Foundations of Spiritual Psychology
Training and Immersion Programs for Therapists and Helping Professionals
INTRODUCTION:
FOUNDATIONS OF
SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY
TRAINING AND IMMERSION PROGRAMS
FOR THERAPISTS AND HELPING PROFESSIONALS
WITH PAUL WEISS
This training is designed to fill a void for the growing body of therapists who are drawn to bring a stronger spiritual foundation to their practice, but who want to proceed in a way that is intellectually discerning and clinically sound and relevant.
Distinguishing between dogma, mythos, cultural artifact and core spirituality, Paul Weiss depicts the truly spiritual as an evolving awareness and "sanity with the universe" which not only has the potential to open us to the deepest experiences of transcendent insight and love, but which also offers a template for healthy psychological functioning across the full dimension of our life and our relationships. As such, he offers an integrative model of spiritual psychology that accesses the deepest gifts of Eastern and Western spirituality in a way that is directly relevant to everyday issues of mind/body function and of mental and emotional health.
Paul Weiss helps us to see the evolutionary journey of all human beings – ourselves and our clients – as falling within the context of our fundamental – but not fully awakened – capacity for conscious loving presence.
This seminar will enlighten and cut through the intellectual confusion around the subject of spirituality while offering an experiential grounding – and two days to process together – that will immediately enhance your ability to integrate spiritual perspectives into your personal growth and clinical practice.
"Paul Weiss is pivotal to our times. On the one hand, he carries with him a substantial architecture of thought. On the other, he is able to breathe into that architecture a vibrant breath of presence. In this new day, when both psychology and spirituality must be transcended by what I would call 'soulology', we need the contributions of those who, like Weiss, are masters of both."
— Albert J. LaChance, Ph.D.
author, The Architecture of the Soul and
The Modern Christian Mystic
TRAININGS IN SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY
FOUNDATION RETREAT
In Winslow, Maine October 7 and 8, 2008
(Or contact us for other training dates
in New England)
This introductory training provides you with a cohesive theoretical framework for the most essential issues of spiritual psychology, closely integrated with an experiential exploration and application of these ideas for personal and clinical practice. The retreat format will allow us time to step out of our normal distractions and more fully engage and absorb the principles and the practices of spiritual psychology.
(The principles, practice and skills offered in this training are developed at greater length in our subsequent specialized trainings.)
The Living Water Spiritual Center is a welcoming retreat spot with lots of woods and nature trails going down to the Sebasticook River, and with excellent meals. The daily program will go from 9:00-4:30, and the Tuesday evening program will go from 7:00-9:00. Lunch and dinner will be served on Tuesday, and breakfast and lunch on Wednesday. Those who are able are encouraged to spend the night at Living Water. Cost for the program is $245.00, plus a guest charge of $120.00 for overnighters, or $65.00 without an overnight stay. Those registering by September 12 may take $25.00 off the program charge. Registration is secured with a $125.00 deposit for overnighters, or a $75.00 deposit for commuters. Deposits, minus $25.00, are refundable up to 12 days before the event. (Overnight space is limited to 28 participants.)
COURSE CONTENT
DAY ONE
- WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?
- Examination of terms, including:
- Spirituality, metapsychology, evolutionary psychology
- Identity, fixation, presence, intimacy, enlightenment
- Distinguishing open and closed spiritual systems
- Distinguishing mythos (participatory), dogma (exclusive), and core spirituality (transformative) in religious systems
- How understanding core spiritual principles allows us to reach those without a dogmatic system as well as others within their dogmatic system
- Examination of terms, including:
- BIOSOCIAL PERSPECTIVES ON SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY
- Evolutionary perspectives – the evolving brain and the heart/mind connection
- Developmental perspectives – culture and neuroplasticity
- The stress model – perception and sympathetic response
- The two paradigms of psycho-physiological functioning and their implications
- INTERLUDE (both days): Gentle breath and movement exercises for integrating mind/body/spirit and enhancing parasympathetic functioning
- THE BUDDHA AS SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGIST
- The ground of awareness and the birth of mind
- Samsara and nirvana, and the six realms
- The three modes of cognition
- The nature of trance and awakening
- Stability and insight
- Bodhicitta: the ground of compassion
- IF FREUD WERE A SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGIST
- JESUS AS SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGIST
- Sin and repentance
- The Kingdom of God is at hand!
- The paradoxes of love
- CONSCIOUS LOVING PRESENCE
EVENING: COMMUNICATION AND PRACTICE
DAY TWO
- THE NATURE OF DUALITY
- Patterns of avoidance and addiction
- Patterns of intimacy and enlightenment
- Meditation and the healthy ego
- ENHANCING THE COGNITIVE: the practice of comprehensive detached awareness
- ENHANCING THE AFFECTIVE: restoring the primacy and integrity of the heart and the positive emotions
- COMPASSION, INTEGRATION AND HEALING: the ancient Tibetan art of tonglen
- AWAKENING COMMON PRESENCE
- Bringing the practice of presence into group communication
- Bringing the practice of presence into partner communication
- THE GREAT UNFOLDING: INTENTION, INTIMACY AND SURRENDER
Registration, Tuesday: 8:30 am
Course Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday, 9:00-4:30 (lunch break at noon)
Tuesday evening 7:00-9:00
Cost: $245.00 ($220 if registered by September 12)
To register, or for more information about this or our other supportive trainings, please contact us at info@thewholehealthcenter.com or by calling 207-288-4128.
