While trained as a physician, psychiatrist, addictionologist and a cognitive therapist, I have found that my combining the wisdom of Jungian analysis & my Eastern ground best helps me integrate these diverse dimensions in treating the whole person. The clinical approach calls for weekly or more frequent sessions.
It is a partnership between my patients and I to attend to their soul work. All patients are thoroughly evaluated for basic psychiatric care. Motivated patients are offered long term psychotherapy. Those with more evolved psychological and reflective attitude and preparedness to explore the depths of their psyche are offered more extensive analytic experience. Patients are expected to make room in their lives to attend to the mystery and the guidance of their soul. They must be prepared to do daily journaling, silent time, studio time, time for reflection, record their dreams, do relevant reading, practice Yoga, Pranayama, Mindfulness, Meditation and put their insights into practice. This is a Magnum Opus of their soul. Not everyone is prepared and equipped to do the work. Patients are selected carefully to decide the depth of their exploration.
Other than exploring their transference of feelings onto their analyst, we explore the dreams, patient's personal myth and the archetypal guidance in deepening their understanding of themselves, their illness and the meaning of the illness in the trajectory of their life and purpose. Patients are particularly encouraged to explore their unique creative potentials not only to deal with their symptoms but to achieve their higher potentials in service of family, community and society.
Such an approach calls for balancing the demands of the ego and the society with attention to the uniqueness of our beings. It calls for balancing adaptation to society’s demands with the calling of our soul.
It means balancing our conscious with our unconscious, our past with the future with the present as the fulcrum of this transition. It is about balancing ego with the shadow – or our dark side that we project onto the others. It invokes a balance between our conscious attitude with our unconscious contra sexual potentials; the anima (inner feminine of males) and animus (inner masculine in women). We must balance our comfort zone of functions e.g. thinking with feeling, intuition with sensate and attend to the totality of our four functions as appropriate. It calls for balancing our embeddedness in our past with the call of our teleos, our destiny, our purpose and meaning in this lifetime. It means balancing the material with the spiritual aspects of our life, of the mundane with the sacred. Hence, I chose Tula as the name for my practice; Tula means Balance in Sanskrit. From balance of these personal and archetypal forces in our psyche comes healing, wellness and wholeness. This is a sacred journey. I feel privileged to be the witness and the guide to a few on their path to the Soul.