Life Awakening With The Human Trinity Principles: An Introduction Miriam Grace Granthier & Jillian Schofield.

Life Awakening With The Human Trinity Principles:

An Introduction

Miriam Grace Granthier &Jillian Schofield

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Today’s Workshop

The aim of today’s session is toConsider the concepts of truth, metaphor and reality in psychotherapyConsider the concept of Inner Voice & phenomenology Consider the function of altered perceptions in their natural form and within the structure of HTP

Leading on toIntroduce the concepts of Human Trinity Principles (HTP)To explain the practical application of HTP to life review workTo leave you with references, materials and further reading.

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A good traveller has no fixed plans

and is not intent upon arriving.

A good artist lets his intuition

lead him wherever it wants.

A good scientist has freed himself of concepts

and keeps his mind open to what is.

Tao Te Ching

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Truth, reality & phenomenology

People often confuse reality with truth. In psychotherapy we concern ourselves with the client’s phenomenology, i.e. their experience and their truth. This fits humanistic orientations. It also ties into neuroscience because we only have to think of a scenario for our bodily responses to activate and our neural networks to grow.

HTP is concerned with truth, not proving reality. We are not caught up in fighting for the best approach, we are looking for the next step in line with the client’s Inner Voice.

Psychotherapy has an evidence base that it works. For many years we did not know HOW it works, just that it does. Other less researched therapies also seem to offer solace and healing to those who seek it. Their theories may seem implausible* to us but the practice appears to be useful.

Example: It is unlikely that we can prove the existence of God, but phenomenologically many clients benefit from their relationship with God. It is a belief system that is beneficial to them and works.

* “An implausible hypothesis is a notion that stands an extremely low likelihood of being validated, and which is inconsistent with current evidence.”

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Reflections on reality EXERCISE 1

 Have you ever worked with a client and known what they are going to say before they say it?

Have you ever worked with a dream (your own or a client’s) and found truth and enlightenment within that which is not real?

Do you work with art, movement or drama? Psychodrama, family constellations, two chair work?

EXERCISE 2

 Have you or a client ever benefitted from a therapy that has an implausible theoretical basis (i.e. unlikely to be proven)

Have you or a client every benefitted from an unproved belief system (you can include spiritual beliefs)?

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Inner Voiceand Phenomenology

 Exercise 3

Think back to a time when you made a good decision in your life and did something that was really right for you. 

What did other people expect you to do? 

How did you make your decision? 

Did you use any other processes to make you decision other than thinking? Did you use your feelings? Your gut? Or your intuition? Did you let signs, dreams, or associations influence you?

 How did you know your decision was right? How did you feel when you made the decision? What did you notice in your body, mind and energy?

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Exercise 4

Think back to a time when you went along with something in your life that was really not right for you.

 What did other people expect you to do?

 How did you make your decision?

 Did you use any other processes to make you decision other than thinking? Did you use your feelings? Your gut? Or your intuition? Did you let signs, dreams, or associations influence you? 

How did you know making this choice was not right for you? How did you feel? What did you notice in your body, mind and energy? 

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Meditation

Exercise 5

Meditation

To connect with your awareness of

Body

Mind

Energy

Then ask your Inner Voice a question & listen to the answer.

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Altered Perceptionsand their function

Life changing events can alter perceptions:

Bereavement

Trauma

This brings about existential questioning

Why am I here?

Where can I find meaning?

And life review and often life direction changes

We do not need to die to ‘see our life flash before our eyes’. We can voluntarily alter our perceptions in therapy. HTP invites clients to access the Viewing Platform and voluntarily begin altered perceptions.

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The story of the Blind Men and the Elephant

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Perceptions and Viewpoint

The story of the Blind Men and the Elephant

The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar;

The one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope;

The one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch;

The one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan;

The one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall;

The one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.

But No one says, “It’s an elephant!”

No one asks the elephant

They don’t ask each other their view

No one sees the whole picture

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Group Activity

Exercise 6

Can you find the people who best describe your method of working

Find three things your group all agree on

Now find three things that another group of therapists does believe that you wouldn’t agree with with!

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Intelligent Intuition: Communal

CollaborationWhat can we take from that exercise regarding the way we understand and communicate about clients, people, ourselves?

When we work within our specialism for a long time we develop a sixth sense, and intuition. This is not spooky voodoo, this is a fast thinking method or Rapid Cognitive Processing. We think quickly within our own knowledge base.

What if the Blind Men started talking? What if each one of us draws on our own knowledge and our own access to the collective unconscious? How could it work if we collaborated? Can we collaborate and why would we? The Human Trinity Principle of the Three Wells explores this some more.

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To enter into the mystery where learning can occur, both desire and control

must be relinquished. The desire to be right must give

way to openness and receptivity to that which is.Grace Unfolding: Psychotherapy in the Spirit of the Tao

Te Ching

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Life Purpose Regulation Function

Initially we observed that people who were ‘forced’ into life review, by traumatic circumstances, seemed to space out and be concerned with meaning, feeling misunderstood and ‘not of this world’.

