Goal Oriented Psychotherapy Practice

Goal Oriented Psychotherapy Practice

By

Payam Ghassemlou Ph.D.

There are number of ways to conduct psychotherapy sessions that can be helpful in meeting the client’s needs and matches the therapist’s style. A goal oriented psychotherapy practice which utilizes a goal setting method is one way to practice psychotherapy. This is a collaborative process that clarifies what the client would like to accomplish during his or her psychotherapy process. Goal setting also helps with constructing a vision of life as it relates to each person’s unique circumstances. Some goals relate to the betterment of one’s external life such as career, finances, education, relationship, and health. Other goals can be about exploring one’s inner world and working toward inner balance, deepening the relationship with the Self, accessing one’s creativity, healing from trauma, and improving mood. These are small examples of common goals clients bring to their psychotherapist which can add clarity to the process.

 In general, working on establishing decisive goals for one’s life can help increase motivation and avoid getting lost. People often feel more motivated in life when they have a sense of purpose, and goal setting can give them such a sense. In addition to helping with motivation, goal setting can improve self-confidence. It affirms the fact that one’s life is worthy to have goals, and the attainment of them helps believing in oneself. I find it extremely rewarding when my clients express joy for progressing toward their goals or attaining them.

Writing down goals in positive language, practicing patience in achieving them, and keeping them manageable for the client are part of the goal setting process. Establishing goals in an affirmative manner can help generate positive emotion to support their attainment. Also, while practicing patience avoids unrealistic expectations in attainment of one’s goals, the process needs to be time-bound. Since every client’s circumstances are unique, it is important to respect people’s time table while collaborating with them in creating target dates. Moreover, goals need to be manageable to avoid making the client feel overwhelmed. The more specific the goal the more manageable it becomes. In some cases, it is important to help the client prioritize their objectives and work on one goal at the time.

Therapists can help clients feel less alone in achieving their goals. This can be done by working with them to identify resources in their lives and in their communities. I often find it helpful to provide a list of community resources to clients who have difficulty obtaining them. For example, a client who is unemployed and can’t afford accessing the internet might find it useful to know about the free internet access at the West Hollywood library.

Finally, those individuals who have difficulty setting decisive goals can benefit from depth oriented psychotherapy which tends to look for unconscious elements that can get in the way of having a clear direction in life. I find helping people to understand their life challenges on a deeper level very useful. No one deserves to feel shame for his or her difficulty in establishing clear goals and having empathy for such struggle is essential. When it comes to practicing psychotherapy, one size does not fit all. Therapists can be flexible in offering modalities that meet the client where they are. 

 

© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist

(https://SomaticAlivenessArt.etsy.com).

 
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.

Boredom from a Gay Perspective

Boredom from a Gay Perspective

By

Payam Ghassemlou Ph.D.

Gay people are naturally creative and industrious. They are often a small percentage of any population and yet their societal contribution is enormous. I take a great deal of pride knowing not only gays, but also our courageous lesbians, transgenders, bisexuals, and queer members of our community have always stood up for causes that make this world a better place. This short article mostly focuses on gay men and the issue of boredom. Many points being made here do apply to lesbians, transgenders, bisexuals, and queers as well.

Despite growing up gay in a homophobic world which can discourage artistic expression, gay people’s creative spirit continues to shine. Given their rich imagination, the experience of chronic boredom and a sense of inertia is contrary to a gay person’s true essence. Whether boredom is momentary or a long lasting experience, it stops people from living a full life. In order to deal with boredom, it is important to understand and learn how to transform it. Examining and understanding your emotions is an opportunity for personal growth. One of the places to examine your emotions as a pathway toward knowing yourself is in a therapeutic setting with a licensed psychotherapist. Working with emotions can be intense, and you need a trained professional to help you navigate through the sea of emotions. In my work as a psychotherapist (licensed MFT), I work collaboratively with my clients. I explore their somatic experiences, feelings, and thoughts in order to support them on their journey of self-discovery to alleviate their boredom.

