AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF KRIYA YOGA
An Essay by Shakti Dieste
Without any fondness I remember the days when my marriage was falling apart, I was in great conflict, and I sought help from professional counseling. My first attempts to find a therapist were useless. I still remember a session with a man who sat on the far opposite side of the room, said nothing until a few mumbled words at the end of the hour, and was about as helpful as talking into the wind.
When I finally found a competent therapist, I learned indelibly what immense help it can be, so much so that I became a psychotherapist and have, since 1989, maintained a private practice, coming to Port Townsend in 1994.
The first great relief upon entering therapy is to discover that you are seen and heard by another person who actually gets it why the whole thing has been going around and around in your head and why it can’t be solved with some snap of the fingers. You realize that the therapist has joined you in turning over the complexity of things and has become an ally in finding a way out of the morass. You come to realize that you are respected and appreciated and you remember your strengths. Your therapist helps you become aware of your emotions so that you can learn from what you’re feeling and be in charge of your behavior.
As time goes on the therapist might become a teacher of new ways of communicating or a collaborator in identifying new strategies to get to a happier place, but is above all a person who is present to you while you discover your answers within yourself and, by some almost mystical process, those answers begin to shape and improve the world you live in.
All too often, people experiencing psychological distress contact their doctors and are not met with an adequate plan for their healing. They may be given a diagnosis and prescription drugs. These medications are sometimes helpful. However, to offer a pill in a bottle as the sole response to a person struggling with life’s complexity and problems, a person who also may have experienced a specific trauma such as rape, childhood sexual abuse, combat in a war, domestic violence—the list goes on—is remarkably discounting of the soul journey of a human being.
Peter R. Breggin, M. D. is a psychiatrist who has authored the book Toxic Psychiatry, in which he is a critic of his own profession. He writes that psychiatry is out of control and provides an argument that neuroleptic drugs may be less of a “medical miracle” and more of a “chemical lobotomy,” an unspecific destruction of brain cells. He states that “Therapy, Empathy, and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the ‘New Psychiatry’”
Why Hypnotherapy?
Even so, psychotherapy is not always enough. In 1992, I began a four-year period of study with Diane Zimberoff and David Hartman at The Wellness Institute in Issaquah, Washington. Diane and David are master therapists who teach psychotherapists at the Masters or Doctoral level to take their clients into altered states. This methodology makes it possible to go deeper into the emotional reality a person is holding and to effect energetic shifts that often bring immediate and dramatic relief. In a single session, it is possible to go from a symptom to its cause to an energetic shift to healing. Old patterns that have recurred repetitively throughout a person’s lifetime can be ended, to be replaced with a happier way of living in the world. A patient suffering from an anxiety disorder can find relief from phobic symptoms and heal the actual cause of the anxiety. Body-mind techniques help in the healing of physical symptoms, even as the body sometimes seems to “help” the body by holding emotional distress. Lifelong patterns created by childhood abuse can be healed. What might have otherwise taken months or years of therapy can sometimes be resolved in a few hypnotherapy sessions. And, yes, hypnotherapy really has helped a lot of people to permanently stop smoking or to put a stop to unwanted weight gain.
I am also a Certified Release Therapist, using another healing technique that occurs in an altered state. At once the most simple and the most powerful of the modalities I use, Release Work relies on the use of the breath to break up old energetic patterns that may go back as far as birth or the prenatal period.
Past Life Regression is also a part of the altered-state therapies. Whether or not one is sure that past lives really exist, a hypnotherapist often witnesses a patient’s journey to a past life to heal a trauma that has been carried in the soul. Brian L. Weiss is a psychiatrist who risked a highly prestigious reputation to write Through Time Into Healing about his clinical experience of clients healing themselves through past life regression.
The Psychology of Kriya Yoga
Paramhansa Yogananda was a self-realized master who came to the United States from India in 1920 and taught Kriya Yoga, especially here on the West Coast, until his conscious exit from the body in 1952. Kriya is a scientific method developed in ancient India that teaches methods of meditation and pranayama, the conscious movement of breath and the life force in the spine, as a way to experience one’s own Self in union with God. For the practitioner of Kriya Yoga, God ceases to be an abstract concept and is instead experienced as inner joy, harmonious living, and even bliss.
On the posters Yogananda created to draw people to his lectures (which he did, by the thousands, all over the United States as seekers recognized his wisdom, joy, sweetness, and immense energetic magnetism), he actually described himself, among other things, as a psychologist. Psychology is the science of the soul.
Although not all psychotherapy and hypnotherapy clients will feel drawn to a practice of meditation, there is a path to happiness through the practice of Kriya Yoga for those who feel attracted to this method of transforming their lives. Counseling and meditation are a wonderful combination for healing, and never were meant to be mutually exclusive.
In Conclusion
It can be a powerful experience to enter therapy, often beginning with distress in living that needs resolution, only to end at a level of self actualization that many people never achieve. It is all about your self, that is to say, your Self, a sacred soul on a meaningful journey through life who is capable of finding happiness.