Gloria Karpinski and Spiritual Psychology(2010 total words in this text) (651 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.”
NEXT: KARPINSKI
ON FEMININE SPIRITUALITY
Gloria
Karpinski On The Goddess Movement
by Christine Hall
When Gloria Karpinski is away from her
home in Winston-Salem, traveling around North America and Europe
conducting seminars and workshops, she stresses the necessity of
integrating spirituality into one’s life. She challenges people
with the notion that it’s not enough to find God outside of
yourself. According to her, you must find the divine spark that
resides within you and incorporate that divinity into yourself.
She recognizes this has not been an
easy task for women in our culture, since the image of God that we’re
given by most churches is male. It seems that all aspects of the
divine feminine have been relegated to antiquity, lost in the dark
depths of the collective unconscious. She brings this point home near
the beginning of a workshop that she conducts for women.
“I will go through eighty-some
slides of goddess figures from history and from all over the world,”
she said. “When we get through, we’ll fill up the
blackboard with where they’re from. Then I’ll erase the
blackboard and I’ll say, ‘Now tell me your feminine role
models, spiritually, when you were growing up.’”
She said that she always meets dead
silence, until eventually someone will meekly mention Mary. “Yeah,
that’s true,” she added, “we have the great mother
Mary, if you were lucky. But if you grew up in Protestant culture,
she probably got brought out of the closet once a year and was then
packed right back up.”
Many women have been looking to the
goddesses of old for clues to explain aspects of their own spiritual
nature. They look to the “neters” from ancient Egypt to the
great goddesses of Babylon and Sumeria. From the Hawaiians, they
learn about Peli, the goddess of fire and earth who makes the land
rise above the sea. Or there is Maeve, the warrior goddess of the
Celts, who is cunning in her dealings with men. The list goes on and
on.
These women claim to have gained
valuable insight into themselves and into their spiritual nature by
understanding these goddesses. In recent years, there has been so
much interest in the goddess that major booksellers carry numerous
books, like Starhawk’s “The Spiral Dance,” to help
guide women through the maze of feminine spiritual attainment.
This was not always the case. A very
few years ago, a woman wanting to gain insight into the goddesses was
pretty much on her own. Karpinski remembers what it was like when she
was doing research for her first women’s workshop. “I had
to go to the back rooms of libraries and blow dust off the books,”
she said. “Who knew about goddesses? How obscure all that was.
Now you go to any bookstore and you find lots and lots of choice.”
This interest in women’s
spirituality has even had an effect on some mainstream Christian
churches. In some congregations, God is now seen as a being who has
both masculine and feminine qualities. Many churches have replaced
“our Father” with “Mother, Father, Parent God”
and a few have been willing to entertain even more unorthodox
viewpoints, like embracing the goddess herself.
“I did a conference in San
Francisco a few years back, at Grace Cathedral,” Karpinski said.
“The whole conference was on the divine mother. There were
thousands of people in this third largest cathedral in the country,
chanting to the divine mother. It was absolutely one of the key
moments in my career.”
She also once introduced the idea of
the divine feminine to a large group of elderly people at a
retirement center. “There was total respect and totally
intelligent questions,” she said with pride. “A lot of them
came up afterwards, saying I never really thought about it and so
forth. I didn’t hold back either. I just talked about what we’ve
done to our mother, that we’re like divorced children forced to
live with one parent.”
It’s not just women who are
interested in learning more about the female aspects of the divine.
Both at Grace Cathedral and at the retirement center, there were men
as well as women in attendance. In recent years, Karpinski says that
she’s been seeing more men attempting to discover their yin, or
feminine, side. “They’re showing up at workshops. They’re
showing up in counseling sessions. We’re talking about lawyers,
doctors, candlestick makers, entrepreneurs and CEOs. I think this is
very, very exciting.”
She pointed-out that sometimes she is
met by confusion from people who believe that a pantheon of gods and
goddesses somehow lessens the viability of “the one true God.”
In all pantheistic systems, there is always the great unknowable
creator of it all who is essentially the “one true God.”
Karpinski sees the gods and goddesses as different manifestations of
the divine source. Basically, these are principles to guide one
through difficult life passages.
“Can you imagine,” she said,
“if from the time you started to walk you were taught that you
were made in the image of God and what that really meant? That the
spark of God was in you? I think a lot of the spiritual practices
that we do are a way of reeducating the mind and the subconscious to
be aligned with that spark. Whereas, we’ve been so deeply
programmed not to be aligned with it.”
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2004 by AlternativeApproaches.com
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