On Living in Alignment

A few years ago, I worked with a therapist that was more like a spiritual mentor than a counselor. She was a Jungian analyst and psychedelic integration therapist and she loved witchcraft and dream symbolism and kundalini yoga. We were similar people, but we weren’t exactly alike. We had different politics and thoughts about how to heal the world, yet when we talked, it was like looking into a mirror at a version of myself I could have become had I decided to walk a different path.

One of our sessions, I was asking her to help me define her work because it was so divorced from the traditional therapy I had previously participated in. We concluded that at the crux of her therapeutic philosophy was the desire to help people become aligned with their innermost selves. She wasn’t interested in working with people beyond what was necessary; she wanted to help her clients discover their own ability to guide themselves through a connection to their intuition.

That was the mirror I was looking in. Every once in a while, I would be talking through a problem, analyzing it, figuring out what to do with it, and as I finished monologuing she would say, “you’d be a great therapist.” She wasn’t the first person to tell me that, and I considered it, but I know now that’s what my writing is for. I too live to help people connect to the parts of themselves that know the way forward, and I’ve compiled a strategy on how to come back to that center the best way I know how: a guide.