We will now explore some of the major areas of client experience. The following gives an overview of client paradigms that the spiritual counselor can use as a way to understand the client’s experience. Each of these paradigms needs to be assessed and evaluated within the counseling relationship, because they play an essential part in client growth and change.

Welwood (2000) notes that many in the West have used spiritual practice to escape earthly or personal issues. He has termed this escape ‘spiritual bypass’, which means a refusal to deal with unfinished psychological business and an attempt to escape it by moving right to the spiritual practice. However, one must develop a healthy ego before one involves oneself in releasing the ego through spiritual practice. Otherwise, spiritual emergency may occur, and the individual may find himself having spiritual experiences while he is still caught up in neurotic relationships or grappling with an inability to deal with the realities of life.

The spiritual counselor must help the client accept and appreciate his current level of development. Blocks to spiritual development may be located at any level of development, and these blocks must be faced and worked through in order to facilitate spiritual growth. Thus, Welwood advises psychological clearing and personal individuation to release blocks in personal and interpersonal realms. He says, "in addition to waking up our ultimate spiritual nature, we also need to grow up – to ripen into a mature, fully developed person" (p. xviii).

Psychological aspects may need to be handled before spirituality enters into the counseling discussion. This is why we need both prayer and practical tools of healing when dealing with client issues. The focus of interaction may begin in one domain, such as difficulties at home, and then move toward the spiritual domain, such as meaning and purpose. The counselor needs to be prepared to discuss both and make the leap when the client is ready.

As the client begins to recognize that he is not his body, he is not his emotions, he is not his thoughts, but rather he is a Divine being, he identifies less with his actions and his outer appearance and more with his true inner nature. He respects his inner being and is then able to more objectively see the outer trappings of the personality mask or persona that he presents to the world. Welwood says therapy is not about diagnosis and procedures, but rather it is about "developing a new kind of living relationship with one’s experiencing" (2000, p. xiii).

Suffering, illness, pain, loss, and death are often the issues that bring the individual to counseling. Assisting the client to find meaning in suffering is often the goal. If individuals can find meaning in pain and suffering, then clients have a better chance of healing the pain. Our religions and spiritual beliefs are the framework that helps us find meaning and make sense of the tragedies of life. Counselors must be attuned to this need to understand.

The process of counseling deals with suffering. Welwood states that "suffering is nothing more than the observer judging, resisting, struggling with, and attempting to control experiences that seem painful, scary, or threatening" (2000, p. 101). The way to alleviate this suffering it is to be present with the condition, and to walk into it, explore it, and appreciate it for what it is:

1. First, make it conscious. Bring it into focus.
2. Think on it, conceptualize it, and name it.
3. Then put aside the conceptual and explore it by directly feeling into it and experiencing it directly. Through the use of focusing exercises and feeling into the experience, it may shift its meaning or importance.
4. Witness and distance even further from the importance of it. Detach.
5. Become Present with it. Become one with the experience. This is a different identification than in step one, however. Now we are at peace, no longer struggling with it. We simply recognize it for what it is. We have transmuted the suffering to pure experience. There is no emotion-generated resistance to the situation. There is simply pure acceptance and appreciation for it. We are simply present with the experience, vulnerable to it, without resistance.

Transpersonal Psychology makes full use of the Shadow in its therapy. The Shadow manifests the feelings we try to ignore. It creates what are commonly called Freudian slips, and it holds power over us as long as we try to control or suppress it. The shadow is important, however because it also contains vast reservoirs of energy and power. It represents our unclaimed parts, both positive and negative. It is a mixture of our dark repressed secrets as well as our unacknowledged holiness. If we do not acknowledge our shadow, we do not connect to our truth or to the entirety of who we are (Welwood, 2000).

Through the process of counseling, we help the client acknowledge and claim the elements of herself that she is refusing to own. This means that we help her claim the painful and negative elements as well as the potential power and strength that she is denying. The negative elements can be found through her projections, and the positive elements can be found through the heroes that she worships. As she claims these elements, she becomes whole and more consciously aware. This is Jung’s process of individuation that usually occurs at midlife.

Richo (2000) says that individuation is the psychological version of incarnation. "Our work is to incarnate in the world the virtues of the divine Self" (p. 125). We open to the timeless riches of the Self. "When we live in accord with our deepest needs and values and wishes, we are incarnating the self" (p. 125).

The work of individuation is to build a healthy ego and heal the neurotic ego by facing and integrating disowned parts of ourself. As we do this, it becomes possible to transform consciousness and move our awareness from centering on the ego to centering on the Self. We bring the Self into the world through our heart. We express higher feeling of compassion and care. We live in accord with our highest values. In these ways, we are incarnating the Self and bringing the Divine into the outer world. We release our full potential in service to a greater purpose, and we activate the Divine qualities of love, virtue, wisdom, and healing. We become spiritually mature and live in eternity, in the moment, because we have manifested or incarnated the pure potential of the Divine.

