Finding Peace of Mind

The Divine Therapy: A First Step Toward Finding Peace of Mind Is it hell being you? Good news: You may have just taken the first step toward f inding peace of mind. Dawn Raffel sits down with an inspired pair of psychothera pists. By Dawn Raffel If you're seeking peace of mind, emotional fulfillment, and a sense of your plac e in the world, try looking in hell. We're not talking about your Sunday-school teacher's fire-and-brimstone inferno but the one you've built for yourself in th e privacy of your own mind. According to husband-and-wife psychotherapists Bonne y and Richard Schaub, the road to enduring solace begins, inevitably, with a tou r of your home-honed torture chambers. The Schaubs' personal journey, which led to their book, Dante's Path (Gotham), b egan 40 years ago. Frustrated that traditional therapy failed to address spiritu al needs and that so many apparently successful people they met seemed to feel los t in their lives they stumbled on the work of an Italian analyst named Roberto Ass agioli. A student of Freud, Assagioli had rejected the master to develop somethi ng called psychosynthesis, which rests on the belief that we're each capable of reaching beyond our personalities, that we can grasp transcendent wisdom but only if we first take a long, hard look at how we contribute to our suffering. "Born in a Jewish ghetto in 1888, Assagioli was no stranger to the kind of hards hips we can't control. He was imprisoned by the Fascists (for being a pacifist), then freed, only to be forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation. Shortly a fter the war, his only child died. He deeply understood the pain that life can v isit on us, yet insisted that a profound, healing wisdom is always available. He found his internal Mapquest not in modern science but in Dante's 14th-century m asterpiece, The Divine Comedy. Written while Dante was in exile, this epic poem depicts the progress of "the Pilgrim" on a guided tour of hell and purgatory, an d finally into an illuminated paradise. While Dante's frame of reference was Cat holicism, Assagioli read his work metaphorically, as an exploration of our inner realms, a model of personal transformation. "The idea," Richard Schaub says, sitting in the Manhattan office where he and Bo nney use psychosynthesis to treat clients with 21st-century problems, "is that w e all use a limited amount of consciousness. If it's absorbed in hell patterns fea r-based instincts and the reactions we develop around them that means we're unable to discover other parts of ourselves." We create our own hell, the Schaubs beli eve, through indifference (attempting to protect ourselves by assuming an air of not caring); greed (insatiably craving money, stuff, accolades anything to fill t he emptiness inside); jealousy; intentional cruelty; betrayal; and addiction. We 're in "purgatory" when we become aware of our self-created torments and conscio usly work to release ourselves, and rise to "paradise" when we tap into our high er wisdom, our universal connection with others. "Combining traditional therapeutic techniques with meditation, visualization, an d even contemplation of art, the Schaubs have helped cancer, cardiac, and AIDS p atients gain relief from depression and rage. They've also led clients with mari tal strife, career anxiety, and garden-variety angst to recognize their role in their problems as a first step in getting unstuck. Read more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Emotional-Fulfillment-Finding-Peace-of-Mi nd#ixzz2qBJsXqB4