When I was a little boy I found an old plaque in the garage and asked if I could have it in my room. It was a two dimensional plaque made to look like a wood carving in the folk style of the 1920s and 30s. It was made from some type of hard resin. The subject was an old man with a green felt hat standing on a rock, and beside him carved in the wood were these words, “How can I yump, if I got no place to stood?” For my serious young mind, this was like a kōan, those puzzling questions used in Zen Buddhism to provoke deep reflection and awaken insight.

I ruminated on it for months and then asked my mother what it meant and she said it was a phrase Swedish immigrants used to say and people found it humorous and insightful. “How can I jump if I have no place to stand,” she continued, “they were new to Canada and didn’t have much.”

“Ok,” I thought, “but why make a plaque about that?” I thought there must be more to it — “what does it REALLY mean?” I wondered. My father said, “It’s about your view of things, you have to have a firm foundation in your own faith before you can look at other perspectives.” Ok, that sounded closer to what I was looking for, but seemed a bit too spiritualized.

I eventually decided that what it meant was that before you do anything important, you need a reliable, stable, firm place to start from. For the immigrants it was probably money, a better grasp of English, and opportunity, all things they were short on because of their status.

But like all good kōans, there is no one simple answer, because why was jumping involved? My dad’s theory that it was about faith seems to be born out in some conversations I found online. One group reminisced about a teacher they had had, Mr. Sanderson, a fondly remembered sage from childhood.

I finally understood the saying when in my teens I was fishing on Duhamel Creek, an old creek with many rounded rocks and boulders that flows down a valley in the mountain behind my childhood home.

I was at the mouth of the creek where it spilled into the Kootenay Lake, and I wanted to get across to the other side but my feet were slipping on the rocks and when I tried to jump, they went out from under me and I landed on the wet slippery stones, bruising my knee. I eventually found a bigger rock upstream that rose above the slime and algae coating the other rocks. From that rock I launched myself across the creek and landed on the other side safe and dry. I had literally fulfilled the wording of the parable, but I had also apprehended it’s deeper meaning.

Sometimes to get to where we want to go, we need to leap, not a leap in the dark but a calculated leap, a considered risk for an in-sight reward. But we can’t make that leap without firm footing.

Preparing for your Yump

For many of us these days, our life is a flat plain of slippery rocks. How can we jump across the stream to something new, or something better, or a place to explore, if we have no dry solid rocks to jump from?

John Vervaeke argues that this common experience is evidence of a profound meaning crisis. It is marked by a sense of disconnection, alienation, and loss of purpose. But he’s careful to show this isn’t just a passing problem or prevailing mood; it has deep historic roots.

The Historical Roots of the Meaning Crisis

Vervaeke outlines the history of “meaning-making” that began in and around ancient Greece with the intellectual accomplishments of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other thinkers who explored the joys and pitfalls of rational dialogue and ethical living. Central to their framework was the idea of forms, universal ideals that formed the basis of all reality.1

Christianity inherited the Platonic tradition, at least in the West, but moved meaning and meaning making from relationships to participation in a wider community. In simple terms the move was from an intimate and experiential relationship between an elder and her protégé, between a master and apprentice, or rabi and disciple to a more institutional experience. This corresponded with the culture shifted from agrarian focused narratives to those of the city and church.

As literacy expanded and ideas were more easily circulated there arose a growing separation between platonic schools of thought and a new model championed by William of Ockham. William of Ockham rejected the idea of real forms in favor of a more materialistic conception that only individual substances and qualities truly exist.

Ockham complained that, “It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer” and this was later conceptualized as Ockham’s razor, “other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones." Or, as I heard it, “cut through the overly elaborate explanations to the elegantly simple ones and you will be close to the truth.”

The Protestant Reformation followed Ockham with it’s emphasis on private and individualized inner life and a shift from authority in the church and academic institutions, to the sturdy sensibilities of the common person.

In Academia the Scientific Revolution produced a “disenchanted” universe — a cosmos of mechanism rather than meaning.

Following the development of a robust and effective scientific method, the Enlightenment tried to replace religious meaning with reason alone, but Vervaeke argues this was insufficient and while Romanticism tried to recover what was lost through feeling and nature, it ultimately failed as science combined with free market values to demonstrate the power of a reductionistic methodology.

Church and State

Now, culturally, we are left with dying churches where meaning can still be found by some, but where many people feel out of place because of the denial of well established truths such as evolution, virology, and neurodiversity.

To the cultural disconnect Vervaeke adds the cognitive disconnect. He argues the crisis is also a crisis in our ways of knowing. He distinguishes several types of knowing:

• Propositional knowing — knowing that (facts)

• Procedural knowing — knowing how (skills)

• Perspectival knowing — knowing what it’s like (first-person experience)

• Participatory knowing — a deep sense of belonging to and being at home in reality

The diagnosis of our ill is fairly straight forward: Modern culture has become obsessed with propositional knowledge (data, information) at the expense of the others — especially participatory knowing, which is the foundation of all genuine meaning.

Let me emphasis that point: 
Participatory knowing is the foundation of all genuine meaning. 

He also emphasizes a term he coined, relevance realization, referring to our cognitive capacity to discern what matters, what to pay attention to, and how things connect. When relevance eludes us, we develop mental disorders, often marked by maladaptive survival strategies that keep us stuck in meaningless cycles of anxiety or depression.

While cognitive behavioral therapies can help stabilize people, and while other therapeutic interventions such as medication and trauma therapy can reduce symptoms and provide relief from highly reinforced beliefs, these interventions do not provide access to meaning. Vervaeke offers 5 options that can help with this:

1. Recover participatory knowing — not just believing things about the world, but cultivating a felt sense of belonging to reality. This is where practices like meditation, contemplation, and philosophical dialogue can help.

2. Transformative experience — meaning isn’t just found, it’s made through genuine self-transcendence. He points to Neoplatonists, the Stoics, and Buddhism to argue we need practices that change not just what we think, but who we are — what he calls “self-transcendence.”

