Counseling

Would you  benefit from IDL?

Everyone is stuck in one way or another.  Sometimes the pain is external, in relationships, jobs, and finances.  Sometimes the misery is more internal and hidden, as it often is with addiction, mood, and thought.

All of us want to get unstuck, but often the price of change seems too high.  It is a rare person who makes transformational changes as an adult voluntarily, without a crisis to knock them out of their comfortable orbit. Most of us would rather focus on building our strengths and ignoring our painful limitations. The sad truth is that we are comfortable in our stuckness and mostly accept help from those who help us stay comfortable in our misery.  Because we don’t want to be challenged, we can stay for years with groups and therapists that provide considerable comfort and not much real growth.  They can become co-conspirators with us in unconsciously maintaining the status quo.

While you can do a great deal of work on your own, just mining the information available on this site, we recommend that those serious about their personal and spiritual growth work with a Practitioner.  An IDL Practitioner supplies objectivity, a common orientation toward personal and spiritual development, and an accountability structure to keep you moving.  Such services are hugely valuable.  They can make the difference between years stumbling through life and building a clear, centered, peaceful space within yourself that will weather the storms of life.

When you work with an IDL Practitioner you don’t just work with a wise and committed teacher and guide; you make a friend of the soul that will help you learn to dance through the challenges of your life.  Quality always has value.  It is difficult to put a value on the time and suffering you can save yourself through avoiding dead-end relationships, painful drama, and short-sighted choices.  The more awake you become, the more you cultivate the six core qualities within yourself, the more rewarding and satisfying your life should become.   Money and time are best spent increasing the value of our lives.

Integral Deep Listening looks at dreams, and particularly at nightmares, for help in understanding how spirit helps us grow.  When we interview dream monsters and persecutors the explanation they give for their presence is often some version of being there to wake us up.  At the least, we remember the dream.  At most, we get out of our own way and learn how to be more awake.  Like nightmares, your IDL Practitioner isn’t there to make you more comfortable so you can continue to dream your life away.  She is there to help you wake up.

When you work with an IDL Practitioner you are choosing a fast track to healing, balancing, and transforming your life.  IDL is like continuously holding up a magical mirror that shows you how and where you are stuck and what approach and course of action is most likely to get you unstuck the quickest.  When we go to a therapist we bring them our agenda – “Get rid of my anxiety, help me build my self-confidence, eliminate my depression, help me get over the end of my marriage…”  This is where we are in pain; it is why we seek help.  So if seems paradoxical and counter-intuitive to focus on anything else.  Are you willing to trust the agenda of your collective inner self instead of your own?  This is not something we are used to doing.

You have probably focused on your own agenda for years and years.  How’s that working for you?  Spirit doesn’t focus on your agenda, as most therapy does. Spirit wants you to focus on its agenda! IDL does not focus on your agenda because that’s not what spirit does. Consequently, IDL is built on a very challenging hypothesis: “If I focus on the agenda of my collective internal self I will heal, balance, and transform my life much faster than if I focus on my own agenda.”

If you want to make a priority out of learning to trust yourself, IDL can make a huge difference in your life.

As Gandhi said, you must be the change you wish to see in the world.

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