WITHDRAWAL OR ENGAGEMENT

by Stanley

I’ve often wondered about the difference between spiritual meditation and person-centred therapy. Are they complimentary or are they going in different directions? Do they help or hinder each other. Maybe we can work out some distinctions and differences of purpose. We need to do this because in recent times there has been a tendency to conflate the two.

It isn’t easy to generalise about meditation because there are so many different styles, but I think certain generalisations can be made. Many popular modes of meditation emphasise relaxation of the body and of ‘getting out of the mind’. This usually means to ‘witness’ what is going on in the body, to observe the flow of thoughts in the mind, but to not identify with any of them; that is to say, be aware, but distance oneself from them so that one remains neutral or equanimous. The general idea being that I am none of them. I am not my body or my mind, not my sensations or my thoughts. The passing states of oneself and the world are an illusion. This is the ideal practice, not just for meditation, but for living. The good life is achieving this non-attachment as an ongoing state, a way of being in the world.

And it is just here that we run into difficulties. Being in the world forces me to make choices. Each morning I either go to work or I don’t. At the party I either have another drink or I don’t – I have to identify with one or the other. I cannot do both. I either stay in my marriage or I leave. Some would say I could sit on the fence. But I am either indecisive in the marriage or I am indecisive out of the marriage. I am forced to choose. I ask myself: what is best for all? What is it I want? Even if I say I want nothing, that itself is a form of commitment. I identify myself as wanting nothing. I can’t escape from being either this or that.

So it’s understandable why meditation works best when one is isolated from worldly activities, in a ashram or a ten day course, where one meditates and speaks with no one. Worldly choices are at an absolute minimum. After an intense course of meditation people will report a wonderful spiritual transformation, a state of wholeness and peace. In coming back to the world, however, they cross over into their normal selves. The old problems are there waiting for them just as they left them. When you are in the world it won’t let you be a detached onlooker. It pulls you in. You have to take a position, you have to engage. It’s impossible to be only a witness, a detached onlooker.

Today the meditation mode is having quite an influence on our psychological practices. There are some benefits in this and some distinct disadvantages. Both in popular psychology and in serious therapy it has become customary to talk in terms of ‘parts of myself’. You know what I mean: ‘ part of me feels this and part of me feels that’. Indeed, there are some respected therapists who appear to base therapy entirely on this recipe. It is an attempt at non-attachment. It is useful, they say, because acknowledging the different parts of yourself integrates them – more than this, these different parts may have some important things to say. We should be a witness to all the parts of the psyche; but to do this we have to be in some sense detached, present but not involved.

In a therapy session, if you start with meditation or relaxation you will find that people do not move from this into their current problem area. If you start with observing a body sensation or pain the person will not move from that into the problem that generates it. In other words the mediative mode tends to cut off the route to the world; so does relaxation. By ‘world’ I mean all your worldly memories, desires and aversions; I mean all that’s going on for you in your life. Detaching from all that is OK if that’s what you want, but it also cuts you off from the therapeutic process; it cuts you off from being a person in the world – and all that this requires of you.

It’s interesting to note that standard focusing procedure starts with ‘what problem would you like to work on?’ It starts with your worldly mind, with something that engages you, with a consciously felt concern. This is done to start things moving at the place where they need to move.

Every movement in a focusing session is an engagement, a movement into this or that, into a feeling about that problem or a position about this concern. Each movement is a thorough going engagement. First, the problem seems to be this; then it seems to be that. New positions emerge. The process is one where you keep changing your mind. Things do actually change, but each change is one you believe in – you have to because that’s where you’re at. In each of these moments you are not sitting on the fence, not witnessing, but involved. You identify with each moment. True, the next moment there will be a movement to something else, to another position; but that itself is another engagement, another concrete position. What we call ‘experiential shifts’ in therapy are a series of movements as you work through your engagements with the world, your connections that need to be dealt with. The therapeutic process, in other words, moves through identifications, through one engagement after another. Each time, for the moment you are in it, you are not detached, but identified. These are not positions you assume, but viewpoints you successively find yourself in. At any given moment you cannot not be in some position or other. The whole idea of a neutral witness is an oxymoron. You cannot observe something from nowhere. Trying to impedes the process.

Take the proposition that ‘the internal critic is part of me’. This can be merely an idea I have learned and am rather fond of. But if I am stirred into really looking – yes, the critic is part of me. But, no, that’s not quite right. It feels more like a bunch of demons chattering away in the back of my head. They nag me and I’m sick of it.

At that vital moment I grasp how it really is for me. Not from some detached overview. I’ve really got it. They nag me and I’m sick of it…. I mean it: I’m sick of it. Not ‘part of me’ is sick of it – I am sick of it. In that moment I am passionately myself. The demons that nag me are now not the issue. Something else has taken centre stage. Not that I have thrown the inner critic out, or ignored it, or befriended it or integrated it. No clever psychological tricks. I have moved on to something else that is now more real and, at this moment, more important: they nag me I am sick of it !

I have arrived at a new place.

I am at one with my impatience.

At that moment there is no split - I discover how I am.