Up until the mid-life crisis erupts, our first priority is ego survival and ego enhancement. Our entire life is polarized into me and not-me, ideal self versus shadow self, and all of the priorities based upon such polarities. If you are lucky, it only takes about 40 years to find out that this prioritizing doesn’t work. Unconsciously people go to counseling because their prioritizing isn’t working; consciously, people go to counseling to get rid of the pain that others are "causing; them. What is the purpose of counseling and psychotherapy? The purpose of therapy is that the suffering story-teller may learn to make the healing of his pain and the awakening from his illusions his first priority on a moment to moment basis. This is a fundmental shift. Up until now our entire energies have been prioritized into making our ego story work. Now we realize that if any other goal than healing and awakening takes first priority, it is doomed to fail in due time.

 

If we are not consciously on our spiritual path on a moment-by-moment basis, then:

• we are falling back into sleep
• we are resuming our addictive story
• we are acting out our fears
• we are projecting our shadow onto others
• we are digging our victim hole deeper
• we are creating more symptoms
• we are confusing ourselves further
• we are ignoring our inner core of bliss
• we are dis-empowering ourselves
• we are short-changing ourselves
• we are deceiving ourselves
• we are sabotaging our relationships

Therapy is where we learn that therapy is basically all we have to do in life. Therapy is in direct competition with the rest of our goals for first priority. Therapy is the supreme value in life, even more important than survival. Survival is an ego concept. Survival is basically all that the ego can put first. As long as ego survival is our primary goal, therapy will be useless. When therapy becomes our first priority, ego survival and enhancement loses its grip on our life. Ego strategies do not want healing, they want what they want. Therapy brings an end to ego strategies in time. Your therapist cannot heal you. Your healer is your Higher Power within. Healing is an awakening to Reality. What is healed is the pain that is arising from your ego story. What you awaken from is your false belief system which is causing the pain. What you awaken to is your God-self and its unlimited potentialities.

The healing of the painful belief in separateness occurs to the degree that we awaken from the illusion of aloneness and become aware of our belonging, connectedness, and wholeness

The healing of the painful belief in lack occurs to the degree that we awaken from the bad dream of deprivation and become aware of the presence of our infinite potentiality, abundance, and god-likeness

The healing of the painful belief in entrapment occurs to the degree that we awaken from the human story of victimization and become aware of our glorious freedom and holiness as the sons and daughters of God.

Jesus said "You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free." That sounds like an inevitable process. Coming to know the truth means that we do not yet know it. We will be set free from illusions, ego stories, false beliefs, victimization notions and painful guilt and anger. Our illusory belief system works only in a hit-and-miss fashion and ultimately fails. People come to therapy because life isn’t working. People come to therapy because they have mis-diagnosed their condition and their problems and therefore their solutions and strategies are not working. Every one plays doctor, and has their own self-diagnosis and RX for their self- diagnosed condition. I lack _____and I must have _____. This is a mis-diagnosis because you already have ______ as a spiritual being. You are just overlooking it because you think it is out there somewhere. Therapy is the reversal of our perceptual format.

Therapy is the process of discovering the meaning of our mis-diagnosis and mis-treatment. Therapy is the dawning realization that we fall asleep to the truth of ourselves hundreds of times a day. We fall back into the deeply engrained pain of our habitual chronic illusion of victimization. Our sick thinking is constantly playing in the background of our conscious minds. Unless therapy becomes our conscious priority, we shall continue with our habitual assumptions and self-rescue efforts.

It seems weak and humiliating to see that our schemes are not working, but it is actually a strength. Our weakness is that we are so proud of a non-working story. It takes a lot of pain to convince us to summon the courage to really investigate our ego belief system. If the suffering seeker does not put his or her therapy first, and begin the inner journey of individuation, there will be no second birth. The first part of life is our physical and psychological birth and story; the second part of life is our spiritual re-birth and journey into true individuation. In the first part of life our priority is our ego survival and enhancement, during which we have little awareness that we are spiritual beings. In the second part of life, we become conscious of our spirituality, we are re-born, and we consciously choose to nurture that growth process as our first priority. If I practice my therapy, all else takes care of itself; if I do not practice my therapy, things begin to deteriorate.

