The spiritual dimension in psychotherapy1
Umberta Telfener2
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle” A. Einstein
“You are here to enable the divine purpose of the Universe to unfold.
That’s how important you are!” Eckart Tolle
“What is the definition of enlightenment? The end of suffering” Buddha
I was trained as a systemic strategic therapist at the Child Guidance
Clinic in Philadelphia in the mid 1970s, involved in the systemic-relational
psychotherapy which asks for connection and belonging. In the 1970s I also
began reading Castaneda’s writings. Curious about what there is between earth
and heaven, about the ethereal dimensions and the rapport between humans
and nature, I have made a point, ever since, of visiting shamans around the
world. I drew out another aspect of my personality working with migrants and
developing a shared dialogue, beyond the constrains imposed by Western
psychotherapy. I discovered another facet talking to women, who are able to
open their soul and disclose their personal cosmogonies. I was able to get close
1 I would like to thank Emanuele Mocarelli, friend and teacher. With his course on The Tree of Life and his friendship he has
allowed me to deepen my path and train my consciousness. I am grateful for his making me understand how the Divine
Comedy, the Song of Songs, the Bible and many other works are initiatory books. I thank Alfredo Ancora, trans-cultural
psychiatrist and travel companion, who encouraged me to dare in this article.
2 Systemic therapist, teacher of the Milan school of family Therapy, utelfener@gmail.com , www.systemics.eu . This article is
an English version of one published in Terapia Familiare N° 107, march 2015, pp.15-36.
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to them through a reflection upon the dynamics of love, between couples and
within individuals.
In this article, I would like to think about the degrees of junction between
the inter-related and crucial aspects of living, such as body and psyche, spirit
and soul. The title and the contents of this article grew out of this specific
objective. I do not intend to present a set of well organized ideas rather I will put
forward some suggestions, a personal experience, a story. These are post hoc
reflections, after a life spent in clinical and epistemological rigour. Not
coincidentally the path I propose is a point of arrival in my personal journey; it
makes sense only after a long time of meticulous and disciplined study and
reflection. The idea is to offer frames of mind, actions and ideas that are
constantly in evolution and borne out of a feeling that is in the air: a perception
of complexity. That is to say, the connection between different aspects of our
culture that we are accustomed to perceiving separately. I am speaking about
the link between different aspects of oneself, as well as with people and with our
Mother Earth. I will emphasize the need to connect the profession with one’s
personal search, a dimension too often left unsaid. I will allude to an awareness
of the wisdom of the Universe, and to my attempt to achieve a mindset of
interconnectedness, which while driven by emotion, is also based upon my
curriculum and the many experiences along my own spiritual path. Each person
can embark upon this journey, more or less voluntarily and become aware of its
intimate, private and unique flavour. For someone it is just sporadic
experiences, for others it becomes a search for an essential framework for their
own lives. For me it continues to be a life work.
I profoundly respect the power of words and I do believe that once
expressed, a new reality is created, which will never just be any more in the
background. The link between psychotherapy and the spiritual dimension has
existed for a long time: Jung’s process of identification is a true initiation
experience and Jungian theory deals with the soul and with the spiritual
dimension. During the 1960’s, Alan Watts - in a book that was a cornerstone investigated the functioning of the Ego and the roads developed in the East and
the West to set it free: in one case through the union with the Cosmos and in
another through psychotherapy, which is faithful to the illusion of separateness.
Some years later, Suzuki – well known representative of Zen Buddhism - and
Erich Fromm, the great psychologist, collaborated on a text together; during the
same period, Guru Ram Dass was invited at the Menninger Institute (Kansas,
U.S.A.) - a temple of psychoanalytic and psychiatric research - with the aim of
exploring the interconnections between the psychic and spiritual domains.
These same connections are still and currently proposed by transpersonal and
phenomenological psychology, while ethno-psychiatry just suggests them.
Mindfulness, very popular among cognitive psychotherapists, is perhaps a
Westernalization of the same concept. Cognitive therapists talk about an
effortless mindful experience that is inspired by Buddhism and can be defined
as a way of “facing the bare facts of experience, seeing each event as though
occurring for the first time” (Goleman 1998), “maintaining an awareness of the
present reality” (Hanh 1991) and “paying attention to what is here and now
without being judgmental, focusing on the purpose” (Kabat-Zinn 1994). I prefer
to focus on mindfulness as a unitary thought, like my colleague Restori (2010),
who writes,: “Awareness is an experience generated from a non-dual dimension,
where body and soul, individual and environment cannot be separated.
Awareness means feeling this interconnection. Being aware implies being in a
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relation, or better, being the relation with everything that one can feel, through
the breath of emotions.”