"Paul is a dharma teacher with lots of heart wisdom. I truly believe that his presentations and teachings are going to benefit anybody. I want to recommend that his work is going to be very transformative."
— Lama Anam Thubten Rinpoche
 |
A WORD FROM PAUL WEISS |
We experience today a grave crisis in the flattening out of the dimensions of what it means to be a human being. For all our technology, our scientific investigation, our psychological and cultural activity, and our economic development, we are creating a world that leaves us poorer in the depth of our inner life, and in our relationship to the natural world and our sense of the holy. In fact, the rampaging growth of technology and economic expansion not only drives the nature and pace of change in the modern world, but also has the power to shape our vision of ourselves to suit its own momentum. And this momentum has nothing to do with human relationships, with nurturing the core self, or with community or spiritual values. At the mercy of these powerful trends, and despite our popular ideologies of progress and democracy, we feel the pain of this flattening of our lives in both the community and personal dimensions. We begin to realize that we have abandoned the richest part of our spiritual inheritance, that which can uphold the fullness of our humanity, address our modern psychic pain and dysfunction, and help us in charting a humane and sustainable future.
We are intelligent beings; we are feeling beings; we are vitally energetic beings. And when we recognize that our cognitive, emotional, and energetic natures find their fullest harmony and integration, not in the drive for accumulation, power or enhanced identity; not in the service of either rationalist or non-rationalist dogmas and conditioning; but rather in relationship to the open-ended, full-feeling dimensions of being – in which the known and the unknown, the bounded and the unbounded, are equal partners in the fruition of our human faculties – then that is to acknowledge that we are also spiritual beings.
Hence our growing interest in a spirituality that is not dogmatic, but that supports our authentic growth, higher awareness and exploration of reality, and is capable of bringing added integrity and enlightenment to our psychological functioning. And we seek to open modern psychology to the therapeutic truths, and to the transformational insight and practice, present at the essential core of spiritual traditions.
It is often easier to appreciate this essential and non-dogmatic core when we look at spiritual traditions outside our own culture. We easily recognize the profound and pragmatic spiritual teaching in Taoism and Buddhism, for example, shorn of cultural context. Buddhism is especially accessible to us because it uses a fundamentally psychological language to convey its depth of meta-psychological understanding developed over millennia. But such study may also mirror back to us the psychological depth in the teachings of Jesus, for example, and at the heart of Western traditions.
I have spent the last twenty-seven years at The Whole Health Center designing and delivering programs in whole health and spirituality, integrating my own spiritual journey – and study in India and China – with my training in counseling, communication, emotional process work, meditation, and the transformational practices and psychologies of the East. These programs put a premium on cohesive intellectual structure; practical and experiential immersion; and transformational intent and results.
I am pleased to bring the fruits of these years into a new, comprehensive experiential training program specifically for therapists and health care professionals. This training includes the introductory weekend featured here, supplemented by a constellation of programs offering greater experiential immersion and personal development.
"Paul Weiss is a great teacher and healer with decades of experience and proven results. I find his work scientifically informed, pedagogically sound, clinically relevant and personally fulfilling. With a true marriage of heart and head he is able to offer us, from his unique and authentic perspective, a broad and compelling vision of how to bring a vital spiritual dimension into psychology."
— Stephen L. Chorover, Ph.D., Professor
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
About Paul Weiss:
Paul's unorthodox training began with his early interest in human potentiality that led to a 1967 graduating thesis entitled "Towards a Non-Dualistic Psychology," which built a bridge between Freudian psychology and the yogic psychology of the East. He subsequently devoted years to intensive training in zen meditation as well as immersion in other yogic and spiritual systems under several noted teachers. His studies carried him on four visits to India and on seven visits to China, where he was eventually certified to teach by three different schools of qi gong – the ancient mind/body system of practice that incorporates the principles of Taoist philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine. Paul returned to school for counseling psychology with a minor in clinical health education, and pursued supplemental training in nutrition and bodywork therapies.
He founded The Whole Health Center in Bar Harbor, Maine in 1981 as a nonprofit education and treatment center dedicated to providing holistic and integrative approaches to personal wellness and spiritual growth. His study of the communication and mind-clearing work of Charles Berner, and several years of emotional process work and subsequent years of training, added to an unusually integrative practice of mind/body and spiritual and emotional healing with individuals, with couples, and with groups.
Today he brings his growing incisiveness of vision to his expanding teaching work, including training programs for therapists, small community learning groups, and transformational retreats. His True Heart/True Mind Intensive draws people from all over the world for this dynamic integration of contemplation and communication processes that promotes self-realization and spiritual growth.
