As I have done each year since 2012, I spent the b’twixt and between days this festive holiday reflecting on what has been in 2025 and what is to come in 2026. I think its fair to say that over the past 15 years there has been a gradual shift in focus and energy from professional to spiritual intention setting; this year, heavily influenced by the material I was chewing for my wintering nourishment, it felt like I was simultaneously pondering how I work and how I practice: we might think of this as healing the soul (therapy) and healing the spirit (Buddhism).
In particular, my reading of Peter Kingsley’s “Catafalque” over the holidays has taken me back into the land of mysticism. It was a little over 12 months ago that I was here for the first time: reading of Simon Critchley’s work, delving into Thomas Merton, and arriving in Ken McLeod’s “magical” descriptions of Vajrayana. Such sources have been creating a turn towards realising Vajrayana Buddhism has more in common with mysticism than the Buddhism of the Hinayana and Mahayana.
“Mystic” (noun): a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect (Oxford dictionary).
I have shared many of the events that made 2025 a challenging and full year: moving to a new town, my father’s bad health and near death, and starting my yidam practice with “Vajrayogini”. Curiously – and what I will flag up now – all of these three invite a relationship with liminality – the transition from old to new home, between life and death, and the imaginal world of visualisation process that conjures the it does not exist and yet it appears. Re-starting therapy has been an incredible support during these past 12 months; and yet in that commitment “to go to pieces without falling apart” (to quote Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein) much has been stirred up, brought into clarity, and worked through. As the Buddhist sage Gampopa says “may the path clarify confusion”, as it is this vital step that allows dormant confusion to be transmuted to wisdom. However, one of the most challenging aspects of returning to therapy has been in fact, a twofold challenge: in choosing a psychodynamic approach for my personal therapy, how do I reconcile that with my own therapeutic approach which prioritises experience over interpretation? And furthermore, how do I not lose my transpersonal ontology and epistemology when working with a theoretical model of ego-relations? I spoke with my mentor about some of my challenges and they pointed out the paradigm clash; and one that needed pointing out and reframing within the dimensions of what Buddhism calls the relative and absolute truths: both a seemingly individual ego that holds wounds and an interconnected being whose true nature was and never can be afflicted by such wounding. Just this conversation and compass re-set soothed my being: yes, therapy is helpful….we can both honour our personal history (karma) and we don’t need to fall into the wound and believe it is who we really are.
Thus my first intention for the year to come: a re-pledging of my allegiance to the vaster perspective: to sit back in my experience, allow the “beautiful monsters” to appear; hold them tenderly and let them unfold naturally.
This isn’t easy though: it takes courage and faith* to sit back and leave our troubled souls alone. Undoubtedly, I benefit from holding a frame of the absolute nature and relative appearances. I have much to be grateful for my work (and the theoretical understanding of distress and its alleviation) and practice (the steadiness of mind from meditation and the various teachings I have learnt that bring together the two truths).
And it’s important for me to be able to hold both the vast and the detailed view of my human existence – because I also want to help others do the same; Carl Jung is one inspiration in this regard and so I was excited to receive Kingsley’s text. “Catafalque” is an invite to go even deeper into the depth psychology that Jung presented. I think what surprised me about Kingsley’s book (and it is but one view) is firstly how differently Freud and Jung saw things; and secondly, that Jung’s ideas have a more religious basis than I knew. Jung’s depth psychology is not simply a departure from Freud’s psychoanalysis; it has a completely different basis i.e. the psyche is not based on ego but encompasses so much more than an individual mind: We might say that Freud was a rationalist focused on the personal unconscious, while Jung was a phenomenologist and “prophet” who explored a deeper, mystical collective unconscious. Being the humanistic therapist and Buddhist I am, this phenomenologist tag helps explain my draw to Jung.
And its timely: coming toward the end of my current writing project, a book in which I am urging humanistic psychotherapists to get back to and deepen our phenomenological roots for the sake of experiencing the dialectic inherent to the flow of life. Timely: because I have been on a phenomenology deep dive professionally and personally. Phenomenology has helped me go deeper not only “inward” (to the gross and subtle bodies ie the physical and energy bodies), but also “outward” and realise the body is ‘merely’ the door to the world that I am always and already co-extensive with (hear Merleau-Ponty’s cry for the flesh of the world!). Timely, also because the next book is launching in my mind – and this re-visioning of Jung’s work in my own mind is helping me bridge (personally, professionally, spiritually) to integrating more of how phenomenology takes us outside of time and space as we know it: knowing the now. And, plot spoiler, the enneagram will be involved!
As an enneagram Six, my orientation (which is felt bodily) is forward toward the horizon. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger (through Thomas Fuchs’ work) have invited me to consider the sedimentation – if I turn attention away from the horizon “out there, in front”, turning it around “in and down”, I feel grounded and rooted. Roots are where we come from – the sedimentation and layers of past. Living in the front of my body, I lose my footing and tumble forward. I am slowly resisting this forward motion; and on the cushion I can consciously sit back (and therefore hold the wound, not perpetuate it). Jung (through Kingsley) is taking me deeper: To remember the dead. He describes Jung’s psychology as one of “compensation”. Our world is spinning out – as a collective we are all forward orientated. Everything is invested in progress, better futures – and the biggest learning is, so Jung / Kingsley point to, is in looking back to the ancient and learning from the past. This isn’t just a personal karma, it’s a collective one.
I knew of Jung’s passion for alchemy: but I had little idea that he was so interested in the gnostic traditions of Ancient Greece. And I now understand his criticism of westerners turning to the esoteric traditions of the east: he was adamant that “to compensate” for the current world demise, we need to transmute the collective karma of our lands. The wound of the West can benefit from the practices of the East: but if we think of buddhanature, the Western block to that is a very different elk. This is confirming some of my sense of the importance of liminality; and I’m sure to come back to this another time.
So another intention for me in 2026: to consider what is it to transmute and awaken through the wound?
One that is not just personal but collective? Life, and all its myriad of experiences throws our ego clinging into light…a la Gampopa! We might take these experiences to therapy; something is clarified. If we hold these injuries in our bleeding hearts, the attention and care soothes the subtle body: the affect, the wound, the narrative of the wound, even the sense of “me” who has been wounded starts to soften and loosen. At times, in my deepest meditation experiences there is no difference between the wound, the wounded, the wounder, and I get a sense how this personal work is for the collective***.
What remains a question for me is how I fold in the fruition view of Buddhism (we are already awake and Buddha) with the evil deeds often manifested by human nature. True nature, human nature. I am exploring what Jung brings with his writings on soul; that aspect of human being that Jungian Murray Stein says we must tease apart from our complexes and wounds, liberating it so it can be the divine at its core. I sense the work of Rob Burbea, a Buddhist influence by Jung in his “soul making dharma” is going to be of interest here…and I am bringing this work into my practice.
And so this is the main thrust of 2026: if it’s the mysticism thread that weaves through Vajrayana and Jung’s work, what is it to be a mystic? How do the Vajrayana practices allow the dance in the liminal and imaginal space that offer soul to untangle itself and liberate into its primordial nature? I get on a conceptual level at least, that this is not something I can work out or answer: I have to live the question, daily. I also want to keep this question alive in my client work, with supervisees, with the trainees I teach…and hold fire with the ideas for my next book**
What is it to be a mystic?
I’ll get back to you on that 🙂
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*Deliberate choice of words given my identifying with enneatype Six process
**or I won’t finish the current one!
***This needn’t be a metaphysical claim, it can simply be my being a kinder human and the ripples of that