In depth: Connecting worlds
Thresholds, April 2026

Thresholds April 2026

In thinking about the worlds of therapy and spirituality, I have come to believe that spirituality without therapy can and often does lead to what is called ‘a spiritual bypass’ (avoiding sticky bits), and a therapy without spirituality leads to a subtle reinforcement of a belief in separation. Paraphrasing de Mello,¹ it may help us to live better lives in the prison as opposed to helping us get out of it.

My journey 

Brought up in an Iraqi-Jewish household, not by any means orthodox, but sent to Hebrew classes, I decided very early on that Judaism was not for me. Like Freud, I saw the need for a God as a form of regression and threw myself into psychology. But at 21, I had a psychotic experience after eating some hash. Terrified that I would be taken away by the police, I heard myself say, ‘there is no fear (of anything external) – the fear is in me’. I went from terror to total peace in the blink of an eye. I started to read Indian spiritual literature, went to live in a spiritual community, travelled to India seeking a guru and landed up in Sri Lanka, where I caught hepatitis. I was alone (1971 – no mobile phones or internet), my money stolen, with a temperature of 104 degrees. I realised I could die here and said, ‘OK’, went to sleep and woke up with the peace that passeth all understanding.

Since then, I have attended a 48-hour Enlightenment Intensive. This is a residential group retreat where participants are told to ask each other, ‘Tell me who you are’, repeatedly. After a day of this non-stop, the monkey mind had nowhere to go, and I had a sudden awareness that I did not know whether I was in the world or the world was in me – the boundary of ‘me’ had dissolved. This led me to study the life of the great Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi; The Work by Byron Katie;² a channelled book called A Course in Miracles;³ the Sufi poet Hafiz; and countless other spiritual texts, all of which suggest a world of no separation. Without any spiritual context, the world of therapy and related professions can seem to offer a better ‘I’ but leave us with a sense of separation. Thus, we settle for a more successful ego, rather than dissolving the blocks to connection it creates.

The separate ‘I’ 

Let’s look at this separate ‘I’ – though ‘it’ might not like that too much if its survival is threatened. The ancient Indian Upanishads have a saying, ‘Where there is another, there is fear’. Once I ‘other’ you, I am bound to fear you at some level. You might attack me, compete with me, steal from me, shame me, betray me, or I might find myself wanting to do that to you and have to repress those feelings and project them onto you. And then unconsciously, or even consciously, fear retaliation. It’s a dangerous world identifying with this separate ‘I’, but we are not taught to really examine it. Rather, we are taught to believe in a post-Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest, so we strive to be the most powerful version of this ‘I’. 

Byron Katie, a woman who had a spontaneous awakening, puts forward the idea that if you want to know the truth you should get an enemy. A so-called enemy has the potential to be a wake-up call. We have an opportunity to see how we separate from this enemy with our thinking – ‘They should not be like that’, ‘They should see what they did wrong’ etc. This separate ‘I’ acts like a tyrant and tries to control – from a place of fear, I believe. Looking at the world from non-separation is quite a challenge to this separate ‘I’. 

But until we can accept that everything is interconnected, at some level we will always be trying to control, manipulate or judge (an illusion of control). Ultimately that will not work, as we are not in control. The ‘enemy’ (in my case, hepatitis) is asking us for a form of surrender. 

Hetty Einzig told me about an approach which illustrates my point. Consider these different ways of viewing the same situation: 

• The person is the problem and they have formed their identity around it (e.g. I am a survivor).
• The person has a problem. We are then in the ‘fix it’ mode that plagues much of Western thinking, keeping us on the treadmill.
• The problem is part of the journey. We move towards a bigger picture, accepting that we have something to learn from every experience.
• There is no problem. It is a complete acceptance of what is. Anything less is still conditional and therefore elicits fear and the need to control.⁴ 

Taking responsibility 

My 1995 article ‘How green is your mind?’⁵ suggested that if you thought of yourself as a car and your brain as the exhaust pipe, every time you attached to a negative thought, you would be polluting the planet. Extinction Rebellion would then take on another dimension. We start with our thinking. We are full of negative thoughts that pop in uninvited – Bion (cited by López-Corvo) calls these ‘orphan thoughts looking for a thinker’,⁵ which I like. It is our attachment to them that creates difficulties and polarisation. 

I connect the ‘green mind’ idea to forgiveness,⁶ likening revenge, or even vengeful thoughts, to a form of pollution coming from separation. We may not kill, but we have murderous thoughts. Rather than just condemn the killer, we find the murderous part of ourselves (and this is not justifying killing: it is recognising that we are more similar to the murderer than we think and taking responsibility for our thinking). We do the forgiveness work, not to let the other ‘off the hook’ but to release ourselves from our inner pollution. We do this not as a ‘should’ but in recognition of our connection and similarity to those we want to condemn. We thus free ourselves from the tyranny of separation, recognising the spirit within us. Seeing it in the other, I see it in myself and vice versa. 