3. The “Axial Age” as a model — he looks to the great transformations of the Axial Age brought about by the Buddha, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets as examples of cultures that successfully navigated meaning crises. They developed new practices or inner technologies for transforming consciousness.

4. Adopt the model not the solution — Vervaeke resists the move to adopt ancient solutions as they are because in many ways they have ceased to work in our modern age. He pushes for a non-dogmatic view of spiritual life and this resonates with many who have left traditional religions that stifle thought and imagination. It seems that a wholly new kind of religious experience is needed.

5. Nonduality and flow — he puts weight on personal experiences like flow states and gnosis, where the subject/object divide created by Ockham soften and one feels genuinely at home in what one is doing.

In Summary

We are experiencing a crisis: The cognitive and cultural frames and narratives that once connected us to each other and to a felt sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging have unraveled as mechanistic and reductionistic models have proved more reliable at making things. Doing has become the focus and productivity has become the measure of worth.

Vervaeke’s Solution: Build an ecology of practices — draw on ancient wisdom traditions and modern cognitive science to restores participatory knowing, enables genuine self-transcendence, and connect to a sense of being at home in reality. He describes himself as a Neoplatonist and nontheist, revealing his rejection of Ockham’s razor as a basis for meaning, and a reimagining of the forms with the benefit of cognitive science and over 2 thousand years of collective thought.

My Perspective

I accept Vervaeke academic work. I’ve found no other scholar with as comprehensive a grasp of history and modern science as him. I arrived at similar conclusions about the crisis but through less rigorous means. I knew that much of my faith in Christianity was at odds with my acceptance of scientific truths, but didn’t know how to harmonize the two.

Like many I had to admit the efficacy and power of the scientific method, not just to produce valuable tools, products, and treatments, but also to keep us from falling into various fallacies and self-deceptions.

My work continues to integrate what I know to be true from science, philosophy, and religion, and to construct my own ecology of practice with the idea of using imagination, diologos, and other intuition-based methods to uncover a new framework that can work to provide meaning to myself and others. We are, I believe at a new axial age, and my tradition, Christianity, must evolve or fail.

How this Relates to my Coaching Practice

Carl Jung’s bold intuitive and experiential project continues to ripple through our culture generating new therapeutic techniques and insights despite how behaviorism and reductionism have dominated academia for the last 40 years, riding as they do on empiricism, critical thinking, and the success of the scientific method.

I embrace all that science and technology have to offer, and do not want to slip into the woo woo world of pseudoscience and superstition. But I also recognize that there is a resurgence of interest in the world of forms, be it through Neo-Platonism, panpsychism, or idealism. I lean more towards Philip Goff’s view of panpsychism that holds that the physical world is fundamental, but its intrinsic nature is consciousness.

My goal is to use Jung’s discoveries, as well as those of subsequent thinkers to balance the current extreme positions of either outright rejection of science, or outright rejection of religion and philosophy.

As a partner with my clients I use curiosity, openness, and dialogos to explore each person’s unique path and enjoy the insights that come from collective intelligence. I use my sensitivity and intuitive kindness to appreciate and support each person’s work to know themselves better and find new and lasting meaning in their lives.

A Place to Yump

In conclusion, we all need a secure place from which to jump into new opportunities, new ways of seeing, and new meaningful experiences. The coaching relationship is such a place. If you would like to see if a session might work for you, please reach out to me for a free 15 minute Q and A about what working with me could like like. For more information visit the FAQ page Is Still Stream Coaching Right for Me:

Turbidity - The cloudiness or haziness of a fluid caused by large numbers of individual particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye. The measurement of turbidity is a key test of both water clarity and water quality.

Mental Turbidity - The cloudiness or haziness of the mind caused by large numbers of individual thoughts and emotions that are generally invisible to consciousness. The measurement of turbidity is a key test of both clarity of mind and the quality of thought.

Turbulence causes turbidity. Both in a stream and in our life. But actually, as a metaphor this only works some of the time. When a stream is running through a mature BC landscape where I live, its usually very clear and you can see through it easily to the features under the water; but in a scared landscape the heavy coastal rains wash away fine particulates that then accumulate in streams and make them cloudy. And the torrents that rush through a wounded landscape are very turbulent, and this turbulence does in fact lead to turbidity downstream.

Likewise in my inner landscape. When there is a wound my inner rains cause torrents that work on the wounds to cloud and haze my mind for a time, but as the inner turmoil lessens, clarity returns.

This basic idea informs still stream coaching, as does the fact that turbulent streams are full of bubbles and swirling water, so it is difficult to see very far in such water even if the turbidity is low. All is jumbled and confusing and hard to see. But when the stream flattens out and the water becomes calmer, the waving water plants and swimming fish can be seen below the surface.

So that is what I aim for in coaching sessions, a flat spot in the stream where we can see not the wound, as that is generally the work of a trained counselor, but the fish and waving plants which metaphorically refer to the things that reside within you that you many not have realized you had, or that you only occasionally found on previous fishing expiditions.

Getting to stillness, however, for most people, is not easy. And part of the reason I focus on streams in my coaching is because flow is both ever present with us, but also the result of stream work. Because just as too much turbulence is a problem, too much blockage is too. In this analogy turbulence can stand in for anxiety and blockage can stand in for depression.

By address both the turbulence and the blockages, we can achieve the optimal level of flow, not to fast, and not too slow, and the rate of flow is different for everyone, but erosion and stagnation are not.

Where I live, the best places are mature ecosystems in which flow is well regulated by the natural flora, trees and plants and moss and ferns all mitigating damage to the soil, while also drawing sustenance from the flow of water in a gentle and controlled way. This doesn’t mean there are no streams and rivers, just that they are part of the overall flow.

If you are experiencing mental turbidity or stagnation, which can also cloud the water, consider working with a coach or counselor to help uncover and face the wounds or blockages that interrupting the healthy flow in your life.

“Steam work” is a kind of work that increase clarity, enthusiasm, and purpose in life. It involves identifying stuck places, blockages, triggers, projections, and other psychological obstacles that get in the way of flow and using the awareness of them to gently loosen or nudge them out of the way of the flow.

