Working with People

A Psychology of Awakening

"The present psychology is not yet comprehensive enough; it touches only the periphery of human individuality. It remains confined to the mind. It is not right to call it “psychology.” Psychology means "the science of the soul" and the present psychology is not only, not the science of the soul, it denies even the existence of the soul.
The moment you deny the soul, consciousness, something which is beyond the mind but within you gets lost. This denial is not an ordinary denial because it destroys the whole dignity of man. It takes away his very center. He becomes center-less, soul-less, just a robot.” ~ Osho

Working with People, A Psychology of Awakening, is a unique approach that aims to create a bridge between the understandings of Western Humanistic Psychology and a spiritual approach of Awakening as practiced in Middle Eastern and Eastern traditions.

Having been trained for almost 35 years by the enlightened master Osho, we have come to understand the powerful, yet subtle relationship between psychological issues and the realization of our true spiritual nature. Spiritual practices, though essential for transformation, often bypass and thus fail to transform our conditioned patterns of behavior and unconscious identities that were formed during our personal history. At the same time, psychology, without the recognition of spiritual dimensions, remains empty and ineffective.

In our experience, only when we bring psychological and spiritual work together is true transformation possible. With this approach we discover that every emotional and psychological issue is actually a potential doorway to an embodied state of being. As well, we realize that spiritual experiences illuminate the patterned ways in which our personality structure functions.

This approach awakens the relaxed and integrated human being. With this we mean a person who participates fully in this world through a perception of awakened consciousness….someone who is in the world and yet not of it. A spiritual journey needs psychology and psychology is incomplete without the recognition of awakened consciousness.

In this training we will lay a foundation of understanding and experiencing one’s self. We must find a deep connection with our spiritual Being as well as develop a profound insight into our own personal psychodynamics in order to work with people in a truly effective way.

Each day will include teaching on a particular subject, self-exploration, exchanges of sessions under supervision, meditations and teaching of specific tools for working with people.

"Learning is the discovery
that something is possible."
~ Fritz Perl

Part One:

The Art of Being Present — The Embodied State of Objective Perception and Inner Guidance
Turiya & Rafia

Being present indicates an inner state from where we are capable of recognizing reality as it is, rather than perceiving it through the filters and prejudices of our past conditioning. Cultivating the capacity to remain in objective presence in therapeutic situations is to learn to work from a space of clarity and delicate awareness. We need this capacity to effectively work with people. Presence is the capacity to be non-reactive to whatever is occurring in the moment. It is grounded in a sensing and awareness of our body, mind, and heart. This awareness can be developed through the practice of meditation and by a passionate curiosity to inquire into what is happening in ourselves and others.

Inner guidance awakens to the degree that we can find and orient ourselves to the love of the truth. It can manifest in many ways but it is always bringing us close to our true selves and helps us to be agents of transformation for others.

Part Two:

Relaxed Confidence – The Psychology and Embodiment of Support
Rafia

This section looks deeply into the issues around support and teaches an approach for being relaxed and confident in the midst of life’s most challenging situations.

Support, experienced as an inner quality and as the capacity to appropriately support others, is a very important aspect of working with people. Relaxed confidence is a state of Being that arises when we have a good relation to our issues around inner support. Most of us did not receive adequate support, good mirroring or guidance while growing up. As a result, we often feel tense, ungrounded, and unsure of ourselves, which can give rise to a pushy and driven personality. In this state of efforting, we have difficulty to trust that the capacity to face the challenges of life is simply within us. Only once we truly see and understand how to evoke inner support can we face our performance anxiety and lack of a grounded solidity. The capacity to stay present while facing our deficiencies brings a radical and profound inner shift from effort to relaxation.

It is necessary to remain relaxed and confident when clients go through difficult inner work without trying to ‘fix’ them. The safety such presence evokes makes it possible for people to trust themselves and engage their own intrinsic wisdom and natural impulses for healing.