Where are you coming from? 

A very simple exercise embodying some of this is the four lenses from our supervision training. A student presents an issue for supervision to the group and students choose a lens, or state of being, to listen from. The four lenses are: fear, judgment, curiosity or love. People choose one lens or notice which one emerges and half-way through the presentation (two to three minutes long) they consciously change lenses. They pay attention to what’s happening internally as they listen. Afterwards, they report that when in fear or judgment they are tense, have restricted breathing and cannot even hear what is being said. A switch to curiosity or love creates internal space, and people often find themselves leaning towards the other. We can do this exercise anywhere, in an argument, walking down the street, for example. We break the habit of separating when we choose love or curiosity, which moves us towards connection. As Victor Frankl describes from his concentration camp experiences, we always have the freedom to choose our responses.⁷ 

Supervision as spiritual practice 

The above title is also that of a book I edited based on students’ work on a diploma course.⁸ In my chapter, I quote six-year-old Albert, learning to read. He sees the book In Love with Supervision⁸ on his mother’s desk and reads out the title. His mother asks, ‘Do you know what supervision is?’. ‘Yes, of course’, he says. ‘It is when you see through things and see what is really there.’ I quote de Mello on seeing clearly: 

The first act of love is to see this person or object, this reality as it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking, a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service...¹ 

And 

It is in the act of seeing that love is born, or rather more accurately, that act of seeing is Love.¹ 

I think love is a difficult word in our work as it has become confused with the erotic, with need, dependency and attachment; but we need to embrace it if we are to consider spirituality. From a spiritual perspective, I see this love as impersonal, a state of being, not in any way attached. In that state there is no separation. I will give two examples below. 

Most of us have had glimpses of a state where we become aware of something much vaster than the little ‘I’. In that state we might feel connected to everyone and everything. Thomas Merton, a contemporary monk, describes it as follows: 

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realisation that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud.⁹ 

Merton sees that being a monk, separating himself to devote to God, is an avoidance because everything and everyone are connected. God is in the shopping centre. And in our work, if we choose to see it. 

Byron Katie described her awakening: 

All my rage, all the thoughts that had been troubling me, my whole world, the whole world, was gone… There was nothing separate, nothing unacceptable; everything was its very own self.¹⁰ 

Taking responsibility 

These writers remind me of what is always there, but like most people I forget. Merton, de Mello and Byron Katie do not look at the world of therapy specifically. Jill Hall in her book The Reluctant Adult explicitly links therapy and spirituality.¹¹ She argues convincingly that Western psychology reinforces victim consciousness by focusing on early childhood, when we are physically helpless, as being key to how we are now. Though early childhood is important, without a recognition that we are spirit, we try to get the best version of this separate self which will always lead us to feeling insecure (victim) and looking for an external cause for our incompleteness. She writes: ‘A concept of self which embraces the dimension of spirit and leads us into a living knowledge of our being in spirit, is the most potent means we have of consciously organising our meaning and creating our experience.’¹¹ 

Conceiving of ourselves as purely material entities and having no apprehension of our indestructibility (as spirit), we then hunger for illusory safety – e.g. status symbols, wealth, image, titles. We place our power elsewhere and then, in our insecurity, we try to suck it all back. 

Hall writes that with a direct and living knowledge of spirit, we have access to a security so profound that we no longer need to give so much attention to distorting our powers like the need to be right, or a need to control, or have power over as opposed to with. We come into this power through acknowledging spirit as a source of our being.¹¹ She writes: ‘We are never absolutely powerless because we are never spiritually powerless.’ 

Through a recognition of spirit as primary (while not denying the body), she tackles issues such as the hatred of self and other that stems from a betrayal of our (spiritual) selves; the wastage of world resources mirroring how we waste energy protecting our separate selves; capitalism as forgetting our true wealth (spirit); and many other of our current crises, traced back to this separation from spirit and an over-identification with the separate physical body which pursues what it can from a universe which it sees as separate from itself. She states: ‘True individuals, undivided in themselves, cannot be divided from the universe,’ and asks us to recognise, as spirit, our connection to everyone and everything. Without taking this responsibility, we are ‘reluctant adults’. 

Ultimately, a psychology that does not recognise spirit can only go so far. In a materialistic world, the fear of death will haunt us and keep us looking for safety outside. I appreciate how Jill Hall connects the worlds of therapy and spirituality. We need a sense of spirit – the absolute, truth, whatever word we choose to use – to remember our interconnectedness; and we need therapy or an equivalent to help us look at our shadow selves and undo the blocks that will almost inevitably arise on our journey.