From a systemic perspective, talking about a spiritual dimension is
neither a new nor an uncommon action. Bateson (1972) already proposed this
connection with his hypothesis that the Sacred can emerge from the
complementary union of meanings and positioning. He was the first systemic
thinker to introduce us to the realm of the sacred without ever saying explicitly
what this was. His daughter Mary Catherine (1987) speaks about areas where
angels usually live and where the fools are afraid to enter and other areas where
also the angels fear to thread. The “unstable” ingredients that, according to the
two Bateson, allow us to reach a respectful, humble and sacred attitude are: 1. a
refusal of the Cartesian dualism, 2. attention to relations and communication, 3.
the sacral gaze and the consequent sacredness attributed to the organization of
our biological world, 4. the connection between aesthetics and ethics, 5. the
union of mind and nature, 6. metaphor as the logic by which the world was
build.
The desire for connection continues.
Even though our primary responsibility is the psychic, I don’t think
psychotherapists can afford to ignore the spiritual domain anymore. This need
for the spiritual dimension was highlighted in my encounter with migrants and
their thirst for the super-natural, and confirmed by several foreign colleagues
who, in this particular historical moment, seem more attentive to the evolution
of the living practice and are more considerate of the pursuit of harmony, peace
and spirituality.
Traditionally “the spirit” was forbidden to the believers; it was considered
an heretical step if not mediated by the church itself and only in recent years it
seems it has returned to a sort of free-zone.
Gurdjieff (1960), wise man and guru who dedicated his own life to the
achievement of the Sacred, invents the kundabuffer - an organ that has been
transplanted by the archangels in our bodies in order to keep our awareness
asleep - which makes us live with our feet firmly on the ground and keeps us
from waking up from a purely biological state. Various errors usually feed this
organ: A. lying to oneself and to others, B. repressing ones’ feelings, C.
identifying oneself in a role, D. projecting upon others our moods and our fears.
All actions that we risk to perform daily and that keep us switched off.
It is interesting to note Eister and Montuori’s (2003) two different
models for living in and reading the world, in other words, how to set one’s
mind. These models structure every sphere of life. The first is ruled by beliefs,
structure and hierarchical relations, the other one is lead by sharing. In the first
model the human is separated from the rest of the world and spirituality is only
a consequence of an abstraction: you isolate yourself, you go to the temple, you
create a special space into which you introduce the sacredness. Coherently with
the model of sharing, the second model is not only transcendent but also
immanent, based on everyday care, on empathy and connectedness. These
following sentiments - feeling respect, gratitude and non violence – are
embedded in every action, in every moment, they are embodied in daily life and
oblige us to pay attention to multiplicity and to process. Spirituality therefore is
not something separate or isolated nor does it separate us from others; it’s not
even an intra-psychic phenomenon that produces individual change. Rather it
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becomes an embodied social process which influences our relationship with
everything, making possible a truly relational way of life.
Access to the Sacred is not immediate nor does it happen intentionally, it
occurs “naturally”. We can undertake a path that allows us to improve our
capacity to perceive and we can begin a journey in order to learn to read the
Sacred throughout and in every which way. The two authors offer four means by
which to increase our spiritual potential: 1. Improving our ability to pay
attention to our inner wisdom; 2. Becoming totally aware of others, of what
happens around us, in order to trigger an active engagement with the rest of the
world; 3. Using empathy, care, attention, and a sense of responsibility towards
ourselves and others; 4. Learning and acting in a participative manner.
As psychotherapists, we look after the mind, the emotional sphere and
inevitably also the physical one. I dare to use the word “spiritual” in this text
and add it as a dimension to the clinical relationship. I have had a taste of the
knowledge of connection to which more and more humans have access. This
implies a refusal of separateness in favour of a union with the macro-cosmos,
with universal love. It implies an awareness that all the energy of the Universe
may be found in all that exists; a desire to explore the mysteries of life and the
significance of being human; the capacity to open oneself to an unconditional
love towards everything that exists and therefore existence itself. I know that
reaching for spiritual awareness is a journey made up of steps that make us
more and more aware. I have practiced finding the unseen in every gesture,
trying to reconnect the threads of traditions and finding the connection between
past and future, living the smallest as if it were a fractal of the macro. Because
the visible and the invisible affect each other, because it is this very necessity for
connection and purpose that justifies the possibility of introducing the spiritual
dimension into psychotherapy. “Everything is in everything” asserts the physics
Henri Bortoft, appreciating the wonder of the world.
Time, space, dynasty; wind, shadow, tree, butterfly; ying-yang vs.
spiritus-animus-anima (Taoism); vitality, breath, pulsation, gaze (Hindu
tradition); intellect, soul, mind, heart, numinosity, spirit (the layers that God
blesses in in XVI psalm of the Talmud); body, soul/thymos, soul/psyche,
mind/nous, spirit/pneuma/logos, genius/daimon, intellect/gnosis (grecoroman culture); body, soul, reason are some of the distinction that we use more
often nowadays. Topographies of the human being are diversified but according
to Zolla (1989) they can overlap. Talking about the Sacred implies a necessary
distinction between soul (Great Id, antenna) and spirituality. The soul is a
system of relations, a part of ourselves that we can only glimpse; that which
remains of ourselves when we get rid of the earthly affairs; a vast area to which
we have access when we fall in love. Once, an “illuminated” friend told me:
“You are in your soul when you transform your life into a work of art. Initiates and
artists are into their soul. It is a timeless entity in which everything is present. Love and
acceptance are the ground structures of spirituality. By living, we have to enter another
timeless dimension, the spiritual one: renouncing what I am in order to become what I
want to be. Because the process of individuation is never ending. The interconnection
between body, soul and spirit is the same as the one between Saturn (the body), the
moon (the soul) and the Sun (the spirit) in our cosmogony …”
Maybe we need to learn how to connect the individual soul with the soul
of the world.
