“The approach to the numinous is the real therapy.”
– Carl Jung

“First there’s me, then there’s mine, then there’s trouble”
– Akong Rinpoche

As therapists of every persuasion we hold all kinds of conversations with our clients.  These include many aspects of emotional, cognitive, and relational health issues.  Trained and experienced therapists are in an effective place to help clients explore, navigate, and act in these lived territories. But what of the spiritual?

Are therapists sufficiently trained and experienced to skilfully and ethically help our clients when spiritual issues arise?  How do we know?  How do we disentangle the religious from the spiritually immanent or transcendent?  How do we help our clients navigate their spiritual development?  Should we?  A large part of spiritual growth is actually psychotherapeutic development[1], but how should we intervene? Engaging with the spiritual can help lower anxiety and improve wellbeing[2] but what do know of the connection to Spirit itself?

Therapists might believe that our clients (and our!) spiritual path is “anything we want it to be,” but study and research for decades now has unequivocally shown that not only does this perspective render spiritual endeavours as essentially meaningless, it also encourages deeper spiritual-and emotional and cognitive-pathologies to take root and flourish[3].  In addition, spirituality as just a “connection with an inner self” is a painfully inadequate way of experiencing the subject.

So how can therapists help?

As with psychotherapy, can we come to the table as not the “expert” in our client’s spirituality, but with a degree of expertise that helps clients reflect, make sense of, and map out their spiritual pathway?

This workshop will seek to bring together theoretical and practical learning from those who have integrated the psychotherapeutic and the spiritual pathways (known as Growing Up and Waking Up[4]) and will set out a series of spiritual cartographies, stages and strategies that can help us to help our clients make sense of their spiritual experience and future journey.

This in-person workshop will outline the work of Ken Wilber, Iain McGilchrist, Carl Jung, Augustus Masters, Marina Kaplan, Gangaji, Trungpa Rinpoche, James Fowler and others to explore:

• What is the connection between spirituality and good mental health? Knowing our boundaries as therapists
• How we killed Spirit and what filled the vacuum, or how “God is Dead” is a warning, not an assassination
• The domains of the self and the postmodern situation (right brain alienation) or how we became James Joyce’s Mr Duffy
• Coming to our senses: savouring our experience and coming out of the left brain into embodiment
• What is spiritualty? What is it not? Flatland spirituality
• Is it all about finding happiness, truth, meaning? What do we really want? Connection? Connection to what?
• Waking Up and Growing Up: a clear way of understanding and differentiating these lines of growth
• Umm, but waking up to what? The kensho experience and the simple feeling of being. The diamond in your pocket. “I see you Maya”-We’re trying for something that’s already found us
• Opening to the apophatic self and the vividity of life. Absolute interconnection
• The doors of perception (Blake). Blocked and locked doors
• “John Smith concealed and John Smith revealed” self-enquiry and “a man without a mask”
• The spiritual path: a goldmine in a minefield of transference and projection?
• What kinds of resistance might there be to engaging with the spiritual in counselling sessions? What views might we have?
• What is “Spirit”?
• Spiritual intelligence and spiritual experience
• Freud and the “future of an illusion” the New Atheists-critics of spirituality
• Wilbers 4 Quadrants or where’s spirit hiding?
• The spectrum of consciousness: spiritual development itself
• The 1-2-3 of God: the ways in which we can experience Spirit
• The pre/trans fallacy -how to understand the confusion brimming in the levels and meanings of spiritual experiences and why it really, really matters
• Cultivating discernment on the spiritual path
• Spiritual emergency, spiritual bypassing, spiritual materialism….and spiritual BS
• What about mindfulness? two kinds of mindfulness: clinical and transformative
• Focus and attention, thoughts and self-liberation of thoughts
• The EPS (egocentric preference system). The denial of death
• The conceptual self and nonconceptual self: should we destroy the ego?
• Identification may be the problem: the work of Eckhart Tolle
• The tapas of the path: should we expect difficulty and failure?
• Obstacles on the path and the path is obstacles
• The 3-2-1 of shadowwork: blocks to growth and the problem of the “puer aeternus”
• Suffering: what it means before letting it go (mindful self-enquiry) or no mud, no lotus!
• You experience pain, but you are not your suffering: The Buddha’s Sutra of the Second Arrow
• On being a compassionate mess: wholly human?
• Vast Sky: a glimpse of the nondual
• The Guest House poem
• Do I put more work into Growing Up or Waking Up?
• Integrating Growing Up and Waking Up: steps on the path to Cleaning Up and Showing Up (Doors of Perception 2)
• Case studies
• The path is practice: 20 practices to orientate to Spirit

This workshop is being presented by Graeme Armstrong. Jesmond Therapy Centre hosts this course and provides the venue and administrative support. Course content, materials, and delivery are provided by the facilitator and reflect their professional approach and clinical framework. For nearly a decade Graeme studied aspects of religion and spirituality at the Athur Findlay College of Spiritualism. He practised meditation and explored the paranormal over this period with a focus on mediumistic development.

In 2011 Graeme undertook a two year Post Graduate Diploma in Studies in Mindfulness held at the Tibetan Buddhist Centre in Eskdalemuir and was awarded a PG Dip Distinction. He went on the deliver over 60 weekend modules in mindfulness and compassion in the Buddhist Centres of Samye Ling Scotland, Samye Dzong London and Brussels. In addition, he has delivered over 100 hours of mindfulness and compassion training to the NHS.

Graeme’s focus is on finding a therapeutically meaningful path to help navigate and embody spiritual experience and growth in a healthy manner.

[1] Maria Kaplan Eyes Wide Open: cultivating discernment on the spiritual path
[2] John Swinton Spirituality and Mental Health Care
[3] Ken Wilber Integral Psychology
[4] Ken Wilber Finding Radical Wholeness

This workshop provides 6 hours of CPD and a Certificate of Attendance is provided at the end of the course.

Click here to view our CPD Booking Terms and Conditions.

Please note, the room in which we hold our courses is on the first floor and is accessed by stairs.     If you have any special requirements, or if you need to advise us of anything before booking or attending the course, then please contact us.

Our Early Booking Discount has expired.