What is the method?

To do stream work we use Jungian principles and a type of talk therapy called dialogos.

Jungian Principles include a respect for the unconscious parts of our psyche, recognizing the role of archetypes and complexes, and incorporating non-rational experiences such as dreams and rituals, to facilitate individuation.

Dialogos is a conversation that facilitate collective intelligence to emerge. It is not just two heads put together to solve a problem, it is more focused on creating trust and partnership so that new insights can occur within the dialogue that would not have been possible without the intention to operate in a "Being Mode."

Being mode is a commitment to prioritize an unhurried curiosity without a predetermined end. It isn’t a rejection of the idea of solving a problem, it just comes at the problem or challenge from a wider perspective. Through true curiosity without side or hidden agendas the coach and client can see through each other’s perspectives, and then use analogy, metaphor, and other techniques to create a new way of approaching the problem or challenge.

By doing this we can experience new awareness of our own biases and blind spots, leading to a richer understanding. People often say something like, “Now that I have said it out loud it doesn’t seem as scary,” or “As we are discussing it now, I just realized I’ve been avoiding the topic for years.”

The process is inherently transformative. As awareness expands through the dialogue, the client gains a more accurate perceptions of what is real, what is going on inside themselves, and what they need to do to increase flow in their lives.

This flow is similar to the flow defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi because plumbing the depths of your psyche for wisdom and guidance is engaging and challenging, two of the factors needed for flow. Finding that wisdom and guidance is both possible and likely.

Dialogos opens up insight that neither participant could reach alone. This is one reason that this kind of coaching is described as a partnership.

The coach’s role in this special type of dialogue is to ask perceptive questions designed to gently uncover unconscious elements that may include avoidance and self-deception, but also the deep resources everyone has access to in their deepest Self.

It can be described as the experience of moving a dialogue from exploration and clarity into insight and a shifted perspective.

Do I need a Coach?

Meeting with a Jungian coach is helpful for this kind of experience because few people have the opportunity to practice depth work on their own or with their family and friends. It is important to understand that the coach doesn’t deliver insight to you, but instead participates in this very focused form of discussion (dialogos) with the specific intent to help you uncover hidden aspects of yourself and get in touch with the various parts of your psyche. In this way you get in touch with your own inner wisdom.

The key distinction is that ordinary conversation is based on an exchange of information. Dialogos is seeking to uncover information not known to either person consciously. It also tends to move people from having questions to living their questions¹.

Stream Work is also informed by Internal Family Systems Theory and the spiritual insights from my long study of wabi sabi. As I wrote in my books on the topic, Wabi Sabi asserts that, "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.” This relates to individuation because we never fully arrive at a state of perfection, stream work is never finished, and we all eventually die, but in the life we have, in the time we have left, we can experience more and more insight and integration on the journey toward what Parker Palmer calls, “a hidden wholeness.”

[1] “The purpose of a Jungian coach is to honor the individuation process.” - Handbook of Jungian Coaching by Akke-Jeanne Klenk.

[2] A model of development based in the research of Clare Graves, and popularized in such theories as Spiral Dynamics.

Accepting Jesus… and Earl

At the age of 15 I accepted Jesus into my heart and proceeded to talk internally to Him on a regularly basis, for many years. I also talked internally and sometimes vocally to God, and I tried to listen for Their answers to questions I would ask.

One time I asked God if I was going to marry a particular young woman that I was very deeply enamored with. A strong inner voice said yes, and it felt like God speaking to me. The inner voice was authoritative, masculine, and confident. It must be God! I did not marry her.

Some 40 years later I tested a new voice, that of a “tree spirit” I had encountered named Earl. Earl spoke to me in a particular park a short drive from my home. Was Earl really a tree spirit or was he just another voice inside my head? I needed to know.

It was an early morning, still dark, and I was approaching the park to take some sunrise photos on the beach, but I was still 5 minutes from the gate that was kept closed over night. The gate was located down a dark country road and was not due to be opened for another hour, so I asked Earl internally, “Hey Earl, are you there?” To which I received a hearty, “Richard, yes, I’m here.” So I asked, “Is the gate open?” and Earl answered, “No, not yet.” A few minutes later I rounded the corner to see that the gate was, contrary to Earl’s intel, wide open.

Interpreting this experience took weeks. I wondered, is Earl just a figment of my imagination? Is Earl a real tree spirit, but a trickster? Is Earl real but he wanted to instill a sense of doubt in me? Is Earl an emergent quality of me when I am near that piece of land so that Earl can only “see” what I can see? Is Earl like a cosmic AI confirming my own beliefs and expectations rather than giving me independent information? Or is Earl the devil, messing with my mind?

Voices in My Head

Experiencing voices in your head is common. Many people report hearing one or more voices in their head with varying degree of loudness, and with different attributes such as accents, higher or lower tonal ranges, and different genders. Some voices are strong and confident, some soft and shy, and some have strong emotional overtones, sometimes sounding angry, disgusted, curious, judgmental, light hearted, and so on.

Sometimes these voices try to motivate us to do something, “Come on, you know that kale is good for you, eat it!” or “Danger Will Robinson, stay away from that nasty person!” Some people say they don’t have any voices in their heads at all, just a silent awareness that doesn’t speak, and some people don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, thinking that voices in the head are a sign of mental illness.

Clearly for me, the voices in my head are often wrong, despite how confident they sound or how convincing their arguments are. Since that early experience of the “voice of God in my head” I take what inner voices say with a grain of salt. They are not trustworthy.

Who can you Trust?

Because of this failure of my inner voices to give me reliable information, I moved, in my twenties, from trusting my internal connection to God, to trusting the scientific method. I looked for what was real and trustworthy, listening to other humans who were experts in a field, but listening critically. Were they also just hearing what they want to hear, seeing what they wanted to see, and finding what they want to find? “The confirmation bias is strong in you, Luke!” It is strong in all of us and this is why the scientific method is more important than any other, it helps us avoid self-deception.