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Talking about the Sacred necessarily implies an interruption of that
“spiritual desertification of the modern historical subject” (Zolla 1989). It
implies gathering principles of wholeness without drifting into religion, without
putting God on the table, as if we knew what we are talking about. But where do
we find the Sacred? In 2010, my colleague Bianciardi wrote:
“I believe that both in human relationships and in psychotherapy it is possible to
experience rare moments in which it seems we could meet the other in a “sacred” place.
We are meeting him/her when something unsaid is put into words. Certainly, this also
applies to an encounter with ourselves. Upon a close inspection, I believe it is more
precisely the place where the mysterious link between content and context emerges;
there where individuality comes forward, becoming the subject of a story that comes
out of (draws upon, feeds itself with, is subdued by) the other’s narrative and begins to
participate in an autonomous way to weave the same relational context from which it
tries to distinguish itself. I suggest therefore, that the encounter with the other should
be experienced as sacred when what is said (sometimes for the very first time) allows
an elaboration of that which was overlapped and confused, to be perceived as a
hypothesis, as an interpretation of what was before perceived as unique reality.”
What we are all trying to get at is a moment of communion, an amplified
sense of awareness and an overall heightened feeling, very well described by
Senge and colleagues (2004). From time to time I have felt moved in a
psychotherapy session, felt touched by a feeling of sacredness for what had
occurred: together we had reached a new gestalt, a picture that proposed a very
different point of view, never before investigated. I agree with Kenny (1998)
when he says:
“Also by consciously entering the domain where our comprehension gets destroyed, we
need to overcome our own invented knowledge, determining a slipping in order to push
ourselves beyond the “limitations of language”, questioning the limits applied to our
actions and those established in finding meanings. We need to enter the domain where
our comprehension fades away. The will to undertake this impossible effort is a
manifestation of the presence of the Sacred: that is, the effort of going beyond the
prisons of language in order to reach the unknown, the inexpressible, the undeliverable
meaning of a fuller mind (Mindfulness)”.
Psychotherapists should always try to push beyond and overcome their
clients’ narratives, which too often are saturated, having been repeated and reelaborated many times. They need to enter into an unknown territory through
and within the relationship. More and more often the problems we face stem
from tacit and preverbal experiences. We need to enter within an area of
possibilities, in the domain ruled by rituals and gestures. Actions and
experiences performed together become gateways that can lead to memories
and sensations.
Clinical work permits us to access one form of knowledge of the world
and allows us to live the experience on various levels. One level has something
to do with the reaction we have produced; another level allows us to open our
hearts, beyond words. We need to think vertically and horizontally, overlapping
layers from the most concrete to the most abstract, from the most mundane to
the most hypothetical. I like to imagine the Universe as a construction site, by
definition incomplete. We are the workers. Each of us is the creator of his/her
garden which is also the garden of the Universe; we are the gardeners but at the
same time the flowers and the bushes. In psychotherapy this hypothesis implies
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that we do not need to act immediately, we don’t need to understand everything.
However it is fundamental that relations are considered inevitable. We need to
accept that we know that we don’t know, be aware of our unavoidable
ignorance as well as the inescapable presence of blind zones and collusions
(Telfener 2011).
In these pages I am also talking about a professional ethic and an aesthetic
attitude, a positioning that I personally feel is useful and profitable. It
influences: (1) the clinician’s attitude, (2) the events to which we give our
attention, and (3) the spirit that emerges from the common dance. I will now
mention a series of steps that I consider necessary even if not sufficient to
honour and bring our attention to the spiritual level. I am not proposing to add
new procedures, but rather to assume an attitude towards the world, the others
and their problems. I believe that this dimension can emerge only if the
therapist has explored it personally, since it is mainly our choice as to how
concrete the common psychotherapeutic work should be. The level of the
initiation and learning of course are determined by one’s own nature and
choices, by one’s own life journey.
Comprehending (to grasp/collect together) what is told
Sometimes, when you sail on the open sea, you see dolphins. If you are lucky, the dolphins may swim along
with your boat and play with each other, with the waves and the hull. Sometimes, it will happen that your
eyes will cross and in this instance, just like the one with the whales in the Northern sea, you feel
connected to the entire Universe. It is as if they knew things we ignore. The astonishment, the peculiarity
of the event and the delicate effort on trying to keep them with you, ensures a loss of self awareness so as to
concentrate on the common dance. They squeak and play, it seems they are doing it just for the humans,
but we also extend ourselves, we emit sounds, welcoming them with love and gratitude. When it happened,
I felt the separation between us dissolved. For a moment I felt purely happy.
