Introducing…
That’s right, i’m starting a podcast! My unique perspective on the myriad ways that spirituality and counselling enrich and enhance eachother, as well as rub up against and challenge eachother.
Transcript of episode 1:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Spiritual Counselor podcast, a place for counselors, clients and anyone interested in psychology, mental health and spirituality.
We're going to get deep on all the ways that counseling and spirituality interact: how being in touch with something bigger enriches and challenges the therapeutic dynamic.
My name is Martha and I help people integrate non-ordinary states of consciousness. I'm a spiritual crisis peer, a mindfulness and self-compassion practitioner and I have a master's degree in transpersonal psychology, spirituality and consciousness studies.
I'm also a trainee counsellor in the person-centred approach and it's been this immersion into the world of counselling that's just brought up so many reflectionsnI had to share them with you.
So first, a question. Is your reaction to these two words, 'spiritual' and 'counsellor', together in one sentence, one of engagement, curiosity, deep cringing, irritation, confusion, or just like a, 'yeah, duh!'?
If so, stick around, because today I'm going to explore why all of those reactions are in my view, are absolutely valid.
In this episode, I'm going to share some insights from the academic theory on spirituality, and then I'm going to offer a small nugget of my own journey into spirituality.
And finally, I will relate it all back to this business of counselling. But first, I have a little bit of beef with the word spiritual.
I chose it anyway, obviously. but I just wanted to put on the table why I think it is slightly problematic as well as really accessible and useful because it does represent some of the challenges and tensions that I want to talk about on this episode in relation to counselling.
So just taking the word spiritual on its own for a minute and exploring why in some ways I think it is problematic.
Firstly because it has this... association with ideology and belief. You can only be spiritual if you believe in angels or, um, spiritual people, believe in the afterlife, things like that.
And it can get a little bit dogmatic. Um, and that might just be a perception, you know, an outside perception, or it might be people's own experience of, um, what they think spirituality is to them.
Another issue I have with it is that it's been co-opted as an identity. It's been used to sell festivals and clothes and crystals and just a sense of worthiness to people who are looking like we all are in some ways to to get that sense of okayness and it's just been co-opted and it's complicit with materialist consumer society like a lot of things.
So that's some of my beef. Finally, there's this issue with the word spiritual and the idea that that conjures up is that in that some people have attainment than others and those people are very special and very wise and we should listen to them rather than rather than ourselves so it's this idea of projected authority and this can take the form of like gurus or spiritual teachers and it's not to say that all spiritual teachers are bad not by any means, but there can be a certain level of vulnerability.
That people come to spirituality with. And when you combine that with someone who is holding that authority. That can create trouble. It's a position that needs to be handled with a lot of care.
And sometimes it isn't. sometimes there is intentional abuse, sometimes there is unintentional abuse of that power.
When spiritual attainment and wisdom can come through somebody in the way that they speak and people gather around that and people are helped by that, that's wonderful, of course.
And there are so many, um, people doing that with so much integrity but it's just it's a combination that can be dangerous So this is what I meant when at the beginning I was like, if your reaction to the words spiritual and counsellor is one of kind of anger and irritation and cringing, then I feel you, like me too.
In part, you know, there are a lot of other reactions that I resonate with because these are issues within modern spirituality.
outside of the context of counselling these are problems yeah within within the spiritual world. And then add all of those issues to the therapeutic dynamic or a practitioner coming to a client with some of those power and identity and, um, other agendas.
And it's terrifying. And I'm literally imagining like a million counselors and their disapproving stare, including myself, because yeah, when you, when you combine the the kind of the toxic elements of spirituality and a vulnerable client, imagining it in a therapeutic dynamic, it's just a nightmare.
So I'm going to introduce an alternative term. It doesn't solve that issue and I am going to do an episode on all the reasons that spirituality and counselling kind of shouldn't go together but there's nuance to it and this term I think carries a little bit more of that nuance and it's the word is transpersonal.
Now it's not a hugely well-known word outside academia but I do think it is useful and what it literally means is beyond or through the personal.
