Welwood's "Realisation and Embodiment: Psychological Work in the Service of Spiritual Development"

Oregon, 2004 - Laura Anderson

• Monastic or retreat situations are designed for people to devote themselves to enlightenment, however, real-day life poses different challenges.
• People may believe that they’ve had a shift of consciousness post retreat, however, a lifetime of conditioning is difficult to leave behind. Some people may even use their spiritual practice to reinforce an element of distance between themselves and others.  (Note irony re: losing sense of boundaries of self and compartmentalization of spiritual life in the greater day-to-day)
• “Realisation by itself does not necessarily transform the being as a whole . . . One may have some light of realization at the spiritual summit of consciousness but the parts below remain what they were (Indian Sage Aurobindo qtd in Welwood 139)
• In traditional Asian paths, it is accepted that a yogi can pursue a spiritual path without focusing on developing their personal lives, however, often when a Westerner attempts to follow this path, it leads to neglect or denial of their pre-existing situation, or functions as an avoidance tactic.
• Therapy can assist in dealing with pre-existing issues in order to integrate the spiritual practice into one’s life, instead of compartmentalising or replacing it within it.  This must be a specific form of therapy, however, that recognises the importance of body in reinforcing conditioning and patterns.Psychology deals mainly with the relative truth and personal meaning, spiritual practice deals with the truth as unbound by the physical form.  Do these have to be at odds, or can they be “allies”?
• Buddhism encourages people to find their own path, but specifically meaning their own spiritual path.The great gift of the East is the focus on absolute true nature, the great gift of the west is to develop an individuated expression of true nature (soul or personal presence)
• Eastern teachers, although warm and empathetic in their own way, have a difficult time recognising challenges facing their Western students, and so tend to help their students build their spiritual path on or over a shaky psyche, which leads to both an unhealthy mind and spirit.  Welwood calls this “Spiritual Bypassing”
• Spiritual bypassing is a strong temptation for those who feel a need to make up for failures of individuation, and a spiritual community can fill in as a spiritual family.  The specific danger here is the tendency to try to succeed in order to please their teacher instead of simply embracing the path.  People with narcissistic bents are also particularly vulnerable to feeling prideful or special in their spiritual accomplishments because they “are using spirituality to shore up a shaky sense of self while supposedly working on liberation from self”
• Psychology represents the relative truth, which cannot be denied in favour of the spiritual, or global truth.  The personal pain of loss is just as valid as the understanding of the diluted loss in the global sense. We may be part of a whole and not limited to our bodies, but we still embody this plane of existence. We must respect and deal with the corporeal as we work towards identifying with greater humanity. 
• Another problem for western practitioners – the idea that nothing they do is quite good enough (including their spiritual practice). Their own sense of failure turns to self-loathing. This sense of failure is not rooted in their spiritual practice, but in previous psychological issues.  Resolving this requires an understanding of psychological dynamics that traditional spiritual teachings and teachers often lack.Spiritual traditions generally explain the cause of suffering as either a result of ignorance, misperception or sin, or as a disconnection from the greater being.
• Western psychology offers a more specific developmental understanding, which is that suffering has roots in childhood trauma or conditioning. 
• As such, spiritual teachers offer practice to elevate one out of suffering, without engaging with the root causes, as is dominant in Western psychology.  This means that one can have a robust spiritual life, while still suffering at a personal mundane level. 
• Spiritual practice can have a powerful effect on the psyche by undermining its conscious identity (self-image) , which exists as a defence against the threat of emptiness (Buddhist thought) or a defence against an underlying sense of threat or unworthiness gained in childhood (western thought). This identification with the sense of lack is the unconscious identity.
• Buddhism has always grown by absorbing understandings and methods indigenous to the cultures in which it spread. If psychotherapy is the modern Western way of dealing with problems of the psyche, then meditative traditions may be better absorbed, and have a greater impact, alongside psychotherapy, where both of these paths to a mental and spiritual health can support each other.

Works Cited:
Welwood, John. "Realisation and Embodiment: Psychological Work in the Service of Spiritual Development", Psychology of Awakening. ed Gay Watson, Stephen Batchelor, Guy Claxton. Maine: Samuel Weiser. 2000. 137-166. Print.