Sometimes, listening to the “difficult” stories that people bring to me, I feel
I am facing something limitless and at the same time very very small. The
boundless silence of pain appears to me like a dune in an immense desert and I
seek for collective rituals that no longer exist. I believe that I must pay homage
to time, respect it, delve into what is the personal past and beyond to a transgenerational one. I query the flow of life that justifies what is presented in the
here and now. For this reason I begin by investigating individual and family
history and, if the situation doesn’t evolve, I look to past generations. Inquiring
about past generations is the same as reflecting on the single mind here and
now, both are fractals of an organizational whole, both offer a similar and
repetitive design of what is happening. I also have to bring the future into the
present in order to find out what this person wants for himself3 and from us,
what he is learning from the crisis “here and now”. If suffering is a way to gain a
major coherence of the self, what message should the client accept and
recognize?
Antonia enters therapy desperate. Her partner has left her again and again and she is obsessively
concerned with having been abandoned. She recalls every interaction of the last several months, she
3 I now arbitrarily decide to render the clinician/professional a “she” and clients masculine. It is my choice in order not to
repeat s/he all the time.
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analyses every detail and she asks herself why. It is impossible to answer. I feel sorry for her pain. I feel the
urgency of trying to stop it, without disqualifying nor denying it. I ask myself how much the topic of
abandonment resounds in her family history, how much is her obsession related to the man and how much
is related to the fear of being left alone, how much might it be related to a sense of defeat with respect to a
tough challenge in her difficult working life. Who is she obsessed with: with him? With herself? With her
charmer of a mother who has always had parallel affairs in her marriage? With her boss who humiliates
her? And what does being abandoned means to me, how do I react to it, how did I manage it in my own
life?
Com-prehension4 means accepting, taking on together with the other that
which is brought by the “heart of the mind”. Feeling a sense of sacredness in the
encounter with the other can underline that rare and magic moment (a moment
one can never consciously look for) in which for an instant we feel both as one.
Bianciardi (2010) thinks it is a moment in which we feel together and at the
same time distinct, present and jet not enmeshed.
To comprehend means also taking into consideration the generative
process. As Varela writes (in Varela, Thompson, Rosh, 1991), “Shifting our
attention towards the origin rather than the object”. Questioning about what
keeps people where they are, which assumptions and relationships reinforce the
problems brought to our attention, asking what do these problems signify and
which adaptive or evolutionary role do they play. It also mean “to let go”, to let
what is already happening happen, going beyond the duality between subject
and object, in order to live the present without being judgmental.
This is not just a matter of understanding intellectually or even
emotionally. It is not about “fighting” against symptoms but rather understanding them and giving people the time to absorb what we have elaborated/
redefined/deconstructed/hypothesized together. Intuition, the ability to vibrate
together, to make connections and to integrate the experiences of others with
our own, gives us the opportunity to access collective symbols, private
narratives, shared listening. All of these common actions go along with the
emotional and intellectual comprehension of what is happening. To
comprehend means hypothesizing, making assumption about the role of all the
subjects involved in the creation and maintenance of the pain. It means asking
oneself how the mind, the relationships and our own participation to this
semantic dance create/maintain/infect the problems and the process. Our belief
system creates our reality: which projections do not allow an evolution? In
which ways are culture, habits, prejudices, beliefs, driving us to undermine the
possible evolution of the process, thus to lose togetherness and lightness? We
create blocks in our awareness, which prevent us from moving on. They are
repetitive patterns that lead us to a never ending circle. Learning to let go is
useful, at times indispensable. The only way to influence the external is to
understand how one’s mind and heart collude with what is happening. The wise
say: “Change your mind and the world will change”. In order to change the
external is crucial to start questioning our beliefs, to transcend the rational
mind and render it our servant rather than our dictator. Ram Dass says: “Fear is
only the result of impure thoughts that define us as separate from the rest of the
Universe”.
4 Com-prehend (comprendere in italian, cum-prendere, to take together), the English under-standing, and the German Ver-
stehen (not staying) are three different ways of talking about comprehension. They assume different cultural positioning
for the same action.
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The moves I wish to list as part of understanding, of comprehending are:
(1) open one’s heart and feel involved; (2) see from the inside; (3) hypothesize
and grab hold of the purpose of what should happen; (4) connect as coparticipants in a holistic reality that binds us together; (5) make the future
present; (6) become one with the situation. In sum, create a climate of non
judgmental listening
Accepting multi-dimensionality and union with the whole
I went to the Amazon forest of Peru in order to meet with the shamans. I walked for a long time
to reach an Eco sustainable village in the middle of nowhere. I walked among trees that were so
tall that they couldn’t make a shade and I caught myself surprised by the sounds of the forest:
trees and branches falling, birds and other animals’ noises extremely amplified by these long
corridors of vegetation. At the very beginning I felt as if the rainforest was divided into layers,
just like a cake: each layer a different ingredient. One layer was filled with birds, fronds and
leaves, another with beetles and flowers, another had humans and shacks, some with loud TVs
blearing, and still another with the soil, the ants, the insects and finally a layer inhabited by
what we could not see: roots underground, snakes and other hidden animals. For a moment I
felt a part of Everything. It has been a moment of deep peace and my mind was purely free from
boundaries and constrictions, just as if there was no more I/Ego. As soon as I tried voluntarily
to prolong this feeling, it disappeared.