What is boredom? From a psychological perspective boredom is an emotion, and like any emotion, it can carry important information and messages about your current needs and sometimes unmet needs from the past. It can also reveal something about your current state of mind which becomes an opportunity for deeper analysis. People who are bored often experience life as monotonous. Sometimes boredom can accompany another emotion such as frustration or a feeling of emptiness. When a person gets overwhelmed by ongoing feelings of boredom he can asks himself, “What is boredom trying to reveal to me about my relationship to my psyche, my soul, and the world around me?” or “How can boredom become an opportunity to add meaning and purpose to my life?” The answers to these questions require personal reflection which can become a doorway to a deeper connection to oneself.

An important approach toward understanding boredom needs to involve evaluating your relationship to your sense of curiosity. Curiosity is an emotion that plays a vital role in motivating you to show interest in yourself and the world around you. When fully in effect, curiosity can neutralize your sense of boredom and help you to passionately engage with the mystery of life. When curiosity is embraced, boredom disappears.

When you show curiosity toward your experience of boredom, you are less dominated by it. In general, becoming curiously conscious of your emotions help you to be less controlled by them. By becoming aware of any particular feelings in the moment, you can choose to either embrace the emotion and fully experience it or let it go. “Empathic witnessing” of an emotion such as boredom in the moment without judgment gives you more choices on how to deal with your emotions. 

Sometimes boredom, like a habit, stays with people and it takes willpower to try to change it. Your willpower can be used as a determination muscle to focus on making positive changes in your inner and outer life. You can use your willpower to direct your attention away from boredom and use your curiosity to explore uplifting experiences. For example, when feeling bored you can make an effort to get out of your “comfort zone” and explore healthy activities that you never tried before. Eventually, being curious becomes a personal habit that replaces boredom and enriches your life.

It is important to note that embracing curiosity might be challenging for many gay people because of a homophobic upbringing.  Many gay individuals as a youngster felt too ashamed to show curiosity toward their homoerotic feelings which caused them to find curiosity too threatening to embrace. The habit of embracing curiosity needs to take place at a young age with support of caring adults. The absence of such support makes curiosity less accessible and difficult to embrace.

As you engage with your boredom through your curiosity, you can notice where in your body you sense your boredom. Locating bodily sensations that correspond to how you feel in the moment is another important way of managing your emotions. I often hear clients share with me about experiencing boredom as a sense of dread and emptiness in their chest area. Individuals that I work with in a therapeutic setting often find it helpful when I invite them to curiously scan their bodies and look for sensations of strength. Focusing on a sensation of strength anywhere in their bodies which might include places like the upper arms or legs can lessen their sense of inertia. For others who can’t notice any sensation of strength, they might benefit from making a pleasant or neutral sensation as their focus. For example, neutral or pleasant sensations can be experienced by inviting clients to notice the support of their upper back against the couch. In general, tracking the neutral or pleasant sensations in your body can add harmony and balance to your inner world.

Your curiosity can also be directed toward examining your thinking patterns and belief system. You might discover a link between your beliefs, thoughts and boredom. Many gay people were raised to believe that they were sinners for their same sex attraction.  As such, they have developed a belief system that does not leave much room for feeling deserving of happiness. Thought patterns based on such a negative core belief system can lead to a life void of joy and pleasure. By using the muscle of determination with an attitude of empathy and kindness, we all can change our negative beliefs and thinking. By developing a belief system based on love and acceptance of ourselves, we can feel deserving of joy and vitality instead of boredom and inertia.

From a spiritual perspective, chronic boredom might reveal a lack of relationship to one’s soul and the soul of the world (Anima Mundi). Given that gay history has been often intertwined with shamanism and mysticism, getting bored and living a dull life reveals disconnection from one’s gay essence. From a spiritual perspective, the remedies for such condition can involve not only connecting to one’s gay soul but also connecting to a sacred place within one’s heart through meditation and other spiritual practices that correspond to one’s chosen path. Recognizing a divine spark within one’s heart can be enough to transform boredom and sense of emptiness to feeling of aliveness.