Personal state of being, personal sense of self. So it refers to experiences, processes and events which expand or extend that state of consciousness, state of being and sense of self beyond the hum drum limited everyday getting through the day kind of state that most of us are in most of the time where we're doing a school run or cooking dinner or maybe slightly rushing somewhere.
um it goes beyond that into connecting to something bigger. This can also include an expansion of care and concern beyond personal family and community ties for the whole of the human race, the whole of nature, and also identification with whole of nature and the whole of the human race as opposed to I am this person from this country who belongs to this family and this religion for example so there's many ways that it can manifest but essentially it's really not about ideology or belief it's about a direct experience of profound transformation and What I'm going to do now is talk a little bit about a useful text, a useful text on the transpersonal and just introducing a few more terms really, which I think shine even more light on this multifaceted word or idea that is described by the word spiritual or transpersonal.
So Michael Daniels is the guy. and it's his 2005 book Shadow Self Spirit Essays in Transpersonal psychology. And to give a little bit of context to what he's saying here is that in the 60s in the beginning of Transpersonal Psychology there was a bit of a Pollyanna vibe.
it was a reaction to Freudian psychoanalysis and there was this human potential movement and it was all very positive and optimistic and that is an understandable reaction but it's found its way into new age spirituality and into the research that transpersonal psychology was actually conducting and so there was this very much a focus on spiritual attainment of the individual, ecstatic states of being, transcendence, pure consciousness, almost like climbing a ladder to the very top of the mountain.
And the higher you are, the better you are, kind of thing. And what was less valued and of ignored in a lot of the early research in transpersonal psychology was the feminine and embodiment and immanence and indigenous cosmologies.
So there was this context of very optimistic pollyanna vibe and then there was this focus on these kind of peak experiences at the same time.
And what daniels is making the point is about is that in life, in terms of transformation, it's often the negative experiences that are the most potent.
And what he did was he created a taxonomy of experiences, of transpersonal or spiritual experiences and practices, and divided them into positive and negative, but also used these terms exotic and mundane.
And that felt like when I came across that, I was like, yes, that is what I'm trying to put across here is that spirituality is not just these exotic, big, loud experiences.
There's something very quiet, very ordinary that for me personally is what I orient myself towards when I think about spirituality.
So I'm going to read a few of these experiences from the two lists and see how each of them land. I think that's quite a big contrast and I think you'll understand why one of them really feels relevant to counselling and the other just doesn't.
So the first group I'm going to list are the positive exotic experiences and practices. So we've got things like peak experiences, orgasm, ecstasy, nirvana, pure consciousness, joy, rapture, channeling, visions, psychic awareness and abilities, psychedelics, vision quests, sexual mysticism, kundalini yoga.
I think they capture what most people think of when they think of spirituality. But now compare this list. These are the negative, mundane experiences, according to Daniels.
Depression, existential crisis, emptiness, alienation, deadness or numbness, tragedy, trauma, illness, stress, ageing, bereavement, death and dying, failure.
And the practices he mentions here, associated with these negative mundane experiences are counselling and psychotherapy, working with survivors, hospice work, bereavement work.
So counselling is actually a transpersonal practice, according to this book. And these terms, exotic and mundane, positive and negative, are just quite helpful in shining a light on these different facets and helping us identify, helping me identify at least, okay, yeah, this is...
where for me, the juices and while there's nothing wrong at all with any of those more exotic practices, they just don't seem as related to counseling to me.
So we can remove that assumption that spirituality is always exotic and positive. And then we're left with, okay, well, it's kind of relevant to everyone then because everyone's going to suffer.
And suffering is spiritual. And what do I mean by that? Well, I'll quote Daniels because he says in the book, from the time of the ancient Greeks, suffering has been recognized not only for its cathartic effects, but also for its capacity to reveal the depth and nobility of the human soul.
So there's this idea of soul making that Hillman talks about, where we deepen through our suffering.
I think this is what he's pointing to in Eckhart Tolle, talks a lot about the purpose of suffering on an individual and a collective level being spiritual evolution.
So what are we taking from some of this theory before we move on? That deepening occurs through tragedy, loss and suffering. And that there's a side to spirituality that is quiet and humble.
And a list that I didn't mention when I was talking about Daniels was the section on positive mundane experiences.
