The Taproot Podcast - 🛐☯️⚕️Mysticism, Spirituality and Therapy - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: March 15, 2022

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Hey guys, it's Joel with Taproot Therapy and today we're going to talk about therapy, mysticism, and spirituality. In the medieval period, it was common to take pilgrimages to the Holy Land from mainland Europe. The trip was an opportunity to face one's fears and to learn to know the deepest parts of oneself and to know the divine. The trip was long and dangerous, and the terrain and culture were different from anything that the pilgrims had seen back home.

Along the way, pilgrims prayed and they fasted and they sought to prepare inner peace, to prepare to be close to God. The pilgrimage to the Holy Land was a metaphor for Jesus' life and journey, much like the Stations of the Cross. Peasants and minor nobles, however, couldn't afford to take a trip thousands of miles away to the Middle East, and so instead they would take a symbolic pilgrimage where they would contemplate the self, and the path that they walked was called a labyrinth. It was a pattern that was set down in stone on cathedral floors, beginning with France and then later in other places. At first glance, the labyrinth looks like it's a maze that one might get

lost in. The path has many twists and turns, but upon closer examination it becomes clear that the labyrinth is a single path and if one continues to persevere and walk onward then one will inexorably come to the center of the labyrinth the labyrinth is one example of a mystical practice as we are walking the labyrinth we don't need our rational or conscious mind to help us make decisions. We only need to keep walking towards the middle. The repetitive action without the need for our executive functioning help wind down the ego. And walking the labyrinth is a meditation practice, and then it helps us tune in to a different state of mind. To turn off the ego and to tap into something else from the unconscious.

The labyrinth is a tool to concentrate on some parts of ourselves, beneath the ego-driven conscious mind. And the labyrinth is not about going somewhere, being productive, or getting something done. Instead, it's about going somewhere inside our mind and inside of our heart and perhaps our soul. Mysticism is a philosophical tradition that holds that the search for ultimate knowledge of divinity or of truth requires that we discover a deep knowledge of ourselves first, that the journey

outward is really the journey inward. The idea that their search to know the self is also the search to know God is a threatening ideology to some people at first glance. However, it should be pointed out that few mystics believe that the self is God. Mysticism does not have to mean that the self is God. Rather, mysticism is often used as a metaphor by mystics for how our ability to understand ultimate reality is limited by our ability to understand ourselves. Through this lens, it is our own trauma, fear, and undeveloped, undiscovered self that limit our ability to understand truth and to accept ourselves. Through healing and accepting the self, we are able to accept the world as it is

and see it and accept a higher purpose. This can be a religious process, but it can also be a deeply secular one. The important part of mysticism is that it is giving us a great discovery because of an inward knowledge, not an outward intellectual discovery. So, what is mysticism and what does it have to do with psychotherapy? To some people, a mystic means somebody who is overly abstract or someone who obscures information, but this is a secondary definition. Mysticism is the belief that the self and spirituality are not found through worldly accomplishment or possessions,

but that the mystic instead finds spirituality and the journey inward into the deepest parts of the self. Mysticism is a belief that truth, divinity, and or the true self is found by learning to connect with the deepest parts of our heart and our mind. In this tradition, the ego is the enemy. The ego is our rigid self-image or idea of what we think that we are and what we think that we have to be. It is the thoughts and the language that our consciousness identifies with. The goal of the mystic is not to identify with the ego through thoughts and through language, but instead to release it and break it open to

make room for something else, for change. For the mystic, the self is not the ego, but the self is a larger unconscious mind that is accessible only after the ego is dissolved. The goal of the mystic is to dissolve the conscious mind and let go of language-based cognition. Throughout life, trauma, anxiety, and negative coping mechanisms pile up and they obscure our view of who we are and what we really want. Obsession, anxiety, and other protective ego protective parts turn our

focus to regrets about the past and fear about the future. When we dissolve the ego we are able to contact the self as it existed before it was obscured and as it exists in the present moment without concern for the past or for the future mystical techniques dissolve the protective parts that protect us from change like addiction anger stagnation and many other things. Does mysticism have to be religious? While we often think of hierarchies and doctrine when we think of organized religion, there is a mystic tradition in every major world religion.