Boredom affects everyone, and it becomes a reason for concern when it turns to an ongoing psychological state. Boredom like any challenging emotion can become an opportunity for deep psychological work. Don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for help when boredom turns to a painful psychological state.

 

© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist

(https://SomaticAlivenessArt.etsy.com).

 
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.

For more articles by Dr. Payam, please click on the following link:  https://drpayam.com/articles_and_book

Gays in Search of Meaning

By

Payam Ghassemlou Ph.D.

Many gay people are acknowledging a need for a more meaningful way of living to avoid a motionless and purposeless existence. Lack of depth and meaning has caused many gay people to experience feelings of boredom and emptiness. Such feelings have forced many to look for something outside of themselves in order to feel content. Some indulge in drug use, excessive drinking, or brief romantic affairs, while others might engage in excessive shopping, traveling, or overeating in order to cope with their negative emotional states. Even though such activities might feel pleasurable and provide a momentary sense of euphoria, they do not lead to a real experience of vitality and aliveness. There is a different kind of intoxication that involves the experience of the soul. Such experience is beyond the ego’s need for cheap thrills. By embracing what is inherently sacred about our gayness, we can start to live a soulful life.

While we, as a community, fight against discrimination and progress toward equality, we need to take time to embrace the numinous qualities inherent in being gay. We need to honor the spirit that exists within our gay souls. For the most part, our current culture places a great deal of emphasis on maximizing one’s pleasure through consumerism and minimizing one’s need for a deeper purpose in life.  Couple that with internalized homophobia, which prevents gay people from gaining a deeper understanding of gayness. Internalized homophobia is the internalization of shame that many gay people have been forced to experience growing up in a heterosexist society. By working through this internalized homophobia, a path toward an understanding of the deeper meaning of gayness can become more accessible.

The essence of being gay is love. We come out in order to love freely. Many gay people experience love in the form of romantic relationships. A conscious participation in a romantic relationship—which includes working through what we project onto each other—can serve as preparation for a different experience of love. Beneath our gay love affairs, there is an empty space waiting to be ignited with mystical love, waiting to be known for the sake of a deeper love affair—the kind of love affair that takes place at the level of the soul. This is expressed in one of Rumi’s poems:

 “The minute I heard my first love story,

I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,

they’re in each other all along.”

A love that begins in a romantic relationship needs wings to fly beyond the field of personal connections and into the realm of the transpersonal. We help such love to grow wings by attending to our inner garden and weeding out toxic shame. The more we embrace our gayness with a sense of pride, the more room we can make to love and approve of ourselves.

On our journey inward toward our true essence, we need to deal with the mind. Our mind can be like a wild horse that, through meditation, needs to be tamed and taught to bow down to our heart. The heart is where the flowers of Divine love bloom and the fragrance of such love fills our inner emptiness. We can connect with the sacred place in our heart by gently closing our eyes and concentrating on anything in the universe that helps to generate feelings of love in our heart. Neuroscience tells us whatever we focus on becomes our reality. In other words, “You energize anything that you give your attention to.” So why not energize the feelings of love in your heart? This is how we can embrace our true essence and add more love to the world.

Humanity is facing difficult choices pertaining to our future survival on the planet. Given the threats of climate change, war, poverty, racism, homophobia, and mass shootings, we as gay people more than ever need to participate in the healing of the world. We can make a difference. Triumphs like the way we took care of our dying people during the AIDS crisis when the Reagan administration turned its back on us and how far we have come in our struggle for equal rights are truly a reflection of how courageous we are as a community. Our courage can continue, and we can advocate for issues that can make this world a better place. By honoring our gayness and letting it become a strong foundation to stand on, we can “love the world back to health.” Our involvement in helping the world can also add meaning and purpose to our own individual lives.