I think this sums up what I'm trying to say. And he mentions things like flow, simple awareness, peace, quietude, innocent cognition, simple enjoyment, compassion, connection, action, creativity, love, So, for me, it's this attuning to the quiet, sacred in the everyday, that when it's actually, for me personally, when I'm actually quiet enough and still enough to do that, it's quite vibrant, it's quite vivid, the aliveness and the joy sometimes, and the love that permeates the now moment And while I'm certainly not always attuned to that, I do, I guess because of my background and some of my experiences, that neural pathway in me is quite well worn.
It's like I've got a bit of an embodied blueprint now to sort of being able to know it's there, to know it's literally right there under the surface.
But I'm certainly... You know, I'm not in this state all the time. I'm a single mum to a toddler and I'm often finding myself, you know, lacking in that sense, lacking in presence actually.
And that's why it feels so precious when I am able to get back to it and it feels so important. It feels like the primary practice of parenting. It feels like the primary practice of counselling is presence.
And the act of being present, to me, feels quite spiritual. So I'm going to transition and tell you a bit of a story now about my journey into spirituality, which went from no interest at all to being intensely immersed, drowning in it, you could say.
And it began in Colombia where I was living after I'd done a Spanish degree. And I had this really important dream that I was working towards, which was social justice activism, I suppose, and human rights activism.
And I was very passionate about it. I was outraged at the atrocities and the corruption and the violence. And it was all very good-hearted, but I was really emotionally immature.
I was just pointing a finger outside of me at this awful situation and not looking inwards at all at the way that I was personally navigating close relationships.
or triggers or anything like that. Just had no sense of that being relevant or important at that time. And yeah, absolutely no, it wasn't on my radar, spirituality or mental health or anything.
And I really wanted to make a difference in Colombia. I was quite a risk taker as well. I was quite driven by... the extremes of that situation. The fact that I wanted to go and live in Colombia and do that.
I was quite a big recreational drug user. I was just in a phase of life where I was taking a lot of risks. And this was definitely risky. There weren't any British NGOs that I was part of.
It was just me trying to connect to Colombian NGOs. And it was... Yeah, it was a dangerous situation in that the group that I wanted to work with were the victims of the conflict, you could describe them as, and many of them were displaced, internally displaced, so they'd lost their homes.
And some were urban, so some came to cities and tried to sell things and were seen as a bit of a nuisance, and others were in the countryside, forming communities, they had a few shacks and some crops and I did manage to connect with one of them.
It was very rural. It was in a red zone so there was no public transport. Had to get a pirate cab there. And I just wanted to listen to them and understand their story and share that and these, yeah, these communities didn't, just get to kind of try and pick up pieces of their lives after the devastation of having lost their homes.
But every couple of months, the special police forces in Colombia, who are called ESMAD, would just come and destroy all their crops, beat a few people up, and then leave again and then come back.
So if you imagine what that was doing to their nervous systems... their basic need for security and safety was just not met at all. And I wasn't able to do anything about that at that time.
And yeah, I had, I think they saw me because I was this British person. I think I was a bit of a letdown. In Colombia, there's a view of sort of the Brits as, I don't know, people with Influence, maybe, and I think they thought, well, this person's wants to know our story, like, maybe she can actually help us, and actually I couldn't.
I was just, you know, wanting to, wanting to listen and and understand and actually that wasn't enough, and at to a certain at a certain point it became not safe.
I got the got a very clear message from people around me that that place was even less safe now and that if I were to go there I would be endangering myself and others.
So I was kind of forced into stopping but also the connection was just dropping away anyway because of what I've just explained and that mismatch of of needs really.
And so when this happened my dream basically falling away. Part of my identity started to fall away. There was just this inner psychic opening which wasn't there before.
And there was a day, I remember it, where for the first time I just became aware of this vast spaciousness behind and between my thoughts which just wasn't there before.
I was just completely identified with my thinking mind and my ideas and beliefs. And suddenly I was like, wait, what? There's this consciousness that's alive and silent.
And I intuited it was the most important thing that happened in my life so far, even though it was so quiet and internal.
And I started thinking, watching Eckhart Tolle videos and bearing in mind I didn't know my ass from my elbow in terms of spiritual wisdom or experience.