Mystics in the religious tradition see the goal of ego dissolution as oneness with the divine. Christian mystics include Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil, and Julian of Norwich. Islam has the poet Rumi and the Sufi tradition. Judaism has writers like Martin Buber and the Kabbalah tradition. Hinduism and Taoism both have mysticism baked into their core teachings. The list of mystic poets and artists is also long. Rainer Maria Rilke and Hilma of Klint are some of the most well-known. Mysticism does not have to be a religious practice.

There are non-deistic and atheistic mystical traditions, too. Theravada Buddhism posits that the ego self is a delusion and seeks to disband the ego entirely so that we can reach enlightenment. Yoga practitioners teach participants to drop down into the body-mind, through physical movement and somatic awareness. One theme in most mystical writing is the discovery of the authentic self and a resulting deep compassion for others that is found when the ego is dissolved. Mystics emphasize that dissolving the ego results in a deep sense of love and a profound sense of connection.

Another theme in the mystical traditions is the simultaneous and paradoxical feeling of connection and of otherness when the ego is dissolved. Many mystics write about feeling separate from the world and yet simultaneously at one with all things. The experience of ego dissolution is often hard to describe, and it does not fit neatly into our consciousness or the language of the conscious mind. So what does any of this have to do with psychotherapy? I don't chant or do yoga with my patients. I rarely do hypnosis. I don't do psychotropic breath work. I don't use psychedelic-assisted therapy or any kind of psychedelic drugs. But yet, I find that I use techniques from the mystics with patients

all the time. In fact, I believe that having a mystical experience is often the crucial point in therapy when patients change and get better. I remember hearing multiple lectures from the 1970s, where the therapist would say something like, the place where real change takes place is when the patient enters a space between waking and sleep. And at the time I thought, what the hell does that mean? After experiencing many of these moments with patients that were in a liminal state in between sleep and wakefulness, both as a provider of psychotherapy and as a patient in psychotherapy, I now understand what these therapists meant.

Change happens in therapy when patients experience deep emotional releases that challenge our self-image and help change our worldview. Put succinctly, we and help change our worldview. Put succinctly, we only really change our life when the ego is turned off. It takes reprogramming the subcortical part of our brain, responsible for our emotional reactions and body awareness, to change the way we behave. Cognitive-only therapy tries to tighten the ego's control over the system to beat our unconscious mind into submission. The effect that this has is limiting and often temporary. Real change occurs not by changing the way we think, but changing the way that we feel.

Is there a mystical therapy? Yes. I find that many traditions of psychotherapy have a very mystical component. Somatic therapies, brain-based medicine like brain spotting, and Jungian psychotherapy is extremely effective at healing trauma and helping patients change behavior. Taproot Therapy Collective uses approaches rooted in depth psychology and in brain-based medicine to heal trauma. Both approaches stimulate the sub-stimulate the subcortical brain and both approaches help patients turn off the ego and confront the true self. Neither of these approaches are cognitive or ego-based therapies. As a patient, I found that brain spotting was one of the most mystical experiences of

my life. It allowed me to grow and to heal more than all previous psychotherapy models that I had tried. You can read more about my experiences on our blog at GetTherapyBirmingham.com. Is mysticism part of psychology Jung Ian or depth psychology based on the work of Carl Jung is the branch of psychology concerned with the egoless unconscious mind much of what Carl Jung its founder studied with the psychological implications of the mystic traditions Jung looked at religion as

the framework to create a new psychology. While this led many serious-minded academics to label him as a new-age mumbo-jumbo woo-woo, it also let him create one of the most influential approaches to psychotherapy. Many modern trauma therapies have their roots in the Jungian tradition. Somatic therapy, IFS therapy, or internal family systems therapy, gestalt therapy, DBT, and the life coaching model all have their origins in Carl Jung's discoveries. Jungian psychotherapy sought to teach patients to recognize and understand the parts of the unconscious that they avoid. This helps the patient accept and integrate parts of themselves that they hate, fear, or judge. Jungian psychology helps bring

these repressed parts of self into conscious awareness. What are the parts of self that get repressed? Chief among the parts of the unconscious that Jung identified was the shadow or the parts of the unconscious that were the most threatening to the ego the shadow is all the parts of self that are not allowed or not accepted in the conscious mind consequently the shadow is what causes most of the symptoms that make patients present to psychotherapy because the ego seeks to repress the shadow the ego repress the shadow, the ego cannot control the shadow when it emerges from beneath the placid surface of consciousness.