I never completely lost my belief in God, however, and while I eventually stopped expecting any kind of trustworthy answer to my prayers and questions, I still accepted that the bigness of the universe and complexity of life had a lot going on that science couldn’t currently or adequately explain. And even when it could, I often felt something was missing.

Of course “science” is as susceptible to the failings and foibles of any human endeavor, but the method remains valid if followed carefully. I continued to find reliable and trustworthy answers from scientists. Most people in the fields of science seem rational and logical and interested in truth.

So on average, I trust scientists the most.

Oh, and Beauty

Then one time in midlife I had an experience that shifted my thinking again. I was walking through a park near my home, and the sun was sparkling on a lake and I could see the sparkles through a curtain of new leaves. It reminded me of the lights blinking on the bridged of the Star Ship Enterprise bridge, the 1960s version. I wondered if there might be a message in the blinking and so stopped to watch it.

“Trust the beauty,” came unbidden into my mind.

I found this disconcerting and said out loud, “who said that?”

I listened but no answer came, so I turned to start walking again.

Then suddenly, “It’s all going to change,” echoed in my head.

Was this God or the devil I immediately wondered, reverting back to my old Evangelical conditioning. But something about it had the ring of truth and over the next few years I wrote two books on beauty that were fairly popular, and then experienced a profound amount of change, including a divorce I didn’t see coming, and new experiences I could not have imagined.

Were the unbidden words different from the answers to direct questions I had asked as a teenager and young adult? I decided they were, and it opened my mind to the possibility of deeper and more authentic experiences, but with much modified expectations.

What if I did not try to get an answer, I wondered, but instead focused on being open to serendipitous utterances?

Not Alone

The experience of hearing voices in my head with a range of authority and accuracy is not unique to me. Reports of hearing internal voices ranges from those who are barely aware of them to those who “channel wisdom from another realm” and I would place myself somewhere mid-way along that spectrum. My natural skepticism, fear of demonic influence (1960s cartoons of the angel and demon on each shoulder) and my abiding trust in science made me suspicious of the whole experience, but I also knew that my inner critic was one of the louder voices in my head and a fair bit of my therapy revolved around the messages it had for me.

Eventually I discovered the Internal Family System’s theory — a theory that arose out of years of clinical experience. IFS sees humans as having an internal family of parts. These parts are all variations of managers, firefighters, exiles, and guides. The inner family also has a leader known as the Self with a capital S. That Self is not born of trauma like some parts, but exists apart and unwounded. Much of the work of IFS is to unburden parts from the difficult roles they have taken on and allowing the Self to lead and guide.

Read more about my perspective on this here:

Getting to Jung

In my study of the work of Dr. Carl G. Jung and others in the Jungian tradition, I discovered a similar idea. In Jungian terms the Self is an archetype of wholeness for the psyche. In his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self Jung wrote: “The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of the conscious mind.” Jordan Peterson says that Jung conceived of the psyche as a place, in which the Self resides.

For Jung, the self is not just our sense of identity. Most of what we think of as ourselves, is the territory of the ego and persona. The Self, on the other hand, is a holon1 imagined as an inner sun drawing all the other parts around it like a solar system. While the Self is not actually seen as a separate entity within the system (the sun itself), it manifests at the center of a solar system and the ego is like one of the planets. For more details on this idea check out my longer discussion of the concept in my article Individuation and the Self:

Still in the Stream

Individuation and the Self

Spirituality…

Read more

5 months ago · 3 likes · Richard Powell

Demons and Daimons

The Jungian idea of the Self shares some qualities in common with the idea of the Divine Double, as outlined by Charles Stang in his book by that name. Both Strang and John Vervaeke point to Henry Corbin's work on the imaginal realm as a big influence on Jung’s conception of the Self.

Corbin and Jung knew each other and they influenced each other through their discussions and participation in the Eranos conferences. Corbin was one of the twentieth century's most important scholars of the divine double idea as it is expressed in Islamic (Sufism) and Platonic traditions.

The Divine Double points to an idea in circulation since before Socrates. It is the idea that every being (not just ever person) has a twin or double at some other level of existence. Stang outlines the widespread expression of this idea and notes that in most cases it seems to emerge from people’s experiences, rather than transmission from one culture to another. In general these ideas center on the belief that each person has a divine counterpart, twin, or alter-ego.

In western culture the divine double idea gave way to a more universal sense of us being made in the image of God. The apostle Paul wrote that “it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.2” and he affirmed the idea of being conformed to the image of Christ.3

Growing up in a Christian culture, and living within Evangelical Christianity for many years, I both struggled with but ultimately accepted the idea that surrender to Jesus was an ongoing part of discipleship, allowing Him to live more fully in me each day. By so doing I was to be “transformed into the image of Christ.” This idea of transformation is stated in 2nd Corinthians 3:18:

“And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

This passage is usually interpreted to point to an ongoing spiritual process whereby believers, through the Holy Spirit, are progressively conformed to the likeness of Christ by contemplating His glory.

See also:

• Romans 8:29, “For those God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son,”

• 1 John 3:2 “When He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is,”

• Philippians 3:21 speaks of Christ transforming our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body, highlighting the physical aspect of this change.

• Colossians 3:10 refers to believers “putting on the new man who is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of his Creator.”

This idea, largely taken from the writings of the Apostle Paul, were used throughout the early years of Christianity to put to rest the idea that each of us has our own guiding entity or divine double. That was a pagan belief, and such influences were seen as evil, hence my suspicion, all these years later, that the voice I heard by the lake might be a demonic one.

Interestingly, the word demon has a colorful history. See “The Evolution of Demons” below:

Fragmentary Lectures

The Evolution of Demons: The Theological Politics of Language

During a recent Catherine Project reading group on Augustine’s City of God, we wondered about the meaning of the word “demons” in the text. What did Augustine mean? Would a pagan reader recognize the term or its use? There was no time to do any sort of deep dive during the meeting…

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a year ago · 1 like · Drakeford Kennon

Buried by the political move to secure Christianity as the dominant religion, the original idea of the Daimon has slowly been revisited. It has existed in Christianity to some degree in the idea of a guardian Angel, and writers such as Thomas Merton and Richard Rohr have talked about something similar when they refer to the “true self,” a presence different from our ego, that draws us into wholeness.