Accepting the multidimensionality of the Universe means giving value to
the knowledge of complexity, taking into consideration the system we belong to,
that we are part of. It means accepting and understanding that the common
“game” that includes us, is bigger than us. It is a matter of going from the
Everything to the particular and vice versa, to become active parts of what could
happen instead of passive observers, ruled by pre-established maps. To respect
multiplicity on this Earth implies a change in our focus. We must look beyond
the surface and approach a state of mindfulness, a non judgmental awareness of
the connection between events. We need to experiment the world not as
something given a priori but to consider the underlying process of what we
perceive: the world is made manifest through us. “Seeing a wider pattern allows
people to feel deeply connected and makes them powerful. This inner
knowledge comes from the heart” says Otto Schermer (Senge 2004). In therapy
it means going beyond the usual script in order to see a larger design that refers
to more generations, different stories, multiple descriptions and the possibility
of rendering the future present and living in the here and now. It also means
going “beyond” the individual, giving clients a chance to feel part of a family, a
group, a community, a culture, part of human becomings5, of nature, of the
Universe. Because being alive is being part of a vast combination of
relationships, it means accessing different time dimensions, respecting the
interwoven complexity and welcoming the client into the comprehension we
have of the world. I personally believe that a bi-dimensional therapist is not able
to accompany her clients into a dimension that is denser than the one she
inhabits.
5 To call humans “becoming” is the suggestion of the philosopher Martin Buber in order to underline the evolutive
process we are inevitably involved in, from birth to death.
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Promoting the transformation of the therapist
In 1992, I was in Buriazia to attend the first pilgrimage of the Mongolian and Buriat Shamans on the holy
island of the lake Baikal, where it is said the first Shaman was born. We were many and in that occasion we
felt like citizens of the world. Each one of us had brought his or her personal expectations and a strong
desire to be part of a collective moment. It was very cold even though it was June. The lighting of the fire around which we used to sing and gather - became a fundamental and dayly ritual. Shamans at the head of
the collective rituals were asking us to bring out our intentions and to visualize a way to fulfil them, to
figure out the necessary steps to go home “changed”. Despite their culture being so very different than
ours, they were able anyway – through small gestures – to overturn the scripts we had brought with us and
stimulate new opportunities and new points of view. The task was every day to rebuild the harmony of
what we had lived and of what we shared with them and among ourselves, almost never using verbal
language. I went back home deeply changed, having made important life decisions.
As clinicians we are prone to reflect about health and disease, about life
and death, about birth. We are not explicitly taught how to tune into the laws of
Nature, how to perceive our participation in the Cosmos. Considering oneself a
part of the process becomes essential, as is being able to trust the connection
between heart and mind (our personal vision of the world) in order to bring the
other to the level of awareness that we have already reached. We tend to leave
the spiritual dimension to the personal sphere, when instead in psychotherapy it
is easy to realize that what we have to offer is ourselves and our attitude towards
life: our awareness, our capacity to use an abductive way of thinking6, to give up
the bonds of causal and reductive explanations. This attitude is fourfold. For
one it is about facilitating the “us”, abandoning the idea that we act on someone
else in order to carry out the meeting ; at the same time it means working on
ourselves to overcome our own prejudices and increase our levels of freedom. It
also implies to accept the social responsibility we’ve been given and monitoring
the process in order to make something significant happen. Be curious is the
fourth operation: complexity demands a shared investment, not to solve
problems but to redefine them together. Curiosity means also lightness,
irreverence, attention to what is happening, a capacity not to fall into the trap of
symptoms, into the seriousness of the situation, into the mind as a priori. There
are no victims nor executioners and if I dwell only on the sickness it is only
because I cannot see in an integrated manner, because I am seeking for
homogeneity where there are only differences.
It is necessary and inevitable that also the professional be willing to call
herself into question. She may be more or less transformed by the stories she
listen to, according to her own attitudes and her disposition to beeing
perturbed. There are epistemological differences in the attitude towards the
process: there are those who consider it a technical path geared to change and
those who deem it a dialogical experiential pathway oriented to the an opening
of shared possibilities. For this reason, choosing the second option, I prefer to
talk about evolution instead of change and I am also interested in marginal
themes, where chatting about issues that are on the periphery of the
psychological work can be fundamental.
