Psychospirituality Explained

This article on psychospirituality is going to be particularly relevant to those of you who have participated in my coaching or classes and those who’ve been following my website and podcast for a while. Although, if you’re here for the first time, I welcome you: you’re joining at a very interesting moment for Deep Psychology.

Today I’m going to share my new vision for Deep Psychology and all the work I do. I’ve come up with a new system to recontextualise it, flesh it out and make it more complete.

The Need for Change

Where did this shift come from? I’m always evaluating my work, on both a low level in terms of the quality of individual articles, episodes, and so on. I do a lot of research into these topics. This is my life, this is my life’s work, this is my life’s mission, and I’m very critical with the small details.

However, I’m also always tuned into the larger purpose and impact of my work, whether it’s sufficient, and whether it’s aligned with the latest theories and discoveries in psychology, spirituality, philosophy, and so on.

Recently I’ve had the sense that my work isn’t complete enough and something was needed to bind it all together.

I’ve been writing articles on deep-psychology.com for four years now, and making videos for my YouTube channel for three years. In that time, I’ve been cherry picking. I’m interested in a lot of different areas when it comes to my own personal growth, my personal interests, my understanding of the world, my self-understanding and my knowledge of human psychology.

I’ve covered a lot of different areas on this site in an eclectic manner and presenting it like a buffet: lots of choices, but with little structure to it.

What has been lacking is a guiding principle, purpose or structure. And this has been gnawing away at me for around 18 months now. At the end of the day, what am I trying to achieve? Even if I cover all possible topics in psychology and spirituality, which is impossible, there still has to be an emphasis of some kind.

If I say it’s about psychological growth or spiritual growth, what does that mean? And is it just psychological growth? Is that enough?

It lacked structure. It lacked purpose and power. I feel I’ve pulled too many punches. I’ve not been very honest sometimes about the potential of this work. I’ve also not been honest about the difficulty of this work. I feel like it’s been watered down because I haven’t had that clarity.

This is going to inform my work for the foreseeable future, and I feel very inspired and excited about this new evolution of Deep Psychology.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve come up with a new direction, a new overarching system. It’ll now be under the name of psychospirituality, psychospiritual training, psychospiritual work, or psychospiritual transformation. The aim is to skillfully combine spirituality and psychology without falling into the traps of either.

The Changes

Everything I do from now on, whether it’s workshops, coaching, classes, or even in my articles and talks, will be impacted by this.

My work will now be shaped around Tools and Theory. You can even see this in the menu on my website, where you’ll see all my articles divided into Tools and Theory. The Theory work is theoretical study that we later apply and bring into our personal work, into the Tools part.

On the other hand, the tools part is very practical and immediate. For example, meditation is a tool because it’s practical, it’s a form of training. Meditation has always formed a big part of what I do, and it’ll continue to be one of the main tools I use.

However, I’m also going to focus on theory as well, whether it’s psychology, developmental psychology, spirituality, integral theory, philosophy, human evolution, psychological evolution, cultural evolution, and more.

So it’s all divided into Tools and Theory and is all related to psychospirituality. Requiring that it be related to psychospirituality still gives us enormous freedom and scope for exploration.

As part of the Tools and Theory, we’ll have the topic of Effectiveness. I’m very interested in learning, productivity, mindset, and other traditional self-help topics, and have been writing about them for some time. However, so far I have done so in a loose way, without an overall logic or direction. This will all be recontextualised, so that instead of simply talking about these topics, I’ll always relate them back to psychospirituality.

You might wonder how spirituality has anything to do with traditional self-help. Why not just practice spirituality and nothing else? From the perspective of psychospirituality, the role of traditional self-help is to make you more effective in the world. It may not directly help you with psychospiritual work, and often the two are never combined. We’d do very well to combine them.

What is Psychospirituality?

The first sentence you’ll now see on the homepage of my website includes the world psychospirituality, and I now consider myself a psychospiritual teacher.

It’s psychospiritual because we’re combining psychology with spirituality. Let’s talk about the spiritual side of the equation first. Spirituality is a critical element because it’s inseparable from our higher potential.

When I say spirituality, I do not mean belief-based spirituality, as in believing every word in the Bible or the Quran, or any form of traditional religion.

I also don’t mean atheism, which is a kind of spirituality because it claims there is no divinity in the world. That is a spiritual claim because it refers to the nature of ultimate reality. We’re not doing atheism here.