So I was just taking in this content completely misinterpreting it really. um Eckhart Tolle has a tendency to sort of talk about the ego as something that needs to be transcended and that's okay but when you've got inexperienced, ignorant idiots like me taking in that content, they might do something stupid with that knowledge and I did.
Really, really something stupid. So that came about about six months later where my cousin, who was based in the UK, suggested we do ayahuasca together.
Ayahuasca is a Native American plant medicine. and she knew the shamans that were in columbia and so i just thought, great, safe bet.
It ticked quite a few boxes for me, to be honest it was it was exotic and spiritual and um involved drugs, which i enjoyed at the time.
And I went in there with the most stupid intention to destroy my ego. And intentions are really important with plant medicines. They're quite a big focus of people that do them really seriously and really regularly it's kind of like the way that you communicate with the plant spirit in the first instance is through is through your intention and ayahuasca must just have thought who the hell is this idiot and I did have huge peak experiences of universal oneness and divine love and complete lack of fear and I also got my ass totally kicked, and rightly so and I what came from it was a really serious breakdown that did transform into a breakthrough, but it took two years and involved being sectioned three times back in the UK.
I suddenly became really sensitive to weed and yeah kept having these episodes, and I'll talk more about my story in another episode but for now, how does what I have shared relate to what we're saying what are the takeaways from it well clearly I was very drawn to this exotic experience and it was too much for me I don't regret it now it's part of my beautiful messy path but you know the those peaks of oneness and divine love, they weren't actually where the change happened.
It was in the troughs and the valleys. And, you know, when it, when I got, when I'd been sectioned a couple of times, you know, I was 26 and I was just having to look at my life and it had imploded.
And it's like I'd just thrown my life away. And I think I remember one psychologist just saying to me, like, what are you doing with your life?
What are you doing? And that stayed with me. And what that transmuted into was this sense of, okay, I've just got nothing now.
I've got absolutely nothing but this present moment. And so I was forced into the now. And to my surprise, found this quite intense liberation and joy in that.
And there was just this peace and relief of Actually, I don't have to be anything. I don't have to be anybody special. And, you know, ironically, that ego, um, downgrade that i was looking for very much came around.
It just came a long way, you know, being, being quite a fuck up at 26. And that, that actually did the job that i was asking for, which was essentially to mature and be more humble and more grounded.
And I just didn't know how to ask for that lesson in a sensible way at the time. But when I look back on it, it's kind of like I knew that's what I needed.
And I think Ayahuasca did give me what was needed in a way. And underneath it all, it wasn't just this like, oh, my life's been, you know, I feel so torn down.
There was just this peace. to quote Meister Eckhart, this peace that passed all understanding, you know, everything had gone to shit and yet I felt so much aliveness and peace and serenity in it all it was it was pretty nuts so that was that was impactful and I knew that was important.
So I've shared some helpful terms. Hopefully you found them helpful. I have. I've shared a little bit of insight from the theory. I've given you a bit of my own experience.
There's a lot more to say. Now let's think about why is it actually relevant to counselling? So there's two points that I want to talk about here.
And the first is that our pain is the gold that we can harvest within ourselves. Counselling is holding space for people in that process. Counselling is walking alongside someone as they sit with their pain.
And when you have that perspective of that pain is absolutely... as difficult and real and draining and overwhelming as it is potentially transformative, then that becomes really interesting to be sitting with that with a client.
And it's this idea that difficult experiences can be a real catalyst for change. They can be a change in our attitude, So for me, it was almost like radical acceptance and surrendering, a deepening.
Hillman calls this, I think I said earlier, soul making. And it can also be behaviour change. So what this inspired in me, this, you know, pretty rough experience was to completely change my lifestyle.
I really cleaned up my act, um, I started, I started meditating and doing embodied practices and just a healthy lifestyle and just getting my shit together really and I wouldn't have done that.
I would probably still be, you know, have a bit of a weakness for recreational drug use. Not that I'm judging that at all but I've just scratched that itch now through that really difficult experience.
I just don't, feel the need to go there anymore. And that's the difference between difficult experiences and these blissful, enjoyable peak experiences.