I work with R. I try to help him move beyond medication, to create barriers between him and his father
who criticizes and calls him a “helpless psychotic”. After a period in which R. feels better, is more active
and starts to have a social life, he begins having trouble sleeping, he connects ideas erratically and he
seems restless. How scary, how worrying! I fall into the same fear he and his parents have. The morning I
have to meet with him and his family because they consider him in a maniacal state, I wake up at dawn
6 An abductive way of thinking is the one preferred by Bateson. It calls for abandoning a strict logical mode
in order to follow the flow and think in a relational associative way.
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and try to stop my thoughts. I voluntarily force myself to imagine him better and I push myself farther: I
imagine he could keep a job and find his balance. If our though are connected into a common matrix, I
better not fall into the trap of worrying about his downfall. I have to offer to both of us the chance of a
subtext, of a shared mind not polluted by fear. I can do it, if I work on it I will succeed. He is not able to do
it right now.
Some operations are more useful than others:
Being here and now means to flirt with the ideas that come but do not
marry them ever (Cecchin 1991); implies being aware of the emotions and
sensations that emerge and choosing how to use them rather than being
organized by them. It means to honour what is happening in the here and now
of the relationship, making incursions into the past and the future in order to
illuminate the present. It means understanding your own role in regulating/
producing/ correcting/ maintaining the system and interacting with the other
professional involved in the narratives; it also implies an awareness of the
unavoidable possibility to collude. It means listening deeply. It means, finally,
letting go of the well-known in order to explore uncharted territories in order to
let something new to take place.
Suspending judgment is something to be learned. Francisco Varela talks
about the “capacity to escape the usual flow of thoughts” and he considers it the
first step to increased awareness. It is not a matter of creating a taboula rasa, to
through away every model but rather to gain an epistemic awareness that allows
us to trace the premises which organize our perception. It’s a matter of facing
our premises and thus be able also to act. It is a matter of seeing our outlook,
considering that judging voice shaped by our own culture and habits, not falling
into the blaming and controlling modality. It is not to jump to conclusions, but
trust the process and build a multiverse of possible complementary hypothesis.
It is important to enhance the capacity to see things as if they are happening for
the very first time, without falling into the same old automatic paths, traced
over and over again. Every session should stand on its’ own, every problem as if
it were different: to search for the integrity of the system, that includes us.
Waiting means not acting immediately; honour time, allow stimuli that
may not be the determining factors to come to light. Knowing how to look
attentively without having to intervene allows the process to happen and to
flow. I am suggesting to leave behind the mentality of the problem solver,
overcome the dualistic vision of doctor and patient, of seeing the problem
separated from the person. I have myself had to learn to “listen to the silence”
and not to fill the empty spaces with understanding.
Allowing vulnerability means accepting not knowing (inter alia Telfener
2011. 2014) and allowing oneself not to need answers, being able to remain
silent. Further, it means to tune in to the other’s pain, feeling and
understanding together, while perturbing by making connections and
assumptions. I have been moved to tears in a session, I allowed it to happen but
I also moved on to construct some hypothesis that could give meaning to the
sufferance.
Learning from others means being available to learn, to consider oneself in
a constant process of evolution, in continuous expansion and contraction. Each
person who comes asking for help teaches us something about ourselves and
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about life. The work consists in understanding that part of ourselves that is
mirrored through somebody else and to integrate it. This process allows us to
give back to the client a vision of the process of living.
Trusting the other
In Rome I used to live in front of the apartment of the famous conceptual artist Cy Twombly. His canvas
are worth millions of dollars and are home to the walls of major contemporary art museums. The painter
used to go up and down along his studio, usually in his underpants, with a piece of chalk in his hands
behind the back. I was writing my dissertation, stuck at my desk, and he was going up and down for hours.
Sometimes he would make a sign on the gigantic canvas hanging on the wall, then he would start walking
again, totally absorbed . There seemed to be a relationship between the signs he left on the canvas and who
he was, his history, his vision of what was emerging from his canvas, to which he was connected through
his thinking/feeling/scribbling. His actions were spontaneous, he didn’t seem to have a pre-conceived
notion of the result. He seemed driven by an inner motion which was giving sense to what was emerging.
He seemed all one with his painting. I was fascinated.
I believe the aim of our work is the well being of the individuals with
whom we are working so as to access to a dimension of collective well being.
However there is no such thing as a single person alone. The aim becomes the
common well-being, harmony between people and generosity towards oneself
and others. I believe that I belong to a universal family that is interested in
peace, and will be capable, in time, to achieve it. My values are trust, healing
and harmony. I often ask to my clients what are theirs. What do they aspire to?
What is it that is keeping them going? What would they want their lives to
include? The drive for change emerges from the affirmation of self which
originates from the renewed capacity to feel empathy, connection and gratitude.
The inclination to change is also related to how each person dancing sees
her/himself through the eyes of the others and the capacity to acknowledge
ones’ own resources. Therapy is the occasion created when two or more people
meet and, thorough the reciprocal knowledge, build a shared energy that
becomes “sacred”.
Trust in the human becoming and in his capacities to evolve is one of the
indispensable assumptions for a clinician. I believe that whenever we cannot
consider the positive evolution of a specific problematic situation, we become
part of its defeat by maintaining the status quo.
