During my years practicing psychotherapy, which is arguably an activity, rather than a job title, I have held a secret longing for people, through deepening their awareness, to develop listening skills and empathic skills that Allow and allow them to heal themselves and others. This thinking is something of a heresy (since the days of Freud and Jung the status of psychotherapy has aspired to rise to religious status), implying a disregard for therapy training, regulation, registration, licensing and the general professional paraphernalia, which as someone (I forget who it was) once said would turn Jesus into an illegal counselor.

But although I have personally endured the rigors of personal therapy for many years, the training, both theoretical and experiential, therapist supervision, and so on, all of which give me great respect for the “profession” of psychotherapy, inwardly I feel and I maintain that therapy is a natural response to human problems, and a response that has become complex and somewhat extreme, a response possibly too intricate to what is arguably the craziest world the human species has ever inhabited. .

In the pursuit of happiness, we inevitably stray further from it. This is, of course, because we are going in the wrong direction. Happiness is inside, not outside. Or to put it a little more bluntly: unless you have tapped the inner vein of happiness into the inner realms, you cannot expect any person or event in the outer world to bring you happiness. This is the same argument as saying that unless there is a part of God within you, you cannot conceive of, perceive, or experience God (actually, you do not experience God, because the spiritual realms operate according to entirely different laws). , than transcending the relative world, but here we have entered deep water indeed) and this too would of course have been a heresy in a not too distant time, before the holistic era in which we currently live.

It is this matter of the inner world (or inner inquiry or inner journey) that tends to put off outwardly oriented people (that is, most of us). After all, you have nothing to show externally for internal exploration: no photos, no certificates, no medals, just the subjective benefits that can accrue and positively influence your life. We live in an age of overwhelming materialism, which places great emphasis on the individual, like never before in human history. What we possess (how many qualifications, achievements, belongings) defines us in a world primarily attuned to manifested individual wealth.

Before dismissing this argument, note that the predominant communication between individuals is about professional activity, material struggle and achievement, what they have been doing, where they live, how many children or grandchildren they have. They will rarely discuss internal states of emotionality, spirituality, energy, psychic experience, or interpersonal intimacy skills; at least this is not so common.

Yet this area of ​​inner experience is precisely where life makes sense and is therefore worth living. Only when we can be with ourselves and fully inhabit the inner realms can we come close to realizing our true potential, evolving as human beings and living in a reciprocal relationship with the outer world that is nurturing and enriching, vibrant and authentic.

To be with ourselves, we must truly learn the skills that enable and enable us to be with others. This is the subject that I will deal with in the second part of this article.