They probably won't inspire that change. You know, let me know if it has for you. Like, that's amazing. But engendering that major behavior and attitude change often comes from facing something difficult rather than something that we just get addicted to in itself.
It's really common when people have enlightenment experiences to then, when they go away, to just be on a hamster wheel of chasing that.
Which then, ironically, kind of sets us up for this sense of disappointment in the simplicity of the present moment and the attuning to what lies within that.
If we're always chasing bliss it can also make those periods where there's depression or darkness or loss feel wrong.
We can set this dichotomy up in our minds where bliss and joy are right and sorrow or sadness is wrong.
So that's where counselling comes in. To hold space for people to go into their experience rather than try and come out of it through seeking bliss and joy and of course this is where these tensions come in because from a spiritual perspective bliss and joy and ease are our natural state but we're also human and I believe we're here to experience the whole spectrum of emotion and, you know, there's no way out but there is a way in.
And that's the lyrics from a favourite song of mine. So that's the first way that looking through spirituality and counselling through this particular lens that we've done in this episode, that's the first way that they really feel like they're meeting.
And the second way is that There's this idea of sitting with the unknown in counselling that I think is quite important, at least in the person-centred approach.
You know, there's no techniques to hide behind really. There's just yourself and there's this emerging process that we don't get to control or predict or really know.
We don't really even get to know how effective we're being as counsellors and that's really difficult.
So with this when we infuse that with a spiritual perspective, that discomfort of like not knowing isn't just something to be tolerated, it's actually elevated into something um really valuable.
One of the things i did after my breakdown to help me ground and integrate the experience was practice zen buddhism quite intensely for about five years, and i was really drawn to Zen precisely because of that focus on not knowing as a gateway to enlightened states of being.
It's kind of the opposite of maybe what you think an enlightened kind of guru might feel. But with Zen, it's almost this, you know, it's the idea of the beginner's mind.
It's the really innocent, open, attuned person present state of being that can be there because there's no agenda layered on top.
It's open to what's emerging now and that's where life is, that's where creativity is, that's where the intelligence of the universe is.
It emerges when we are really attuned and present And I just think of what Carl Rogers said in one of his later interviews, maybe his last interview before he died was like, the therapist should not have a goal around the client's progress or journey.
The goal of the therapist should be how present can I be? How attuned can I be? How real can I be? And that's it. That's the responsibility of the therapist.
And I love that. And it just feels like I'm just discovering that and just trying that out with clients now and just starting to integrate and weave together in client sessions.
And I'm really looking forward to seeing how it unfolds. So wrapping this first episode up, What we've covered is some useful terms to help shine a light on how multifaceted the word and idea of spirituality is.
We've looked at some insights from theory, a bit of my own story, and we've talked about how spirituality does relate to counselling.
There's so much more to say and one day we'll have some guests on to harvest some of the wisdom that you guys have to offer.
Right at the start of this episode, I asked you what your reaction is to the words spiritual and counsellor put together in one sentence.
From interest and engagement to cringing and confusion, I really hope you have a satisfying and intriguing taste of the complexity and richness of this topic now.
If you or somebody you know... needs some assistance in integrating spiritual crisis or non-ordinary states of consciousness or you're interested in being on the show contact me through my website transpersonalintegration.com thank you guys so much for listening.
I'll catch you next time.
Spiritual crisis and late-stage capitalism: 4 lessons from the edge of sanity.
What wisdom can we gather from transformative crises in individuals to assist humanity’s urgent transition out of late-stage capitalism?
“The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities... Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.”
- People’s Agreement of Cochabamba
Imagining post-capitalist realities, ways of living and being that don’t reduce the earth and human life to what can be extracted from them is an essential step in moving towards a sustainable future. I believe this requires us to accept the breakdown of our current systems and seek a way of collectively alchemizing this time of collapse, into a ‘breakthrough’. Enacting a ‘breakdown to breakthrough’ transition for planet Earth will need to be informed by inner transformation, which then translates to wise, innovative outer action and social change. This is not a unique idea; the United Nation’s ‘Inner Development Goals’ harnesses the application of inner development and transformational skills to global challenges faced by humanity.