Buying into a negative judgment and believing in the severity of a
presenting problem is not the best strategy towards evolution. The risk is one of
becoming enmeshed in the other’s pain. At times, we end up believing that this
pain is unavoidable, thus we participate in the creation of chronicity, anchored
in the sickness instead of opening to well being scenarios. Activating
regenerative and self- healing forces means instead not falling into the trap of
symptoms and not blocking oneself at the level of comprehension proposed by
the client, but rather to access our intuitive wisdom in order to offer to others
our level of connection with the generative energy and attaining an evolutionary
process. This also means creating a secure environment in which we can explore
different alternative hypothesis about what is happening. Whatever problem is
presented we must not to be overly frightened. We can use what Zolla said:
“Humans are taken away by their biographies (while) our experience of the
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world is a function of how we conceive it and we are free to conceive it as we
wish.” (1981).
A pleasant and curious manner when meeting a client is very different
than a merely dutiful attitude when we think "I have to see the client at all
costs". We should be able to tell personal anecdotes, demonstrate respect and
consideration and feel the pleasure of the common dance.
Going “naturally” towards what you want to achieve
I went in various countries of the world to get my future read through coca leaves, shells, tea leaves, coffee
grounds, stones, bones, coins, sticks, even coloured plastic buttons (!). Each time, the procedure has
seemed to be an attempt to harmonize what was already happening in my life with new information. None
of the narratives has been completely foreign, I have always been considered part of a larger ecosystem,
constantly flowing. Often I have been confirmed: my wishes were on road, on the way to be fulfilled. The
same happens in psychotherapy, when I tell a lonely woman that if she emotionally divorces from her exhusband she can finally be courted, it becomes more probable that – while looking around – she can draw
on herself the attention of others.
I declare myself a constructivist. This means that I believe I take part in
the construction of that which emerges in my world. If, for instance, I don't feel
loved enough by my partner, the outcome will be entirely different if I look for
perpetual confirmation as opposed to trying to live joyful and intense days
together. The outcome will be completely different. The same thing happens
with our clients. Being focused on the disease and the symptoms or on recovery,
we yield to different outcomes. The same happens if we let go of the thoughts of
negativity ore we stick to them; if we think about a conversation as a flux or
rather as a picture of the actual happening; if we get scared as opposed to
considering each behaviour as a an event that will allow our clients to live more
intensely the mystery of their lives. Renouncing the conscious aim does not
mean believing you are not manipulating (this is impossible) nor does it mean
settling for controlling everything (equally impossible and hurtful).
I believe that forgiveness of ourselves and others has not been sufficiently
appreciated and valued as a therapeutic practice.
Sebastiano is a successful fifty-years-old man, torn between two women. Each one accuses him of being
stingy with himself, of being unable to take care of them. On the contrary, he is convinced he is doing his
best. To me he seems a man running away from his self: he is always busy, he is not able to manage any
request, he never misses any opportunity, he constantly excuses himself with both women, with his
children. He feels at fault, yet without ever changing his life style. He tells me about his childhood: a very
distracted mother and a selfish father. He has always been in between their fights and had to take care of
them as if he was his own grandfather. I share Sebastiano’s fatigue, his feeling of always being invisible to
others, and I ask him to spend a week concentrating on himself, on his needs and wishes. Sebastiano is
moved, he is convinced he is guilty because of his bigamy, because his children and the women constantly
accuse him of being selfish. I do not see him as a selfish man; I see a child busy in living his life, who has a
deep fear of being disqualified and of suffering. This is why he works so hard. A man, all mind, very willing,
ambitious, capable, a workaholic, full of success, but without room for an emotional connection with
himself.
Allowing the right side of the brain to participate in the sessions
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In Yayeme, a village in Senegal, in 1994, I visited a saltigué – an old man who was able to see and answer
questions about the future and about health. I spoke to him, thanks to a translator, about a person who was
not eating. “Why is this person not eating? Isn’t there enough food?” he asked me alarmed. Of course there
was enough food. How could I explain to an old African man a Western obsession? The wise man
immediately realized that the problem was beyond his rational comprehension and he proposed a very
elaborated ritual. I had to find an anthill and collect the soil that the ants dig up and leave around the
entrance hole. I carried out his instructions precisely and performed the ritual, binging up many
connections in the process, and went home with this soil. Was it pure coincidence that when I returned to
Rome, my “protégée’s” problem was on its way to being overcome?
Usually perception is linear. There is however another level of awareness
where perception becomes holographic, in which things are not considered in
time and there is the possibility of escaping the Ego and strict causality.
Shamans call it “the loving dimension”, made up of awareness, energy and the
capacity of accessing the inner space of the Self which is love and awareness of
the entire Universe. An abductive way of thinking favours this dimension. One
starts by no longer wanting to understand and letting oneself be transported by
associations, transversal thoughts and by one’s own fantasies regarding ongoing
relations. The idea is that one’s attention is free to wonder and perceive
different shades and particulars.
