Dear reader,
This article emerges today through a space of silence after a turbulent period, something like the rainbow after the storm. I have mentioned several times the concepts of 'Ego and 'Self' and some elements that they may include. We are our body, its needs and desires, we are our feelings and what they express, we are our thoughts and what they declare, we are our soul and everything we know and we do not know about it. All these levels exist simultaneously and interact in ways we do not know and do not fully understand yet but we can somehow deduce that we are multidimensional beings. How our body feels, influences our emotions, thoughts and soul and vice versa. So everything we experience is experienced at all these levels. When I started training in psychotherapy and started doing my first hours of practice, I was impressed with what I was encountering and experiencing during the sessions. I do not only mean the problems, the difficulties, the pain and all the things that can be difficult to feel in the therapeutic process but also something else that very few people talk about. Through also my own process, I began to discover the various dimensions and forms that all people have. I started to see, feel and hear me and other people talking about ourselves as landscapes, images, colours, and sensations. Some people enter psychotherapy because they want to solve a particular problem, somehow they do not feel functional and want to fix this. That is how I initially started with the hope that I would unblock where I was stuck, heal the wounds, find answers, move forward by only being happy. While the process continued I began to discover other things about me, other wounds, new sensations, new landscapes sometimes quiet ones, sometimes intense, sometimes rigid, sometimes fluid, but they were all mine. That is exactly what I see and the people I have worked with for some time see for themselves. When I see and connect with one's landscapes I feel awe and profound emotions. My favourite metaphor is as if someone is opening the door and slowly guides you to their home, into their rooms that were previously locked and discover new rooms to explore which all of them constitute the individual himself. The ownership of discovery does certainly belong the individual and I participate with reverence and attention offering a mirror, a certain perspective on what the person discovers and experiences at every moment. This whole process is sacred to me on one hand because we may find ourselves in very fragile places something like a sacred ritual and on the other hand because by exploring the landscapes that make uthe person is like a testament to the existence of God. I see beauty, qualities, movement, vibrations, humanity and not just good or bad, not a just lack or excess, not just happiness or suffering. I often find myself taking the position of defending psychotherapy, which has widely been attacked for its motives, predominantly against the various new methods that promise fast and spectacular results in dominating the conscious ego and gaining everything that offers us happiness by accessing directly the unconscious mind. I am not referring here to any particular method, nor do I dispute that they can have significant results. My comment concerns mainly the commitment of duration and the personal effort required to make lasting changes. The therapeutic space is a place that has always existed in various forms as the place where a person could explore his experiences, understand them, incorporate them, be reassured and thus be freed and evolve in a similar way that fire and cooking of food helped man to evolve leaving at his disposal (due to easier digestion) more energy to spend. To a degree every human contact has the potential to do the same thing. When we feel intimate with a person we connect at the same time with something of our own and something of his. If we see a person as the totality of his landscapes and qualities that he may not even recognise for himself, then we can teach him to see them and he can teach us to see ours. I do not mean that we should become each other's therapists, but I am mainly referring to the position that each of us can take towards oneself and others. We are the first to forget and not connect with our own landscapes, which we abandon as less interesting than the other's. We are the first to raise walls in front of them in order to protect them from the other, we are the first to not love them and to not take care of them exposing them to the moods and criticism of others. If we begin to see, experience and take care of ourselves as a whole world, with its rich landscapes and dimensions and not just as a machine (either physical or emotional) that should aim only at happiness and towards a vague growth, then we may succeed to appreciate, to get in touch and really experience the depth and the sacredness of our existence, of others and of the universe of which we are all part. With Love, Panos
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Panos GoumalatsosCounsellor/Psychotherapist, Archives
March 2023
Categories |
Proudly powered by Weebly