This semester I’m taking a “Counseling Theory and Practice” course as part of my graduate training. One of my big worries going into the program was that I wouldn’t be able to situate myself within the “mainstream” discourse in the field. When I graduated from college in the early 90s, it seemed as if there weren’t any conventional psychology graduate programs that acknowledged and appreciated an integral or integrative approach to mental health, which was one of the reasons I ended up studying East/West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. I thought of myself as being on the cutting edge back in those days, as one of the few who could see through all the reductionistic b.s. of “mainstream” or “conventional” psychology. And there was probably a little bit of truth to that. It’s only been in the last ten years or so that topics once thought of as woo-woo, like mindfulness, have been appreciated and embraced by mental health professionals outside of a few outposts in California, Colorado, and Massachusetts. But today, assuming the textbooks we’re using at New Mexico State University are any indication of wider trends, it seems that a full-on biopsychosocial, integrative approach to counseling theory and practice is at long last having its day. Here’s a quote from Chapter 1 of Gerald Corey’s Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy:
To understand human functioning, it is imperative to account for the physical, emotional, mental, social, cultural, political, and spiritual dimensions. If any of these facets of human experience is neglected, a theory is limited in explaining how we think, feel, and act.
Shit, that sounds an awful lot like the blurb on the front page of this website! Could it be that this integral health stuff is no longer such a radical idea?!?! Perhaps I’ll have to let go of this notion that I’m part of the avant-garde! I can live with that, I suppose… :O)
My other textbook, Hackney and Cormier’s The Professional Counselor, has also alluded to an integral-ish perspective right off the bat, within the first few pages:
Each individual is an ecological existence within a cultural context, living with others in an ecological system. One’s intrapersonal dimensions are interdependent with others who share one’s life space.
Sounds a lot like the “woo” I studied in San Francisco back in the day! I can only hope this integrative vibe continues as the semester unfolds. It’ll sure make having to read hundreds of pages per week a lot less painful.
Bob, in the past two or three months I’ve been delving into the literature relevant to mindfulness based stress reduction and related approaches, and as someone who went to psych grad school during the 20th century I’m impressed how much mindfulness has moved into the professional mainstream. Jon Kabat-Zinn discusses how much hard work went into “Americanizing” or “secularizing” the MBSR approach in “Some reflections on the origins of MBSR, skillful means, and the trouble with maps”, in Contemporary Buddhism, <Vol. 12, No. 1, May 2011. It's available at http://www.association-mindfulness.org/docs/Kabat_Zinn_Version_anglaise.pdf
Kabat-Zinn's abstract says, " …He stresses the importance that MBSR and other mindfulness-based interventions be grounded in a universal dharma understanding that is congruent with Buddhadharma but not constrained by its historical, cultural and religious manifestations associated with its countries of origin and their unique traditions. He locates these developments within an historic confluence of two very different epistemologies encountering each other for the first time, that of science and that of the meditative traditions….The author's perspective is grounded in what the Zen tradition refers to as the one thousand year view. Although it is not stated explicitly in this text, he sees the current interest in mindfulness and its applications as signaling a multi-dimensional emergence of great transformative and liberative promise, one which, if cared for and tended, may give rise to a flourishing on this planet akin to a second, and this time global, Renaissance, for the benefit of all sentient beings and our world. "
Shinzen Young (also a very sharp guy, I think) expresses much the same idea this way:
"Science has beauty, depth, power, and practical utility. I believe that the two most impressive discoveries of our species are the Eastern method of meditative exploration and the Western method of scientific exploration. Some people claim that meditation and science have mated, but I think they are just starting to date. I believe the true mating will occur sometime later in this century and will give birth to a world-transforming paradigm shift. "
There are, of course, other countervailing tendencies, so it's hard to make really firm predictions, especially about the future. Still, Kabat-Zinn tells us:
"On a two-week vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1979, while sitting in my room one afternoon about Day Ten of the retreat, I had a “vision” that lasted maybe ten seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was rich in detail and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought stream, but rather something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully explain and don’t feel the need to.
I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the long-term implications
of what might happen if the basic idea was sound and could be implemented in one test
environment – namely that it would spark new fields of scientific and clinical investigation, and
would spread to hospitals and medical centers and clinics across the country and around
the world, and provide right livelihood for thousands of practitioners.
Because it was so weird, I hardly ever mentioned this experience to others. But after that retreat, I did have a better sense of what my karmic assignment might be. It was so compelling that I decided to take it on wholeheartedly as best I could."
[end of quote from Kabat-Zinn]
Great points David. Thanks for the link (I will read through the pdf when I get a breather from grad school) and the insightful feedback.
I hope you are well. I’m curious, what is your current take on Somatics? It’s hard to believe our training was ten years ago now! I did not finish the training or ever practice HSE in any professional sense, although I continue with my set of personal practices that incorporate much of the somatic perspective. Anyway, whatever you are doing these days, I hope it’s enjoyable and fulfilling.
Take care!
Bob