Marta and I are engaged in an intensive work. She is a single woman who has worked very hard to find her
stability. She has occasional jobs and sporadic love affairs; she talks about an inner world made of
loneliness and fantasy images that vividly arise in her mind. I make her talk with every “voice” within
herself that participates in her daily life in order to understand the meaning of her visions, which I choose
not to call “hallucinations”. From a holistic perspective, I believe there are “doors” that open onto other
dimensions of her awareness, which are sometimes full of light and at other times allude to loneliness and
self destruction. I ask her inner voices to tell us their function in Marta’s life and into her evolutionary
path. What we discover is that Marta is ruled by her childhood experiences during which she played a
crucial role in taking care of a borderline mother and a younger sister, both under her emotional charge
from the time she was five years old. These have determined Marta’s every choice ever after and equally
her deep fears of commitment, duty and responsibility.
Favouring ritualization
The All blacks, rugby World Champions, have developed a ritual to become one with the game and to
intimidate the adversaries. It is a dance that is always the same, rhythmic, accompanied by gestures and
belligerent expressions. My guess is that they fall into a trance while practicing it, to touch in a sense the
energy of their past victories and of the winning strategies they had reached together. They build one
collective mind that arises from the utterly same and repetitive actions and the image they receive back
from the observers.
When you attend a family constellation, the facilitator at the beginning, establishes a ritual in order to
create a sort of cybernetic brain able to stimulate a morphogenetic field (Sheldrake 20xx) in which a
common feeling emerges. In this way it is possible to synchronize to other people’s scripts and all work
together.
For the majority of individuals, the symptom is often a benchmark
between before and after. We can imagine it as a chance to stop and interrupt a
mechanical life and try to deeply understand the roots of our functioning. Just
as with the spiritual path that lies between the before and after you experience a
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sort of symbolic death, so also in psychotherapy one must often sacrifice the old
identity in order to reach a more complex one. Ceremonies and rituals help this
process, as long as they come from the heart and are not techniques imposed
from above. We can imagine the psychotherapeutic process as a path in which
all together we recuperate the information that is needed in order to integrate it
into a new coherence. Sparks of capta7, organized within a frame built “with
love” and sharing, through an exchange of gifts (Kinman 2000).
Conclusions: an unavoidable ethical attitude
When I was in Buriazia in the 1990’s, the shamans taught us to honour Nature. If you took a stone, a
flower, a shell you had to pay homage to Mother Earth with a though of gratitude and leave something in
return: a coin, an intention, a thank you. It is a way to honour the spirit of each thing, to feel part of the
Everything.
I have flowers in my studio, a lighted candle, a small apparatus that builds rainbows and every morning,
when I step in, I always tidy the room up, so that it becomes a pleasant place for myself and the people I
will meet. I do not consider it any old room but rather a sacred corner where people give me the honour to
come and tell me their problems. Where together we reflect upon their feelings and what to do. As my
friend and colleague Alfredo Ancora told me once, the Mongolian Shaman we worked with in Buriazia
once asked him: “Do you ever pray before working?”. Alfredo asserts it took him many years to find an
answer!
Health is based on interior harmony, on belonging and implies the
possibility to be in contact with one’s own loving Self. It is based as well on trust
in life and the sensation of having a place on Earth. The concept of health
involves all the levels of being: mental, emotional, physical, psychic, spiritual
and ecological. Working in therapy we are attentively present, we participate by
acting with respect and we focus on resources, those of the people we work with
and ours. We centre on the procedural aspects of the shared context. As
systemic therapists we create evolutionary relationships based on a sense of
curiosity, non judgment and union. I am not speaking only about a participative
and attentive attitude towards the diverse dimensions of clinical procedures
(use of language, choice of positioning, spotting of possible collusions with the
dominant culture and the context, to cite the most important), but rather about
the possibility of considering psychotherapy an “ethical” practice rather than a
“medical” or “scientific” one (Bianciardi 2012). Psychotherapy is concerned with
the integrity and uniqueness of the subjective experience; it deals with the
subjectivity of each individual, which is unique in its complexity. The
psychotherapist must assume full responsibility not only for the correct
application of her own method and the relative techniques, the psychotherapist
needs also to assume responsibility as a person and become personally
responsible for what happens within the encounter, with the others and for the
outcome of the meeting (Bianciardi 2012). The ethical stance guarantees respect
for the complexity, the involvement, the wonder and the multi dimensionality of
each encounter. An ethical attitude constitutes a “strada maestra”, the high
street or principal avenue leading to the Sacred.
7 “Capta” is the word Ronald Laig () suggests using instead of “data” since information is not something that we find
and is given to us but something that emerges from an active work of choosing and selecting.
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What I have said here about the Sacred may or may not be received,
carried further by all who read this discourse. I am aware of how incomplete it
is. Each of you will have to assimilate and transform what I have said, and find
his or her own independent way. I would like to conclude with a greeting the
Indians use when they meet: NA MA STA, I honour the light within you.
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