By focusing on the love in our heart and cultivating an awareness of the world soul (Anima Mundi), we can trigger an awakening of healing energy that could transform our current civilization. LGBT people are only a small percentage of the population, but our contributions to helping solve our current global problems can be enormous. When we connect our gay soul with the soul of the world, not only do we start tapping into a deeper purpose for our existence, but we also begin to experience the oneness of life.

 

© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist

(https://SomaticAlivenessArt.etsy.com).

 
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.

Vulnerability

For  an updated version of this article, please click on the link below:

https://drpayam1.blogspot.com/2022/06/a-queer-perspective-on-somatically.html

 

© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist

(https://SomaticAlivenessArt.etsy.com).

 
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.

Queers in Search of Refuge

In the dark corners of this planet, there are places that innocent people get executed for their same sex attraction or living the life that matches their true gender identity. There are many of us who managed to escape from such terrifying places. As LGBTQ people wander on a long journey in search of a refuge, many have found the United States as the answer to freedom. This country gave us a chance to live life with dignity along with the hope for a brighter future. The freedom to marry the person we love which became possible during the Obama administration gave many of us the chance to form families. Perhaps gay Americans who left their small towns for a more tolerant metropolitan city might relate to an immigrant who left his or her country for a freer society. It is possible we are more similar than different.

Those of us who found America a safe place for asylum are now starting to feel unsafe again.  The rise of xenophobia and the threat of losing hard-fought LGBTQ rights are now becoming a new source of concern. Growing acts of violence toward LGBTQ people and immigrants in general have been reported in many parts of the country. LGBTQ refugees and immigrants who have a history of trauma are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression when they experience mistreatment due to homophobia or xenophobia. Protecting such a vulnerable population from violence is important. They have unique psychological needs, and they are dealing with the added complexity of being a minority within a minority.

Given many refugees have lived under authoritarian regimes before coming to America, they are often familiar with how these oppressive regimes operate. I am familiar with them as well. Such regimes often come to power without the support of most people or through lies and offering empty promises. Once in power, oppressive regimes tend to manufacture a national security crisis by starting a war or creating hysteria about a terrorist attack, which throws people into a frenzy. People tend to rally around whoever is in power during a national security crisis, and this is how oppressive regimes can gain legitimacy. These manufactured situations give them excuses to oppress their opponents and even try to “lock her up” for unsubstantiated claims. To maintain power, some authoritarian regimes use military force to stop people protesting. Finally, by mindless reality TV shows and shallow news programs, they can keep people unaware and distracted from what is really happening to their country.

Undemocratic regimes extend beyond external oppression and continue into our inner world, eating away our human spirit. The creation of a culture of unconsciousness causes many people to be cut off from their soul and their connection to the inner world. People enter a state of participation mystique and lose their sense of individual self. Authoritarian regimes take secret delight in knowing that most people are sleeping walking through their political destiny and don’t know what is really happening to them.

Many psycho-spiritually aware people know that authoritarian dark forces aim to spread hatred and prejudice by absorbing the light of our democracy. We can turn to our own individual light of consciousness and witness what is happening. Within our heart of hearts, there is a sacred place that dictators cannot touch. Our activism starts by journeying into that sacred space. We go deeper and deeper into the heart and embrace love. The love for America coupled with our passion to care for Mother Earth vibrates above the forces of archetypal evil. We don’t clash with darkness. We simply let the power of love rise us above it. We broaden our focus beyond the unjust political situations by embracing what is sacred in the inner world and honor its reflection on the outer world. Through our experience of the numinous, we can create a container for arrival of a new archetypal energy that can change the world for the better. This is how we become spiritual warriors. This is how we don’t get entangled in “good versus evil.”  

Many foreign-born LGBTQ people who live in America as an immigrants or refugees know that there is a deeper purpose for our existence. Some of us are summoned to keep America accountable to its promise of liberty by pointing out that the emperor is in fact naked whenever America begins to abandon its true values. Not only as Americans but as citizens of the planet Earth we can come together and protect one another during the rise of archetypal evil. Not only America, but this whole world is a living being, endowed with a soul (Anima Mundi) and intelligence, in need of love.