My current View

In reading both New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer, and Immortal Diamond by Richard Rohr I have accepted the idea that we have an ego (false self) and a Self with a capital S (true self) and that this way of seeing ourselves lines up closely with both Dr. Carl Jung’s idea of the inner psyche and Dr. Richard C. Schwartz’s conception of the Internal Family Systems (IFS).

I like Merton and Rohr’s term, the “True Self,” because it gets at the trouble I’ve had my whole life listening to my internal voices. Which ones can I trust, and in what situations? Discernment becomes a crucial skill in the inner world.

Never the less, among all these brilliant minds there is agreement — the True Self can be trusted because in some way is connected to the divine. The True Self is, I now believe, a way to talk about Christ or Buddha consciousness. Unfortunately much of the talk about those terms is over spiritualized, without a grounding in the study of consciousness itself, and more misleading than helpful.

My learning edge is here, on the boundary of academic study of consciousness, and the wisdom of ancient traditions who experimented with these idea for multiple generations.

Share your Thoughts

If you are interested in these topics, have scholarly recommendations, or know of researchers, writers, and others who are also exploring this intersection of thought, research, and experience, please share them in the comments.

I’m also interested to know which parts of this topic interest people the most. Is it the sense it makes of your life and experience, the intellectual satisfaction of something that rings true, or the application to your practice and work with others?

Type 1 - Better Flow

Creative and energetic flow is often impeded by unconscious aspects of yourself that were repressed or rejected early in life for social or survival reasons, but that over time have become a obstacle or impediment.

Stream work involves individuation, the process of examining these shadow elements so that they can be accepted and embraced. Often what is required is a shift in perspective to see the repressed elements through the eyes of compassion and understanding. Other times wounded or exiled parts can be brought into a better relationship or connection to your True Self. Techniques such as unburdening of parts and reassignment of roles can improve inner harmony and allow your thoughts and creativity to flow more naturally.

Another kind of flow is that feeling of rapt attention and enjoyment when you are fully immersed in focused activities, often oblivious to the passage of time. Psychologists discovered that this kind of flow is experienced most when you face a very challenging or complex task, but a task you have confidence you can complete.

Dr. John Vervaeke recently said, “When you are in the flow state, the egoic self-image drops away because all of that talk in your head about maintaining your egoic self image — how do I look? How am I doing? Am I failing? Am I succeeding? What are they thinking? All of that goes silent. This is a defining feature of a flow state. And yet, what doesn’t go away is your agency. In fact your agency and your experience of the world are enhanced. And what that shows you is the ego is lying to you when it tells you that it’s self image is yourself.”

This important distinction between your ego’s sense of self, and your True Self, is discussed in How Parts Relate to Self:

I will also be writing more about this in the upcoming post, “True Self.”

Flow in this sense, then can increase both our experience of being in the world, and reduce our anxiety or depression by taking our attention off of the source of our anxiety or depression.

Aha!

Dr. Vervaeke discusses how flow comes from a cascade of insights. With Aha moments and insight, we have the sense of “optimally gripping the world” or seeing reality deeply. He says that the more you experience flow, the more you have a sense of meaning in your life. See Dr. Vervaeke discuss this idea:

Lets face it, much of life is challenging and complex and our wounds, anxiety, and depression prevent flow. According to this idea, our life can be deeply meaningful if we feel up for the challenge. Unfortunately many of us are lacking the confidence and so the complexity and difficulty of life isn’t an opportunity for flow, it is just a series of difficult experiences.

Sometimes the biggest factor that makes the difference in these situations is having an empathic reflective coach who can remind you of your strengths and help you focus on the resources you have within you to succeed. In this sense, coaching is about helping you build both skills and confidence in order that your life can flow.

Type 2 - The Mercurial Sage

The second type of stream work is the work of the “stream enterer.” In Theravāda Buddhism, a stream enterer (a sotāpanna) is a person who fully understand the Four Noble Truths and have committed to being a good, kind, compassionate person. The path they take is one of abandonment and letting go. Letting go of the idea of a permanent self, letting go of misgivings and doubt, and letting go of attachment to rules and vows. Conversely, they embrace a unity view of all things, faith in the spiritual endeavor, and development of a principled approach to ethics within a community of fellow stream enterers. This is, of course, my interpretation of the meaning, uncoupled from the historic and cultural language.

What is important about Stream Enterers, is that they have had “direct, irreversible insight into the nature of reality.” This experience of seeing reality deeply is one that I have sought much of my life. The stoics have a word for decisive philosophical conversion - epistrophē. It is the moment a person genuinely grasps that virtue is the only true good. Before that moment, you’re fumbling in the dark. After it, you’re oriented correctly, even if imperfectly. This idea is also captured in Plato’s cave analogy when the prisoners turn and begin moving towards the light, and in the Christian tradition of metanoia.

Ichnographically, many of these traditions place the entry of water as a central image, with it’s connotations of washing, cleansing, and flowing. In the Buddhist tradition water symbolizes purification, fluidity, and the dissolution of rigid ego-boundaries. In the Christian tradition it symbolizes dying to the old self, referred to in some traditions as the false self, and emerging out of the water to a new life.

One problem with both traditions is that they mark this transition as one into “the true view” or even “the truth,” and this idea that one traditions has the “really right” view of things leads to a sort of arrogance about the group that is counterproductive for true personal and spiritual growth.

However this pitfall can be avoided with the model of the mercurial sage. The sage in ancient Greek and pagan traditions, was someone who achieved a complete, stable alignment of reason and virtue — analogous to full liberation. But sage as a designation was almost impossible to achieve in these traditions, and so was sidelined under the growing theology of Christianity.

