The Ethics of Awake Presence
Last week I breathed air that makes you feel different, in company where I felt different. In the middle of the French mountains, without an internet connection, in a place with no public transport, we explored Tandava meditation and searched for sovereignty within ourselves.
I am glad that, as a client, I can surrender to ethical principles that do not align with the familiar psychotherapeutic ones, and that I can, and am allowed to, experience the positive sides of that system first-hand.
I feel I have enough sovereignty to feel completely safe in a system that does not have a prescribed framework in the way I was taught was necessary.
Meeting Komala Lyra and Dez Nichols left me in deep reflection about ethics and working with people.
Watching a walking embodiment of extremely radical sovereignty in action brought me back to my eternal crossroads: questioning the ethics of the system and the ethics of the soul.
Many times in my life I have found myself in a place where I feel resistance towards structures, even though at the same time I can understand their value.
I remember the moment when I could rationally justify the “hospital system” in which we, mothers of children in neonatal care, went like “little cows” every three hours to breastfeed our children.
My soul was falling apart with pain as I watched my child sleep, too sleepy to draw milk, because I was not listening to his rhythm, but to the rhythm of the hospital, a system that found it easier to “process” us all at once.
It was not fair to that little being. He survived, and later we healed the trauma that arose because the system’s most important goal was to save a life, not to care for the wellbeing of the whole being. My pain came precisely from wanting my child to be cared for as a whole.
Systems are there to prevent catastrophe, but too often they are the very ones that, in that same place, prevent miracles.
Why systems have become more important than people is a question that often comes to me, and one I still do not have a real answer to.
I remember situations in my work that my supervisors would probably condemn, when I reached out to a client outside the office and mixed roles. I believed I was doing her good by supporting her in following her passion, offering her the job she dreamed of.
I gave her trust that was not easy for me to give. I decided to be a Human instead of a Therapist.
The profession would say: “That is mixing roles, that is not done.” The ethics of my soul said: “That is the only way for her to feel her strength.”
Today I know that, in those moments, I was “unethical” by the standards of the books because I chose to give trust where I was not supposed to.
Although that lesson later cost me, in that moment it was the only act of love that made sense to me. And today, with some distance, I feel I would once again remain faithful to her soul and to my own.
The price of walking that edge is high.
Sometimes those to whom you have given the most, in their process of growing up, try to cut you down with the very rules you moved beyond in order to help them.
That is the price I had to carry so that she could be her own person today.
And I did carry it. Years later, I was labelled an unethical therapist because, at the moment of separation, she held on to fragments of the relationship rather than the relationship as a whole.
That is exactly what children do to their parents during puberty. They separate through anger and by emphasising the bad parts of parenting, while forgetting the good ones.
Parents need to survive and endure that, because only after that phase comes the integrative one: reconciliation and acceptance of the parent as a whole.
I see that most people who work with others on that edge of ethical principles experience this wound in one way or another.
As a therapist with a master’s in Gestalt, I was raised in a world of rules. I believe they are there as a safety belt that prevents our unconscious shadows from hurting the client.
Yet Komala says that protective rules kept in place over the long term actually prevent both the client and the therapist from truly growing up and taking responsibility for their own boundaries or their own wakefulness and awareness.
It sounds radical and quite “scary”.
And in some situations I can agree with her, because I see clients and therapists who stagnate for years for precisely that reason, because for years they have relied on a framework set by other authorities, without questioning what truly expresses their own soul.
And I do not think I can take such a radical approach with my clients in my own work, because I chose psychotherapy as my calling, but I can bring elements of tantra’s radical approach into the therapeutic relationship.
Over time I have realised that, whatever we do, whether we set rules or not, the dynamic of power will always appear.
The question is: will we look it directly in the eyes when it appears, or will we be “politically correct in gloves” and hide it?
I had a teacher in my Gestalt training who could stop and say: “Here I went in the wrong direction and did not see you. Let us start again.”
I valued that part of her personality because she had a capacity that not all therapists have.
She had the radical quality of tantra that I like.
She demystified her power and showed her personality as it was in that moment.
The downside of psychotherapy schools is that they have fenced us therapists in with high walls of what is “allowed” and what is “professional” and what is not allowed, with the intention of protecting clients, but personally I often wonder whether we are actually protecting therapists from having to be fully awake and aware of their own ethics at every moment.
It inspired me to see how Komala used “the dominance of power that appeared in the relationship as a mirror”, and she inspired me with the sentence: “I feel I am taking over your responsibility.”
“Why do you now feel the need to hand your power over to me? What prevents you from recognising it in yourself and carrying it?”
It is a form of ethics in which I do not hide power, but place it on the table as a shared object of observation and growth in awareness.
A teacher at HDST inspired me in a similar way…
Instead of pretending to be “the one who knows”, I show the process and encourage the client to reflect on themselves and their sovereignty.
The positive sides of such more radical approaches give me the courage to be me, me in a relationship with the client, and on the other hand I believe that in this way I treat the client as a powerful being, rather than a victim of the past and transference.
The core of our vitality is in living eros, which manifests through the body.
If we try to mentalise it, it dies. If we try to ignore it, we do not bring the magic.
I believe eros is the fastest engine for healing if it is given space, but I can also see that it is not for everyone, because those who are fragile do not know how to hold their inner compass, so rules protect them. As a person matures, they need fewer rules set from outside and more alignment with their inner compass.
My work today is that walk along the edge and the search for where it is alive and what your eros needs to meet the body again.
For those who are ready for work that is sometimes soft and sensual, and sometimes brutally honest.
For those who are not looking for a saviour, but for a witness and companion – I am here, get in touch to book a session.