Wrestling with the Question: East, West …and liminal spaces

Trip To India 21st June to 5th July 2006

Coming back from India again feels like having been in a different world. Although the world feels smaller after such long but possible flights, the processes that take place ‘amongst the worlds’ feel huge, difficult to be put into words. This was my second visit to the ashram of Prashanthi Nilayam, South India after 7 years. When I first went there in 1999, it was out of an urgent need to find my path, to get more in touch with my inside and find some sort of direction. I wasn’t sure how that would happen as a result of the trip but the changes in my life that followed were decisive and crucial. After that trip I decided I would become a counsellor although still I was not sure what even the word meant and what it entailed. Things gradually fell into place with me discovering my training route and so on. The trip then took place in a period of quest and transition; the trip now also came at a period of needing to ground all that has happened and searching for what’s next. I am a counsellor now and I notice in my awareness that I am not using the word as a professional title but as a characteristic of my identity. This is what makes it relevant to including this strand when reflecting on this trip and my stay there since it feels like ‘a trip within’, a journey towards certain ‘worlds’ of myself and worlds that have been built as a result of relationships and interactions with others. (am thinking of ‘indwelling’ as part of the heuristic process – uncle Moustakas, p.24)

I am thinking of Kerenyi’s conception of ‘journeying’ and his writings about the ancient Greek God Hermes, the guide of souls through liminality.

“He who moves about familiarly in this world-of-the-road has Hermes for his God”

As I write, I jumped to my bookcase to find the book “In midlife” by Stein (2003) where he describes Hermes as “the God of boundaries and of traffic over them, of pathways that wander over land and sea, of cultural spaces such as markets and bazaars where ambiguous exchanges take place, represents a type of consciousness that exists essentially within transitional time and space. Hermes is the god of transitions, and transitions always move through liminality” (p.7)

Am contemplating on the meaning of the word ‘liminality’ as discussed by Stein:

- The word comes from the Latin limen meaning ‘doorway’ or ‘threshold’. Entering a room or leaving it, once crosses a limen, and while there, in this borderline space, one is in liminality

- In psychology, the word is used to ‘refer to a threshold between consciousness and the unconscious portions of the mind’

- what he calls ‘psychological liminality’ is “a person’s sense of identity is hung in suspension. You are no longer fixed to particular mental images and contents of yourself and others. The ‘I’ is caught up in a field that it cannot control, whose patterns it does not recognise as ‘me’”

Those psychological functions above that often refer to describe the state of being in ‘a midlife crisis’, feel very similar to the experience of what happened to me when I opened up to a spiritual quest and also when I left my country and ended up living amongst cultures where the processes of the ‘me’ are very intense and the grief involved often painful together with bringing new insights

When I was in India, it seems that a few Gods were around as manifestation of the One…not only the 12 ancient Greek ones but also so many others like Krishna, Budha, Rada, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Siva to mention just a few…as for the ‘midlife transition’, it felt a bit like that when celebrating quietly by myself (and all the Gods!) my 30th birthday a few days before I flew back…when expressing my wish for a new phase to begin in my life, where I leave all the hindrances of myself behind and make a start with a new me. This is not rejecting aspects of myself but more an attempt to embrace who I am but also consciously start again, be reborn and live more fully, closer to who I am really, more in touch with the Spirit. Is if I want to let go of the pain experienced through life or maybe view pain and suffering from a different perspective, one that brings a sense of humility, liberation and more gratefulness…so many questions inside…which maybe meet in one question…a very existential one (thinking of ‘focusing’ as used in heuristic research to describe the ‘clearing of an inward space to enable one to tap into thoughts and feelings that are essential to clarifying a question”)

What was definitely different during this second trip is the presence of ‘myself as a researcher’. Everything was/is data! Wherever I went, whomever I met with, whatever I saw, whatever I thought, felt, experienced felt so much relevant to the research process. I feel that I AM the research topic in a way…is that too egocentric? Why on earth would I be a ‘contribution to knowledge’? isn’t that arrogant? BUT……I do know that what I mean by that is that the experiences I am starting off to explore are primarily within me……my spirituality, my cultural identity, my counsellor identity, the different me(s) in me and all that they have been through as a result of being involved in a spiritual journey, of leaving my country and living in a foreign land, of living with two languages in my head, with experiencing the languages in my heart etc etc etc.What am left puzzled with is how to express and communicate such processes to others, it is the actual fact of finding my voice into the writing that leaves me with an uneasy feeling. However, I need to let go of control and wanting things a certain way and just write as I do now, until the spark of creativity kicks in and the speech flows, the energy comes out through the hands onto the paper.

