Re: How is integral psychotherapy helping you and your clients

Hi Katherine,

I can tell you how my practice is integral and how it benefits me and my clients. First of all I should specify that I’m not a psychologist/therapist in the official sense of the word - all my work comes from word-of-mouth and I mostly deal with people who are looking for answers in their quest to further development and an increasing number of people who have issues relating to family/personal relationship and those who are dealing with death in some form. Durwin and I met on the II pod and he asked me to join this pod to get some of my ideas out.

I work with individuals and groups through their interaction with animals - dogs specifically. The biggest part of the work is done in wilderness or park settings, and nature and our relationship to nature is the background to all we do (obviously culture and society play a part here as well). I find that integral comes in most specifically in that I am at integral levels of development, and as such am able to interpret what is happenig in my clients’ world from an integral perspective. “Being present” is the most important condition I try to establish (hence the work with animals in nature) as I find that my clients are able to take a higher-level view of their reality and are much more open to gaining insights from an integral level. The main benefit to the integral approach seems to me that it makes sense to people, and it seems to generate insights that stick. I started my organization after I got to know integral and AQAL as a concept, and it has as such played quite an important part in setting up “On the Trail”. It’s been 4 years now, and my work has shifted mostly to working with people, but it’ll always be a work in progress, and I welcome this pod as a helpful tool in developing my own insights.

Frans