Waking Up: Relevant to Psychotherapy?
What does it mean to “wake up”? What does psychotherapy have to do with waking up and does waking up have anything to do with finding a life purpose? Does it have anything to do with healing? Thanks to people like Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now), Oprah Winfrey (Super Soul Sunday), the Dalai Lama, Adyashanti, Byron Katie and many others, the idea of waking up has made it into the mainstream.
For some people waking up simply refers to what happens every morning. For others it means waking up to our true nature. For others it means recognizing something important that we’d been unaware of previously.
Waking up is an important part of psychotherapy because waking up to what is actually here (previously unseen) allows change to happen. Waking up means that we gain a more accurate perspective. Like waking up in the morning, we realize we used to be asleep.
In the psychological realm a person becomes aware of the internal beliefs and patterns that have been behind the choices, behaviors and experiences of life. In the spiritual dimension a person can awaken to what is always present and yet rarely recognized–awareness itself.
A client (who we will call Stacey) realizes she’s lived with a core story of being unlovable because her parents were busy and didn’t spend much time with her. Children assume what happens around them is their fault. When Stacey looks deeply, she can see that their busyness had nothing to do with her. Through seeing this deeply, she is able to reconnect with her inherent lovability.
Or there’s Michael, a client who realizes that he has many thoughts that turn out to be untrue upon closer inspection. Things like “I need to be able to change the things I don’t like.” Or, “it is unbearable to feel helpless.” Michael wakes up to his innate capacity to become aware of his thoughts without always believing they are true. He discovers that he can question thoughts he has automatically acted upon and consciously choose a different perspective.
Waking up is one of the most remarkable things that human beings can do. Through self-reflection our lives change and infinite possibilities open to us.