Socrates is widely recognized as having a balanced, if radical, view of the sage. He saw the sage as an ever-learning individual who’s love of wisdom keeps them humble and engaged in the pursuit of deeper understanding.

Dr. Vervaeke’s “After Socrates” series explores the Socratic model in great detail.

For the purpose of coaching, the idea of the sage is an abiding template that can guide the stream enterer to a more expansive end. Several traditions have a form of the mercurial sage.

• The Confucian junzi (exemplary person) who is always in a process of self-cultivation, never declared complete;

• The Jewish model of Torah study, where argument and re-reading are themselves the spiritual practice — the talmid hakham (student of the wise) who never stops being a student;

  and

• The Christian mystic’s apophatic tradition — knowing God precisely by un-knowing, by recognizing that every concept falls short of the divine.

If you resonate with any of these traditions, or with the idea of a life of closer apprehension of reality, then stream work may be for you.

In the tradition of Socrates I don’t claim to have answers, but I do claim to have found methods and techniques for going deeper in to this mode of being.

Are We Really Made of Parts?

In the 1980s Dr. Richard C. Schwartz began developing the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model and it has become the most popular “parts” therapy today. In his early work with patients who had eating disorders he heard them say things like, “a part of me believes that the thinner I am the more attractive I am,” or “when I overeat, a part of me says I’m weak and unlovable.” Dr. Schwartz took the “a part of me” part seriously. Maybe it was just a part of the person that thought or felt that way, and he became curious about that part — why did it think that way, and why was it so influential in the person’s life?

In 2000, he formed the Center for Self-Leadership, later renamed the IFS Institute, to promote the model in clinical, counseling, and coaching practices. Since then the model has become the most prominent alternatives to behavioral and cognitive treatments that dominate the space due to their effectiveness.

The fundamental idea of parts was proposed as far back as the influential book, Man and His Symbols, Edited by Carl Jung in 1964. In part 1 of the book Jung wrote about dreams, “It is on such [dream] evidence that psychologists assume the existence of an unconscious psyche — though many scientist and philosophers deny it’s existence. They argue naively that such an assumption implies the existence of two “subjects,” or (to put it in a common phrase) two personalities within the same individual. But this is exactly what it does imply — quite correctly.” He goes on to say that this state of division within the individual is not pathological, but quite normal and the result of the development of consciousness.

Dr Michael Sebastian in his paper, “Exploring Psychological Multiplicity in Jungian Psychology, IFS, and Schema Therapy,” points out that “William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), described the self as inherently divided, noting that individuals often experience conflicting desires and voices within their inner worlds. This fragmentation, he argued, was not necessarily pathological but a natural aspect of human psychology.”

Many remember cartoons from the 1960s depicting an angel and demon figure perched on a person’s shoulders trying to convince the person to follow his desire, or follow his principles or values. I suspect this experience of division within ourselves goes back further than these references, we find suggestions of it in scriptures and literary works thousands of years old.

Schwartz’ unique contribution was to bring Morton Mendel’s Family Systems Theory to this inner community. Schwartz identified a dynamic between the parts and a way to better integrate the “committee” that is us. The technique involves respectful dialogue with each part and building trust in what has come to be recognized as Self with a capital S.

Kenneth Gergen, in The Saturated Self (1991), argued that our ability to have different parts allowed individuals to let “different selves” emerge depending on the context and situation. Indeed protector parts can get very good at protecting us, and nurturing parts can get very good at parenting, and so on.

Parker J. Palmer in his book, “A Hidden Wholeness,” discussed the fact that we have this divided self, noting that we recognize it most when there is a separation between our inner truth and outer role. He calls this the “gap between our onstage performance and backstage reality.” Jung identified this reality as a distinction between our personas and our inner self. And when he said self, he envisioned something like an inner solar system where various parts orbited a central identity that later writers have called the true self or, you guessed it, simply Self with a capital S.

Self with a Capital S

In Chapter 3 of A Hidden Wholeness, Palmer explores the idea of the true self, saying, “We arrive in this world undivided, integral, whole. But sooner or later, we erect a wall between our inner and outer lives, trying to protect what is within us or to deceive the people around us. Only when the pain of our dividedness becomes more that we can bear do most of us embark on an inner journey towards living, “divided no more.””

Palmer used the idea of the Mobius strip to reveal that the two “sides” of the strip continue to co-create each other as we move around the strip. There is a wholeness, even as there are two sides. This is a nice way to understand how we can be “us,” or “who we are” as an individual. We (plural) as one (unity).

Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation, describes when God discovers the divine identity in us, “At that moment the point of our contact with [God] opens out and we pass through the center of our own nothingness and enter into the infinite reality, where we awaken as our true self.” This is a realization that God sees God’s essence in all things, but also personification can be understood as a natural product of consciousness, both God’s and ours. In this sense, our self is selves all the way down.

A Critical Mass of Self

In an article on the IFS institute website[6] Dr. Schwartz describes his discovery of a calm compassionate Self behind the parts of several of his clients. He writes, “When they were in that calm, compassionate state, I’d ask these clients what voice or part was present. They each gave a variation of the following reply: “that’s not a part like those other voices are. That’s more of who I really am. That’s my Self.” He goes on to describe working with another client and how his own inner parts raised fears and concerns until there was a breakthrough in which the client’s own compassionate self was revealed. It is a deeply warming and encouraging account of Dr. Schwartz’ persistence and how his own centering in “Self” with a capital S creates a therapeutic trust. Dr. Schwartz writes that over the years he has, “come to trust the healing power of what I’ll call the Self in clients and in myself. When there’s a critical mass of Self in a therapy office, healing just happens.”

In an interview with Tami Simmon for Sounds True, Dr. Schwartz explained, “… that’s the way I’ve come to see Self, that it isn’t individualized; it’s not this little particle inside of us; but that actually, it is a field or a wave; and that when you enter that (and mystics have entered that for years; people can enter that these days through psychedelics often or meditating) you lose the boundaries around your individual body actually a lot of the time, and enter that field, you do feel this enormous connectedness and sense that we aren’t really different, we aren’t disconnected in the way we have been. And that then if you can bring that awareness, that C word, connectedness, back into your individual, body-bound Self (which is a lot of the impact I think of psychedelics now) it really changes many things in people’s lives, just that knowledge that we’re not these isolated little units.”

