The Need For Both Psychology and Spirituality

My life has been a personal search for ways to lessen my own and others' emotional suffering out of my own need to get relief from what I experienced. It began in Africa, watching two sides of a conflict - colonial rule and the fight for independence. My family was in the middle, being liberal whites, and I had to deal with the dichotomy of being part of a privileged white minority while living in the African bush with my black friends. Then I came to the US to go to college and dealt with the culture shock of entering the counterculture of the Vietnam era. I almost didn’t make it through that.

I ended up looking for answers in religion and psychology. At first, the religions I encountered didn’t seem to be alive to me, both Western Christianity and Eastern Buddhism. It looked to me like they hoped that God was really there, but didn’t really know it. Or they hoped that they would get enlightened someday, but really didn’t think it could happen in this lifetime. So I chose to focus on psychology, on healing dysfunctional habits of mind and emotion.

After 20 years of continuing to learn each new psychological method that came along, I realized something was missing because I wasn’t seeing enough change in myself or others. So I went back again to look at spirituality. I was personally drawn more to Eastern spirituality, but I do not believe that any one spiritual path is better than another as long as one is open. I wanted to see if I could find a teacher who felt alive to me. It took me awhile, but I did find a few people who felt like they had fresh eyes and a personal experience to relate to me. I took it very deeply to heart and gave everything I had to it, meditating, and studying. It was the missing piece for me, but it didn’t replace psychology, I found that it added to it.

I found in the end, that psychology uncovers the unconscious emotional patterns of projecting onto the present, our old habits from childhood. We react from our memories, rather than from the information we are receiving in the present. It is like being in a trance from the past, an instant replay superimposed over the now. Psychology acknowledges this, and has developed methods to bring this into consciousness.

Whereas, some meditation, or what I like to call experiential spirituality, teaches us to be able to sit with the strong emotions that come up, and not do anything, at least temporarily. To allow whatever emotion is there, to just be present, to accept it, to not have to act impulsively in the old habitual ways. We learn how to let the strong feelings or thoughts just be there, without chasing them, analyzing them, obsessing over them, or having to fix them.

It is this which allows healing to happen, as the emotions will move naturally toward a healthier stance. It is as if they need our attention before they can resolve. And it is usually the case that we did not get that attention from the adults in our lives when we were children. It is possible to get this attention from another human being now, but ultimately we have to learn the skill ourselves. I believe it takes another human modeling this behavior of being able to be calm in the face of stress that allows us to learn how to do this ourselves. A meditation teacher or a therapist can do this modeling for us, depending on their own level of skill.

There is also a deeper side to what meditation can bring. It teaches us to not take these feelings personally, we see that we are Not our feelings or thoughts. We are something else, that which observes them, something which cannot be defined. Eventually this experience of being the unknown observer, gives us the personal seeing, the actual experience that we are not separate isolated beings, we are connected to all life. There is an awareness that there is something at work here besides what the eye can see, there is something behind life, some purpose, some benevolence that cannot be defined. This intuitive sense that “all is well” becomes a steadfast, calm foundation on which to stand.
It is experienced, it does not come from reading a book or from a belief.

While there is a deep peace that comes with the “experiential spirituality” of meditation, it does not address the hidden unconscious, that which we do not want to see. I have seen very well respected meditation teachers with blind spots to their own unconscious issues. We are unconsciously defended against giving up our Story, that which helped us make sense out of the world when we were small. The unconscious attachment to this story has to be acknowledged. Psychology has developed ways to invite this unconscious into the conscious.

I came to the conclusion that both spiritual and psychological methods were needed to address human suffering. Without the ability to sit with a strong emotion, which one learns from meditation practice, it is difficult to heal pain or fear. Without the skill of awareness of the unconscious from psychology, we never get to these feelings. And without the experiential sense that “ all is well” which one gets from any spiritual contemplative practice, one has less of a foundation in the world to relax into.

It is not just our own suffering I am talking about, but when we project onto others from our unconscious memories, that which they do not deserve, we perpetuate the hurt which causes the projections in the first place. We carry on the hurt of centuries, which has been passed down from parents to children for eons. It causes unnecessary separation and pain between people, and ultimately causes fear, greed, and war.

This is why I became a therapist, this is why I learned to meditate, and I cannot separate the two. These two practices have brought me a long way in alleviating my own stress in life, and being able to help others with theirs. I am grateful for the journey that has brought me here. I hope that it has made me a wiser, more compassionate human being.

Much love and peace,
Viki Markham