Finally, as LGBTQ people, our next journey of immigration needs to happen on the inner plane. We can resort to our psychic refuge by walking through our inner labyrinth and access inner light of consciousness to stay present. Such inner journey is open to everyone, regardless of one’s nationality, who is seeking refuge during such uncertain times in America.

 

© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist

(https://SomaticAlivenessArt.etsy.com).

 
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.

Embrace Your Inner Stories to Build Your Career as an Artist

Life without art is like a blank canvas. Artists add color to our lives with the genius of their creativity. They inspire us, make us laugh, and add meaning to our lives. They also bring awareness to social justice issues that affect us all. Great literature, films, live performances, poetry, music, paintings, drawings, sculptures, documentaries, acting, comedy, blogging, fashion, design, photography, and other art forms come from the hard work of artists. Many of these artists sacrifice a secure, conventional lifestyle and go through a great deal of financial hardship in order to make art. Without their sacrifice, many great pieces of art would never be produced. Artists deserve appreciation for enriching our lives, but they are often criticized for their choice of career and for not flowing with the mainstream. Such lack of support can add more suffering to their lives. 

As an artist, you can benefit from understanding how to navigate the challenging journey of working in the creative field. There are many sources to aid in such understanding. One of the most accessible ways to build creativity is to listen to your own inner stories. Your inner stories can be found by paying attention to your inner dialogues or self talk, dreams you have at night, the contents of your fantasies and imagination, intuitive messages, and the sensations in your body. In this brief article, I will discuss how the way you relate to your art and your path as an artist can be influenced by your inner stories, and how working with them can add vitality to your artistic journey. It is best to approach your inner stories in the context of psychotherapy in order to avoid becoming overwhelmed by what you might encounter. A psychotherapist who has experience and training working with the art community can be helpful companion on your journey. 

Let’s start by bringing awareness to what you are telling yourself about your creative process. You might notice your internal dialogues consist of comparing yourself to others who are more successful. For example, when you say to yourself, “My work is not as good as my friend who just got a job as a staff writer for an HBO show,” you can discourage yourself from becoming a prosperous artist. Comparing yourself to others who are more successful in their artistic careers is a recipe for triggering feelings of internal shame and inadequacy. These feelings of inferiority can discourage you from pursuing your path as an artist. Everyone’s path is unique, and there is no need to compare yours to others. Your mind, like the magic lamp, can be illuminated by the creativity of your inner genie. But your creative genie can stay locked up inside your pessimistic self talk if you don’t stop the negative chatter box.

Be creative with how you deal with discouraging negative self talk. You can find inspiration in the story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp when it comes to dealing with life’s obstacles. As soon as you notice your negative dialogue, say, “Abracadabra,” and let the genie out of the bottle of pessimistic story-making. Do some sort of creative work or say positive affirmations about your creative career. Like Aladdin, turn your life into an amazing odyssey and defeat the sorcerer of negative thinking.  Sometimes the habit of negative self talk has to do with a deeply held belief system that you acquired as a result of growing up in a less-than-optimal family environment. With a help of an experienced therapist, you can uncover the root of such dysfunctional belief systems that give rise to negative self talk and undermine your confidence in your career as an artist. 

A powerful source of self-understanding and becoming a more conscious artist can come from paying attention to the dreams you have at night. Some of your dreams can shed light on your struggle with your creative career. When you wake up in the morning, write down what you dreamt about in your dream journal. By analyzing your dreams with the help of a trained person, you can learn about the content of your unconscious. Working with the unconscious is important because within the unconscious resides creative potential and the answers to many of your life’s mysteries. Dream work can also deepen your relationship with yourself. It is an important way to honor your unconscious. Inner Work, a book by Robert Johnson, is inspired by Carl Jung’s teachings and describes a helpful process of how to understand dreams. Many people have found this book to be a helpful introduction to working with the unconscious.

