“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls” – Jung

Transpersonal psychotherapy is an inter- and intra-personal journey, leading to the mystical. 

Transpersonal psychotherapy is something very different, something even deeper [than day-to-day reality]. Because it connects us to and it offers a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves. It promises meaning and purpose and offers us the possibility of transcendence -the experience of being greater than the day-to-day identity that we have worked so hard to create. The spiritual path promises to alleviate a deep homesickness -the longing for some kind of goodness, truth, rightness or beauty. The spiritual path promises to speak to that deep homesickness, to heal that longing. It promises to liberate our suffering and provide us with inner freedom. It makes order out of disorder and sense out of the chaos and disintegration that we see around us in the world. It heals our wounded soul. (http://psychosynthesis.net/promises-pitfalls-spiritual-therapeutic-path/)

Spirituality is innate in human nature and can generally be defined as ‘addressing questions of ultimate meaning and significance’.  The spiritual qualities of peace, wisdom and oneness should naturally be part of the helping professions.

But they are often ignored because professionals generally don’t know how to awaken these dormant qualities within a secular, cross-cultural population.

Transpersonal means beyond the person or personality and its Practice  is a map and skills for awakening spiritual qualities in our patients, clients, employees, students and congregants -and in ourselves. Transpersonal experiences are essentially those experiences and dimensions that are ‘trans’, beyond or through the sense of identity or self as an individual and that have  greater scope than the more widely used concepts in religion or spirituality*.

Transpersonal Psychotherapy is known as the ‘fourth force’ of Psychology and assumes that a person is actually a soul that has a personality/identity which is on a personal journey.

‘Soul’ is a complex, multifaceted and open-ended construct, given that it is based on a variety of human capacities and experiences. At its simplest it is a kind of quasi-physical reality of some kind that has psychological qualities and some greater human connection with a divine reality*.

*Daniels, M (2005) –  Shadow, Self and Spirit: essays in transpersonal psychology. Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK. (pages 11 and 175)

A good paper on Transpersonal Psychology and how Psychosynthesis relates as a therapeutic modality can also be found here.