A loving, heart-centered therapist

I believe a therapist having good clinical skills is essential. I also believe having a regular mind/body practice is extremely helpful, not just to be able to teach these techniques to a client, but also to help the therapist cultivate an open and loving heart. This open and loving heart I am talking about is not just another name for our emotional heart. It is partly that, but it’s also bigger than that. In the qigong tradition, it’s what we call “heart energy,” and it refers to the spirit.

But we need to be careful here, because what is meant by that word in the East is generally very different then what we mean in the West. Here in the West, “spirit” gets interpreted in many different ways by many different belief systems, and the very existence of spirit is widely debated. In the East, the spirit is viewed as undeniable, something that comes with the package of your humanity. It lives inside of you; it is the source of your innate goodness. If you have a mind and a body, by definition you have a spirit.

In qigong, as in many Eastern spiritual practices, the natural outcome of a conscious mind/body practice is a more open heart. In Taoist understanding, when your mind and body are in balance, when you are grounded in your original nature, and when you continue to cultivate your energy through regular practice, your heart energy has no choice but to open. It is simply in the nature of things.

My teacher Master Lin and I call this phenomenon “the mind/body/heart” approach to health and life. We believe it is a more culturally accurate way to describe the concept of “spirit,” and it sidesteps all of the confusion around the term. When I use this paradigm to think about therapy, I am reminded that the goal of therapy isn’t only to be healed, but transformed. In the past, my clients too often left therapy using their emotions not just as a guide to sorting themselves out, but also as the major orienting principle of their lives. Too often, they left with a clear sense of their own personal boundaries and needs, but without knowing much about how to care for others, or how to feel more connected to the world at large. And the person most responsible for those failures was me. I didn’t know how to help my clients do anything else.

As I mentioned above, it’s vitally important for therapists to practice breathing and visualization if they want to teach these practices to others. It’s no less important for therapists who want to help open a client’s heart energy to also work on opening their own heart. We therapists are not trained to be openhearted with our clients. We are trained to be caring but clinical, taking care not to love our clients because of the potential to harm them by confounding their therapeutic process or exploiting their vulnerability. But this kind of response to a client, which is driven more by hunger than by love, is not what I’m talking about here.

Sitting in a session with an open heart and letting your loving energy flow freely isn’t about hunger. Nor is it even about feeling benevolent toward a suffering client. It is about your goodness seeing their goodness, your humanity witnessing their humanity. These days, when some difficult or confusing moment arises in a therapy session and I ask myself what to do next, the answer that often comes to me is simply, “Patrick, open your heart.” It changes everything. I shift out of my therapist mind, and sink my consciousness into my heart. I then don’t see them as needing some clinical intervention, but as needing my loving presence. When I do this my energy changes, and I often then watch as their energy changes. In the last two years, I’ve had more clients spontaneously tell me that they know I love them then I had in the previous 20 years. This loving energy knows the limits of what I can do, and the boundaries that are necessary. But that energy also wants the best for my client, and trusts in the power of that caring and love for healing and transformation.

We all know the transformational power of love. Be it from a parent, grandparent, lover, spouse, friend, or even our children, love changes us. A therapist, clinically sound and ethically grounded, who lets their clients know they are loved, offers them an opportunity to not just sort out their issues or to be healed, but to be transformed.