"Human"istic Psychology and Spiritual Psychology: Are They Far Apart?
For years I described myself as an eclectic psychologist. Lately I've come to see the label doesn't fit. What I actually practice is Humanistic Psychology, the kind Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers worked out. The core of it, for me, is that how a person privately understands who they are ends up steering the whole course of their life.
People keep searching for answers about why they're here and what their lives mean. One of the places they're turning now is spiritual psychology. For a long time that corner of the field went largely unexamined. The usual objection was that you can't put things like prayer or mental telepathy under a microscope and demonstrate that they work, so most psychologists kept their distance.
That objection no longer holds up the way it once did. Studies exist now, and some of what they found is hard for even a committed atheist to wave away. Two sources worth reading on this are "Measuring the Immeasurable," published by Sounds True, and Dr. Masaru Emoto's "Messages from Water," which documents his experiments on how water crystals form.
My own interest in the spiritual side of this started with a person rather than a book. I met Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist who spent her career alongside dying children and adults. From them she collected account after account of near death experiences. Elisabeth carried a rare sincerity. When she spoke, you were pulled in, and you came away certain she wasn't dressing anything up.
She never turned any of it into income. She and the others who led the workshops charged only what covered the plain costs: a stripped down retreat space for a few days, with room and board, nothing more. Beyond that the participants paid their own way to get there and back. The leaders gave their time for free. People who went through those few days often walked out changed.