Psychotherapy in itself can be a very helpful and liberating practice to free individuals of troubling, neurotic patterns. Even though psychotherapy can free people from specific, individual patterns, it can still fall short of helping individuals address issues of meaning and existence. This goes beyond the Descartian model of “I Think, Therefore I Am”. Experienced meditators have informed us for a long time that awareness can exist without thought. Please see Kurt Goldstein’s (MD) exciting discussion on this topic – Thoughts without a thinker and falling to pieces with falling apart. On the other hand, Abraham Maslow, a famous psychologist of the late 60’s and early 70’s, has been misunderstood by the popular culture. Maslow’s notion of natural and spontaneous highs, has been systematically and commercially exploited by many new age philosophers and thinkers. They have a habit of over-emphasizing the “light-side” of such experiences. This over-emphasis results in a one-sided pursuit for enlightenment, to the point of exclusion of the darkness. This exclusion creates disappointment in self because of the emergence of anxiety from “unfinished business”. This “unwanted” intruder only becomes more invasive when resisted. So called “New Age” philosophers and thinkers have emphasized the importance of this experience, often to the point of avoidance and exclusion. Carl G. Jung, perhaps the most influential psychiatrist of the 20th century (Freud not excluded) understood that “what we resist persists”. He accurately identified this as a “shadow problem”. Shadow problems are represented by equal and opposite negative complexes that eventually may help to create psychological balance. Those overly seduced by “new-aged” ideas of undifferentiated light, often see these shadow problems as either plaguing, nagging, and in extreme cases, de-stabilizing. This resistance to face “what-is”, the existential ground of being, creates what is called “ungrounded spirituality”. On the other hand, spirituality that is understood in its appreciation of psychological opposites, is called “grounded spirituality”. Since grounded spirituality finds its foundation in psychological awareness of opposites, the equal and equivalent term for it is “psycho-spiritual”.
It is the goal of psycho-spiritual techniques to take individuals into grounded awareness of themselves, by neither emphasizing light or darkness. Practitioners of psycho-spiritual techniques learn to develop an appreciation of riding on this edge of experience, which neither denies nor attracts a certain type of experience. It is the experience of “what-is”. In the Cato Upanishad, this concept is referred to as the “razor’s edge”. This doesn’t mean that it can cut or injure the practitioner; the “razor” part implies that the edge of awareness is narrow, and easy to fall from.
Psycho-spiritual techniques, which are not unique to Center for Inner Work, (e.g. Oscar Ichaze-Arica, John Pierrakos, Core Energetics ) are designed to help individuals find their own balance points within themselves.