12 min
🪔Don’t Block the Hearth Fire🔥; Reclaiming the Soul of Therapy by Embracing the Awareness of Death The Taproot Therapy Podcast - https://www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com
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- Mental Health
Find more free resources on the website: https://www.gettherapybirmingham.com/
In my house, like in most houses in America there is a fireplace. My wife and I do not often use our fireplace. In fact, I am not even sure if it works. Now that there are more efficient forms of heating installed in most homes there is really no need for fireplaces, but they continue to be built all the same. Any interior decorator or homemaker worth their salt will tell you that whether or not a fireplace works it cannot be blocked, and furniture must be placed so that people can gather around it. The style of houses that we build today are still based on the same basic floor plan of the ancient Roman style of architecture. In Rome, houses were built around a lares, or hearth fires, where penates, ancestral gods of the family, were revered and guarded the home.
Even though most Americans could not tell you why the hearth is afforded such significance, it is still agreed upon in western design language that the hearth is significant. The origin of the hearth idea in western architecture is one example of the many ways that the religious impulse indirectly recognizes a connection to our ancestors. As humans we long for transpersonal and trans-generational connectedness. Jungian oriented therapists help clients cultivate the transcendental and reflective skills that a well-developed spiritual dimension brings into our lives.
Inhale, exhaleForward, backLiving, dying:Arrows, let flown each to eachMeet midway and sliceThe void in aimless flightThus I return to the source.
–Japanese Death PoemGesshu Soko, died January 10, 1696, at age 79:
Stephen Jenkins is a palliative care counselor and writer that I admire. In his writing, he makes the argument that western culture has an unhealthy avoidance of the reality of death. Jenkins writes that that the fear of death in our society has robbed us of a spiritual dimension and tools for everyday life that ancient civilizations have always had. Acceptance of one’s own mortality and acknowledging one’s ancestors are directly related concepts. Jenkins’ argument is that acceptance of death is what gives a culture the ability to make meaning and understand its own story. If we deny or disregard death as an important part of our human experience, then we can never make meaning of our own lives. We must embrace this important part of our humanity if we are to be able to make ourselves whole (Wilson, T 2009).
As a society we hide children from the dying, and often even from the elderly; not allowing young people to understand this important stage in the life journey. We do not value the wisdom of the aged; we simply treat their cultural experience as out of date. It is our general cultural practice to pretend that we are immortal. We hide from death and all the trappings of death until it is too late. We wait until we are at the end of our life journey and we have not developed any tools to help us understand how to die. This practice is to our own deficit and the deficit of our culture. Jenkins argues in his interviews that our culture needs to embrace death and the process of dying in order to reclaim the spirituality our culture has lost (Wilson, T 2009).
It’s your life. You don’t know how long it’s going to be but you know it’s got a bad ending.
–Don DraperMad Men; Season 2, Episode 9
Spirituality in most religions contains a meditative or contemplative component used to orient one’s priorities, clarify goals and values, and discover one’s own personal identity and agency within the world. Although spirituality is a vague concept that can mean many things to many people, most therapists agree on the importance of spirituality in the therapeutic process. One of the major benefits of spirituality in therapy is that spirituality assists clients in understanding their place in the world, and helps clients accept their own finitude and mortality. This is true whether a person’s spiritual
Find more free resources on the website: https://www.gettherapybirmingham.com/
In my house, like in most houses in America there is a fireplace. My wife and I do not often use our fireplace. In fact, I am not even sure if it works. Now that there are more efficient forms of heating installed in most homes there is really no need for fireplaces, but they continue to be built all the same. Any interior decorator or homemaker worth their salt will tell you that whether or not a fireplace works it cannot be blocked, and furniture must be placed so that people can gather around it. The style of houses that we build today are still based on the same basic floor plan of the ancient Roman style of architecture. In Rome, houses were built around a lares, or hearth fires, where penates, ancestral gods of the family, were revered and guarded the home.
Even though most Americans could not tell you why the hearth is afforded such significance, it is still agreed upon in western design language that the hearth is significant. The origin of the hearth idea in western architecture is one example of the many ways that the religious impulse indirectly recognizes a connection to our ancestors. As humans we long for transpersonal and trans-generational connectedness. Jungian oriented therapists help clients cultivate the transcendental and reflective skills that a well-developed spiritual dimension brings into our lives.
Inhale, exhaleForward, backLiving, dying:Arrows, let flown each to eachMeet midway and sliceThe void in aimless flightThus I return to the source.
–Japanese Death PoemGesshu Soko, died January 10, 1696, at age 79:
Stephen Jenkins is a palliative care counselor and writer that I admire. In his writing, he makes the argument that western culture has an unhealthy avoidance of the reality of death. Jenkins writes that that the fear of death in our society has robbed us of a spiritual dimension and tools for everyday life that ancient civilizations have always had. Acceptance of one’s own mortality and acknowledging one’s ancestors are directly related concepts. Jenkins’ argument is that acceptance of death is what gives a culture the ability to make meaning and understand its own story. If we deny or disregard death as an important part of our human experience, then we can never make meaning of our own lives. We must embrace this important part of our humanity if we are to be able to make ourselves whole (Wilson, T 2009).
As a society we hide children from the dying, and often even from the elderly; not allowing young people to understand this important stage in the life journey. We do not value the wisdom of the aged; we simply treat their cultural experience as out of date. It is our general cultural practice to pretend that we are immortal. We hide from death and all the trappings of death until it is too late. We wait until we are at the end of our life journey and we have not developed any tools to help us understand how to die. This practice is to our own deficit and the deficit of our culture. Jenkins argues in his interviews that our culture needs to embrace death and the process of dying in order to reclaim the spirituality our culture has lost (Wilson, T 2009).
It’s your life. You don’t know how long it’s going to be but you know it’s got a bad ending.
–Don DraperMad Men; Season 2, Episode 9
Spirituality in most religions contains a meditative or contemplative component used to orient one’s priorities, clarify goals and values, and discover one’s own personal identity and agency within the world. Although spirituality is a vague concept that can mean many things to many people, most therapists agree on the importance of spirituality in the therapeutic process. One of the major benefits of spirituality in therapy is that spirituality assists clients in understanding their place in the world, and helps clients accept their own finitude and mortality. This is true whether a person’s spiritual
12 min