“Awareness is Curative.

MAURA SILLS

Including the spiritual in the inquiry

CHANGING OUR LIVES BY PAYING ATTENTION TO SUBTLE EXPERIENCES.

The form of Buddhist Psychotherapy that we practice is called Core Process Psychotherapy, developed by Maura and Franklyn Sills at the Karuna Institute in Devon, England.

As a contemplative approach to psycho-spiritual psychotherapy, Core Process Psychotherapy explores how we are in our present experience and how this expresses our past conditioning, including our pre- and perinatal experiences. The inquiry into our inner processes is explored through a depth awareness of what is happening in the present moment. This includes an awareness of our feelings, sensations, subtle energies, mental processes and their expressions in our physical body.

The goal of the work is not to change our experience, but to understand how we relate to it and how that can lead to suffering. With such awareness, a deeper wisdom emerges that naturally moves toward healing.

Witness consciousness

Subliminal field

Joint practice

Embodied presence

The fundamental concepts behind Core Process Psychotherapy are those of presence, inherent health, the holding field, the co-arising of experience, the relational field, joint practice, the subliminal field, and that awareness itself is curative.

At the very foundation of Core Process Psychotherapy is the belief that health is inherent and never lost. It is only obscured by our life experiences and past conditionings.

TOTAL ENGAGEMENT OF BOTH THE THERAPIST AND CLIENT CREATES THE ALCHEMY FOR TRANSFORMATION.

Life is a relational experience, and many of our joys and suffering are a result of our relationships with the world. The concepts of the co-arising of experience and the relational field in Core Process Psychotherapy point to the importance of the relationship between the therapist and client, and joint practice refers to the commitment to experience what’s emerging in the field by both the therapist and the client. Both therapist and client are deeply involved in the inquiry.

The therapist holds the client in deep listening and inquiry into the different fields of experience, including the subtle and subliminal. Presence, if held in clarity and mindfulness, becomes the container or holding field where embodied awareness is the natural result. An embodied awareness is awareness that is not only cognitive, but also experienced in the body. It is a whole, coherent experience, non-fragmented and non-dualistic, and can be experienced as a kind of inner knowing. It is this knowing that is curative.