Psychotherapy vs Spiritual Inquiry, Which Is Best?

Dear Self-Improver,

What’s the difference between psychotherapy and spiritual inquiry? One helps heal the mind, emotions, the traumatized ego. The purpose of psychotherapy is to help you, to save or rescue you… from yourself probably… to fix you. It has to do w changing your relationship with your past and your future to improve your present. And it’s fixed in time, isn’t it?

Spiritual self-inquiry has nothing to do with fixing you or rescuing you from anything… not your problems, not your past. In fact part of what must be surrendered is the desire to be saved from yourself and your problems or the urge to fix yourself. Surrender the hope of this. You give up hope that you’ll be saved and in that moment – just before you spiral into hopelessness about that – you discover spaciousness. This is an important thought and I’ll return to it in a moment.

Many people are seeking spiritual growth to fix themselves, to improve upon themselves because they think they need improving. And they think others do to. Most people seek self-realization or enlightenment for the sake of that ultimate validation that one is finally fixed, saved, that one has arrived. They imagine a great relief there from the world’s problems.

Being honest, you will find this idea in you, and I in me. The belief that we are not enough as we are is so deeply engrained that few escape it. It’s a way the ego personalizes the concepts of enlightenment and self-realization. Then it becomes a story of achievement and failure. It becomes a path with steps and rules and measures.

None of this has anything to do with spiritual inquiry.

Spiritual inquiry leads, always and inevitably to what most fully and completely is there. It leads to what is there without exception – through thick and thin. Whether you at your best, or you at your worst, it is still there. The spaciousness. That spaciousness is who you really are.

More best moments of you lie ahead. More worst moments do too. You’ll feel great, bad, lost, confused, elated, blah, angry, peaceful, sad, hurt, betrayed, joyful… all again. These are part of this world we currently live… the world as it is right now. Right here where you are.

This is the essence of phenomena, of matter and the physical world: cycles. Up, down. Around and then around again. Sun, rain, drought, plague, good harvest – it all comes and goes in cycles and seasons. We get so focused on this that we begin to think we are here to make it all stop being that way, to fix it.

Self-inquiry and spirituality are not about getting repaired – though this can be a beneficial side effect. But it is not about this. That can be hard to believe, but it is so. The saving of things and the compulsive fixing of yourself and things and others – and all the time and energy that goes into this – that’s a big part of what must be surrendered.

Now. Self-inquiry may well start as fixing what is wrong in any given moment, true. In self inquiry, you will probably naturally first move thru your psychology… why did I feel that, why am i sick, why am I reacting this way? This is probably where you begin. And it’s a good beginning, it’s useful.

You will even have very worthwhile AHAs as you do this, ones that are a real gift to you. On a spiritual path it’s important to become more intimate with yourself. But do not stop there.

Spiritual inquiry goes deeper. What does that mean? Inquire deeper than this aha, move through those layers each time, past why and the psychology of it. This is the opportunity. Keep going.

Carry on past the why, the aha, move thru the stories, proceed beyond your beliefs and the things you identify with. Don’t get caught up in the thought processes that comes up about them. Make note of them if they serve but don’t linger long there.

Keep going because soon you will break thru all the layers. Not because you have fixed them all, more likely because you realize they are endless, lol. There are more layers and more layers and always forever more layers of the mind in the physical world. Endless layers of psychology, of whys and what’s and aha’s. Recognizing that, you surrender. You finally give them up, you stop that. You surrender.

The Moment of Surrender

You give up hope of being fixed, of reaching perfection. You give up that hope. And in that moment before discouragement overwhelms, before you spiral into hopelessness or despair, into self-judgment – just before that there is a moment where you are free – there if you pause, if you pay attention, there you will find spaciousness.

If instead you feel discouraged about ever being fixed, it means you switched from self-inquiry, spiritual inquiry, to the psychology of inquiry. If you remember you’re in a process of Spiritual Inquiry, you will surrender and pause. And in the moment of that pause – while you are still free from self-doubt or incrimination – the pause will reveal the spaciousness of life, of all that is, the spaciousness of you.

You break through and you see that the spaciousness is you and you meet yourself there. This is the purpose and the opportunity of inquiry. So take care not to institutionalize your spiritual inquiry by relating to it as psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy and other such fixing modalities serve the needs of the body, the mind, they serve emotional refinement, they serve the fractured ego. Like psychotherapy, they all serve what they serve but they cannot serve the Soul. Only your connection to and knowledge of your self as spaciousness can do that.

This is something good to clarify because our training is fix, fix, fix, improve, improve, improve. It’s a bit of a compulsion. Just try to stop doing it for a while and you observe how jittery your mind gets, you will feel how restless the body is, how anxious the emotions, how tyrannical the ego that wants to impose rules. Until you give them spaciousness. They are fed by spaciousness too, they recognize it as greater truth than their own.

In spaciousness, all parts of your physical self are well served. As is your Soul. But the Highest in you – your essence, your true self – cannot be fed by all the fixing in the world – who you really are can only be nourished by knowledge of and connection to the awesome Spaciousness that is You. That is the purpose of spiritual inquiry.

Through spiritual inquiry you follow the outer world inward rather than outward. Your spiritual inquiry leads deeper inward, into spaciousness. It’s from this place that your choices and actions, and activism, have real power to reframe, to transmute, to alter.

Spaciousness eases the way, it steadies your heart, your mind and body, it tames your ego as you navigate the world of physical phenomena that you came to experience and, yes, to change – but first and foremost by knowing and being who you truly are.

Ever deeper, inward ho! See you there, fellow innernauts.
Much love in this moment where we meet in time,

Mayet Leilani