Despite recent progress in opening up the conversation around mental health, what happens between two people in the therapy space remains something of a mystery. ‘Do you just talk?’ I am sometimes asked. This is a bit like saying to a dancer ‘do you just jump about?’ Pressed to give an account of my work I sometimes find myself lost for words.rijui21
It concerns me that the intricate and tender dynamics of soul’s journey are increasingly represented through a vocabulary littered with abstract terms which solidify and label experience. Depression. Anxiety. Grief. Trauma. If we are to communicate the dynamic and essentially creative process of soul’s unfolding, we need to be less reliant on nouns. Instead, we need verbs (which convey movement) and symbols (which hold complexity).
In this series of posts for the EPA Blog I invite you to join me in an exploration of words we might draw on to distil and convey what happens in the therapy space. Each of the words I will share carries in its belly a vital image or a story that might help us convey the art of psychosynthesis therapy. Our word this week is conceiving.
1. Conceiving (v.) "to take in and hold; become pregnant"
These last few days I have been walking by the river Swale in the Yorkshire Dales, occasionally removing my boots and standing in the cool refreshing current. Feeling the flow of water ripple over my toes I realise that the life experience of the river at any given point in her journey - rushing, burbling, drifting or meandering - is not just a consequence of her birth story somewhere high in the hills above me. Her nature is ‘conceived’ in each moment, through her encounters with coalescing forces around her and within her. The river is always becoming. Every moment is a birth moment. Everything, Rilke insists, ‘everything is gestation and then bringing forth’.
Taking in the experience of wild water through my senses and holding it in my imagination, I feel a deep affinity. I remember what our ancestors knew: we conceive ourselves through our affinity with the living world, a vital realm rippling with stories and images which offer us an equivalence to our own unfolding narratives. I am not suggesting here that nature is merely a mirror reflecting human experience, but I am convinced that our lives are expressions of a deep interpenetration of imaginal forms that ‘lend’ themselves to each other.
The Greek word for this process of conception is poesis, which simply means to ‘bring forth’. Understood in this way, a garden can be ‘poetic’, a shared meal, a relationship, a therapy encounter and of course a poem. At the same time, none of these are necessarily ‘poetic’ (even the poem). To establish the poetic credentials of any experience we might ask: Does it render life more vivid? Does it enrich our experience of aliveness? Does it conceive more life?
The notion that life is freshly conceived from an unfathomable field of potential is not mere lyrical fancy. Einstein himself used the language of poesis to pay tribute to the existence of vast seedbeds of possibility alive beneath the known surface of the living world:
Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension.
If we are to experience these vital depths, we need to recognise life in its ‘becoming’ and not just in its ‘being’ (or in its ‘has been’). We need a shift of focus from concepts (noun) to the experience of conceiving (verb). Perhaps this is one of the defining aspects of our work as psychosynthesis therapists. We pay attention to what is seeking to emerge in our clients’ lives. Roberto Assagioli’s articulation of the unconscious includes a ‘superconscious’ dimension, a seedbed of implicate meaning and potential which longs to be born into our lives. We are influenced by our history, but (like the river) we are always more than our history.
Cultivating an affinity towards the emergent poiesis of life matters (maybe now more than ever). For it is so often the emergent (‘the wanting-to-be-born’), which bring forth the very qualities, images and energy we need to conceive ourselves afresh as we move forward on our journey towards maturity, as individuals and as a community of beings. As midwives to the mysteries of conception, we must hold our pre-conceptions lightly. We may know this person intimately, but we do not know the next moment of their emergence. Psychosynthesis is rooted in respect for this constant unfolding of life. In this way we have an affinity with poets like John O’Donohue when he writes:
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (third Letter), Trans. M.D Herter Norton (W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1954).
2. Albert Einstein, Letter to Heinrich Zangger, 10 March 1914 (The Albert Einstein Archives).
3. Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis, Harper Collins, 1965
4. John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, (Bantam, 1999)