This wasn’t a negative symptom but a self regulating function a natural Viewing Platform.

And so the idea of the Viewing Platform was born, as a way of doing life review without needing trauma.

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Applying this natural function to therapy

Looking at life direction and life lessons and personal growth was a perspective that clients naturally were drawn to and engaged in when in crisis and they felt helped by this work.

Addressing life purpose and meaning and blockages seemed helpful with all types of client presentation.

We now observed how clients who were stuck, obsessive, depressed, fatigued and anxious, couldn’t hear their Inner Voice.

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The HTP Viewing Platform

In therapy we often encourage our clients to feel what they are feeling, to connect with it.

This raises the question of who needs the client to do this, the therapist or the client? What we suggest is initially to take a step back from the emotion, to stand a distance away from it, to stand on a platform and review it from a distance. To stand on a Viewing Platform.

As HTP has a strong self-empowerment, self-help basis, this can make therapy assessment or Life Review safer and more contained.

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The HTP Viewing Platform

Why?We can examine what is there, what is going on, what our lives mean, without the emotions attached (which often gets in the way of really reviewing something). To hear Inner VoiceDiscourages ‘overwhelm’Engages responsibility for self

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How does the Viewing Platform help?

Right of the client to be seen as clearly as possible not just the way we were taught

More client centered than therapist directed

Encourages listening to themselves, improves the internal relationship, decreases dependence on practitioner/s

Engages the client’s mind and observational skills

Broadens perspective by including a ‘bird’s eye view’

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HTP concepts

Human Trinity Principles

Unique Make and Model

Viewing Platform

Collaborative Working

Well Well Well

Inner Voice

Life Purpose Regulation Function

Life Review

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Human Trinity Principles

Human Trinity Principles works with the idea that all humans are made up of a trinity:

Mind Body Energy

This three-in-one, trinity, is inseparable and dynamic: what happens in the mind affects the body and the energy and vice versa.

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Three within one

But we are not in three parts

We are one, we are whole

The Human Trinity Symbol

The Mind, the Body and Energy are all interlinked into what we called the Human Trinity Triquetra model.

The three different systems are interlinked and have a circle further connecting them, this circle represents the Infinity Field, which incorporates the past, the present and the future.

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Unique Make and ModelHTP does not believe there is anything wrong with the patient/client/seeker - the elephant is not wrong for not being a polar bear.

HTP aims to help the individual explore and come closer to an understanding of their own unique ‘make and model’. We need to understand and see the unique individual.

It is client – centered in that the person’s uniqueness and choice is honoured, yet it goes beyond that by offering views not from the client perspective in order to stimulate the client to think outside their own box.

By working with archetype (dreams, goddess, astrology, enneagram and so on) or finding our ‘type’ (Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine, Myers Briggs or even psychiatric terms) we can choose to use labels not to DEFINE ourselves but to EXPLORE ourselves.

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HTP what is it?

HTP is a Soulistic therapy for the 21st century

Our approach has evolved by talking to other therapists who said, they often sense and intuiting their way into what actually works with their clients.

This coupled with our own realisation that we only see a part of the elephant and we can undertake as much training as we like we will never see the whole elephant.

We have a curiosity for seeing the whole and also a passion for uniqueness and diversity. One size does not fit all and we wanted to take the creativity of therapy further.

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Unique Make and ModelTo do this we all have to suspend our preferred labels, of ‘tree’ ‘wall’ ‘fan’ and take a look from all angles, listening to each other and most of all the seeker.

It is easy to see what we are used to seeing through our trained eyes. It is harder to suspend a structure that has meaning for us in order to find what has meaning for the other.

HTP is not a medical model: the seeker is not sick, we are not here to make them well. It’s about the experience and the journey, it’s about the pleasure for all involved in doing an important life changing jigsaw puzzle together.

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Communal working

The point of HTP is not to know everything, not to see everything or understand every treatment available, but to draw on a ‘world wide web’ of different therapies. (This is the HTP principle of the Infinity Field)

HTP works in a communal way, bringing together therapists and clients to work together to find and discover who the client is and how their mind-body-spirit balance is working and then to apply therapy that is tailored to each individual.

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Inner Voice

We believe that people know what is best for themselves and who they truly are.

However their life may have given them different messages or they have lost who they are.

So the aim is to stand on the Viewing Platform away from the emotion and to quiet the mind so they can hear their own Inner Voice.

The belief is that their Inner Voice enables them to self regulate.

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Multi -diciplinary

Its [research] major significance, it seems to me, is that a growing body of

objectively, verified knowledge of psychotherapy will bring about the

gradual demise of “schools” of psychotherapy, including this one [the

person-centered ‘school’].

Carl Rogers (2004, p. 268)

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Communal working We are inclusive of an almost infinite amount of research and therapeutic method and restricted only by our own limited capacity for understanding everything.

We don’t aim to use every therapy on every client but by working with an HTP model we have access to a great deal of mind, body and energy therapies, which we can use without bias or prejudice, and which we apply on the basis of client need and therapist skill and qualification.