FOUNDATIONS OF SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY
SUPPLEMENTAL TRAININGS
The complete clinical training program in psychology and spirituality consists of the foundation training supplemented by a constellation of programs offering greater experiential immersion and personal development. The complete descriptions for this expanding list of programs are in the process of appearing on this website. Please check with us for forthcoming dates.
- Compassion, Integration and Healing: Therapeutic Applications of Tibetan Tonglen Practice (see below)
- The Experience of Presence as the Foundation of Authentic Communication - Therapeutic Applications (see below)
- Illuminating the Heart/Mind: Expanding the Domains of Feeling and Knowing
- Mind, Body and Spirit: Principles and Practice of Mind/Body Integration and its Direct Impact on Mental and Emotional States
- Contemplation, Meditation and Prayer: Windows on the Self, Windows on the Infinite
- True Heart/True Mind Intensive - reserved for training participants
1. Compassion, Integration and Healing:
Therapeutic Applications of Tibetan Tonglen Practice
(to be scheduled this year)
The ego is charged with the job of protecting or enhancing the boundary systems of the self, which it does more or less functionally or dysfunctionally. Its activity derives from the basic perception of duality - myself and others, pleasure and pain, self interest or self-defeat, good and bad, survival and annihilation. The personal strategies, solutions and compromises we arrive at in negotiating this dualistic challenge is expressed in our beliefs and in our behaviors. But our "solutions" often lead to closing down areas of ourselves or of our capacity to feel; or of limiting our openness or limiting the range of healthy functioning with ourselves and others. Hence the task of psychotherapy.
The ancient Tibetan meditation practice of tonglen was intended as a Buddhist practice to deepen our capacity for compassion in relationship to others and in relationship to the suffering in the world. But it is a technique that can also be turned to bringing compassion to ourselves and to our psychological limitations that are based on fear and dualistic perceptions. It can illuminate our own areas of suffering and dysfunction in a way that can, at the same time, allow integration, healing, and transcendence to occur. Taken as a whole, tonglen practice can be a profound and complete system of functional support, psychological healing and spiritual growth. Once understood, it is an invaluable and user-friendly tool to offer clients.
In this training, we will experience together all the stages of tonglen practice, including:
- The integration of mental/emotional states
- The integration of "the inner child"
- The integration of past relational conflict or guilt
- The integration of the suffering of loved ones
- The integration of the activities and the suffering of those with whom we are in conflict
- The capacity to love and heal in a suffering world.
This program, especially tailored to therapists and healers, is designed as a two-day retreat to allow us to go deeper in processing our own material, master the fluidity and many-sidedness of tonglen practice, ask questions, and discuss the issues or challenges that arise at each stage of practice.
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2. The Experience of Presence as the Foundation of
Authentic Communication
The development of our psychological and spiritual maturity is characterized by, among other things, a quality that we may call "presence." In the absence of mental and emotional reactivity, the cognitive and the affective domains are able to join together in a state of unity, openness, receptivity, non-projection, simple availability to the present moment, and a subjective sense of fullness or sufficiency in the present moment that add up to the quality of "presence." This "presence" is our natural human capacity that makes possible our optimal healthy functioning in the present, but which is frequently overwhelmed by our acquired reactive patterns and conditioning.
The state of presence is characterized by a sense of "wholeness" of self, and an availability to our own feelings and perceptions, simultaneously with a simple receptivity and availability to the presence of others and a capacity to appreciate and support their wholeness and integrity. "Presence" is our inherent and organic boundary system; and also the foundation for truly authentic and functional communication.
I define authentic communication as that communication that is able to arise between people to the extent that each is able to remain in a state of presence. The different therapeutic approaches to teaching "boundaries" that have arisen over the years are somewhat artificial, but perhaps necessary, attempts to compensate for the loss of this organic boundary system; and various remedial approaches to healthy communication, NVC etc., are attempting to instill what would largely arise organically from a state of "presence."
As it turns out, presence can be learned, practiced and taught. There are easy and systematic ways of helping to awaken, or tease out, our natural capacity for presence from the less conscious domain of reactivity and conditioned response. The foundations and guidelines of authentic communication can be taught as an extension of the practice of presence. Conversely, the practice of authentic communication contributes to the growth of presence. This is the ideal win-win of human relationships.
This day's introduction to presence and authentic communication will cover the following didactic and experiential processes:
AM
Communication and Presence: Listening and Presence, Speaking and Presence
1. The experience of presence of "the self"
2. The experience of presence of "the other"
3. Bringing the spaciousness of presence into group communication
4. The elements of a complete communication cycle
5. Dysfunctions within the communication cycle
PM
1. Keeping presence within dyadic, or partner, communication
2. The use of dyads as a therapeutic tool
3. Structured communication processes for work with couples
4. The dyadic integration process and self-realization
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3. Illuminating the Heart/Mind: Expanding the Domains
of Feeling and Knowing