How does it help?
PSH works with the joint participation of client and therapist. Both must be willing and actively seeking the same outcome - a change for the better in the emotional life of the client.
It is fundamental that the therapist does not and cannot make change occur, but strives to provide the ideal conditions to enable the client to make their own changes. Thus the client is empowered with the knowledge that they have made their own choices in their own fashion. They have done it their way.
PSH operates at the level of unconscious feeling memory. To understand this more fully, let us consider the background to the problem states of anxiety, tension and depression.
Memory is wonderful and mysterious. It enables us to operate in the world, recognise people and places, respond to situations, register feelings and so on.
We make sense of each new experience out of the background of our accumulated knowledge. This is an unconscious process which occurs instantaneously.
The complexity is staggering, a million times more powerful than any computer and although unconscious, it is worth remembering that it is your mind that does this and this is but one of hundreds of functions your mind is performing at each moment.
Within this storehouse of memories all of us have had uncomfortable experiences, some more than others. Painful trauma can leave a sensitivity that is recalled in an all too frequent way and that is no longer helpful.
While the events themselves are past, the feelings live on and resurface uninvited to steal our enjoyment of the present moment.
In time, these orphaned feelings themselves become a focus of dread adding to the discomfort. When the feedback loop reaches an unsustainable level of intensity we may collapse into depression, - somewhat like an electric circuit that blows a fuse. A seriously depressed person has, quite literally, barely enough energy to get out of bed each day.
The PSH process involves utilising our immense unconscious resources, - firstly to identify the origin and nature of the uncomfortable feelings. As a prerequisite the individual first learns to relax deeply. With skilled assistance, this is not as difficult as many people imagine.
The meditative state provides an environment of security and safety for the individual, allowing the unconscious to be led to accept and then to review those feeling memories.
Unpressured and in deep calm, the mind can take its own time to find a better way of responding.
The result is a gentle release of emotions and a cessation of the underlying discomfort. Over the following days and weeks there is a gradual establishment of new patterns of response as the system learns to trust that the old ways have indeed gone.
When we take away the burden of emotional blocks from the past, we uncover our true nature, characterised by natural joy and lightness.
Throughout life, it is our emotional nature that provides us with perhaps our greatest challenges. While society encourages the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, we know that both are ever present and follow each other as night follows day.
We can however learn to react in ways that minimise the length and depth of our suffering and recognise beneath it all there is joy and purpose in life.
Next page: Testimonials
