“Where there is great love there are always miracles. Miracles rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming to us from far off, but on our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what there is about us always.”

Willa Cather

Try as we might life’s “problems” are not usually problems to be rid of or contradictions meant to be done away with. This may not be what you want to hear or why you’ve come here looking for a therapist. But see if any of what I am about to share with you lands.

Our first response is usually to push something “bad” away whether it’s a habit we judge about ourselves or in others, an emotional response or thought pattern we deem unsavory. The habits we don’t like can have backing from our culture, societies, families, communities, making them extra bad when they show up. Making us feel like bad people or weak people. We usually come to therapy calling these things “problems.” And we often want them to go away somehow or maybe even learn more sophisticated disguises so the bad things can be better hidden.

Sometimes we aren’t even aware we judge parts of ourselves as bad because that whole process gets put on other people. They are the bad ones with the disgusting bad habits who behave in deplorable ways. Not I. Projecting is something we all do to some extent.

Here is where things get tricky. Whether the “bad” is in you or the “bad” is in others (or both), this game of hot potato does not get us very far. Maybe far enough for some. But not a fulfilling prospect for others. Because if you are on the seesaw of “bad” and “good” life will be a series of pinging and ponging between two tiny goal posts. We are more than just good parents and bad environmentalists, good husbands and bad kids. There is a whole world beyond good and bad but there is a door with a lock separating the two worlds.

Maybe you are someone who already knows limiting beliefs hold you back, keeping your light dim. Maybe you feel that limiting belief somatically (in your body).

Maybe you sense there is a voice within that you’re failing to listening to. You don’t even know what it sounds like or how to make space for it but you suspect it’s there. Maybe you envy others who seem to have access to their inner voice.

The “field beyond good and bad” is where you will meet your voice. Therapy can be a space to help facilitate the unlocking of the door. It isn’t that you’ll forever be rid of black and white thinking, it is so you will have the freedom to move between worlds as the voice within you sees fit.

“Come, come, whoever you are,

wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving,

it doesn't matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times.

Come, come again, come.”

Rumi

Entering into a relationship where together patient and therapist navigate the inner landscape of a mind and see how it relates to the outer landscape of life can be incredible. Alone, we have many blind spots. Together with a trusted, trained witness, those blind spots may be revealed or at least revealed to be a blind spot.

The therapy relationship is an utterly unique one. It is there when you forge ahead, it is there when nothing seems to be happening. It is there when seeds sprout and there when the rewards aren’t yet apparent. It is a resource and guide and a voice of understanding.

With the right therapist-patient fit, it is truly the temenos space where everyday conventional rules are not nearly as important as the uncovering of one’s true nature.