The method trusts a lot to the previously mentioned rapid cognitive process, or intuition, a sense of being connected with our and each others’ unknowing-knowing through relaxation, trust and synchronicity.

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To enter into the mystery where learning can occur, both desire

and control must be relinquished. The desire to be right must give way to openness and receptivity

to that which is.Grace Unfolding: Psychotherapy in the Spirit of the Tao

Te Ching

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Case Example

Lucy left her job with anxiety and depression, she described that time, as a time where she could not take on anything new, her head was full For Lucy it was not a time for psychotherapy or a life purpose review, but a time for her body and energy.

Through therapeutic discussion with Lucy it was agreed she might benefit from yoga.

Lucy having a grounding physical and spiritual practice helped bring about a more peaceful mind. She has a new job.

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Well, Well, Well

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

Tao Te Ching 2

We use language from three different forms of therapy. We call these the three wells.

Body, Mind, Spirit.

The Human Trinity is made up of these three areas.

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“Psychological work is inseparable from spiritual development that truly transforms the soul. Pursuing spiritual work without working on our personality typically results in a lack of resolution of deep-seated issues and a lack of true integration of our spirituality, a situation that has limited and even brought down many spiritual teachers and traditions. Conversely, most psychological work is too grounded in believing the realm of the personality is ultimately real”. (p.38)

The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: Nine faces of the Soul. Sandra Maitri,

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A Therapy of Self Acceptance

Listening to their Inner Voice enabled clients to release blocks, for their energy to flow rather than being stuck by anxiety or dissipated by depression.

One HTP client presented with anxiety and discovered with HTP she had always had lots of

energy and was pushing it down because she had been told as a child that she was (her energy was)

naughty. By recognising this, she realised the energy was her natural self and not anxiety at all. She was able to connect with this quality through archetypal work. Her astrological archetype said

she had ‘boundless energy’. She was able to consider herself outside of the label she held about

this quality (‘naughty’ or ‘anxious’) by viewing herself from a previously unexplored perspective.

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Life Review

We see the idea for life review as a form of self regulation, a natural process that can come gently rather than in a way that turns our life upside down.

Are we stuck with beliefs from other people? Are we who we were told to be rather than who we are?A life review is to find your unique make and model.

 ”It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.” The Bhagavad Gita

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Life Review – a practical application

Birth Gifts

From Then Till Now

Life Patterns and Themes

Now

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Birth Gifts

Seven LensesNumerology

Birth cards

Astrology

Chinese astrology

Family stories, history, lineage, tales, siblings (including lost), birth order, parents’ ‘purpose’.

Ancestry, race, cultural, historical events

Body gifts (eg. DNA, hereditary traits, illness, gender, physical looks, intelligence, athleticism for example.)

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TestimonialEvents in my life over the past few years seem to have been telling me it’s time for change and to reconnect with my true life path. However it can be so difficult to see where that path lies, to strip away all the experiences and conditioning that have led me to where I am today and get back to what really matters to me.

I found the HTP workshops really helpful in giving me the opportunity to reassess where I’ve come from, where I am now and where I want to go from here. The focus on the combination of mind, body and spirit was really empowering; it was good to look at my situation from many different angles, all in the safe and supportive atmosphere of the group. I learned a lot about myself and gained some new perspectives and lots of inspiration for the future.

Catherine, Ambergate

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From Then to Now

Patterns and ThemesChildhood Dreams and Fantasies

Childhood stories

Including beliefs, introjects,

Timeline

Repeated family patterns

Body story

Spiritual Journey

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NOW

Full Triquetra modelArchetypes

Myers Briggs & Enneagram

Current thought patterns and cycles

Body presentation

Energy assessment (i.e. Chakras)

Inner Voice

Environmental factors

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Testimonials

“I feel I can be ME!”

A.G. Oakwood

“I feel so much stronger, I can see now that part of me that is Alan Sugar, and enjoy it!”

L.F. Allestree

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Other HTP applications

Courses

Books

Sessions

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TestimonialWhat I found really helpful from the sessions was the sharing and group work discussions. That not only helped see things about me more clearly but also other people's perceptions and issues and that we can all share. So much can be found in yoga, it is just how we express and label it that is really helpful to be able to badge things differently so this is accessible to as many people as possible.

I love chakra work as I  believe it and physically feel it. The astrology side is relatively new to me but I find it fascinating and, joined with the elements, works for me as it reminds us we are interconnected and part of nature. It all helped me to realise that nothing really matters that much to get myself in a tizzy.

P.W. Yoga Teacher

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Thank you

Any Questions?

We hope you enjoyed the workshop.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thanks to those who trialled the materials:

And those who have edited, fed back and read book drafts:

Our mentors, teachers, inspirational guides and helpers.

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ContactMiriam Grace Granthier

Telephone:

07969 092362

Email:

[email protected]

Website:

www.blue-skies.org.uk

Jillian Schofield

Telephone:

07779 243687

Email:

[email protected]

Website:

www.soulistic-therapy.co.uk