Going through my own transformative crisis, and having worked with countless individuals with similar journeys, it is my firm belief that there is valuable wisdom to be harnessed from those emerging from their own personal ‘breakdown to breakthrough’ experience. This is not to say that people with this experience have healed everything- there is always a shadow, a wound, a behaviour that needs attention, in all of us, forever. The reason I think that individuals who have had significant breakdowns leading to a palpable transformation in their everyday lives are worth learning from though, is because they hold an embodied knowing, a felt sense in their bones, of what the collective is moving through right now.
Slow, steady transformation over time in individuals is incredibly needed too, and no less profoud, in fact let's admit it- it’s a lot less messy, inconvenient and challenging too. However, despite the obvious difficulties of going through an acute crisis, there is something unique about the experience of emerging from a full blown crisis feeling more whole, more connected, more clear- especially when properly integrated with consistent spiritual practice and psychological therapy if needed. These are the ones who will have faced the void, their own death, their own delusions and their own divinity. They will have grappled with how to hold all of that, and what it means to be a human here at this time. They will have been humbled and brought to their knees a hundred times and found the strength to emerge from the rubble of their former lives, more loving and more aware.
“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place” Paul Coelho.
This is what humanity needs to do on a collective level, but instead of valuing these people, society tends to shame them because they have embodied what we are all too afraid to admit- they have embodied madness and delusion; destructive and often inappropriate behaviour. They have played the role in this cosmic drama that no one wants to play- a crystal-clear mirror to the human collective of its own deep insanity. In Western society, we consciously and unconsciously suppress the symptoms of crisis to avoid the discomfort and inconvenience of looking in this mirror. We do this to individuals through medication and incarceration, as well as on a societal level, through consuming, overworking, self-medicating and addiction to our devices.
Key Learnings from the edge of sanity
1) Acceptance of one’s own delusions, madness, and self-destructive behaviour
A prerequisite for returning from the edge of sanity is the acceptance that we did indeed, for a time, lose our mind. The facing square on of one’s delusions and the inappropriate or destructive behaviour that may have arisen from them is what is required for long-lasting transformation to take place after a breakdown. I would assert without hesitation that humanity is in the grip of madness. In today’s world, where we continue to actively destroy the ecosystem upon which the physical sustainability of all life, including our own species, depends, only the most determined (and financially powerful) stay in complete denial of this. Capitalism relies on and thrives on the denial of our collective insanity and self destructive behaviour. It takes huge courage to admit you have been mad; it goes against every survival instinct in our bones, to risk exile from ‘the tribe’. Yet it is this neo-liberal tribalism permeating western society, that we must have the courage to exile ourselves from.
2) Facing death/mortality
Many people who have experienced a spiritual crisis will have had an encounter with death or their own mortality. This is sometimes by mistakenly believing they have died, which impacts the body/mind profoundly despite not being true. In Dark Night of the Soul experiences, there is a deep descent into the death realms. Other times it might be through the physical risk of crisis bringing the experiencer close to actual death, including through suicide attempts. What good, if any, do these encounters with mortality and death do for the human being in today’s world?
An ongoing relationship with death is essential for embedding the human experience within the appropriate context of the earth’s ecosystem. The death process is essential in the cycles of regeneration and renewal that are inherent to life on this planet as well as to the mysterious alchemy of transformation (Ladha & Murphey, 2022) so urgently needed now. Reciprocity is central to these currents of life, death and transformation- knowing when and how to receive, and when and how to let go, in balance with the greater whole, requires deep acceptance of death. In today’s death-phobic, growth-centric society, contemplating dying and as such, leaving everything behind that capitalism needs us to grasp at, is a radical act of liberation desperately needed by humanity.
3) Mythic images
When a spiritual crisis includes manic states, there are certain images and ideas that arise which seem to be universal to those experiencing these non-ordinary states. John Weir Perry, a psychiatrist and student of Jung studied these patterns and drew remarkable parallels between the influx of images experienced in manic states, with the myths and rituals of antiquity at times of civilizational change. Common themes include stories of creation and destruction, cosmic combat, powers of light and dark, chaos and order, and a vision of oneness expressed in messianic ideation. Through extensive research, he began to see the arising of these rich mythic images as the natural effort of the psyche to move towards a greater state of wholeness, as well as articulate a vision for a more harmonious society. Films like ‘Crazywise’ point to the valued role non-ordinary states of consciousness and those prone to them, play in traditional societies.
