What is Relational Mysticism©?
For several decades I have described myself as a “Shamanic Psychotherapist.” As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve recently begun calling my healing and psychotherapy model Relational Mysticism©.
Over the past ten years my awareness has increased about the culturally problematic, appropriative aspects of the words “shaman” and “shamanic.” Recently, those words have been applied to a clothing line, a diet, a cartoon, and a QAnon devotee wearing animal horns and fur, to name just a few iterations. There are also numerous people with sparse experience, superficial understanding, and glamorous aspirations who have appropriated the word “shaman.” So, I will leave them to it.
To be mystically relational is to be receptive and respectful, with a sense of wonder to the subtle dimensions where ancestors, spirits of the natural world, and archetypes reside along with the powerful forces and patterns of the unconscious. A mystic prioritizes a passionate, personal, and direct engagement with the invisible worlds of spirit, eschewing the husks of dogma.
To be in relationship with non-physical realities is to become psychically porous. However, we need to integrate that expansion of consciousness so that it is relational, balanced, and inclusive rather than separative and grandiose.
This is where psychotherapy comes in. The awareness and healing generated by honest self-inquiry help us to cultivate emotional maturity and to be empathetically connected with the earth and other human beings. Without these roots into the linear, rational, physical world, our humanity and spirituality will be incomplete and dissociated.
My therapeutic model, sessions, workshops, and pre-recorded classes embody these questions:
What are you willing to give…
What are you willing to learn/receive…
What you are willing to question about your habitual self-concept…
How are you willing to come to your own assistance…
to be in balance and good relationship with all the dimensions of your aliveness?
These are the beginning, catalyzing elements of Relational Mysticism.
