What is a Spiritual Approach to Psychotherapy?

A spiritual approach to psychotherapy recognizes that human experience includes a reality that is greater than oneself, a spiritual dimension, which goes by many names in the world’s religious and wisdom traditions. A spiritual approach to psychotherapy draws upon this essential nature as a part of the healing and growth process.

Who are Spiritually Informed Psychotherapists?

Spiritually informed psychotherapists draw upon the wisdom and compassion that has arisen through their contemplative practice and study of psychology. Typically, they have engaged in spiritual disciplines such as meditation, prayer and/or contemplative body-centered awareness practices for a number of years.

What is Characteristic of a Spiritually Informed Psychotherapeutic Relationship?

Spiritual practice prepares therapists to embody “unconditional presence,” in which the client’s experience can be explored within non-judging, healing awareness. In a relational environment of unconditional presence, clients enter into a deepening intimacy with their experience, which then allows for a natural and transformative unfolding of what is most authentic.

What Kinds of People and Problems Do Spiritually Informed Therapists Work With?

A psychotherapist with a spiritual orientation is able to work with a large population of clients and a wide variety of problems, including depression, anxiety, and relationship conflicts.  Any and all concerns that are normally treated by psychotherapists are also treated by spiritually-informed therapists. 

However, many therapists with a spiritual orientation are also trained to work with clients who are interested in spirituality or who are having significant spiritual openings.  Opening to the spiritual dimension of human experience might take one of these (and many other) forms:

• Intuitive apprehension of the “sacred ground of being/awareness” that subsumes and pervades all phenomena.
• An expanding love, compassion, wisdom, and joy toward one’s self and others wherein one sees all of life as the embodiment of sacredness.
• Awakening to one’s higher Self.
•  Emergence of the darker, more painful sides of our experience, often in dramatic forms.
• Awakening of extrasensory perception.
• The arousal of subtle energetic phenomena in the body (sometimes called “kundalini”).
• Encountering numinous beings and mythic themes in dreams and visions.
• Disappointments in a spiritual teacher, priest, minister, or a spiritual or religious community.

To sustain and integrate a spiritual opening, self-acceptance, inner stability, and resilience are necessary.  When these are present, spiritual awakening enhances psychological healing and well being.  However, there are also times when the influx of new awareness and insight can frighten, disorient, and overwhelm an individual.  Then spiritual awakening becomes a spiritual crisis or conflict.   Many spiritually informed psychotherapists are trained to offer support and guidance in handling spiritual conflicts.