What I want to write about this morning is what is the role and place of psychotherapy in a post postmodern context.

Presumably, there will be some role for psychotherapy in the post-postmodern world.  Psychotherapy is most generically defined as the intentional activity of one person attempting to improve the well-being of another person, through a deliberate process of some type of interpersonal engagement. 

At present, it seems that in the WIE worldview, there is no legitimate place for any kind of therapy.  I haven't heard this outright, but neither have I seen any attention given to therapy in the pages of the magazine.

Contrast this with AQAL journal, at present the lead publication of I-I, and you see nearly the opposite case: psychotherapy, followed closely by education, has received the most treatment. 

What is going on here?

My opinion is that WIE folks - Andrew Cohen - has thrown the baby of psychotherapy out with its postmodern bathwater.  This is an unfortunate state of affairs - and yet, the profession of psychotherapy does carry some culpability for this.

Ken Wilber, in a recent conference call, spoke about how "regression had replaced repression" as the most significant psycho-cultural issue in North American culture, in recent years.  If true, this is a statement that psychotherapists need to pay very close attention to.  Because in most or many psychotherapy circles, I see how the focus remains largely on undoing repression.  This puts psychotherapy behind the growth curve of the culture at large - and more importantly, means that psychotherapy becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

It seems that the development of coaching is one way that psychotherapy has tried to make itself relevant for the post-postmodern context.  However, coaching is often criticized by depth psychotherapists for being shallow and - the worse of all sins for depth psychotherapists - "cognitive".

What then are the partial truths of coaching and depth psychotherapies, and how could they be brought together in an approach to psychotherapy that is relevant for the challenges the culture faces, where regression has replaced repression as the most significant psycho-cultural issue?  This seems to me to be a relevant topic for our consideration.

Integral Praxis of Time

I've been thinking lately about what an integral approach to the topic of time management might look like.  Because in a career counselling or career coaching context, time management is a practical and important topic.  But as far as I can tell, time management -even the term - tends to evoke a rationalist, "right-hand path" mindset, to use the integral term.  Working in a predominantly formal-operational mode, a person learns to prioritize tasks, chunk out various amounts of time to achieve those tasks, and so on.

I have admittedly not been very good at this for a while - it seems to me that I used to be rather better at time management - and I have had trouble figuring out why.  Well, I think part of the problem is that I have been trying to fit myself to a conception of time management that no longer works me, given my dynamic dialectical awareness of time.

With integral consciousness comes a sense that what is at least as important than time management, in its narrow sense, is timeliness.  A prominent writer in this area is Bill Torbert, who has developed much in the are of an integral approach to action inquiry in real time.  Within action inquiry in real time, I believe a person co-enacts a process dimension of time, which is what gives rise to the sense of evolution being much more than a scientific concept.  It becomes a felt sense or lived experience.  Time just feels like it is going somewhere important, and the individual wants to participate in that.  So, it seems to me that a pragmatic value or quality of active participation in the flow of time, as experienced dynamically, is that of timeliness.

Perhaps we could look for a synthesis of time-management and timeliness through the quadrant model, with timeliness being the experience felt in the UL, and appropriately managed clock time being organized in the UR.  And of course, the collective dimensions are important as well.  In particular, if a person with integral consciousness wants to have career satisfaction, he or she would be wise to look for an employer that organizes his or her business holocratically - or at the least, values the mutual co-arising of timeliness and time management.  Either that or work for oneself.  Since there are not many of these organizations out there yet, this means the latter option is going to be a more feasible one for many of us.

I have left out one really important aspect of an integral approach to time-management: not timeliness but timelessness.  An integral action inquiry needs to make contact with timelessness, or allow space for the sense of Witness consciousness to emerge - it is inevitably difficult to write about something that is experiencing the writing, not an object of it! 

For this aspect, I think one of Andrew Cohen's recent teachings is helpful.  I have been quite critical in the past of shadow aspects in Cohen's teaching and interpersonal relationships, and I remain wary of the seeming lack of attention paid to psychodynamic issues in his work and in his community.  I have submitted to them several times my interesting in seeing an issue of WIE devoted to integral psychotherapy and coaching. That said, I find his recent teaching on spiritual inquiry to be very illuminating.  In particular, I appreciate his emphasis on a practice of spiritual inquiry that balances allowing oneself to "not already know", on the one hand, and to "want to know" on the other.  In Cohen's own words, "not already knowing, at the deepest level, aligns us with the ground of all being, that primordial emptiness, inherently free and already liberated, that is the Self as unmanifest consciousness.  Wanting to know, passionately, energetically wanting to understand, aligns us simultaneously with the Authentic Self, which is the evolutionary impulse of deepest manifest expression of consciousness.  So the perfect evolutionary posture is one that is dynamically poised between those two opposites."

These are some initial thoughts on a topic that I think is of great interest and importance to integrally-oriented folks interested in feeling engaged and satisfied in their work-life, or really any time in their lives where action is required!

Authenticity

What I want to write about this morning is the experience of authenticity I had a few days ago, as well as a general orientation I carry increasingly that being authentic is my most important value. 

Andrew Cohen has written and taught quite a bit about the Authentic Self.  The authentic self is related to a particular state experience of a self at a particular stage, and his use of the term arises out of a specific paradigm or injunction - enlightened communication - that is used in his community.  Therefore, I don't want to assume that my use of the term means the same thing as does his use of the term.

That said, I certainly have had some experiences of states of authenticity that have been deeply meaningful to me, in particular because of the, well, self-authenticating nature of those experiences.  A few days ago I had one of these experiences. 

Can't rely on a state for our identity, however, because states come and go...so here is where there is a need for transcendence to a self beyond states - i.e. Witness consciousness or nondual identity. 

Last night I dreamt about being a member of Cohen's community.  There was some subtle luminosity present in the dream, because I feel some resistance to that luminosity right now in the waking state.

The dream was also full of fear of cults.  Wacky things were going on in the dream - my life was in danger at a couple of points from Cohen's folks who were "hunting me down".

I grew up in an intensive communal environment, which could explain the source of such fears. 

Time to go move my body...