Core Ethical Principles of Psychophonetics - Anthroposophical Ethics
The following principles
provide a spiritual context for the practical activities of Psychophonetics as
a path of knowledge based upon awakening to one’s own humanity, and committed
to the freedom of the individual as the foundation for the re-creation of
community.
The theoretical and philosophical background for these principles can be found in Rudolf Steiner’s books: ‘Theory of knowledge’, ‘Philosophy of freedom’, ‘How to know higher worlds’, ‘Theosophy’, and his lectures on ‘Psychosophy’, ‘Psychoanalysis in light of Anthroposophy’, ‘Curative education’, ‘Metamorphosis of the soul’ and ‘Foundations of human experience’, plus many other lectures.
1. Inner Equipment
Each person's life is considered to be an opportunity for purposeful learning and development, including any challenges and crises.
Digesting one’s experiences is a way of forging the inner equipment and its application to the developmental process.
The essential assumption is that the resources for the next step in each person’s development, healing, and transformation live inside the person’s inner life and outer circumstances.
This unique meeting can create a shift in the combination of a person’s inner resources and life circumstances, encouraged by the practitioner.
The theoretical and philosophical background for these principles can be found in Rudolf Steiner’s books: ‘Theory of knowledge’, ‘Philosophy of freedom’, ‘How to know higher worlds’, ‘Theosophy’, and his lectures on ‘Psychosophy’, ‘Psychoanalysis in light of Anthroposophy’, ‘Curative education’, ‘Metamorphosis of the soul’ and ‘Foundations of human experience’, plus many other lectures.
1. Inner Equipment
Each person's life is considered to be an opportunity for purposeful learning and development, including any challenges and crises.
Digesting one’s experiences is a way of forging the inner equipment and its application to the developmental process.
The essential assumption is that the resources for the next step in each person’s development, healing, and transformation live inside the person’s inner life and outer circumstances.
This unique meeting can create a shift in the combination of a person’s inner resources and life circumstances, encouraged by the practitioner.
2. Inner Guidance
Each person is to be in charge of the their process. Practically this means that there are opportunities and safeguards provided in the process for the individual’s internal guardianship and internal guidance to manifest from the realm of potential within their inner life into their conscious life.
Counselling or a facilitated group interaction is seen as a training ground for that manifestation.
The counsellor's personal, professional and philosophical knowledge and experience does not take the place of the client's inner guidance.
Questions such as: what are the main issues to deal with at any given point in time, what should be the direction of the work and its goals, how pro-active should the process be at any given point, how intense, deep, confrontational, nurturing or otherwise - the final answer to all of these questions must come from the client.
The session is conducted in such a way as to ensure that there is the opportunity for the client to make these choices, to give direction, to be in charge.
3. Self Knowledge
Each person is the one authorised to determine and to know the meaning of his/her experience.
Meaning is seen as not being given but as a creation of the human spirit.
Only the owner of an experience can determine the meaning of that experience.
The counsellor does not complete the connection between the phenomena of the client’s experience and its meaning using their own mental activity - it is the client who completes the act of creating personal meaning of their own experience.
The counsellor’s role is to create new opportunities for self-observation, stimulating new perspectives, and encouraging fresh thinking for new meaning.
That newly created meaning is the redeeming achievement of counselling in its best.
The client is the knower, the interpreter, the bearer of the meaning of his/her own experience, and the role of the counsellor is to encourage this knowing.
4. Teamwork
The role of the counsellor could be described as being an encouraging companion in the journey of the client's quest for self-knowing.
That companionship is expressed through cooperative activity: instead of the counsellor knowing, seeing, and supporting various aspects of the client, the counsellor’s position includes co-knowing, co-seeing and co-supporting the aspects of the client's inner life which they choose to take care of.
The client is considered an active member of the therapeutic team.
A major motto for team work is: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, then there I am in the midst of you".
The ‘I am’ is understood here as the 'universal human' consciousness manifesting through the ‘I am’ of each person present. For the development of consciousness soul, people have to take their own authority, therefore teamwork is important.
5. The 'I am'
The individual's ‘I am’ (core self) is given every possible opportunity to be in the process, to guide, to make choices, and to know.
All professional choices in the counselling process are governed by this principle.
In the Anthroposophic model of the human constitution the ‘I’ is the integrative centre of the human psyche, one’s core identity.
The ‘I’ is the observer, the feeler, the meaning-maker and choice-maker in regards to our own experience, as well as in regards to meeting experiences that come to meet us in the world.
The Psychophonetics process could be described as allowing, inviting, enabling, facilitating and encouraging the ‘I am’ of the client to enter every aspect of their experience.
The main practical activities include consciously experiencing, focusing, sensing, gesturing, visualising, speaking, moving, expressing creatively, sounding, naming, observing, making choices, sharing.
Applying this principle helps to prevent dependency issues between client and practitioner; and allows the client to determine the meaning of their experience.
6. Higher Accountability
The principle of higher accountability is a striving rather than a specific belief system, with an ongoing readiness to question one’s own view on reality, rather than imposing an interpretation.
The principle of higher accountability is a commitment to review one’s psychological dynamics, including the conceptual ones, and one’s personality - from the standpoint of one’s innermost spirituality, in the context of each person's culture, including the universal human dimension.
7. A Path of Self Development
To regularly review and reflect on one's practice, personally and through supervision. This ongoing inner development of the practitioner includes attending to the following seven conditions:
Each person is to be in charge of the their process. Practically this means that there are opportunities and safeguards provided in the process for the individual’s internal guardianship and internal guidance to manifest from the realm of potential within their inner life into their conscious life.