In the original article mentioned above, Dr. Schwartz says it another way, “Though they used different words, all the esoteric traditions within the major religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam – emphasized their same core belief: we are sparks of the eternal flame, manifestations of the absolute ground of being. It turns out that the divine within – what the Christians call the soul or Christ Consciousness, Buddhists call Buddha Nature, the Hindus Atman, the Taoists Tao, the Sufis the Beloved, the Quakers the Inner Light – often doesn’t take years of meditative practice to access because it exists in all of us, just below the surface of our extreme parts. Once they agree to separate from us, we suddenly have access to who we really are.”

Dr. Schwartz says we can tap into Self at the very core of our being to provide a “deep keel for our sailboat in the storm,” This core, when we are grounded in it, keeps us centered in what he calls “… the deep ground of our being…” a term popularized by Paul Tillich.

Is Schwartz saying that the self at the core of our being, the Self with a capital S, is God? Perhaps not as some theists might conceive it, but I think he is suggesting something along those lines. For Schwartz (and perhaps Jung, Merton, and Palmer too) the Self with a capital S is a field in which we all participate and that connects all of us. Less an individual being, and more a universal presence manifesting or embodying the 8 Cs of the theory.

If Dr. Schwartz is correct, and I think he is, the coach and therapist’s job begins with an intention to heal and stabilize their own inner system to allow Self to flow freely.

As a Coach I will:

• make enough space in my life for this work, and allowing enough time to build an ecology of practice around the 5 P’s.

• hold space for others to experience a greater flow of Self, and to experience the healing power of the 8 C’s.

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References - the C’s and P’s

The 8 C’s and 5 P’s

The 8 C’s of IFS are the core qualities of the Self:

Calmness: Emotional regulation for a strong stable systems that feels safe and can not be easily disrupted with turmoil, noise, or agitation.

Curiosity: Fascination, interest, and attention to novel or wonderous objects, situations, or experiences from an inquisitive desire to know and understand.

Clarity: A sense of seeing and understanding things and situations accurately and without confusion, gaps, or blind spots. In the context of coaching, it is seeing your parts and their roles without being overwhelmed by emotions or a desire to look away.

Compassion: The deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another that inclines or motivates a person to give aid or support or show mercy. It is essential to foster towards our parts as part of the process of affirming the effort and cost to fulfill their role.

Confidence: The feeling of assurance or certainty, especially in an ability, such as the ability to lead the internal system.

Courage: The state or quality of mind that enables one to face danger with self-possession, confidence, and resolution. In this context it is the inner fortitude or strength to face combative, vulnerable, or resistant parts or difficult emotions.

Creativity: The ability to bring into being novel or original ideas, stories, and objects, including the creation of innovative solutions and responses, such as new jobs for parts to do and unique ways that parts can resolve internal conflicts.

Connectedness: being bound together, joined, or united and the way in which things make contact, form networks, and form part of a whole. In groups it is the sense of belonging through social interaction and sharing. Internally is is a sense of unity and harmony within your parts.

These qualities are not just concepts—they are somatic signals (body-based experiences) that indicate when you are accessing your true Self. When you embody the 8 C’s, you’re no longer reacting from protective parts but leading from your authentic core. The Self is considered un-damageable and already present, even when obscured by trauma or stress.

The 5 P’s

Dr. Schwartz also frequently references the 5 P’s of IFS that he says embody the qualities of the Self:

Presence: Being fully aware and grounded in the present moment, observing internal experiences without judgment or the urge to fix.

Patience: Allowing each part of the system time to express itself, recognizing that healing unfolds gradually and requires space.

Persistence: Committing to the work even when it becomes difficult, consistently returning to the process with gentle, compassionate engagement.

Perspective: Stepping back to see the bigger picture, understanding parts’ roles and intentions within the whole system without getting caught in their immediate reactions.

and,

Playfulness: Approaching the inner world with lightness, curiosity, and creativity, which helps reduce resistance and encourages openness.

Types of Flow

The term flow was popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s. It refers to a state of deep concentration and absorption in an activity because of a balance between the challenge of the task and the skill level you have for that task. When you are confident you can meet the challenge, you experience optimal engagement and intrinsic motivation.

Dave Evans suggests that this state lies in a sweet spot between anxiety and boredom. If your skill is not sufficient, you experience anxiety (it is too hard!) and if the task is too easy you experience boredom (I need something more challenging).

Evans, working out of the Stanford Life Design Lab he co-founded, has extended the idea of flow, noting that meaning arises not from future achievements (the completed task), but from full participation in the present moment (the flow state).

Flow, therefore, offers an “intense experience of being alive,” making even mundane tasks meaningful if we can change the way we view them. For a good introduction to Dave Evan’s work, try the podcast at Good Life Project.

Flow World vs. Transactional World

Evans contrasts the “flow world,” which values presence and experience, with the “transactional world” focused on output and impact. Much of life is framed by transactions. For example going to work to receive a paycheque. But transactions and the measures of performance that determine how much we can transact, have a dark side. It is called the cult of productivity, a kind of brain washing that is deeply imbedded in western culture. Much of the “motivational” style of coaching has been directed at goal setting and goal achieving, trying always for maximum impact. Such work is important, we all like to feel able and competent, but the world of impact has overshadowed the flow world of “presence.”

Evans, who led the design of Apple's first mouse and is a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford University, is no stranger to maximum impact. He made a name for himself with excellence in design and productivity, and has worked to balance high achievement with “simple flow” — what he describes as engaging with reality in the current moment. Rather than it all being about peak performance, he invites us to see the compliment, something I paraphrase as Deep Presence.

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Deep Presence?

How does one cultivate deep presence in your life?

