Tao Counselling

Sometimes you need another pair of eyes

People come to counselling for all kinds of reasons.

Sometimes there is a very real problem in front of you and you simply don't know what to do about it. Your relationship is in trouble. You have a decision to make. Something has happened that has knocked you sideways. You're angry, unhappy or confused, and you've thought about it so much that you're now going around in circles.

At other times, there isn't one obvious problem. You simply know that something isn't flowing.

Perhaps the same frustrations keep returning. You find yourself having versions of the same argument with different people. Something relatively small can provoke a surprisingly large reaction, or you keep making choices that seem perfectly reasonable at the time and wondering afterwards how you ended up in exactly the same place again.

You may already understand yourself very well. Or you may have absolutely no idea why any of it is happening. Both are perfectly good places to begin. Just bring whatever is happening in your life, and you start there.

Insight can change the picture

When we're caught inside a situation, it can be remarkably difficult to see it clearly. We know what somebody else did. We know how it made us feel. We know what we've tried and why we think it hasn't worked. After thinking about it for long enough, we may also have developed a very convincing explanation of the whole thing.

The difficulty is that we're still looking from the same position. This is one of the things Raj brings to a session. He listens, but he doesn't only listen. He brings decades of experience of meditation, therapy and working with people, and he is willing to tell you what he sees.

He may offer a completely different perspective on the problem you've brought. He may question something you've taken for granted, notice a contradiction, or point towards something that seems obvious from the outside but has been almost impossible for you to see from within it.

And if he thinks you're carefully walking around the real issue rather than through it, there's a reasonable chance he'll mention that too. The point isn't to replace your ideas with his. The point is to look again.

Sometimes today's problem started a long time ago

Not every difficulty needs to be traced back to childhood. Sometimes a problem really does belong to what is happening now. But sometimes the present situation is touching something much older.

We learn very early how to survive emotionally. We learn what brings love and what threatens it, whether it is safe to express anger, whether our needs matter, how to get attention, when to disappear, when to fight and what parts of ourselves are acceptable to the people around us. As children, these adaptations can be remarkably intelligent. But then we grow up.

The child who learned to please everyone may become an adult who cannot say no. The child who learned not to need anybody may become fiercely independent and then wonder why intimacy is difficult. Someone who had to fight to be heard may still find themselves fighting long after anybody is trying to silence them. Raj has worked extensively with primal therapy and deconditioning, and when the roots of a present difficulty lie deeper, he is comfortable going there.

The purpose is not to blame your parents or spend the rest of your life analysing your childhood. The purpose is to see what happened, understand what you learned from it and recognise where that old learning is still directing your life now. Once you can see the difference between what belonged to then and what is actually happening now, you have considerably more freedom.

Relating rather than relationship

Relationships have an extraordinary ability to expose the parts of ourselves we thought we had sorted out. We fall in love with another person and then, somewhere along the way, begin accumulating ideas about what that love should mean.

How they should behave. What they should give us. What we should give them. What they should understand without being told. What is allowed. What isn't. What commitment means. What love should look like.

Before long, we may no longer be meeting the person who is actually standing in front of us. We are meeting them through our expectations, disappointments, fears and everything that has happened between us before.

Often a relationship can become something fixed: You are my partner. This is who you are. This is who I am. This is what we have. But true relating remains alive. It asks whether we can continue meeting the person who is actually here rather than the person we have decided they are.

• Can I hear what you're saying without immediately hearing everything you've said before?

• Can I tell you what is true for me without making you responsible for it?

• Can I love you without trying to own you?

• Can I allow you freedom without experiencing your freedom as a threat to me?

• Can I remain myself while being close to you?

These aren't always comfortable questions. They can bring us face to face with jealousy, possession, dependency, fear of abandonment, expectations and the many ways we try to make love safe by containing it. Raj won’t give you a formula for the perfect relationship. He may, however, ask some fairly confronting questions about the one you have.

Understanding isn't always transformation

Understanding is valuable, but the mind can understand something that the body is still living. This is where meditation and experiential therapy become important. Rather than spending the whole session talking about what happens to you, you may be directed to become interested in what is happening while you're sitting there.

Perhaps you say you're not angry while your jaw is clenched and your whole body is saying otherwise. Perhaps you're talking about something painful while smiling. Perhaps you say that you don't care what somebody thinks and then spend the next fifteen minutes explaining what they think.

This isn’t wrong, it’s interesting. What happens if you stop explaining for a moment and feel what is actually happening? Where do you feel it? What happens if you stay there instead of moving away from it? “What appears when the mind becomes quiet?”

This is where therapy and meditation begin to meet.

Awareness isn't always comfortable

We tend to like the idea of awareness when we imagine it bringing peace, clarity and acceptance.

Sometimes it does.

At other times awareness is the moment you realise that the problem you've been complaining about for five years is being partly maintained by something you are doing. That can be challenging, and yet it can also be enormously liberating. If your happiness depends entirely upon somebody else changing, you don't have many options. When you begin to see your own part clearly, something new becomes available to you.

This is one of the places where Raj can be direct. If he sees you avoiding something, he may say so. If he thinks you're telling yourself a story that no longer stands up, he may challenge it. But challenge doesn't have to become heavy or overly serious. Raj has a particular gift for humour, and sometimes seeing the absurdity of our own coping strategies is far more transformative than another hour of solemnly analysing them.

You don't have to turn yourself into a project

Osho's work repeatedly points away from the endless project of becoming somebody and back towards awareness of who and what is already here. That doesn't mean nothing changes. Quite the opposite.

When we begin seeing our conditioning clearly, some things become increasingly difficult to continue doing unconsciously. You might recognise the old reaction sooner. You might notice when fear is making the decision. You might realise that the argument you're having isn't really about what happened this morning. Or perhaps you finally recognise that something you've believed about yourself for thirty years simply isn't true anymore.

Change begins to happen because there is awareness, rather than fighting against a part of yourself.

What might change?

• You may leave with a completely different understanding of a situation that has been consuming you.

• You may become more able to have difficult conversations without immediately fighting, pleasing or losing yourself.

• You may begin recognising where an old wound is shaping a present relationship.

• You may discover that saying what is true is considerably simpler than all the strategies you've developed to avoid saying it.

• You may become more comfortable allowing another person to be themselves without interpreting everything they do as a statement about you.

• Or you may simply begin to feel more at home in your own skin.

The world may not have changed. But you're no longer meeting it in quite the same way.

The old skin

A snake doesn't shed its skin because there was something wrong with the skin. It fitted once. Then the snake grew. Perhaps some of what you are struggling with is like that. An old defence, belief, identity or way of relating may have belonged perfectly well to another time in your life.

The question isn't whether it was wrong. The question is whether it still fits.

Human beings tend to hold on to their old skin rather more enthusiastically than snakes. We become accustomed to our defences, our stories and even our suffering. Sometimes we have carried something for so long that we assume it is simply who we are.

It may be.

Or it may be old skin.

If there is something happening in your life that you can't quite see your way through, if you keep finding yourself back in the same place, or if you simply know that something is ready to change, you don't need to have worked out why before you come.

Bring the problem. Bring the confusion. Bring your version of what is happening.

Raj will meet you there.