The Psychotherapist and The Spiritual Teacher

Joseph Walters interviews Richard Harvey on the Sacred Attention Therapy Online Training

You are a spiritual teacher and a psychotherapist. Is there not some conflict there?

None at all. In order to arrive at an authentic meeting with spirit it’s essential that we work through our personal psychology. Therapy and spirituality meet in what has been known as transpersonal or psycho-spiritual psychology. In my work it is known as the Way of Sacred Attention.

Tell us about your Sacred Attention Therapy online training. What is it about and who is it for?

Sacred Attention Therapy training is a self-training for people who are intent on self-transformation. In a sense it is for everyone, at least everyone who would like to transform their lives in a positive way by releasing the limiting hold of childhood conditioning. It also a training for practitioners who wish to add a transpersonal or psycho-spiritual dimension to their overall approach and it is a training for those who want to become counselors or therapists and work with others using the SAT approach.

How do you bridge the gap between professionals and lay people in the training?

What gap is there to bridge? The myth of professionalization has been accepted by the laity for over a hundred years but a new paradigm is rising and that is the one in which human potential is unlimited. You know I, like you perhaps, have noticed that whether we hire a solicitor (or lawyer), a doctor, an accountant, or a psychotherapist everything depends on the trust and resonant feeling we have toward the so-called professional. Certificates and experience may constitute societal approval and a toolbox, but the effectiveness and richness of our experience with so-called professionals actually depends on our feeling toward them, the way in which they meet us in common humanity. Now nowhere more is this more the case than in counseling and therapy. The effectiveness of therapy rests on the positive qualities of the relationship itself. So in SAT training the therapeutic relationship is one of our principal focuses.

What would I get out of the training?

The possibilities are many and various but depending on your motivation and application the sky’s the limit! For some it may be a deepened awareness of who they are and how they have created their life, for others freedom and liberation from restricting life patterns that limit satisfaction, fulfilment, and the realization of their destiny. Each individual human being is more amazing that they know. The tragedy would be if you never found out the possibilities in life that you are preventing yourself from realizing.

What distinguishes the SAT training from all the other therapy, counseling, and healing trainings which abound today?

The training is more expansive. It incorporates the insights of depth psychology and spiritual teaching and clearly connects the two in what I believe is the most wise way forward for human beings today. We have to do the groundwork of healing the psyche before we can truly enter the Divine realms. The spiritual teacher who dismisses the struggle with the ego and the therapist who fails to recognize the spiritual dimension of his or her clients both have only a part of the total picture. The spiritual teacher today needs to be a psychotherapist and the psychotherapist a spiritual teacher.