Spending time in an ‘ashram’ (=spiritual community) in the presence of an ‘Avatar’ (=incarnation of the divine) who offers a ‘darshan’ (=the experience of the sight of a holy being) twice a day and participate in chanting ‘bhajans’ (=Indian songs extolling the names of God) when sitting for hours in a temple with people from all over the world is a unique experience which involves many processes often difficult to grasp in awareness. I feel that I do not have much to say just now as such processes are possible to somehow be verbalised when some time has passed. The easiest I could say at this stage is that I went through questioning who am I, what is the spirit, what is God, what is life, what about my relationships, what about issues of my past, my present, my future and so on. I also thought a lot about therapy and its purpose/functions in cultural contexts, how healing is perceived at different places, what makes a therapist after all, why and if therapy shall exist and so many other questions of existential nature both at personal and professional level. And most of all, I somehow know (this is tacit knowledge, uncle Moustakas has been with me a long time now!) that a lot went on at an unconscious level, something that I want to leave untouched at the moment and allow for it to do its course before being ready to come to my awareness in one way or another.

The threads of spirituality, culture and counselling were weaving together in different ways all the way during the trip and beyond…such a great opportunity for heuristic immersion!!! How exciting, confusing and inevitably exhausting! So many cultural messages: the poverty and hunger, the dirt, the begging on the streets, children living under the earth, lack of water, food, basic material things in so much contrast to what we take for granted in the West. It was so obvious that the Western world is so full of materialism but lacks of spirituality whereas the Eastern world has spiritual richness but lacks of managing the material needs. Also, some sense that human drama is essentially woven through everyday life in the East and terms like ‘trauma’ or ‘PTSD’ and the like somehow wouldn’t fit in that context. People survive and seem to suffer in different ways…not sure if it’s my impression but people I saw there, although in absolute poverty, seemed happier….would they go for therapy, even when offered for free? I doubt it… I had an interesting conversation with an American therapist who abandoned the States about 7 years ago and went to live inside the ashram where he set up a counselling service for free. When I asked him who are his clients he said that he saw people from all over the world visiting there, mainly westerners…very rarely Indians.

Indians seem to ‘trust God’ more and therefore do not seek therapy since God is healing them Himself, they ‘ask for’ things to Him directly rather than placing their concerns to a human/professional….and then the Westerners who visit the Ashram believing they are in the presence of an Avatar (divine being) still need a counsellor to contain their pain or guide them though……am left with so many questions….is therapy a fashion? Are the desired qualities of a God projected onto a therapist because there is no real trust/faith or whatever, because humans cannot contain the concept of the divine without a form? What is this all about? Why do westerners need to go to India to seek spirituality and even there cannot in-dwell in the culture or surrender somehow or trust? Am losing my words here….who am I as a therapist? If I was in India or such a places would I have been/doing something else? Are we sick in the west? What does West and what does East represent? Is there a split or not? Is it a real split or is it mine? What is my research all about? Are the research questions real or part of my own ‘pathology’? Why do I use such powerful, often medical words? What am I reacting to or what am I defending against?

Besides my experiences of staying in an ashram situated at one of the most rural and poor areas of India, I also had the opportunity to visit Montfort College, affiliated to Bangalore University, which offers the first Holistic Counsellor Training Programme in the country. Its training manual describes the programme as having two components: the psychospiritual integration for personal transformation and the acquisition of counselling skills. Holistic health is described as the well-being of the person that attains happiness by cultivating both Vyanahara (temporal knowledge) and Paramarthika (spiritual knowledge) as outlined by the Upanishads. The course is delivered by the Montfort Brothers of St Gabriel, an International Religious Society engaged in the service of education and counselling for over 300 years and in India for nearly a century. I conducted 2 interviews with two Brothers there, both trained as counsellors at PhD level in Manila, Philippines.

During those two interviews, and also when conducting the pilot focus group in the UK, I was left with the feeling that ‘something is wrong with my research questions’. I have noticed something reacting in me or a voice or experience in me feeling extremely lost in the process. If it were to attempt to put this into words, I would make the following observations:

• Although, according to the literature and personal experiences from my practice, spirituality is culturally bound and those forces seem linked together, it appears that the counsellors-research participants cannot talk about these two together but talk about them separately. Culture seems one thing, spirituality another and the relationship with counselling is another matter. These are huge areas and am afraid I will get lost into them myself although I have strong personal responses in relation to how the function within myself, my identity, my experience, my thoughts, feelings and practice. There is obviously a debate around definitions which I suspect makes that perspective of examining the interactions of those factors difficult….on the other hand am left wondering what may be about the phenomenon itself that provokes this…how is myself as a researcher interpreting what I am listening from the participants? Would somebody else doing the same thing listen to something else? Am I ‘contaminating’ the data with my own script? How will the ‘Julians’ perceive that process and how can I defend it when I feel so lost myself? And why shall I defend anything? What is truth? Who are we, the researchers, to claim any truth? Does the spirit survive in all that ‘game’ or shall we leave it exist without ‘researching’ it?…………….????????????????