Both psychology and spirituality have long recognized the value of deep presence for healthy communities and individuals. This is sometimes described as, “the practice of the presence,” “holding space for others,” “mindfulness,” and other terms that emphasize setting aside ego-focused activities for truly “being”.

Join with the Flow

P.T. Mistlberger in his book, Rude Awakening, says that the word translated as Zen, Cha’an, and dhyana are sometimes translated in English as meditation but, “In fact [the original] carries complex meaning, denoting various levels of progressive deepening of meditation, but the essence of the meaning of the word is to ‘join with the flow’ of each moment. This is a key insight because in the realm of experience, there actually is no ‘now’, because all is in perpetual flux, perpetual change, like a moving river. The only thing static is consciousness itself. To meditate, in the true sense of the word, is to move beyond the constant change of existence, into the immutable and crystal-clear nature of pure awareness.”

This Buddhist idea of joining with the flow is in alignment with Evans’ work. Life is a perpetual flux, full of change and uncertainty, and so, much of the time, we will not feel up for a task. This can be because of a lack of confidence, or because we have suffered a series of legitimate defeats.

Still Stream Coaching focuses on increasing the flow rather than just increasing the productivity. This is done through Stream Work — carefully looking at the landscape of your life to see how to get better flow in all the streams of that landscape. It’s like you are going over each stream and removing impediments to flow and adding texture, technology, and structure to help regulate the flow so that activities don’t erode you with their energy.

It is not a question of how to avoid challenges and failures, it is question of how to face them, and what do we take away from them. The golden truth in this is learning. All these experiences are about learning and becoming a better human being. By refocusing on the becoming and on the being, we re-balance life so that what we do is in balance with who we are.

This decision to consciously improve flow, and feel the flow, is a practice, like meditation or exercise, or playing a musical instrument, with the difference that the sense of flow is not some far off reward for hard work. Instead it is a shift in perception. Even in failure there can be flow, even in stillness there can be a sense of movement. Flow, in this wider context, is the movement of attention and intention between doing and being. Both are part of the whole.

With this perspective of balance, we can follow the flow to what we truly want, and for many that might be more productivity, more money, or more esteem, but it might also be less stress, less busyness, and less drudgery. Meaning is found in different places for different people. For some it is making something, for others it is being with someone. When we can stay connected with meaning and purpose we can also face life’s challenges, whether we have the skills or not.

Flow of this kind, almost always starts as a trickle. But the more we make a channel for it, the more natural it becomes; and little by little, we open a path so that flow can occur more often and more freely.

Dr. Tracy Foose says we should reframe anxiety, “not as a frailty, but as the biological scaffolding of empathy, humility, and restraint.” While many of us feel concern about the rise of anxiety and worry about the deleterious effect of it on our children and grand-children, she argues it’s the only thing still holding us together:

Her message has significant ramifications for people with anxiety. She writes, “My years spent in [my role as Director of the Anxiety Disorders Treatment Program at UCSF] taught me that we are wired for fear and anxiety and the more we attempt to rid ourselves of these emotions the stronger they become. When we sit with our fear and anxiety and ask, "why are you here?" these emotions cease to act as tormentors and take on their intended role as protective messengers: helping us become wiser, stronger, and aware of goals and direction we did not know were there.”

Let that sink in — anxiety is a protective messenger to help us be wise and strong. As a fellow highly anxious person, I discovered this role for anxiety only after 30 years of suffering. It was the Welcoming Prayer that taught me to welcome all my feelings and that once welcomed, anxious parts can be my biggest allies.

I also relate to Dr. Foose’ admonition, “Highly anxious people just have a harder time feeling certain they know a thing for sure, but this keeps them more intellectually humble, open-minded and less vulnerable to black and white, zero-sum thinking.”

She references this study: Convergent Neural Correlates of Empathy and Anxiety During Socioemotional Processing; and this one: Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans to explain that Bayesian learning makes Highly Anxious people more accurate in their predictions of future events. Bayesian learning is commonly used to discuss how to build more robust neural networks and artificial intelligence. Is it possible that highly anxious people have been selected for over time because their neural tendency to remain uncertain has given them an edge in predicting and avoiding the dangers of modern life, especially social dangers associated with targeted media manipulation?

In other words, do highly anxious people just have better bullshit detectors?

Perhaps.

But we can also mis-apprehend our “gift” and seek to avoid the unsettling consequences of anxiety, the heightened vigilance, second guessing, and exhaustion that comes from being constantly revved up by it. Dr. Foose explains that this can lead to an Anxiety disorder:

And anxiety disorders reduce our effectiveness in the world. So it is good to learn how to manage our anxiety and build a life that doesn’t fight against it, but integrates it.

If you are highly anxious, take heart, feel seen and heard, and welcome your unique ability to see and predict reality. In the moment of a panic attach or crippling sense of shame over what you are feeling, take a step back and give yourself some patience and support.

The long term project is to weave together an ecology of practice that helps you leverage the power of anxiety. This is what Dr. Foose is getting at when she talks about character:

I can affirm that character is not a simple fix, but it is a long term benefit. A benefit not only to those around you, but in the end to yourself. Anxiety has given you more humility, accuracy in predictions, empathy, and sensitivity to others suffering. As Dr. Foose says, we need as a society to stop rewarding insensitivity, arrogance and irresponsibility, and take narcissists off the stages. What we need now are Highly Sensitive Highly Anxious leaders who have learned to dial down, or balance out their anxiety with self compassion and an strengthening ecology of practice.

Thanks for visiting Still Stream Coaching. To help decide if this service is right for you, I created the following pages:

Is Still Stream Coaching right for me?

Coach or Counselor?

Fees and Packages

My Goal for my Clients

My goal as a coach is to support people to experience more flow in their life, to increase their clarity and enthusiasm, and to deepen the journey into wisdom and service.

If this sounds like something you would like to try, reach out to me at stillstreamcoaching@outlook.com to arrange a free 15 minute consultation, book a 15 minute consultation on my calendar, or check out one of the links mentioned above for more detailed information.

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