I have just had someone stay with me for a week in Majorca for a Psychospiritual’ Intensive’ where the entire time is devoted to psychological and spiritual exploration, and I am yet again reminded what a powerful process this is, if, that is, the client is familiar with inner work and truly has a commitment to their process and seeks to be the best they can be.
In ordinary psychotherapy, one tends to see one’s therapist once or twice a week, with the flow of sessions always being dissipated by the momentum of daily life going on around them. In this intensive context, with the entirety of the day being devoted to inner work, one’s life becomes one’s session and as there is nothing to interrupt it, one may more quickly reach greater depths of understanding. In such circumstances, not only may genuine quantum leaps be made, as happened with my recent client, but because we explore all dimensions of a person’s life – their emotional, work, relational and spiritual life, their physical and medical fitness, etc – all these categories which ordinarily we tend to hold as existing in separate compartments, are recognised as being integrated and people actually find out – not as a concept but as a felt experience – that all areas of their lives really are inter-connected and that glitches in one area result in imbalances in other areas.
My experience is that the mysterious idea of what constitutes ‘wholistic psychotherapy’ can best be experienced within this framework which must also factor in time for rest, play and relaxation. What I also discovered with this client, is that our ‘play-times’ – where we did not focus directly on inner exploration – were amongst the most therapeutic!
What Liberates?

The Oxford Dictionary defines liberation as: ‘the act of setting someone free from slavery, imprisonment or oppression’. Liberation, therefore, has both inner and outer dimensions which are intrinsically inter-related because if we are not free inside ourselves, it will inevitably limit our ability to live a liberated outer life, even if the society we live in is a relatively free one. The same can hold true the other way around as well. Many of us, therefore, need liberating not only…