How you fantasize and imagine your place in the world of art is going to impact your relationship to your creative career. This relationship can be contaminated by the images of failure you might hold in your mind about your journey as an artist. You need your imagination to help you create art – not fear. Using your imagination to worry about your creative path is not the best use of your creativity. Practice mindfulness as a way to avoid getting caught in the negative contents of your mind. In the 1960s, Thich Nhat Hanh brought mindfulness to the attention of Westerners. A variety of mindfulness practices exist today. Many of them were inspired by teachings from the East. For the most part, mindfulness involves bringing your complete attention to your present experience on a moment-to-moment basis with acceptance and compassion. Using mindfulness, you can observe your physical, emotional, and mental experiences with kindness. You pay attention to whatever is happening in the moment, and you can use your sensory awareness to stay fully present. For example, when you wash the dishes, you can see and feel the soapy water on your hands. Taking a walk and noticing without judgment how life unfolds around you is another simple mindfulness practice. You can attend classes at UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center (www.marc.ucla.edu) to learn more about mindfulness. The more you avoid getting entangled with the negative images and fantasies about your career, the more serenity you can experience on your journey toward becoming an accomplished artist. 

There are times when, with help of an experienced guide, you can engage your imagination and have a dialogue with the images that come up for you. For some artists, it is necessary to understand the images that come from the inner world, which can help to know the self. Consciously dialoguing with the images of the unconscious is part of a process called ‘active imagination’. In his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung provided an inside view of his own experience with active imagination. Jung had conversations with inner figures he encountered during the practice of active imagination, which felt intense yet enlightening for him. 

Intuitions are also part of your inner stories, and they can guide you on your art-making path. The key is to not confuse intuitive messages with negative thinking. They come from different sources. Negative thoughts often come from an insecure place in your mind that needs healing. Intuition comes from a deep place inside you that is connected to a power greater than yourself. Everyone can improve his or her ability to receive guidance from the sacred place inside. A powerful practice for developing your intuition is meditation. When you quiet your mind, paying attention to your breathing and relaxing your body, you knock on your inner door. A door will open, and you can enter in a meditative space. In that quiet space, you are detached, listening to the song of stillness. You are experiencing a deep silence which purifies your mind. The more you visit this space, the more you can cleanse your mind. With each visit to your meditative space, you enter deeper and deeper into your soul. You get closer and closer to your real essence. Meditation can lead to finding your true voice and positively impact the way you relate to your art.

Your body never lies, and that is why it is important to pay attention to the sensations in your body. Your relationship to your artistic career can be experienced as bodily sensations. These sensations, like a story, can range from neutral and comforting to tense and distressing. As you think about your career path, you might notice tension in your body. Some people might sense tension in their shoulder or neck areas. By paying too much attention to distressing sensations in your body, you make yourself feel worse. One way to create more serenity in your body is to make neutral or pleasant sensations your total focus. The more you focus on the part of your body that is neutral or pleasant, the less you energize the distressing sensations. Somatic psychotherapy offers many tools that can help you work with the sensations in your body and liberate yourself from being trapped in negative bodily sensations. One must always check with his or her physician to rule out any underlying medical problems for distressing bodily sensations.

Finally, there are times when, no matter how hard you work as an artist, your art cannot support you in making a decent living. This is not an uncommon situation. Many artists use their non-art-related skills to support themselves. The need to support yourself and the need to fulfill your creative destiny do not need to be in conflict. Creating an opposition between these two legitimate needs is not helpful. You can make room for both of them in your life and let them work side by side to get you closer to the vision you have for your artistic career.  It takes a great deal of patience, discipline, and good time management to work in a non-art-related profession while making time to follow your dream. It helps to be part of a supportive community of artists that help each other not feel alone in such journey. As a community, artists can unite, advocating that more funds and resources be made available to them to create art that ultimately enriches everyone’s lives.

 

© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist

(https://SomaticAlivenessArt.etsy.com).

 
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.

