A Revolution in Awareness, Part 2

Roy Street interviews RICHARD HARVEY on the recently launched Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) Online Training Course. SAT training represents an entirely new kind of psycho-spiritual paradigm for therapists and counselors, people who want to train to become counselors, and serious students of inner work.

Roy: Is a revolution in awareness enough or are there further natural evolutionary steps for humanity to take if we are to reverse the forces of ignorance and sacrilege in the modern world?

Richard: Awareness is the start and it is a good start! Like so many aspects of the psycho-spiritual journey awareness has a deeper significance. But to gain that deeper significance we must do the ground work The first stage of serious inner work is remedial—essentially it is remedial, anachronistic, and all about the past. You have blotted out so much of the past, forgotten it you might say, suppressed it is another way of saying it. Awareness then at first is the way to remember or to regain your knowledge of where you have come from, what trauma you have undergone, how you have survived and what assumptions of character and personality and emotional-behavioral patterns you have leant to conform to.

If it's all remedial at first what impact does inner work and therapy make on contemporary life?

Well, not necessarily all that much at the start. First, a thorough job begins with adequate preparation. At the beginning of the process of inner exploration there's a lot of inner wrestling, uncertainty, trust and distrust, relief and yet holding on—it really is like throwing yourself into the realm of the opposites! Then as time goes on some insights, breakthroughs, and acquiring knowledge lead to changes, both slight and expansive, sometimes spectacular and often quite undramatic but nonetheless deep. When you persist further of course the impact of inner work on your outer life is tremendous—potentially. You begin to make new decisions, recognize different criteria in your life, refuse certain conformities and compromises, ask for more, receive more.

Is therapy all about what you get in your life, about being happier and more fulfilled, merely an expansive form of fulfilling desire?

It might be for some people and when it is then that is what therapy will mean to them. It's no bad thing of course and no mean feat, becoming happier. But when you persist past the margin of fulfilling desires and increasing in happiness further challenges await the dedicated journeyer.

As he or she moves toward wholeness some great tasks and challenges arise. With tremendous energy, courage, and skill the inner journeyer overcomes these tests and enters into the last stages of inner work which culminate in transcending forgiveness and embracing wholeness.

Wholeness is incorporating the shadow and integrating your disowned parts, yes?

Everything that you have ever feared, resisted, or disowned is brought to your attention... and it turns out to be inside you! When you realize this and understand it, your life is transformed. You are ready to take responsibility for your life at last and to engage with relationship in a mature way at last. Your primary need of the other is no longer to project and transfer your inner material onto them but to open to real feeling, experience, and heart-felt connection.

So love is possible would you say?

Love is possible.

And in module two of the course we look in some detail at the inherent wholeness of the human being and then in modules three through nine we take in turn the seven core elements of Sacred Attention Therapy and go into each one in some depth with background and theory, some examples, and practice application in inner work and therapy.

What are the seven core elements of Sacred Attention Therapy and why do they occupy such a lot of the course?

Each of the core elements represent some aspect of our survival strategy. As a whole they comprise a breakdown into parts of an overall defensive posture or the way in which we met life experience in our early years. The patterns and residue that result creates a resistance to life and an unconscious limitation on experience and relationship in later years. In effect our angels become our jailers as the forces of early childhood defenses, refusing to change for our self-protection, inhibit us to the point of annihilation of our energetic, emotional, and soulful life.

Unless we rely on these elements we feel in our lower instincts that we will perish. It is irrational of course—but nonetheless real. We feel that without these layers of defenses, these assumptions and beliefs, patterns and automatic behaviors, expectations and inhibitions that we risk all. In a sense we do have to risk all to gain all. Letting go of these familiar life elements is like losing your reference points for a time.

The seven core elements are family beliefs, life statements, emotional-behavioral patterns, emotional suppression, sub-personalities, character strategies, and the Central Character Dynamic.

“A Revolution in Feeling, Part 1” goes on to discuss the seven core elements further and the final modules in the Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) Online Training Course.

For full details, see the Sacred Attention Therapy Course on this site.