Many things about the self we fight to accept and we actively repress. There are things that we don't want to know about ourselves. Effective therapy uses the unconscious mind and the shadow to help us accept and integrate parts of ourself that we are not comfortable with. The shadow can contain the traumatic events in our life and hide their effect on us. Teaching patients to recognize the shadow and accept it as a part of themselves is key to Jungian psychology and the models that it influenced. Depth psychology works because it teaches the patient to recognize and own the parts of self that do not feel like me, but still are me.

Until these parts are brought into consciousness, we cannot heal trauma. Carl Jung outlined his incredibly complex yet complete and intuitive psychology a century before Gabor Mate, Peter Levin, Pat Ogden, Bessel van der Kolk, or David Grand began the brain-based medicine movement. These modern scientists used scientific language for teaching patients to regulate the subcortical brain. They relied on medical and scientific advancement to understand what was happening in the deep brain when we heal trauma. Carl Jung's psychology described the same process, but used instead metaphor and symbol. Jung was able to deduce the functioning of the subcortical brain and the process of healing trauma from intuition, and not from scientific innovation.

What exactly is it that we feel when the ego is dissolved? This is a complicated question, because when we feel the self, it is our own self, and I feel something different than you, perhaps. What I feel is likely different from what you would feel. Many mystical traditions have the belief that we all return to the same source and feel the same thing when we surrender our ego. What is the case? I'm a psychotherapist, not a priest. In short, I don't know. In the Jungian language, we feel the parts of self that we least understand and most repress, and construct ego defenses to avoid. In academic language, we feel the limbic dysregulation caused by trauma,

and the way that we hold emotion in our bodies. Put simply, experiencing the feeling in the deep brain is a physical and an emotional exercise. It is not an intellectual one. Feeling trapped, feeling out of control, feeling guilty or victimized. We all learn that there is some space that we cannot revisit, some emotional space that we feel, even if we know maybe the belief is untrue, but we feel if we go back into that emotional space, we cannot survive it. Our ego becomes a protective tool to avoid these emotional spaces. That's just who I am, our ego tells ourself, or that's just what I do. What you feel when the ego is dissolved is all the parts of yourself that you cannot own yet.

It is overwhelming, but it is ultimately rewarding. We have to go through the labyrinth of the places that scare us, to get to the strengths in our personality, and ultimately to change our self and our lives. The ego wants us to believe that it is all of us, but it is not. There are always depths to our personality that we have not yet accepted. Discovering the self is a lifelong process. Where does the unconscious come from? Does it come from a scientific or a spiritual aspect? What it is that we experience when we experience these layers of consciousness? Jung called it a collective unconscious, believing that all beings shared a collective experience at the bottom

layers of awareness. It is still up for debate if Jung thought that a deity or a god or set of gods was the reason that we feel this, or if it was a byproduct of our evolutionary history. Secular mystics see the unconscious as a place where we can learn our purpose as individuals, foster empathy, and achieve emotional clarity. Spiritual mystics often explain the unconscious as a union with divinity or a godhead. What you feel when the ego is dissolved is the heart of the mystical experience. What it is, is hard for me to write about because it's not easy to fit the context of the subcortical brain into language. In my own limited experience, it was a feeling of being out of control, of not

knowing, of feeling deeply inferior. And I realized that I'd been running from that my whole life, trying to be funny or to learn something or to be helpful, to build skills that meant that I never had to experience that emotional state that I was running from. But I had been running from it, unconsciously, and until I faced it, I did not know how to be the person that I wanted to be. Again, I'm a psychotherapist and I'm not a priest or a scientist. The thing that one feels in the unconscious are experiences and not objective data points. Consciousness is like a root that begins in the ego and the prefrontal cortex. When we leave the prefrontal cortex, we lose language and thought-based cognition. The root runs down through the midbrain, engaging our movement,

somatic system, and our fight or flight system of negative emotion and fight or flight energy. The root continues down the basal ganglia and into the nervous system of the brainstem and the spine. So what makes up the unconscious mind? Again, your theoretical orientation might answer a lot of this question for you. But for me as a therapist and as a patient of therapy, I divide the experience up into a couple layers of what people usually feel. In the first layer are all the things that I avoid knowing about myself. Maybe I have an anger management issue, an eating disorder. Maybe I have an addiction, a major avoidance issue. The way my ego frames it is, well, I just deserve it, or I've had a hard job, so I'm allowed to, or well, nobody else has had a life as hard as me.

