SPIRITUAL EMERGENCE OR EMERGENCY?
by Jacquelyn Small, Eupsychia Institute
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* SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY OR THE STORMY SEARCH FOR THE SELF, by Stanislav and Christina Grof, is one example. |
As people begin to access their internal processes through today's more psychspiritual methods and approaches, they experience rapid growth. The internal changes can sometimes outrun the healthy ego's ability to integrate the material coming up from the unconscious mind. This can create a "spiritual crisis" or "emergency" when the person undergoing this growth process has no context for the material surfacing, and no one who can validate the experience as legitimate. Being "wide open," people in this state are vulnerable to suggestion by others. And if they are getting the message that they are sick or "falling apart," that can be exactly what happens. Undergoing rapid sequences of death/rebirth is the psyche's natural way of clearing itself of old issues and advancing toward greater health and wholeness. But whether this type of experience becomes a "spiritual emergence" or "emergency" depends on the person's having available support and the ability to find an acceptable context for their symptoms. People need sacred, safe, loving, and non-judgmental places to go for healing and release of the deeper strata of the human psyche. Otherwise, some of these often dramatic shifts of mood and emotion can look like a severe imbalance or psychosis. And the experience can wind up being misdiagnosed and mistreated. Conventional mainstream therapies have viewed any form of spiritual or transpersonal material as dangerous, or even psychotic, since patient analysis was restricted to the ego. The soul was considered valid only in a religious context. When this kind of material emerged from the psyche during therapy sessions, the patient was medicated to repress it. One of the major tasks of the newer therapies is to honor spiritual emergence (and sometimes "emergencies" too when they can be realistically managed) as legitimate awakenings, and to guide people through to the sequence's resolution. Teaching to recognize the difference between a spiritual crisis and a psychosis is beyond the bounds of this book, but good books have been written on the subject*. A number of transpersonal organizations, including Eupsychia Institute, aide students in this pursuit. [excerpt from RISING TO THE CALL, pg. 172-172] |
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