Tag: Integral Self Therapy

You Are Neo

“You take the blue pill. The story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe…whatever you want to believe. “You take the red pill, and you will see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember. All I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – Paraphrased from the movie The Matrix You’ve seen the now classic scene (and if you haven’t then you should watch it at least twice before returning to this...
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You Are a Flowing River

“Don’t push the river; it flows by itself” Fritz Perls The self is fluid, and constantly changing, said learned Eastern philosophers of yore. Your thoughts come and go, emotions change, and although you think of yourself as the same person across time, actually you are never the same. In fact, in some ways, you have no self at all. Now, this may sound nihilistic to many people. But, as it happens,...
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Kill Your Darlings

William Faulkner famously advised writers to edit fearlessly, to remove particularly those sentences that they loved.  Faulkner knew that the narrative and cohesiveness of a novel is ruined by sentences that are incongruent, no matter how beautifully written. Kill your darlings, he said.  If Faulkner were a psychiatrist, he would have said the same thing in psychotherapy. The goal of all growth oriented...
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The Clearing

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Rumi In order to change unhealthy behaviour, we have to first acknowledge to ourselves that the behaviour is unhealthy. We have to say to ourselves, “What I have been doing all along is hurting me, or those around me.” This can be frightening, because to acknowledge that we have been wrong is to see the past as a...
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Insight

She looked at the mirror and saw herself looking back. It seemed as if she were being observed, and a bit critically at that. She reminded herself, “Those are my eyes looking at me. It is I who is doing the observing.” For a moment, a glimpse of the truth. Then, she closed her eyes...
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