Mysterium by Antonella Adorisio, Trailer video - Music by Donatella...
This beautiful work about the Mysterium of Body/Spirit Coniunctio seems appropo to us as we near the ending of our journey together, which is also always the beginning of a new one. Healing, as it relates to spiritual emergency, often has to do with dream-like experiences such as are found in active imagination. Recovery of the self and of the soul seems to require a recognition of and an acting upon the mind-body at-one-ment. Acting upon is differentiated from acting out as follows: when one acts upon knowledge, one takes it into account and uses it consciously for beneficial and salubrious purposes; when one acts out urges, one ignores the Logos and behaves unconsciously without regard to consequences to the self or others.
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What body work or body prayer do you do that expresses or feeds your spirit or soul?
When do you most sense the unity of mind/body/spirit?
When do you feel least connected or sense some sort of dis-integration?
Why take the body into account when trying to heal or recover spiritually?
How can moving or working with the body help to heal the soul or recover the spirit?
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For those of you who are therapists, I'd like to offer a book review I did back as an MA. It talks about using spirituality in your therapeutic practice with patients. Hope you enjoy it.
The Power of Spirituality in Therapy
By Kahle & Robbins
It’s time for “self-reflexercises.” This book guides readers to reflect on assumptions that can affect therapy. If you believe the sharpest therapeutic tool is self-knowledge, you’ll like the exercises for yourself and your patients.
This book puts the “psyche” (soul) back in psychology. It reminds us that the word therapy comes from “therapeia,” meaning soul healing. As a Jungian, my bias is for spiritual approaches emphasizing patients’ movement toward wholeness, using the unconscious to help guide individuation. I prefer integrative approaches allowing patients to differentiate by getting them in touch with their inner mysteries. Biases are precisely what the authors explore! They emphasize owning up to them and staying curious about others’.
This book focuses on biases that lurk behind therapists’ tendencies to shy away from spirituality in session – fear that patients will not want to talk about God, that they’ll demand the therapist believe as they do, or that therapists will instill their beliefs in patients. Can such transference and countertransference issues be used for therapeutic benefit?
Religion is a matter of diversity, and we must be competent to deal with it. It comes up in grief and loss, blended families, recovery from addiction, geropsychology -- many areas. Interestingly, the authors cite a study showing that “the best gains” in social adaptation and amelioration of depression in religious patients were for participants in religiously adapted cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), compared to traditional CBT, when the therapist was nonreligious! This is not to say therapists should not be religious, since religious participants also made significant gains with pastoral counselors in the study. Treatment matching, more than therapist matching, was key.
One good chapter of the book, called “The Power to Help,” lists and explains 10 ways to support patients’ spiritual health. It fits with therapeutic doctrines to “know thyself,” and “first do no harm.” It acknowledges that religion can indeed do harm, as in the behaviors of certain cults. It walks the therapist’s ethical and existential razor’s edge.
An excellent quote comes from Jung’s Psychology and Religion – which I consider a primer: “No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses … a source of life, meaning, and beauty.” Experience contrasts dramatically with dogma. The authors provide a full chapter on a case study in which a child’s experience is explored without dogma. It led to a powerful and concrete therapeutic change for the patient. It also demonstrated focusing on patients’ internal sense of consistency rather than on whether a belief is “crazy” or delusional. It allowed for symbolic understanding of experience rather than concretizing the numinous as hallucinatory.
Another helpful chapter offers 10 ways to build competence in using spirituality in therapy. While emphasizing that spirituality is not a technique, it provides some understandings to work by. Although a nonreligious therapist can provide religiously oriented CBT, “we cannot give what we do not have,” as Mother Teresa is quoted on providing spiritual love. Therefore, this chapter helps you consider your countertransference around, say, a patient who is going to die within a few years due to religious refusal to have a blood transfusion. It questions your beliefs about absolutes, your beliefs about truth.
If you’re into statistical research, you’ll enjoy the first half of the book, but if you prefer experiential work, you’ll focus on the second half of the book, and wish it were done in workbook format to better explore those questions that help increase your competence in spiritual sensitivity.