Therapy is not just something that occurs in a professional office. That one hour session represents a life process, a re-birth and a growth into a new awareness. Therapy is a process of continual awareness about who I am as a spiritual being. Therapy is a continual process of awareness of the illusions of my victimization story. Therapy is my new life priority about the healing of my pain and the awakening to my infinite nature. Up until now my life priorities have been based upon my belief that I know what is wrong and how to fix it. 24/7 have been devoted to my survival and ego enhancement strategies. Now I see and am commited to the realization that what I was doing wasn’t working and couldn’t work. That failure was not my fault, but it is my responsibility. Neither self-blame nor other-blame, neither condemning nor excusing, have worked. Trying didn’t work, nor did not trying. Inside the ego story, nothing works very well or very long.

If therapy ever becomes second to anything else in your life, you have already gone back to sleep. You have bitten the apple again. In one fairy tale, the princess bites the poisonous apple of false-knowledge and falls asleep. Only the kiss of love awakens her. The awareness of this poisonous knowledge and this kiss of love is what therapy is. Therapy is the continual re-discovery of the true knowledge of unconditional love, wisdom and power. 

Commitment to the therapy process is our way of challenging any fear that we have: fear of loneliness, fear of lack, or fear of entrapment. The daily process of healing and awakening gives us an edge in challenging the victim belief. The victim belief is the most painful persistent lie that human beings tell themselves. The victimization fear is the subject of all therapy. The victimization fear is so pervasive that it controls our lives 24/7 as a program playing in the background. Victimization-fear is a very constricting, contracting, resisting experience.

Raphael Cushnir (Unconditional Bliss. 2000. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books) in his important work on bliss has emphasized and explained the role of contraction and resistance in human suffering. Raphael defines the basics of contraction (page 200) in this manner:

Contraction: an instinctive response to anything unwanted

Expansion: the state of connectedness to all things

Resistance: the choice, conscious or otherwise, to remain contracted

Awareness: enough separation from resistance to recognize its there

Acceptance: the allowing and embracing of all experience

Presence: the moment to moment process of acceptance

Bliss: joy plus love minus cause = the song of the heart, ever-expanding

Our ego story is a contracting experience. We make our world and our self smaller in order to protect ourselves and survive.

Resistance:

Acceptance:

Acceptance can be described as allowing, surrendering to, accepting, welcoming, being grateful for, being willing to. Acceptance expresses on our consciousness map as willingness at 310; acceptance at 380; cooperation at 390; and gratitude at 540. Acceptance permits expansion, a letting go, a flowing, a relaxation, an easy breathing, an allowance of the bliss from the inner core to be experienced.

The real issue is in the inner split, not the tension between any two parties. John and Emily have polarized on intimacy and freedom. She demands intimacy and avoids aloneness; he demands freedom and avoids entrapment. What she expects and demands seems necessary for her to be secure, in control, and painless; what he expects and demands seems necessary for him to be secure, in control and painless. Each pushes the others’ buttons. They are a perfect mirror match. Each is a threat to the other’s story and supposed security. Actually they are God’s gift for each other’s growth. Neither of them cannot imagine anything worse than the threat that the other represents. They are in a defend-and-attack mode. Each has to learn to relax into what he is resisting. John has to allow himself to feel bound; Emily has to allow herself to feel lonely.

RESISTANCE

When I resist what is...
I'm resisting what I co-created,
I'm resisting what I need to learn,
I'm resisting what I need to heal.

I'm resisting...
The "I Am" of me!

Resistance needs to be embraced...
Resistance needs to be explored...
Resistance needs to be understood.

Resistance shows me where,
I'm clinging to my past,
Or yearning for my future.

Resistance needs to be accepted,
Resistance needs to be embraced,
Resistance needs to be transcended.

Resistance is me...
Trying to make "what is"
Into what I "think" it should be!

When I resist any element of my life,
I'm fighting against the
Flow of the whole Universe!

When I surrender to what is,
I see the truth of "what is"
I'm in the flow,
And I go merrily
Down the stream of my Life.

Hu Dalconzo

Rainer Marie Rinke

Raphael outlines the questions to be asked (1) What is happening right now? (2) Can I be with it? (See pages 35-37, Unconditional Bliss)