• When I engaged in conversation with ‘Western’ counsellors about the topic, it is often that they defend themselves and seem to be completely unaware of the complexities involved in how culture and spiritual issues affect the therapeutic relationship by hiding behind ‘the safety net’ offered by person-centred values and the efficiency of the core-conditions in, to my opinion, naïve ways. The concepts that ‘we are all humans’, ‘we are all the same’ and ‘I just stay with the person’ whichever his/her background and with whatever they bring for counselling seem, to me, that they are misused and misunderstood when the counsellor herself appears to be ignorant of how such dimensions influence themselves and the dynamics of the relationship. I was somehow surprised to hear a similar voice from the Indian counsellors I interviewed, although I expected them to be more aware of the ‘cultural’ and also ‘spiritual’ functions embedded in their stories/context – at least how I perceive it…living in a culture so often invaded by other dominant ones, having been colonised and having such a rich spiritual heritage and tradition which seems to often be set aside in an attempt to be ‘westernised’ and ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ and stop being ‘the poor relative’, the ‘developing or third world country’…how such facts of reality can be ignored……….are we resisting the pain or difficulty involved……is all that political as well?

• What is clear to me is that there is a CONTRAST BETWEEN WHAT I HEAR FROM THE THERAPISTS PARTICIPATING IN MY RESEARCH AND MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCES BOTH AS A PRACTITIONER AND MAINLY AS A CLIENT IN RELATION TO THE TOPIC OF INQUIRY. I am aware of putting this into capital letters in an attempt to grasp its dimensions and contain it in order to find a way of describing it. I have often felt that the core conditions are definitely not enough for my counsellor to ‘be with me’ in my experience….especially when the counsellor hasn’t reflected enough on their own cultural identity or has not awakened to the spiritual. Not to mention how often I experience the relationship as ‘dry’ due to how I experience British mannerism or how often I have felt ‘too much’ for a British therapist, when my tears are coming down too soon like the rain or when I am perceived as ‘too demonstrative’ in terms of emotion etc etc. I think there is more to say here…but I need to make a pause and let it sink for a while

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GEOGRAPHICS ABOUT INDIA:

The subcontinent of India lies in south Asia, between Pakistan, China and Nepal. To the north it is bordered by the world’s highest mountain chain, where foothill valleys cover the northernmost of the country’s 26 states. Further south, plateaus, tropical rain forests and sandy deserts are bordered by palm fringed beaches .Side by side with the country’s staggering topographical variations is its cultural diversity, the result of the coexistence of a number of religions as well as local tradition. Thus, the towering temples of south India, easily identifiable by their ornately sculptured surface, are associated with a great many crafts and performing arts of the region.

In the desert of Kutch, Gujarat, on the other hand, a scattering of villages pit themselves against the awesome forces of nature, resulting in Spartan lifestyles made vibrant by a profusion of jewelry and ornamental embroidery used to adorn apparel and household linen. In the extreme north is the high altitude desert of Ladakh. Local culture is visibly shaped by the faith – Buddhism -as well as by the harsh terrain. Yet another facet of Indian culture is observed in the colorful tribal lifestyles of the north eastern states of Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura and Manipur with their folk culture.

In the central Indian states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh tribal village life has resulted in a variety of artistically executed handicrafts.

India’s mountains provide heli skiing, river running, mountaineering and trekking. Its beaches provide lazy sun-bathing as well as wind surfing and snorkeling, and its jungles provide shooting wildlife -with a camera.

India’s history goes back to 3,200 BC when Hinduism was first founded. Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism. Judaism. Zoroashtrianism, Christianity and Islam all exist within the country today. As a consequence of India’s size, the history of the country has seldom been the same for two adjoining territories, and its great natural wealth has lured a succession of traders and foreign influences to it, each having left their imprint in the country, however faint or localized. Thus, Chinese fishing nets in Kerala are a throwback to that country’s ancient maritime trade, while in the north, terra-cotta figurines of the centuries BC bear distinctly Greek traces.

Modern India is home alike to the tribal with his anachronistic lifestyle and to the sophisticated urban jetsetter. It is a land where temple elephants exist amicably with the microchip. Its ancient monuments are the backdrop for the world’s largest democracy where atomic energy is generated and industrial development has brought the country within the world’s top ten nations. Today, fishermen along the country’s coastline fashion simple fishing boats in a centuries old tradition while, a few miles away. motor vehicles glide off conveyor belts in state-of-the-art factories.