Hello and welcome. My name is Harmony Kwiker, and I am the founder of the Institute for Spiritual Alignment, where we offer ongoing learning opportunities for therapists and coaches who are really passionate about bridging the divide between traditional psychotherapy and coaching and spiritual transformation. If you’re a therapist or a coach who is really excited to support your clients, to shift from the condition patterns of the ordinary mind into a more awake state of their true self than this video is for you.
Before we dive in, though I just want to share with you my new book, align living and loving from the true self. This is a comprehensive spiritual guide. I really offer you a map of how to come back home to the truth of who you are, and how to bring that with you into your deepest intimacy, and relatingall of your relationships. I also have these new self-guided alignment cards that I designed to support you in, not only contemplating how to live and love from the true self. but also giving you sentence stems to try on different language and different different activities, with groups or with therapists, to really bring that alignment into a deeper way into the world around you.
So, as we talk about consciousness and supporting the transformation of our clients. I want to begin by sharing a personal story with you. I grew up in a family of healers, and so the trans personal and the spiritual and the more esoteric or new age concepts were really a part of my daily life. My mom was a breathworker. and my dad is a doctor of Osteopath, and he is a homeopath who is really a pioneer in nutritional medicine. and as I was growing up, I was exposed to so much alternative, healing and spiritual growth and personal development. A lot of my mom’s workshops happened in her home while I was there, so I was present at a lot of breathwork trainings in my house. I did a fire walk when I was 7, and I began transcendental meditation when I was 6, as I’ve shared before when I was 6 years old, is when I really started to become aware of the fact that I could see subtle energy.
I was really fascinated by subtle energy and being surrounded by healers. I also wanted to learn how to help people to move subtle energy. Nobody was talking about subtle energy, and I didn’t even have the language for it back then. But what I would do is when I would see this vaporous mock sort of covering a person’s heart, what I call emotional energy, pollution. The heart center wasn’t clear and clean and open. I would just ask the person to lay down on our couch, and I would go get a crystal from my collection. and I would place it on their heart, and I would instruct them to breathe into their heart and just take some nice cleansing breaths. And I remember looking at this energy center and seeing that the vapor muck wasn’t moving, and I was really concerned by that, because I really wanted to support the clarity of the energy body. and I wanted to know how to do that.
Over the years I had forgotten about that superpower of being able to see subtle energy. But when I was 22 years old I started practicing and teaching Yoga. when I was an undergraduate in psychology and English. and I was in a state of extreme suffering. I had fallen asleep to my true self. I had completely turned away from these intuitive senses of being able to see subtle energy. and I had even forgotten that I was able to do that when I was 6, and that it was trying to support the healing of people from such a young age, and my ordinary mind was really gripped and obsessive around thoughts of perfectionism, and I would barely eat, and I would exercise all the time, and I didn’t want to have an opinion, and I just I wanted to be perfect and get straight as and do everything right. I was really confused about why I was still suffering. I was doing everything right, but I was still in a tremendous amount of emotional pain. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was in so much emotional turmoil because I was hyper-identified with my condition, patterns, and my personality. Luckily for me, I had a really strong meditation practice. That I had begun when I was 6 years old, and was really reignited through my Yoga practice.And so one day, when I was in immense suffering, there was a solar eclipse happening, and I had just taught a yoga class, and I collapsed on the floor, and just this hopelessness that I would never get out of this pain. And after I cried and cried, and: I just really begged for some break from my pain and my suffering.
I went home really heavy and hopeless, and I decided to sit with my pain. I closed my eyes. I turned towards my emotional experience, and I sat with my pain for a very long time with deep curiosity, and ultimately a tremendous amount of love and self-compassion. And in that experience I shifted into an awake Aware state. That was the bridge to me accessing my True Self. I had a spiritual awakening, and I was so lit up and excited. But I didn’t know how to really integrate it, and embody that experience in any practical way. And I, as my life continued on, and I fell asleep to my true self again many, many times, and forgot the essence of who I am. Over and over and over again I continued to do the work. I stayed anchored in my meditation practice, and I have learned how to stay in alignment, and to be really curious and loving with myself when I am feeling under-resourced, or a sense of contraction in my body. But I do not hyper, identify, and cling to the thoughts in my mind.