The task of individuation is to see through the persona or mask. The first part of life is spent fitting into society, splitting ourselves, and creating the elements of the persona and shadow. The second part of life is spent re-integrating the two parts, or individuating. Individuation occurs by asking the big questions, including ‘Who am I,’ ‘Why am I here,’ Where did I come from,’ and ‘What is my destiny?’ By asking these questions, we recognize ourselves as the unique beings we are, and we discover our place in the universe. We take the journey from the smaller ego self to the Higher Transpersonal Self.

Transpersonal Psychology insists that healthy ego development must occur before involving oneself in transpersonal experiences. Otherwise, the individual will not be able to appropriately integrate the experience, and the results could be psychological fracture. A mystical experience is a process of stepping outside oneself and joining with something beyond the usual ego boundaries. Ego boundaries must be fully formed before we can step beyond them.

Kasprow and Scotton (1999) attempt to identify the differences between a psychiatric break and a transpersonal experience, because they may look very similar, and the spiritual counselor must be able to differentiate between them. In an emergent transpersonal experience, clients will have:

1. Good premorbid functioning,
2. Acute onset of symptoms,
3. The presence of a stress situation that can account for the symptoms,
4. A positive attitude and willingness to explore the experience.

The individual will attempt to integrate the experience, and she may also have feelings of universal love and empathic understanding. The ego will also be strong in spite of the symptoms.

Transpersonal Psychology describes developmental stages beyond the mature ego. These stages engender the highest human qualities including altruism, creativity, and intuitive wisdom. When transpersonal states occur, ego boundaries are diminished or absent. Most transpersonal theorists hold that transpersonal states are not just feelings of union, but rather they are states where individual consciousness is connected to phenomena that are beyond the ego’s usual boundaries (Kasprow and Scotton 1999). The client will experience these states as he grows and claims his wholeness. The counselor can help him integrate these states into his understanding of himself.

The identity is who we think we are, who we take ourselves to be, and what we protect about ourselves. It is our thought or mental creations about ourself. What purpose does identity serve? Welwood says we create the identity to counteract our threat of non-existence. This is why we feel such a strong need to protect the identity and keep it intact. However, what protects also incarcerates us, because it keeps us trapped in our small self and does not allow us to let go and surrender to our greater self (2000).

We must learn to drop our defenses that protect the identity so that we can access the resources that lie hidden within ourselves. However, our personal experience of our unique identity is that it is what keeps us secure and solid. We fear letting go of it because we fear what we will be without it. Indeed, some people would rather stay attached and engrossed in their own neurosis because it keeps them occupied, involved, and busy with life. It gives them something to think about, obsess about, and talk about, and if they were to let go of it, then what would they do with themselves?

The East brings us to the goal of dying to the ego, but the Western individualist who has spent so much time and energy attaching himself to this identity now cringes in fear when faced with surrendering this prized possession. It poses a threat to one’s very existence. Welwood (2000) stresses that the essential task is to ground ourselves in the ego and remove the blocks to strong, mature, healthy ego functioning before we attempt to transcend the ego. We must heal the issues of childhood, including physical, emotional, and mental blocks before we move to higher states. When the ego is strong, it is much easier to let it go.

Once the self or ego structure is grounded, we then begin to let go or transcend ego. This does not mean that we negate the ego. Rather, it means that we begin to drop our attachment to all the identity characteristics that ego is so interested in maintaining. We let go of our attachments to wealth, fame, success, and status. We surrender their place and importance in our life (Welwood, 2000).

Welwood (2000) includes a third dimension which he calls awakening the heart. By this, he means that we open ourselves to others. We step out into vulnerability and open ourselves to interdependence and relationship. This is the place where the client and counselor meet.

Coemergence is a Buddhist perspective on pathology. It sees the awakened mind and the confused mind as two sides of the same reality. If we look at our neurosis in an objective light, we see that at some time in our life, it served a valuable purpose. As an example, the child may try to please others in an attempt to be taken care of or to protect himself from being beaten or abused. As an adult, however, the continued practice of trying to please others no longer works to his advantage. What once protected now imprisons, and it is a strategy toward life that has outlived its usefulness.

The difficulty arises when we try to let go of a strategy that has once protected us. We struggle with letting go of a piece of our identity – the pleaser for example – without knowing what will happen or who we will be. This produces great fear, because we do not now know how we will cope, feel safe, or survive without it. It brings us face to face with a small sense of ego death because we are moving forward into an empty unknown, and we do not know who we will be on the other side (Welwood, 2000).