It’s also not yoga, good vibes and occasionally meditating, as progressive spirituality tends to be.

When I’m talking about spirituality being our highest potential, I’m talking specifically about experiential spirituality or mysticism. What this means is direct contact with our truest nature, with who we really are.

When we contact that, we realise that our own truest nature is also that of others and of the entire universe. Genuine experiential spirituality is one of the defining features of all higher stages of human development. In that sense, it’s our individual and collective evolutionary calling.

It’s like a magnet that’s slowly drawing us upwards over time, both individually and collectively. It’s not that we’re all guaranteed to make it, but the potential is there, and the overall direction is determined.

From a certain perspective, you could say that the raison d’etre of human life is spirituality and that everything else is a precursor or support to it.

Spirituality is floundering in the modern world. Traditional spirituality is pretty much dead in a lot of the most advanced countries, and the type of spirituality that dominates is postmodern, progressive spirituality. This form of spirituality is problematic, and for my liking it isn’t deep or comprehensive enough. We’ll practice post-postmodern spirituality, and in doing so will helping this nascent form of spirituality to take root.

We also don’t want to miss out on spirituality because, quite honestly, a genuine embodied spiritual connection will change your life completely. This is one of the hallmarks of genuine spiritual mystical experiences: they’re life-changing.

I can’t imagine my life without having a spiritual connection, and the thought of it saddens me.

Psychospirituality: The Role of Psychology and Theory

So we need spirituality, but we also need psychology. Thus, it’s psycho-spirituality: spirituality alone is incomplete.

We can have very deep spiritual embodied awareness, but it doesn’t mean that we’re equipped to be a human in this world. It doesn’t mean that we understand the human condition. It doesn’t mean we understand ourselves. It doesn’t mean we understand our shortcomings and our dark side. It doesn’t mean we know how to learn. It doesn’t mean we know how to be productive.

It doesn’t mean we know how to develop a vision and bring it into the world. It doesn’t mean we understand philosophy or psychology. It doesn’t mean we understand any of the fantastic knowledge that we’ve accumulated as a species.

So spirituality isn’t complete, which is why we need to incorporate psychology. The more we understand ourselves, the more effective we are, and the more we understand the current state of the world and the future of our species, the more we’re able to show up in the world.

While spiritual work can certainly lead to psychological change, it’s not guaranteed. From what I’ve observed, psychology and spirituality are very poorly integrated. I’ve had conversations with many spiritual practitioners who essentially have told me that personal development is an illusion, that psychology is a waste of time, that the body and mind are an illusion, even though they themselves have dramatic shortcomings in their character.

Now, their words do have some truth to them, but only partial truth. The fact is that we’re here as human beings. No matter how deep your spiritual awareness goes, you’re going to need psychological understanding, unless you want to give up your human body and just sit in god consciousness all day.

If you’re active in the world, you’re going to need psychological understanding and tools, few of which are mentioned in the spiritual traditions.

With spirituality, we’re trying to understand the fullness of ourselves in a fundamental sense. But on the day-to-day level, in terms of our human identity, we want to understand ourselves to the full because we want to live full lives, don’t we? Isn’t that what we want? If we don’t do that, then we’re not going to live full lives, even if we’re spiritually awakened.

Psychology without spiritual insight is stale, mechanistic, too personal, too bound to our human identity. It over-emphasises the importance of our mind. It lacks the greater context that spirituality provides. You can understand the mind on a psychological level as much as you want, but unless you’ve done spiritual work to dissolve the mind, see right through it and realise it’s just an experience, you won’t truly understand the mind.

So that’s why we’re doing psychospirituality: spirituality gives psychology an ultimate significance that it tends to lack.

On the other hand, psychology grounds and refines spirituality. It brings it into embodied spirituality, fullness, happiness and satisfaction, rather than simply direct spiritual awareness.

That is a concise short summary of the next evolution of Deep Psychology.

We have a very clear intention now, which is to grow spiritually and psychology, and have spirituality and psychology inform one another such that we lead a fuller life in all areas.

It’s psycho-spirituality, not just personal development: I want the spiritual component to be very explicit.

Absolutely everything I do will be informed by this new vision. And I hope to see you soon for coaching, classes, and my regular articles and talks, all supercharged by this next evolution.

You might like my talk on psychospirituality and the next evolution of my work.