The first confusion that seems to arise has to do with the frustrating limitations of language, especially as we use words across what, in our contemporary Western world, we consider ‘separate’ disciplines. What I hear Hwang’s words reveal is a cultural premise of compartmentalization, where ‘spiritual practice’ is distinct and separate from ‘talking with your therapist’, which would also be different from getting exercise, or eating right. When we look back to various spiritual traditions, where fasting or dietary practices and rituals get ‘baked in’ to spiritual practice, we see a clear example of cultural bias in constructing demarcations for where ‘spiritual practice’ begins and ends.

Although I see shifts occurring, where what were once ‘separate’ disciplines no longer seem separate, certainly my personal experience has involved a lot of sitting in (mostly unspoken) confusion around where psychology, healing, and Self-realization begin and end. Almaas, founder of the Diamond Approach, speaks to one aspect of this confusion in these terms: “The Diamond Approach is described by its adherents as a “response to an important need that is being felt in many quarters, a need for a spiritually informed psychology, or conversely, for a psychologically grounded spirituality. This perspective does not separate psychological and spiritual experience, and hence sees no dichotomy between depth psychology and spiritual work… This body of knowledge is not an integration or synthesis of modern depth psychology and traditional spiritual understanding. The inclination to think in terms of integration of the two is due to the prevailing belief in the dichotomy between the fields of psychology and spirituality, a dichotomy in which the Diamond Mind understanding does not participate.”

The rebel in me wants to high five Almaas’s peaceful non-participation in the dichotomy between the fields of psychology and spirituality. And still, I’ve often gotten frustrated at where this ‘opting out’ leaves us. Not so much from Almaas’s place of transcending a dichotomy, but instead from a fuzzy place, where we’re not even seeing our own blindspots, and where we’ve failed to leave helpful breadcrumbs for those who come after us. As Shinzen Young pointed to in his ‘damned if you don’t’ conceptualization of not talking about enlightenment paths–where, in failing to describe a path, teachers leave students at risk of lacking motivation and direction, and of not being sensitive to benchmarks–I have a similar worry for psychotherapists (not to mention their clients!) who lack a vision of Self-realization, nevermind a sense of how psychotherapeutic work actually gets us there.

Perhaps because of my background as a therapist, my ears have always perked up when I’d find myself on retreat, for instance an Adyashanti retreat, and during the inquiry period people would ask a question about something related to their personal history or intense emotion where they felt stuck. Adya would sometimes respond by directing the person to ‘go do therapeutic work’ (qualifying his recommendation by saying that it would probably be wise to seek out a particular type of therapist–not just any therapist–but a handful of therapists Adya perceived as being actually helpful).

In my own process, when I was doing a month-long Vipassana retreat with Sylvia Boorstein, I was touched when Sylvia, a retired Clinical Social Worker, said to me in an interview “we’re not really supposed to talk about your childhood, but tell me about your childhood.” I found Sylvia’s question especially charming in the context of her just having offered me half of the banana she was eating. To my impressionable view, she seemed, instinctively and fluidly, to model how to offer whatever a student might need in a given moment. Whether geared towards mitigation of a blood sugar dip, a discussion about family of origin dynamics, or a complex deconstruction of Buddhist theory, Sylvia met what was arising and said: ‘yes, let’s work with what’s alive for you right at this moment’. 

But this variability–that wherever a person might find themselves in their individual process called for a wildly different teaching or intervention than another student at another place in their process– seems to perpetuate the very murkiness I yearned to clarify. I don’t feel like I’m alone in feeling confused about where psychotherapy–and other forms of healing, like shamanic or energy healing–fit into the broad brushstrokes of waking up.

From a (possibly snobbish) psychotherapeutic place, I also remember back to my grad school professors, who warned us of the hazards of thinking we were practicing in an ‘integrated’ way, when we were actually just practicing in a sloppy way. At the same time, incongruously, I’ve noticed myself experiencing the strong hunch that some of the people I’ve encountered on retreat–those who seem to me like they’re languishing in a particular conceptual prison, despite rigorous and sincere meditation practice–could be freed up, super fast, if they just did a half hour session with a practitioner outside of whatever lineage they were working with.  Working with the subtle energetic field, utilizing psychotherapeutic techniques to release false beliefs, somatic work, or any other number of effective interventions seemed to me like the most efficient and promising ways for people to get unstuck.

And perhaps there is a way of delineating what we might use any of these healing interventions in the service of. By this I mean, if what we think we’re doing with healing work is strengthening a separate self, or reinforcing identity, we have a very different intention than using what (ironically enough!) might be the exact same technology, or intervention, to dissolve, or see through, the illusion of a separate self. What I would argue is that it’s not so easy to discern intention across modalities. Perhaps because different lineages use different words, gesture to various stages of development, and insist on different ‘work’, I think it can feel impossibly difficult to arrive at a useful way of assessing whether a type of therapy in itself has the capacity to serve–even to hasten–awakening, or to hinder it.  

What I put forth in my larger body of work is a vision of how to hold the paradoxical stance that you’re already enlightened, while also (lovingly!) recognizing every aspect that initially feels unenlightened. According to this conceptualization, we always, and already, have 24/7, on-demand access to the beingness dimension of ourSelves. AND, in the realm of becoming, embedded trauma, unprocessed material from childhood, every false belief and wounded part appear to arise,  kicking and screaming, making it seem like all of our unenlightened bits are sitting on top of (perhaps completely obscuring) our enlightened beingness.

I believe it’s possible to start to apprehend, and work with, a truth long known by sages. We can be both. We can be healer and unhealed, simultaneously. Think of any contracted or difficult area. A deep pain from childhood, a core wound that you carry. If you can find this wound in the body, and really make contact with it, initially you might feel powerless, broken, and imperfect. From the perspective of this wound, it’s likely you can find someone to cast in the role of the villain who hurt you.