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MEDITATION: MAGIC, MYTH AND MYSTERY |
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by Michael A. West Guy Claxton (1986) has explored the parallels between meditation and psychotherapy in his book Beyond therapy. He argues that clients come to therapy seeking greater happiness or less pain and that there are limits to the purposes of such therapy. For example, dealing with a specific phobia of public speaking would usually not involve exploration of the client’s spiritual poverty. Such areas of experience are likely to be ‘out of bounds’ in the therapeutic relationship. On the spiritual path however there are no such limits: The quest is for Truth not Happiness, and if happiness or security or social acceptability must be sacrificed in the pursuit of this ruthless enquiry then so be it. The spiritual seeker’s task is not problem-solving but problem-seeking. Whatever experiences are upsetting must be mounted and ridden in any direction they choose to go, so that the fear that underlies them can be confronted and scrutinised. No thought or feeling or behaviour is ‘righter’ than any other. It is all grist to the mill—the mill that puts experience to the test, and that relentlessly separates out and discards any beliefs, however cherished, that turn out to be unjustified. (Claxton 1986) (pp. 316-17). Claxton goes on to warn that meditation practice may stimulate ‘dangerous’ or ‘bad’ feelings into consciousness which the person in therapy is happier to keep buried since their defences have worked well in the past in keeping them at bay. Meditation would then involve risk for many clients because it will tend to push them further than they are ready to go. Claxton challenges therapists themselves to begin the path of exploration of the boundaries of self through meditation, as a necessary part of their training in order to ‘appraise their value to their clients in terms of qualities of being, rather than the skills and techniques of doing or the conceptual understanding of knowing’.
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