Part of what makes that possible for me. Aside from my meditation, practice, and other devotional practices that I do daily is the work I do with clients. The more I have come into my own alignment when I sit with a client. What I’m doing is mapping out the constructs of their ordinary mind and their condition patterns, and I’m also mapping out the way that they relate to those patterns and to those thoughts and misbeliefs. I’m also mapping out the birthplace of those patterns. and how they relate to the birthplace of those patterns, and I’m mapping out several other constructs along the way, for example, their relationship to their desire. 51 their relationship to their power, their relationship to their intuitions, their higher consciousness to the present moment. to their bodies, to their sensations. And I’m really learning their internal world, and how they relate to different aspects of their internal world. So as I’m doing this, what I’m learning is the evidence that they collect that caused them to believe that they need to hold on to their ordinary mind.
Now the ordinary mind or the condition self is, holds the misbeliefs and the evidence that we’ve gathered throughout our life about who we think we are, or who we think we need to be. So the mask of our conditioning, the face that we present to the world the misbeliefs about the world about ourselves. : For example, the thought that I’m unlovable or other people. I need other people’s approval. or I’m. I’m not gonna ever get what I want. There’s many different ways,. obviously it believes that people hold in their ordinary mind. But when we are sitting with a client we have a really beautiful opportunity to support them, to wake up to the truth of who they are, to embody their truest self, their spiritual essence in a way that is uniquely authentic to the essence of their being. And the entry point to guiding this transformation is through the differentiation of the condition self of the ordinary mind.
So when a client arrives to a session with us, they more likely than not share with us all of the beliefs of their ordinary mind. and they might share with us their emotions that they have about that, and what their ordinary mind thinks about their emotions and about who they are. And if we, the space holder, the therapist, or the coach. collude with the ordinary mind, follow the path of the ordinary mind, get wrapped up in that ordinary thinking, and aren’t able to really stay back in our seat and be a clean mirror of reflection. Then we are encouraging the client to stay hyper-identified with their ordinary mind.
Now, in traditional psychotherapy and coaching, there is this unconscious motivation to get a client to have healthier thoughts or healthier behaviors. and in a trans personal container, and in a spiritually lined container the work is quite different is, we want the client to know that they are not what they think; that that who they truly are does not exist in their mind. And these are these 2 very different approaches. and what I have found in my work as a transpersonal counselor and a professor of transpersonal counseling is that the more space a client can create around the ordinary mind inside of the therapeutic container of the coaching container. The more spaciousness and clarity they can get around their own thoughts provides them with the entry point to shifting to an awake, aware state. So when we’re sitting with a client, if we can clearly map out what their ordinary mind thinks, and invite them to shift they are starting to shift consciousness.
So they walk in in a state of consciousness of the ordinary mind, and they begin to shift into consciousness of the subtle mind. We as the space Holder, we’re attuning to the subtle as I’ve shared in other videos. But we’re also attuning to the subtle, but the subtle mind is always a direct experience. It can be like a flashlight shining on a person’s direct experience, and that’s when they get really present. and I believe that the present moment is really our home base in a session with a client. It’s where we return to over and over and over again. Once a client shifts from their ordinary mind into the direct experience of the subtle mind that then becomes the bridge to shifting into an awake, aware state where the light of consciousness is on. They can see the trap or the matrix of the ordinary mind. but they don’t get tracked in it. They can zoom out and see it more clearly, with more clarity. And when they’re able to do that they can be in discovery about what else there is within them, they can explore the essence of who they really are. And so in this way, in one session with a client, they can actually shift states of consciousness.
There is a difference, however, between a state of consciousness and a stage of consciousness so to shift from the ordinary mind to the subtle mind to an awake, aware state can happen in an instant. We can all shift to an awake, aware state at will to embody an awake, aware state as a stage as the as really the home base from which we live, where we’re not identified with the ordinary mind or the condition. Patterns really does take time and integration and deeper psychotherapy. And with that I just want to share with you that I am really excited, that I have launched my online courses for the Institute for Spiritual alignment. and in that course I go deeper into the states of consciousness, and how to shift into different stages of of consciousness. along with how to work with subtle energy, how to hold sacred space, how to understand and utilize gestalt therapy in terms of your own creativity as a coach or a clinician. and so much more in that signature course. So I would love to have you reach out and ask any more questions about that if you feel called, and if that feels aligned with the truth of who you are. Thank you so much for joining me today.