For more articles by Dr. Payam, please click on the following link:  https://drpayam.com/articles_and_book

A New Way of Being

“A New Way of Being”

By

Payam Ghassemlou MFT, Ph.D.

http://www.DrPayam.com/

Your mind is often busy focusing on one concern or another. Sometimes you might be dealing with remorse about the past, and other times you might be worrying about the future. In addition, you can have thoughts of regret, resentment, and feelings of insecurity which can all be part of your mental activities. Not to mention some of your painful memories from the past or dreams about the future. Sometimes your mind, like a chatter box, can involve critical inner dialogues which can lessen your enjoyment of life. All these are part of your mental process.  It makes sense to learn how to stop listening to the chatter box, and grow beyond your ordinary mental activities.

Worrying and ruminating about real or perceived life problems is common because scientific research on the human brain shows that it is constantly scanning the environment for threats to physical and emotional safety. Also, the brain gives shorter notice to positive experiences, usually only two to three seconds before moving on to the next thought. The negativity bias of the brain coupled with rumination about our problems can lead to anxiety, depression, and an overall pessimistic view of life. Fortunately, this is not a hopeless situation because you can learn to grow beyond the activity of the mind.  As the Persian poet Rumi stated, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

When you grow beyond identifying with the activities of your mind, you can reach a loving open field. In this free space, you are not your thoughts, your intense emotions, and your memories, and yet you are mindfully aware of them. You can mindfully observe your inner dialogue and issues that go through your mind and yet you are not trapped by them. In such an infinite space, you can experience life from a place of clarity where you don’t let your focus move toward unhealthy habits and behaviors. This loving open field is not just another state of mind to get to. It is a way of being.

How can you reach a state of being that is beyond the activity of your mind?  There is no such thing as one size fits all when it comes to personal growth. Everyone is unique. Everyone needs to discover their own path to enlightenment or personal growth. In this brief article, I attempt to offer what I have learned from Sufi poets and teachers, mindfulness practices, and Jungian psychology when it comes to taming the busy mind. The goal is not stop thinking or feeling, but to choose which thoughts and emotions deserve our attention. We can develop a new consciousness of being watchful of our mental activities and decide whether to focus on something or letting it go.

Given we live in a world that focuses heavily on “I think, therefore I am,” as stated by Rene Descartes, it would be difficult to imagine going beyond our thinking and focus on being. It can be done because others have done it.

As a start, imagine you are sitting in your living room and noticing without any judgments all the objects in the room. For example, you notice the couch, TV, coffee table and few other things and at the same time you are aware of your presence in the room. You are aware that you are noticing all the furniture in the room and yet you are separate from them. You do not over identify with any object in your living room. You are not judging them, analyzing them or making story about them. You are completely detached and at the same time present. I like you to use the same concept as you witness your mind activities. You are looking at your thoughts and emotions going through your mind without judging them and over identifying with any of them. You do not define yourself by them. You are the one who is aware of them, and you can use your will power to choose how much attention you like to give anything going through your mind.

You can enrich this practice of witnessing your mind by inviting your heart to participate in the process. Your heart is a place of connection to love, Divine Oneness, Higher Power, God, Universal Compassion or anything comforting that feels true to you. You can activate the feeling of love in your heart by remembering a heartfelt experience and focus on that. The tool that you have in this process is your focus. “Whatever you focus on, it becomes your reality.” In other words, “You energize anything that you give your attention to it.” So why not energize the love in your heart. You might not be able to stop your mind from producing thoughts, but you can fill the spaces between your thoughts with energy of love. The marriage between the heart and the mind can give birth to a new way of being.

To summarize, you notice your mind as if you are standing in a train station and watching each train of thoughts and/or emotions going by without getting on the train. Instead, you can direct your attention to the love in your heart. You can do that one day at the time, and experience having a new consciousness in partnership with your heart. Welcome to a new way of Being.

© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist

(https://SomaticAlivenessArt.etsy.com).

 
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.