This is the essential issue and process that we face as we clear out neurotic or unresourceful tendencies within ourselves, and it is also the very issue that brings us to Dark Night of Soul when we begin to transcend the ego. If the individual leaves behind his secure identity and ego constructs – his attachments to life – who will he be without them? In the Dark Night when we stand poised on the brink of Stage Seven Unity, we are stripped of everything that we are. How, we ask ourselves, can we jump into this great unknown abyss? Who will we be on the other side? If we are not our attachments, our ego, our identity, then who are we? This release takes the kind of courage that only a hound of heaven possesses. It requires giving up all that the individual possesses for the hope that God will be waiting on the other side.

It requires a sense of vulnerability that few are able to develop. To reach this place, we must be vulnerable to appreciating ourselves just as we are. We must move into such deep appreciation that, no matter what demon in our unconscious arises to face us, we are open and vulnerable to meet it. We do not run from it, because we hold the trust and faith that if we meet the demon, we can transmute it with spiritual alchemy and find the gold that resides in the lead. Within every demon is a great gift, and to find the gift, we must be willing to sit with it, appreciate it, and bring it into our heart, because in our heart is where the alchemical process takes place. When we meet and appreciate our inner demons, fully accepting and allowing them to be just as they are, we incorporate them into ourselves and experience the alchemical release into wholeness. As Welwood states, "hidden within every wound we always find a particular blessing" (2000, p. 33).

When we look to the transcendent experiences of spirituality, what we are doing is coming to terms with the gifts the ego has brought us. The ego is the part of us that has tried its best to bring into our lives the parts of us that help us survive. It helps us feel stable and substantial. It creates us as a real human being in an object world. It helps the individual feel grounded and real and consistent from one moment to the next. It holds all the thoughts and feelings that one identifies as ‘me.’ It is our identity construct.

So the question becomes, why would I want to let this go? Why would anyone attempt to surrender the ego? The Buddhist perspective is that the ego is also our source of pain and suffering. Within the ego’s attachments is also the pain of loss when these attachments are taken from us. The biggest attachment that the ego holds onto is the continuation of our identity structure. The pain we must face is that eventually the identity structure will be taken from us – we will die to the physical body. It is this fact that we are a species that recognizes our own mortality that provides the essential reason to transcend the ego. We transcend the ego in the hope and faith that if we do so, we will find the greater meaning and purpose in our own existence, here on earth. We let go of the little self, the ego self, in the hope and faith that we will be reborn to the greater spiritual Self.

From this perspective, it is not the unconscious contents that are threatening to the ego. Defense mechanisms, repression, neuroses, and resistance are rather the way we protect ourselves from our vulnerability to the open ground or emptiness of the egoless state. We fear the expansiveness and vastness and lack of objective solidity of this open ground of being. We fear silence when we sit with another, we feel compelled to fill the empty space with conversation. We fear sitting without something to occupy our identity and ego. We must pick up a book, turn on the TV, or run to the computer to escape the meaninglessness that we attach to the emptiness we equate with boredom and depression. We fear sitting alone with ourselves and just being. It is empty, expansive, and devoid, the very qualities that the state of spiritual experience requires. To fill the void we get busy worrying, obsessing, busying ourselves, or generally letting the ego make busywork for ourselves so that we will not have to face the mini-death that the void creates. We virtually create neuroses to keep ourselves occupied.

Richo (1997) says, "emptiness can mean either vacancy or spaciousness" (p. 80). Confronting the void can be frightening or exciting, depending on our perspective. Vacancy can lead to loneliness or worthlessness. Spaciousness can lead to feelings of solitude, connectedness, and peace.

When the void means emptiness, loneliness, boredom, and meaninglessness, it leads to spiritual fear. One cannot transcend these feelings while experiencing them, and these feelings can lead to panic and abandonment.

If anything helps the individual to get out of the void, then Richo (1997) claims he is not experiencing the true void, because the true void or Dark Night is the place or point where absolutely nothing works. It is the place where one must face that no one or no thing can save or fix things. It is the time in the archetypal Hero’s Journey where our hero must slay the dragon all alone, where he must enter the cave to meet himself. This is a point of spiritual crisis, and all we can do is trust and let go.

Richo (1997) says, "in the void there is a free fall with no possibility of finding a foothold. There is nothing to grab onto" (p. 83). We float in freefall, with no anchors to hold us in place. It is the ultimate unknown. This is the point where the ego is "confronting the inadequacy of its two main pillars – control and entitlement" (p. 83). The ego wants to control all of life so that it can be assured of getting what it wants. It feels entitled to having things go its way. In the void, the ego must face that it is not solid or strong, it really has no control, and there is nothing to ensure that things go its way.

The only way to meet the void is to open to it and allow it to have its way with us. In actuality there is little else we can do, but the more we can relax, the easier the trip will be. As we sit in the void, we allow the old self to die and we wait for the new to be born. We die of the flesh to be born of the spirit. We release the Divine from its prison of matter.

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