Recognising Spiritual Emergence

Given the increasing tendency for many Westerners to seek states of inner calm and even joyfulness through mindfulness meditations and other psychospiritual practices, there is a correspondingly greater likelihood of your encountering a client experiencing symptoms of spiritual transformation. Yet will you recognise that the person is displaying an altered state of consciousness? How will you know whether the symptoms of that state are genuinely transpersonal, as opposed to “normal” psychosis? What do you need to know, be, and do in order to sit with such a client? What assumptions, techniques, and spiritual technologies might you need to employ to be effective? The aim of this course is that upon successful completion of it, you can recognise when spiritual emergence is occurring for a client. Upon successful completion this course, you will be able to: State typical therapeutic goals for transpersonal work with a client; Discuss why transpersonal psychotherapy is necessary in the context of modern medicine; State at least ten defining characteristics of altered states of consciousness; Recognise the awakening/emergence process; Explain the difference between “spiritual emergence” and “spiritual emergency”; Name the chief forms of spiritual emergence and their typical symptoms.