Transpersonal Psychology

[SaraTherase]

Gem - You make so many great points and I agree with the majority of what you've said. I'm not advocating experimental drug use as addiction in any form is unhealthy but I do support higher ideas and different concepts that may be beneficial to changing the mental health system.

I feel it's more up to us people so to speak to be more kinder and understanding towards those struggling. As they say charity begins at home and just doing the best we can to give and help in whatever way we can regardless of how little without having expectation. So few people realise that this too is a form of healing. By helping another we in turn help ourselves too so it becomes mutually beneficial.

I applaud and admire you for the work you do

[Gem]

Originally Posted by SaraTherase

I applaud and admire you for the work you do

I don't do that work any more. After being a street musician I went into social services, but didn't last long before I became a personal trainer, which was interrupted by lockdowns and I went all the way back to landscape and gardening, which I was doing before I became a musician. I gave 'serving others' a shot and thought I'd love it, but as it turns out, I don't even like working with people. I mostly like dirt and logs and stuff.

[Starman]

Transpersonal psychology also uses past-life regression therapy. I have told this story before here on this forum and here I go again. I was in a psychology doctorate program and attended many workshops and doctoral seminars on transpersonal psychology. It is not for everyone, and neither is traditional Freudian or neo-Freudian psychology which it seems the world is steeped in.

So here is the story I shared here before about transpersonal psychology and how it impacted me. I went to a seminar with a woman I had known for many years, we flew from Denver to Washington, D.C. where the seminar was held. The seminar was very interesting and the woman who I was with was randomly chosen to participate in a past-life regression technique, she agreed.

She was put into a trance state and bought back to her childhood where she recounted things about her childhood and while doing so spoke in the voice of a child, she was then bought back to her experience in her mothers’ womb before she was born, which she recounted. Then she was bought back to a previous life time where she started talking French in a man’s voice.

I knew this woman, she was a co-worker of mine and she had a very science oriented perspective; she did not know how to speak French and her voice had never sounded like a man’s voice before. At the seminar she got down on the floor and was crawling around moaning, very uncharacteristic of this woman. Fortunately there was someone at the seminar who spoke French.

It was concluded that this woman was a soldier in Napoleons army in a previous life, and she died on the battlefield, that is why she was crawling on the floor moaning. She was bought out of the trance state and did not remember much from her participation in that session. But when told about it she could draw connections from her current life, traits that she may have acquired in a previous life. This experience for me was one of the things that strengthened by belief in reincarnation.

There is only one philosophy about psychiatry but there are a few dozen schools of thought, or philosophies, in psychology. Nonetheless, it does seem to me that the world is obsessed with Freudian psychology and its model of id, ego, and superego. Other schools of psychology may not follow that model. Just to name a few; behavior psychology, reality therapy, Gestalt psychology, Humanistic psychology, transpersonal analysis, not to be confused with transpersonal psychology, and there are many, many, others. One size does not fit all, yet that is what we have with ego psychology; it is imposed on everyone and even spiritually oriented people are seemingly obsessed with ego psychology.

I am just sharing my personal opinion here. I worked in the healthcare field 42-years, medical, mental health, social work, and teaching post-secondary education. I learned the mainstream traditional approach and also alternative non-mainstream approaches. All psychiatrists basically have the same training and they are medical doctors, but all psychologists or mental health therapists do not have the same training. There are spiritual psychologists; Naropa University in Colorado teaches Buddhist psychology and a person can become a therapist using Buddhist psychology. There is also esoteric psychology. There are lots of different psychologies in psychology.

Yes, I did get a little long winded here….