The fact that these visionary states are now pathologized, medicated and dismissed as useless and invalid by western medicine could correspond with the ‘crisis of meaning’ that being lost in the depths of late-stage capitalism has created. Thought leaders exploring the complexity of the current meta-crises facing humanity recognise the timeless role of myth in ushering in civilisational change. Two of these thought leaders, Ladha and Murphey (2022) put it like this: “As we expand the mytho-poetic landscape and the corresponding creation of embodied knowledge and cultures, we may avail ourselves to the direct wisdom of the Gaian entelechy and the quiet whispers of that which is beyond our perception” p.202.
4) Increased sense of interconnectedness and connection to the divine within.
A consequence of going through a spiritual crisis can be that during as well as after the non-ordinary states occur, there is an increased sense of interconnectedness with the rest of life, including Source, Oneness etc. In normal consciousness, without spiritual practices, psychedelics or spontaneous awakenings and crises, we usually feel most connected to our own body, mind and emotions, as well as the people, activities and issues that affect our daily lives. There might be an abstract belief that we are more than this, such as a soul, but this is quite different to having a tangible felt sense and unmistakable knowing of the interconnectedness of all life and the divinity within every Being. Spiritual emergencies often include these elevated states, where the former boundary of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ becomes expanded to include the mountains, the birds, the river, the person walking their dog- everything. This can lead to a number of behaviours (not all of them wise or helpful) but most of the time there is an overwhelming sense of compassion for all of life and an urgent sincere calling to usher in a more evolved, peaceful and enlightened consciousness on planet earth. Even when the interconnectedness is experienced as paranoia, there can be profound learnings as distilled by Ricky Derisz in this illuminating piece.
The lessons we can take from the subjectively positive states of interconnectedness that tend to go hand in hand with mania and spiritual crises, is not to encourage ‘ego death’, losing our identity or our personal boundaries. The most useful learning is around how we can feel ourselves to be both ‘the ocean and the wave’- connected to All that is, to the Divine, to the more-than-human world, to our communities and to people we formally saw as ‘Other’. And at the same time, honour ourselves as the wave, having a valid experience of individuality, and all the complexity and forgetfulness that comes with that. The emotionally numbed state of denial in which capitalism holds the majority of Western society requires a rigid and limited sense of self- an anxious, deeply paranoid wave, fearful and envious of the ocean it doesn’t know it is a part of. Fear is an exceedingly useful emotion to capitalism; it underlies much of humanity’s most destructive behaviour, including our grasping for 'more’ which then over time becomes a perceived entitlement for more.
Final Thoughts
This piece is an exploration of how crisis in individuals relates to the meta-crisis of our times, driven predominantly by late stage capitalism. It takes an unfinished look at the way personal, inner experiences of breakdown might inform a collective breakthrough into postcapitalist realities. Through working with people emerging from spiritual crises, the themes i’ve addressed above have an archetypal nature to them, ocurring again and again in the journeys of individuals. What does this mean? And how can these archetypes serve our journey as a species towards sanity and healing? These are the questions myself and many others are contemplating at this time.
A final point I need to address is the attempt in transpersonal psychology to differentiate a ‘spiritual’ crisis from plain old madness, which in my view is missing the point- for it is not in how a crisis manifests, but in how it transforms the person over time, that makes it a spiritually regenerative experience. Of course, the capacity to transform through crisis is dependent on a variety of socio-economic factors, exacerbated by late-stage capitalism, inequality and trauma.
This is why it is important to highlight the way the capitalist system stunts the psychic process of renewal in individuals through actively increasing inequality and poverty which research has shown make incarceration and over-medication of a spiritual crisis more likely.
It seems all the more poignant then, that the wisdom gathered through the very states of consciousness that capitalism most vigorously seeks to oppress, point to its remedy and demise.
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If you or somebody you know is emerging from non-ordinary states of consciousness and needing a spiriutally aware, psychologically safe container to integrate the experience, feel free to reach out for a 1:1 session with me.