What is Transpersonal Therapy?

 

View of Human Nature Within a Spiritual Framework

As human beings we live under the illusion of separation. As we grow up in our families and culture, our sense of Oneness with God/Creator and our need to connect wholeheartedly other people is covered over with beliefs, trauma, loss and pain. We all have the choice, during traumatic moments to separate further away from life in anger and vengeance, or to "rise" to the occasion and find our deeper spirit and decide grow through adversity.

 

Through my own personal life awakenings such as when I lost my brother, my father, my grandfather, my cousin and my aunt in the the period of year I made the choice to draw on the larger spiritual forces of life to learn how to cope with my own staggering feelings of grief and loss. Without a larger framework for what was happening, I would not have been able to function with meaning and purpose in my life.

 

There is a lesson in A Course in Miracles that says, “Let me recognize that my problem has been solved.” Our problems stem from our desire to be independent and separate from God, our families and our partners. As we learn to take responsibility for our lives fully, we grow to understand that we actually desire to be separate in our ego mind. We begin to see that we ourselves create our problems through our long cherished mistaken beliefs and that we actually have a choice in each moment, regarding how to see our lives. Perhaps the deepest truth is that we willfully and often unconsciously choose to repeat family patterns. We create problems in our lives so that we do not have to live up to our purpose, our magnitude and give our unique gifts to life.

 

Taking Full Responsibility For Our Mental and Emotional Health

Mental, spiritual and emotional health begins with taking full responsibility for our own lives and the choices we are making in each moment. To do this we need to go back into our family of origin to see where we gave up, where we withdrew our fullest energies and gifts, and where we chose to separate from our magnitude. We can choose to look at where we decided to become wounded, separate and independent from the whole. We can learn to see when and where we chose not to do well in our lives.

 

We can choose to view every event of our lives as inviting and invoking our own healing. Everything repeats itself until it is healed. If our past family issues feel too daunting to communicate directly to, we can find plenty of fodder of repeating ancestral issues cropping up in our current relationships, in our parenting dillemas, and in the current life struggles that are inviting healing right now.

 

Viewing Problems from a Transpersonal Perspective

The key to self-responsibility is that we can never expect other people to change for us, to meet our needs, or be responsible for our lives.  We can only change ourselves. Without self-responsibility and personal accountability, we will remain weak and in a victim stance that is not conducive to growth and change.

 

In relationships, self-responsibility can go to the deepest and subtlest levels where we can begin to see how on the deepest soul levels we colluded with every situation we have been a part of. We can start to see our choices at every level of life. We can begin to own all of the life instances where we created the separation and distance that we prefer to blame on others. At the deepest levels we can begin to see that the personality/ego part of ourselves has always wanted separation and problems in some way. Otherwise it would be easy to forgive, understand and heal through trusting that whole picture of life is healing and shaping us into our best selves all of the time.