Part Three:

Embodiment of Courage and Individuality
Turiya

We all want to embody courage and assertiveness in our work and in our lives. We all want to be able to stand alone in this world.

In this part of the training, we will look at what enables us to develop self-confidence and courage through our work and livelihoods.

So much of ourselves is compromised by trying to fulfill others expectations, that we sell out and lose respect for ourselves.

To live a life full of self-confidence, we need courage and strength. This strength arises from our capacity to separate and individuate. This means separation from our ideas, concepts, images, life stories, and old identifications. Once we are able to recognize what is not our true Being, we can actually separate from the false. We can slowly learn to realize our own personal, individual essence. Understanding and experiencing this form of separation gives us a profound sense of meaning and self-esteem, as well as the strength and the stamina to confront difficult issues. Especially as therapists, we need this aspect of strength and courage in order to face challenging issues both in our lives and in working with people.

"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge". ~ Fritz Perls

Part Four:

Embodiment of Power – Issues, Obstacles and Realization
Rafia

Power is a natural quality of the human being. However, most of us are out of alignment with true power. We are often afraid and judgmental of power when we have not faced parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or split off. Those unaccepted shadow aspects of our psyche exert tremendous control over us when they remain unconscious. To bring power into its deepest potential where we are peacefully relaxed with it, we need to look and recognize without judgment the sources and history of our own negativity. Once we become responsibly aware of our negativity and withdraw our projections that come from it, we are capable of embodying immense power without the danger of abusing it.

True power is in the service of truth and peace and once we connect to it, we are able to be real agents of transformation. True power works to compassionately challenge and remove the false in any situation. This is an essential aspect in working with people.

This section will be powerfully liberating as we gently and compassionately resource ourselves in this essential aspect.

"...nobody can stand truth if it is told to him. Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself because then, the pride of discovery makes the truth palatable." ~ Fritz Perls

Part Five:

Embodiment of True Compassion and Loving Kindness
Turiya

Most of us haven’t learned how to be compassionate and kind towards ourselves. We often learned to be efficiently perfect or self- sacrificing pleasing, but rarely did we experience true compassion in our childhood. Compassion and patience are innate qualities to every human being, and when utilized, become the essential embodiment for every therapist.

Especially as therapists, we are often caught in the ‘helper syndrome’, feeling that, “I only have worth and value when I help others.” This can lead to over-running our boundaries by being endlessly available to the client. True compassion must begin with self-respect and learning to be kind to our bodies, hearts, and minds.

False compassion often gets expressed through a filter of guilt and shame. To embody true compassion, we have to overcome collective beliefs and concepts about what it means to really help somebody and what it means to be in service. This can only happen once we learn how to be kind, notonly to ourselves, but also to life’s challenges. Compassion is an essential tool for every therapist. Only through embodying true compassion towards ourselves can we really be patient and supportive with the client in their growth and transformation.

Prerequisite Understanding about Participating in this Training

The therapeutic quality and presence that we will develop in this training is not primarily based on knowledge and techniques. Working with People is more about learning to cultivate an inner state of being which is full of awareness; which trusts in our personal resources of inner wisdom, clarity, and understanding; which is strong, empowered, and at the same time kind and compassionate. This is a training for people with much life experience and a deep desire to discover their true nature.

This transformative work, based on a psychology of awakening, has the potential to make a great difference in how we live our lives as well as expanding our capacity to work with people in therapeutic situations.

"And once you know how to slip out of your mind, a totally different psychology will be founded on the art of slipping out of the mind. A person who can get out of his mind helps the mind to cool down. The mind is getting no more energy – it cools, calms down on its own accord. That’s why I have said meditation is a medicine too – and both words come from the same root.

Once your intelligence and your innocence are available to you, just you.

I have called the psychology that is based on meditation the Psychology of the Buddha’s. Modern psychology is the psychology of people who are asleep." ~Osho