possession of land but a consensually-agreed power invested in me to exclude others from that land in order to preserve and nurture my integrity) with the proceeds, am involved in no kind of activity in the mainstream which kills or harms (apart from a reasonably shallow carbon footprint, that kind of thing...)...I tithe my income to sensible charities and sleep well at night unless I get on the  Zaadzshow or the Integral Multiplex...oboy oboy...

Yep, that's pretty much it for the yang rationale.

Thank you for yr time in reading this.