Rise of the Conscious Therapist:
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*Editor’s Note: Elephant is not your doctor or hospital. Our lawyers would say “this web site is not designed to, and should not be construed to provide medical advice, professional diagnosis, opinion, or treatment to you or any other individual, and is not intended as a substitute for medical or professional care and treatment. Always consult a health professional before trying out new home therapies or changing your diet.” But we can’t afford lawyers, and you knew all that. ~ Ed
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Therapy is Evolving from the Clinical to the Conscious
“How does that make you feel in your heart and in your body?” I asked my client.
“Well it makes me think…”
I stopped my client in mid sentence. “I’m asking how it makes you feel…at the soul level, in your heart, not what you think.”
My client looked at me with a confused stare—realizing they’ve been navigating life thinking rather than feeling this entire time.
People can talk about their pain for years without ever feeling the pain or healing from the pain. Healing is a word rarely used in western psychology despite its important role in enabling individuals to show up consciously and presently in their lives. As a conscious therapist, I use the word healing regularly with clients because it captures something deeper than diagnosis, which is a word commonly used in clinical settings and western psychology. Other terms like symptom management and treatment plan hijack the entire purpose of why a person is seeking therapy in the first place.
Most people come to therapy with a deep desire to heal, even if they themselves don’t realize at the time. Whether that be to heal from trauma, shame, heartbreak, unhealthy patterns, or to better understand their sense of self and identity to navigate life with more clarity and purpose. Healing signifies a return to wholeness rather than a superficial label to be managed.
To help someone heal is to assist them in navigating their inner world with curiosity, compassion, and clarity. It asks questions such as: “What is this situation trying to teach you about yourself?” “What is it about this situation that triggered this reaction within you?” “What does healing look like not from your mind but from your soul?”
Conscious healing and conscious therapy go beyond examining a person’s external world and dive deeply into their internal world. Who was this person before the world told them who they should be? Who was their true self before they were put into their prescribed roles as student, son or daughter, sibling, worker, and all the other identities society labels and boxes people into?
Conscious healing and conscious therapy invite individuals to consider: What if anxiety, stress, and burnout aren’t problems to fix or be managed, but signals of disconnection from our true selves, our true identities, and our soul’s path? It holds a mirror and asks: Who are you really? Outside of the labels and diagnosis you were given.
Western psychology fails to adapt this perspective as it forces people out of the prescribed boxes they’ve been put into and recognizes each individual has a unique purpose, a soul, and a spirit. A conscious therapist recognizes that mind, body, and soul are connected. That physical pain is connected to emotional pain, and that emotional pain is connected to physical pain. Emotional pain lives in the body just as much as it lives in the mind and memory of an individual. Healing can’t happen by talking alone. If we ignore the body’s role, we miss where the pain is being held.
Until Western psychology recognizes the role of the mind-body-soul connection in healing, people will continue walking around not as whole, healed beings, but as scattered, disconnected fragments of themselves.
As conscious therapists continue to rise, let’s start asking what is trying to heal through you—and how we can walk beside you as you return to who you truly are.
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