Psychotherapists and Counselors – existential orientation

A CENTRAL ELEMENT IN BOTH CHAKRA WORK AND IN GESTALT THERAPY, COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS is the development of a capacity for moment-by-moment awareness of a person’s inner dynamics and processes. This includes mind, body, emotions, and spirit.  Among psychoanalysts, only Wilhelm Reich, and his followers such as Stanley Kelemen, make physical sensations a central part of their work. Psychoanalysis emphasized the mind and emotions, but in a manner that included a measure of distance from them. The gestalt therapy that Fritz Perls and his colleagues created emphasized developing immediate moment-by-moment awareness in each moment of what a person is experiencing. Aaron Beck’s version of cognitive behavior therapy did something similar, asking patients to listen to what their inner voice was saying (such as thoughts about how the therapist might be viewing them) at the same time their outer voice and behavior might be saying something else.

THE CHAKRA SYSTEM ADDS TO THIS the “witness consciousness” or “mindfulness” element of direct self-awareness of the person’s own process of noticing what his or her thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations are doing. A unique contribution lies in also providing a “map” that helps a human services professional or a client pinpoint dominant energies, and suppressed energies the client is likely to benefit from developing. This allows a faster zeroing-in on areas where problems and opportunities lie, and  illuminates pathways for working on them that even most skilled therapists would otherwise require more time to trace out.

FINALLY, MOST THERAPY AND COUNSELING ARE ORIENTED TOWARD HELPING PEOPLE WHO FEEL TROUBLED. A common goal is to help clients become “normal.” That means like the norm, the average — i.e. no more or less screwed up than everybody else, so they can function in society. THE CHAKRA SYSTEM IS EXPLICTLY TRANSPERSONAL OR SPIRITUAL (your choice of terms.) It aspires to help people transcend many of the dilemmas of “normal” everyday life and develop a fuller, richer, deeper consciousness that leads in the directions of greater self-realization than most people ever achieve.