Psychological and Symbolic Reality

All of us want to be happy, yet we ourselves are often the greatest obstacle to our own happiness. When we feel threatened or stressed, our childhood defenses take over and we react through old self-protective patterns: acquiescing and being a pleaser, withdrawing, or rebelling. Furthermore, our adult persona rarely reflects who we really are but is instead an idealized self that as children we assumed to protect us from feelings of insufficiency. Living from a false image or through defensive reactions, our psychological reality is frequently one of inner and outer conflict. The result is personal suffering, diminished effectiveness, self-sabotage, as well as inflicting suffering on others. At one time or another in our lives, all of us become victims of unhealthy elements of our personal psychology.

Richard understands that it is always much easier to explain psychological problems than to heal them. To achieve psychological health we need to understand the developmental roots of our own limiting patterns, but we also have to shift to a different level than our psychological reality. To actually heal ourselves we must be able to consciously face the difficult feelings as they arise in the Now. Real healing of psychological problems and wounds must come through the body and through the quality of attention we bring to what we are feeling. This is where the other pillars of meditation, body-consciousness and attention practices all converge to help us acquire the skill to remain non-reactively present even in the face of the most threatening feelings. When we can do so, we no longer need our psychological defenses and they fall away leaving us capable of spontaneity, authenticity, and happiness.

One of the true wonders of our consciousness, as Richard points out, is that the psyche is always working to restore our psychological health. It does this primarily through dreams. Dreams speak to us symbolically, inviting us to see and feel what our waking egos blind us to about ourselves. Richard’s approach to dreams is illuminating: He appreciates their symbolic richness, but avoids being overly interpretive and intellectual. We learn to consider dreams as coded stories and listen to them in our bodies. We re-experience them in the Now. Richard believes that the invitation of a dream is to let it take us down into the feelings that psyche needs us to recognize and learn to consciously allow. When this is done the insights we gain from our dreams guides us steadily towards psychological health and a new and fulfilling course in our lives.

Richard’s teaching is exceptionally effective in helping people face into their psychological problems and heal their wounded souls. He teaches that faith and fear are inexorably linked. As we gradually learn to face our fears through a deepening understanding of the seven pillars, we realize faith in our essential nature. As this essential faith – beyond belief systems – grows we are able to approach the great predator that haunts our ego-based sense of separate self: the fear of non-being. It is this fear that is at the root of our most debilitating psychological problems. As this fear is gradually mastered we begin to assert our mature spiritual qualities. There arises the possibility of genuine psychological health. We become emotionally secure, able to be intimate with others without fear of abandonment. We become servants of love’s potential in our lives with our families and in our communities.

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