In this blog, I want to outline a model of the human soul that arose for me this past year as I work at understanding and explaining to my psychospiritual therapist students the connection between spiritual care and psychotherapy. I have also used it with pastors and spiritual directors in exploring how spiritual care happens in worship and spiritual direction. Allow me to share it with you. My training in spiritual direction in the late 1990’s revealed to me that there definitely was a strong connection between spirituality and psychology. My main purpose in getting Pastoral Counselling Eucation (PCE) 15 years ago through Canadian Association of Spiritual Care was to go deeper into this integration between spirituality/theology and psychology, but that was not what I found. Instead, I learned about religious care and I learned about psychotherapy but these worlds rarely overlapped or became integrated. Yes, we, as students, did theological reflection but there is a big difference between theological reflection and helping clients experience the dynamics of God’s spirit in a spiritual direction session. Even now my PCE students tell me this year that this divide still persists. Many of them have taken or completed their MA in Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy. For this degree, half of the courses are in theology and the other half are in psychotherapy. However, these two fields of study are seen more like two separate silos for they rarely explore deeply how they can come together and integrate. Let me share with you a model of the soul that I have been playing with… When we, as Christians, do centering prayer practice, the goal is to be with our experience from a place of self awareness that deepens into the place of Presence. When we are self aware, if we allow ourselves to settle, rest, and relax into this place of self awareness, our awareness will expand allowing the experience of Presence to emerge. However, as all centering prayer practitioners know, a lot of time in centering prayer is spent returning to this place of centreness, this place I often call “home” where my self awareness returns and I can again allow myself to settle and deepen into this experience of Presence. Like the prodigal child, we often find ourselves lost in our experience. It is very easy to get lost, and when we are lost, we have lost our self awareness and our place of centreness. As a result, we have a need, a longing, to return home to our center, and when we do, we regain our self awareness, and are able again to practice allowing ourselves to settle into Presence. This is the practice of centring prayer, to practice returning home to our centre over and over again. When we are centred, we can settled further into the experience of Presence. Many spiritual directors are familiar with the term “the inner observer” or the “witnessing I”. It often appears in spiritual direction literature. When we are centred, our “witnessing I” is what makes it possible to be aware of our experience, what we are noticing, what we are feeling, what we are sensing, what we are thinking, etc. In this diagram of the human soul, the “witnessing I” is located here in the spacious part of the soul. But there is another part of the soul, what I call the structured part of the soul. This structured part of the soul contains all our aspects from of our history that structure us: structure our thinking, structure our emotions, structure our behaviors, structure our relationships, structure how we carry things in our body. Let me list the different pieces that are included in the structured part of our soul that comes from our history.
This structured part of our soul is sometimes called our egoic self. Within Christianity, we might call this egoic self our fallen nature. Psychotherapy is all about working with people on healing parts of this egoic self, especially the problematic parts that are affecting significantly our functioning in the world. Now, what do you think happens, when our “witnessing I” moves away from the spacious part of soul and becomes attached to a part of our egoic self? All self awareness disappears and we become lost in the experience of whatever part our inner observer is connected to. What are the parts of our structured self that our “witnessing I” can easily become lost in?
There are many ways we can become lost. What I want you to notice is this. The reason we become lost is that our “witnessing I” has moved from the spacious part of the soul and is now attached to a part of the structured egoic self. When this happens, our experience of life and ourselves is shaped by whatever part our “witnessing I” is attached to. When this experience dominates our life experience, we soon develop beliefs about ourselves, others, God, and the world, all which become part of our structured self. If these beliefs become rigid, they soon begin to reinforce themselves into identities about ourselves, others, life, and God. Identities are hard to changed for we are emotionally invested in them and thus we easily dismiss or avoid any experiences that don’t fit these beliefs. We come to believe that this is who I am… this who “they” are…this is who God is…and this is how life works. However, when our “witnessing I” detaches from our egoic self and moves into the spacious part of our soul, a whole different experience of life and ourselves opens up. We find ourselves in a place of self awareness. But if we allow ourselves to settled more deeply within this place of awareness, we experience more than self awareness. We become aware of the experience of Presence arises from this spaciousness in our soul, what Christians call the Presence or Spirit of God. As you pay attention to this experience of Presence arising from your spacious soul, you notice that this Presence can take on certain qualities. Here is a list of some of the more common qualities that can emerge from this place of Presence.
The qualities of Presence, or Essence, as it is called in the Diamond Approach, are seen as the fruits of God’s spirit within the Christian tradition. Seen from this perspective, what is the goal of spiritual care, spiritual direction, or psychospiritual therapy? To help people regain their spiritual centre through helping people disidentify from whatever their "witnessing I” is attached to. When this disidentification happens, we allow our inner observer to naturally move back to the spacious part of our soul where our centre of being is found. With this disidentification, space begins to arise between our “witnessing I” and the structured part of our soul causing self awareness to arise. As we allow this self awareness deepens, we begin to experience Presence, a subtle sense of connectiveness to all of life and ourselves. We may also notice something else and it is this: the quality of Presence that emerges is often in response to what weare noticing in our experience in the moment, whether it be something we notice in our external world or something we notice within the internal world of our soul. For example, when we notice someone suffering or experience pain within ourselves, the divine quality of compassion may arise along with tenderness, sensitivity, and sadness. When we notice a bright red cardinal feeding at our bird feeder, the quality of wonder or awe may emerge. If we notice someone is rude to us or to someone we care for, we may experience a holy anger and strength arise that causes us to confront this rudeness. If we notice a part of us that feels guilty after making a mistake and we are led to confess this mistake to God and/or own our mistake in some way, we may notice the experience of divine forgiveness arise leading to the experience of purity. When we are with some of our friends, we may notice a certain form of love or connection arise between us. When we are paddling in our canoe on a quiet morning, we may notice an inner peacefulness emerge within us, when our thoughts stop and we simply are able to be. The many ways that Presence responds to what we notice in our experience is endless.
When there is spaciousness between our “witnessing I”, not only do have self awareness, but as this awareness deepens, we often notice Presence ministering to us by responding to whatever experience we are noticing in our awareness. Therefore, the essence of spiritual care, whether it is occurring in worship, spiritual direction, or psychotherapy, is helping people experience this disidentification between their "witnessing I" and the structured part of our soul. Questions to Ponder: 1. Consider the sacred times in your life. What made these times special, different or distinct from your normal everyday experiences? How was self awareness and the experience of Presence connected to these sacred experiences? 2. Reflect upon the times in your life when you lost self awareness. What experiences, emotions, roles, thoughts, etc. do you tend to become attached to? What benefits do you get from becoming lost in these experiences? What are the costs of these times when you lost awareness. 3. When you have experienced self awareness and Presence, what qualities of Presence have arisen in your life: compassion, love, strength, insight/truth, will, inner support, joy, trust, power, value, forgiveness, grace, curisoity, peace/calmness, oneness/unity, intimacy, etc. How was Presence responding to what you were noticing in your experience externally/internally?
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