Counselling or a facilitated group interaction is seen as a training ground for that manifestation.
The counsellor's personal, professional and philosophical knowledge and experience does not take the place of the client's inner guidance.
Questions such as: what are the main issues to deal with at any given point in time, what should be the direction of the work and its goals, how pro-active should the process be at any given point, how intense, deep, confrontational, nurturing or otherwise - the final answer to all of these questions must come from the client.
The session is conducted in such a way as to ensure that there is the opportunity for the client to make these choices, to give direction, to be in charge.
3. Self Knowledge
Each person is the one authorised to determine and to know the meaning of his/her experience.
Meaning is seen as not being given but as a creation of the human spirit.
Only the owner of an experience can determine the meaning of that experience.
The counsellor does not complete the connection between the phenomena of the client’s experience and its meaning using their own mental activity - it is the client who completes the act of creating personal meaning of their own experience.
The counsellor’s role is to create new opportunities for self-observation, stimulating new perspectives, and encouraging fresh thinking for new meaning.
That newly created meaning is the redeeming achievement of counselling in its best.
The client is the knower, the interpreter, the bearer of the meaning of his/her own experience, and the role of the counsellor is to encourage this knowing.
4. Teamwork
The role of the counsellor could be described as being an encouraging companion in the journey of the client's quest for self-knowing.
That companionship is expressed through cooperative activity: instead of the counsellor knowing, seeing, and supporting various aspects of the client, the counsellor’s position includes co-knowing, co-seeing and co-supporting the aspects of the client's inner life which they choose to take care of.
The client is considered an active member of the therapeutic team.
A major motto for team work is: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, then there I am in the midst of you".
The ‘I am’ is understood here as the 'universal human' consciousness manifesting through the ‘I am’ of each person present. For the development of consciousness soul, people have to take their own authority, therefore teamwork is important.
5. The 'I am'
The individual's ‘I am’ (core self) is given every possible opportunity to be in the process, to guide, to make choices, and to know.
All professional choices in the counselling process are governed by this principle.
In the Anthroposophic model of the human constitution the ‘I’ is the integrative centre of the human psyche, one’s core identity.
The ‘I’ is the observer, the feeler, the meaning-maker and choice-maker in regards to our own experience, as well as in regards to meeting experiences that come to meet us in the world.
The Psychophonetics process could be described as allowing, inviting, enabling, facilitating and encouraging the ‘I am’ of the client to enter every aspect of their experience.
The main practical activities include consciously experiencing, focusing, sensing, gesturing, visualising, speaking, moving, expressing creatively, sounding, naming, observing, making choices, sharing.
Applying this principle helps to prevent dependency issues between client and practitioner; and allows the client to determine the meaning of their experience.
6. Higher Accountability
The principle of higher accountability is a striving rather than a specific belief system, with an ongoing readiness to question one’s own view on reality, rather than imposing an interpretation.
The principle of higher accountability is a commitment to review one’s psychological dynamics, including the conceptual ones, and one’s personality - from the standpoint of one’s innermost spirituality, in the context of each person's culture, including the universal human dimension.
7. A Path of Self Development
To regularly review and reflect on one's practice, personally and through supervision. This ongoing inner development of the practitioner includes attending to the following seven conditions:
- Striving
to develop a healthy body and soul by maintaining self-care on all levels
(physical, emotional, energetic, spiritual) - developing self care
- Feeling connected with all of existence; to recognize oneself in everything, and everything in oneself; not to judge others without standing in their shoes - developing empathy.
- Recognizing
that one's thoughts and feelings have as significant influence as one's deeds,
and that work on one's inner life is as important as work on one's outer life - developing experience awareness.
- Recognizing that the true essence of a human being does not lie in the person's outer appearance, but rather in the inner nature, in the soul and spiritual existence of this person. Finding the genuine balance between having an open heart for the demands of the outer world and maintaining inner strength and ‘unshakeable endurance’ - developing self awareness.
- The
ability to be true to a decision once made, even in the face of daunting
adversity, until one comes to the conclusion that it was or is made in error - developing self responsibility.
- Developing thankfulness for everything that meets us, and the universal love that allows the world to reveal itself fully to me - developing gratitude.
- Inner consistency of character and equanimity with the above six conditions - developing integration.
Psychophonetics
was founded on the basis of working with Steiner's seven conditions as a
pathway for balanced adult development - developing integration of needs.
These conditions create a
systematic approach for upgrading and maintaining personal conditions for
enhancing wellbeing, for manifesting inner potential and for personal/ professional
growth and creativity.
Reference:
Steiner, R. (1994). How to know the higher worlds: A modern path of
initiation. New York:
Anthroposophical Press.
Chapter 5. Can be accessed on the web: http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/
Also refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy#Paths_of_spiritual_development
Chapter 5. Can be accessed on the web: http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/
Also refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroposophy#Paths_of_spiritual_development
In
summary, these seven principles embrace the practical applications of the fundamental
ethics and philosophy underlying this work.
They reflect, within the practical steps of the counselling and group processes, the unique attitude to human potential, dignity and freedom - in which each person can learn to see their life as an ongoing and unfolding process or journey that has an inherent wisdom, with lessons to learn.
Psychophonetics counselling/psychotherapy is both a therapeutic and an educational process.
They reflect, within the practical steps of the counselling and group processes, the unique attitude to human potential, dignity and freedom - in which each person can learn to see their life as an ongoing and unfolding process or journey that has an inherent wisdom, with lessons to learn.
Psychophonetics counselling/psychotherapy is both a therapeutic and an educational process.
