I had another great conversation with Dr. Keith Witt last week. Brother Keith has been practicing psychotherapy in Santa Barbara for over 40 years, and is also a master martial artist and devoted spiritual practitioner with experience in many traditions. Who better to talk to about integrating these two approaches to human development, a topic that causes so much confusion and consternation among seekers of higher consciousness?
~Dr. Keith Witt
Spiritual teachers and psychotherapists are often as odds and people who participate in both modalities often reflect that conflict in their own minds. Which is the best way to go? Is it more fruitful to work with our personal history and iron out the stuck points in our lives (psychotherapy) or to work to transcend them by seeking enlightenment (spirituality)? Do we work with our story or drop our story?
Most spiritual traditions are rooted in pre-modern schemas that see dysfunction as a spiritual problem, whether possession by evil spirits or a separation from God. Even a non-theistic religion like Buddhism perceives the manifest world as a fallen and corrupt place that is to be transcended (and in more advanced Buddhist thought, re-embraced) through meditation.
Psychotherapy, on the other hand, works with the circumstances of our lives, and we are encouraged to look deeply into our own dramas and traumas, and even to re-experience them in the controlled psychotherapeutic container created with the therapist.
Anyone who has practiced both systems can see the value of each, yet their trusted guides, the spiritual teachers and psychotherapists, often deny the veracity of the other approach.
The integral solution, as you might expect, is to find the “piece of the truth” revealed by both spiritual practice and psychotherapy, to map the territories that each inhabit (and the territories they don’t), and to work with both in an integrated and harmonized way. That way the benefits are multiplied.
I know of no more qualified (and stimulating!) guide to this endeavor than Keith Witt. Check out our conversation below, as well as an essay Keith wrote on the topic.
For more from Keith, see his website drkeithwitt.com.
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Hi Jeff.
Loved the conversation and Keith’s PDF. Such insights. I too ran across Scott Peck before Ken Wiber. What an incredible man. Looking forward to seeing you twice this year in Denver.(IEA and dinner with Wilber).
All the best
Jerry Mackel
Here is positive news for healthcare and it’s future:
May 6, 2013
Dear Dr. Mackel,
When I was approached by Medscape to become the new Editor-in-Chief, I was thrilled. Why? It certainly wasn’t because I was looking for more to do, with multiple roles at Scripps Health, Scripps Clinic, and The Scripps Research Institute. The reason: Medscape is the largest electronic/digital network of physicians in the world. Millions of doctors and other healthcare professionals look to Medscape for the most useful, practical information to help their patients and their practice.
This is the most exciting, momentous time in the history of medicine. For the first time, we can rapidly and affordably sequence a human genome. We have sensors that can remotely track virtually any physiologic metric, from vital signs to glucose to intraocular pressure. We can add a lab-on-a-chip to a smartphone to assay almost any routine chemistry and digitize pills to ensure adherence. Or use a smartphone to conduct all the components of the physical examination. This is superimposed and convergent with a remarkable digital infrastructure that includes ever-increasing bandwidth, pervasive connectivity, cloud- and supercomputing, enormous social networks, and those little mobile devices that we cannot put down.
Medicine is thus poised for its biggest shakeup ever as it transforms to a more precise, individualized, and democratized model. My charge at Medscape is to help capture this excitement, the changes and opportunities, along with the challenges and the need for validation. Medscape will be expanding its breadth of coverage in areas that will be rebooting, which include not only diagnostics, imaging, and medical devices but also the operational aspects of office visits, hospitals, and medical informatics. We have an outstanding team of experts across all medical disciplines, and we’ll provide you with timely and insightful commentary on the most important topics in medicine.
We intend to take Medscape to the next level, one that embraces the need for change and zooms in on the ways to get there — the ways to provide better, more efficient care for your patients. We are all connected, with only a few electrons that separate us. I welcome your ideas and feedback about Medscape, so please direct emails to [email protected] or follow me on Twitter at @EricTopol.
Sincerely,
Eric J. Topol, MD
Editor-in-Chief of Medscape
Thanks Jerry, see you soon!