In actuality, my unconscious mind knows that I just can't deal with an emotional state, and then I've formed an ego protectiveprotective part to shut down that emotion for me. In the second layer of cognition, or of the unconscious, there's all the childhood and adult trauma that dysregulated the subcortical brain. These are the deeply baked-in emotional assumptions that I might know intellectually are wrong, but I default to them on an emotional level. These could be, well, I'm a victim or I can't protect myself. It could be, well, I have to be the one that wins. I have to be the one that wins the fight. You're not going to take control away from me. It could be any number of things that are controlling us at an emotional level even before we're thinking cognitively or thinking

consciously. Sometimes there are triggers for trauma and PTSD in our fight-or-flight system that we cannot regulate or control with our intellect. In the third layer, many people get to a layer of unconscious that feels familiar but it doesn't really feel like them. Often it feels like a strong emotion that we recognize but we don't identify with. Many patients have recorded birth trauma and they recognize feelings of abandonment and profound separation during brain spotting that feel like an infant. It might be part of an early birth traumatic experience. One therapist that I spoke with had never understood her fear of

the color white. After brain spotting, she had vivid memories of the color white being only this thing that she saw when she was being treated in a vapor tent as an infant during a plague. Intellectually, she had no memory of the color white being a trigger, but her infant brain remembered the white tent and associated it with a stressful experience of her attachment with her mother being interrupted and broken. Not only do you find birth trauma at this layer of the unconscious, but I think that you can also feel things that you have inherited through your genes. Epigenetics are the parts of our genetic structure that are able to change just in one generation. If we're coming into the world during a plague and our mother is starving while we're in utero,

switches start to get put on, turned on, that make us have an anxiety that pushes us to search for food. In something like the Dresden bombing study. They look at people who survive a war, and the babies never know anything but a first world standard of living. But while they're in utero, while they're inside of their mother, their mothers go through a period of brief starvation and famine. When the babies are born, the siege is over, they're back in first world standards of living. However, when they follow up with all the participants at 40, all of the babies are obese, or a huge majority of the babies have grown into adults that have an issue with food.

This would be an example of epigenetic memory. I think some of the things that we're adapting to, some of the things that we felt, that our mother felt when we were in the womb, sort of start to be our early impression of the world. And part of that is something that some people feel like they are confronting or experiencing during brain spotting. I think there are evolutionary realities that we did inherit over our lifetime. Some things that are collective, that are universal. And we have to face some of these things too. We were evolved to have a fight or flight system that kept us alive, but when

it becomes dysregulated due to trauma, memories become stuck and have to be faced at this level of cognition. At the fourth level, on the very bottom level of unconscious, mystics describe a profound sense of empathy and connection to all things. Patients often report feeling like they saw themselves for the first time or have a different perspective on who they are. Mystics describe this state as a separation from the ego and a feeling of understanding and accepting the self. In this liminal state, mystics report feeling connected to the source of being. Where do these feelings come from and where do they lead? Is there a scientific, a spiritual, or a deistic religious explanation for what we feel in the unconscious? Again, I'm a psychotherapist. I'm not a philosopher and I'm not a priest.

I can't tell you where the experiences at the base of consciousness come from. I can only tell you what they are and the ones that are most commonly reported by me or seen by me or felt by me, by mystics and by psychotherapy patients. Whether you choose to interpret the experience as a neuroscience-based reality, a spiritual reality, or a little bit of both, is definitely up to you. I will say, though, that we have one choice in life. Do we go into the places in us that scare us? And do we face those bravely and grow? Or do we run from these places? And if you look at the history of the world, you'll see most people do choose to run. We want to take control of other people. We want to change the way that other people think. But ultimately, this fails and we can't. We can look in our own mirror and we can pursue our own truth, or we can

fail to do this, live in self-deception and run from our shadow. The choice is up to you. If you enjoyed this video, please check out more articles and videos like it on GetTherapyBirmingham.com. If you have a question, a comment, or somewhere in this article that you disagree with, please send me an email and I'd love to talk to you. © B Emily Beynon © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Amen. you