Gloria Karpinski and Spiritual PsychologyPage: 1/2 (2010 total words in this text) (650 Reads)  Gloria
Karpinski and Spiritual Psychology
by Christine Hall
Most self-help books offer easy
solutions to difficult problems. Although many are filled with
valuable and truthful insight, they usually indicate that the road to
wholeness and health will only take a few hours time. As anyone who
has seriously attempted a 12 step program can tell you, recovery and
health are a full time pursuit.
Psychic healer and counselor Gloria
Karpinski knows this. For more than twenty years she has been plying
her trade, both by working with individuals and conducting workshops
for groups. Eight years ago she published her own self-help book,
Where Two Worlds Touch, which is based primarily on
observations she made while working with her clients. Although the
book doesn’t stress the difficulties of self-healing, it doesn’t
encourage it’s readers to look for easy solutions either.
I recently met with Karpinski at her
home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, feeling lucky that she had
managed to fit me into her crowded schedule. These days, she is so
in-demand that a personal consultation with her requires a fifteen
month wait. At the time of our meeting, she had just returned from
conducting a workshop for women in Minneapolis and would be leaving
in a few weeks to conduct another workshop in Zurich, Switzerland.
We talked about the easy answers that
are offered by the majority of self-help books. “I personally
think that’s very misleading,” she said, sipping on a glass
of iced tea. “I think we have to be very real, that the ego does
not give up territory easily. There’s nothing in any spiritual
training to suggest that’s true.”
She explained that by ego she did not
merely mean the idea of vanity, although that’s part of it. The
ego is all of the protection circuits that tend to separate a person
from others. In eastern spiritual systems, the ego is said to
separate the individual from the Godhead itself. To the 12-step
folks, it’s that part of an addict that can’t give up the
addiction and needs to take the first step of offering to a higher
power.
“I don’t know where people
got this idea to go on a week-end workshop, hang three crystals in
the window and say seven mantras, and I’m through,” she
added.
Her book is about dealing with change.
Through her healing work, she has found truth in a basic observation
made by many over the years, that people go through a rhythm of
change. She has cataloged seven major stages to the process. When
explaining her reason for writing the book, she said, “I saw
that when people were in these various stages, very often they
couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”
The book attempts to guide the reader
through these seven stages, explaining each in great detail. There is
no New Age double-talk, just good-sense spiritual psychology. At the
end of each step, she has included several exercises to help the
reader through the process, such as a visualization for stress
control in the section on “resistance.”
This is not a plan to find
enlightenment over Christmas vacation. The steps are not easy and
require great honesty with the self. Karpinski indicates that major
changes could take seven years or longer.
There is a saying among the New Age
folks that everybody has to “find their own path,” meaning
that the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. Karpinski
stresses that fact in her book, and encourages the reader to adapt
her observations for their own situation. “I don’t see it
written in stone,” she said to me. “We’re really
complex beings.”
She shares the philosophy of
easterners and Christian mystics who believe that spirituality must
be incorporated into the process. “I believe we’re all made
in the image of God,” she said. “I really believe that’s
a literal statement. There is a spark of the divine in everyone.”
According to Karpinski, the process of
recovery or healing seems deceptively simple, requiring only that you
recognize your divinity and become divine. The problem arises when
the ego and the unconscious get in the way. In fact, cleaning out
unconscious programs is central to the process. She points out that
we shouldn’t be too quick to judge any of our experiences as
good or bad. Like a poorly written Windows application, sometimes a
“bad” experience is just part of the unconscious process of
getting from one point to another.
She uses her own life as an example.
“In college, I studied every world religion and tried them all
on, like you try on clothes,” she said. “I even tried to be
an atheist for six weeks, and then psychology, I worshoped at that
alter for a very long time. I look back and I think, every single bit
of that was spiritual work.”
The book requires that the reader have
an open mind about spiritual thought while paying attention to good
psychology. Karpinski uses scientific evidence to support ideas like
reincarnation, precognition and the like. Like many others, she
believes that actions taken in a past life can have a major or minor
effect now. Healing might require looking at these past life
experiences.
A past life experience can be
looked-at as a personal myth. Psychologist Carl Jung noted that most
people live by a personal myth that lies mainly in the unconscious.
Finding that key can be a valuable aid in a person’s recovery.
Jung also saw that his patients did better if they were able to put
their problems into some kind of spiritual framework, and he
encouraged his patients to develop a spiritual life.
“I tell people all the time that
their therapy is spiritual work,” Karpinski said, “but I
think one should look to the choice of therapist. If somebody looks
at you and says ‘I’m the well one and you’re the sick
one,’ then that’s the model they’re going to hold.”
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