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Seminar – A path towards wholeness

I held a seminar yesterday about Psychotherapy and Buddhism.

I’ve received a lot of heartfelt feedback. It gave me an impression that the audience felt more connected with their authenticity.

 

As we start feeling more of ourselves, it is normal to feel overwhelmed at times. Everyone has a different volume of anxiety around “being true to yourself.”

If you feel confused about how to deal with your feelings, it is useful to remember the following:

“What is happening in our innermost self is worthy of our entire love.” (Rilke)

Anything and everything that spontaneously arises from within deserves all our love.

So when you feel unsure how to be with your feelings, you can ask yourself

“What is true for me in this present moment?”

 

It’s OK to be anxious.

It’s OK to be scared.

It’s OK to be angry.

It’s OK to be sad.

It’s OK to be joyful.

 

What matters most is to help ourselves acknowledge and accept our emotional truths, whatever they are.

Our emotional truths are not judged.

 

There is a prevailing idea that psychotherapy encourages people to “dredge up” their painful past experiences, and that people always have to work through childhood things in order to become truly happy.

I guess this may be related to people’s real experience that they felt compelled to open their “Pandra’s box” filled with overwhelming emotions when they didn’t want to.

When our inner truth is not respected, it hurts us.

 

There are many ways to cultivate our capacity to heal our emotional pain and create a joy of life from within our own life.

Dealing with emotional wounds from the past is one of many ways.

We can become happier without directly dealing with past traumas as well.

What’s most important is how we are right now is already transforming our entire life including the past.

So we are OK as long as we remain true to ourselves.

 

I like the following quote from Kalsched. It reminds me that how precious each one of us is.

“The divine child or human / divine soul within us is not an artifact of the defensive process, but the very thing the defensive process is protecting. And it is protecting it because it is sacred – the very core of our aliveness.” (1)

When we say “defensive” against something, it usually connotes a negative meaning.

But defence is in fact our “best effort” to protect ourselves from further emotional hurts.

Because we are “sacred.”

 

We are already always worthy as we are.

 

(1) Donald Kalsched “Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption” (2013, p. 242)