Healing the Unseen in IFS Therapy: Unattached Burdens, Past Lives, & Psychedelics

In this workshop, we’ll explore how to cultivate inner perception not as abstract ideals, but as concrete, learnable skills you can bring into your practice:

Past lives could be considered another metaphor system for working with clients. We will discuss the work of Ian Stevenson, MD, and Jim Tucker, MD, on reincarnation. We will also describe how to modify IFS’s Unattached Burden work to deal with these phenomena.

We will compare this modern psychotherapeutic material with the anthropology of spirit possession. There is a basic underlying biopsychological dynamic that appears in almost every culture we have records of, and in every period of history. This dynamic has profound effects on people’s lives, for better or worse. Historically, the metaphors most often used to describe it are those of spirit possession. Whatever metaphor system we use, this territory is worthy of study.

Entering deeper layers of the psyche requires more than insight. This includes cultivating interoception and inner senses, and recognizing imagination as a perceptual system – no less real than sight or hearing. We’ll explore the inner world as ontologically primary, not secondary to the external.

A central stance in this work is personalism – perhaps the most essential attitude in the inner world. Here, we’ll draw from the philosophy of Martin Buber and others who remind us that our inner relationships deserve the same reverence as our outer ones. We will look at modes of attention – drawing from Iain McGilchrist, Gabriel Marcel, and various forms of curiosity – as ways to relate to what arises without needing to define or control it. We’ll explore the practice of unknowing and kenosis, releasing constraint at the far edges of experience.

This is a form of relational spirituality, found in the writings of the Neoplatonists and in animist traditions. It also includes high-arousal spiritual states, a dimension of human experience that modern culture has largely banished but which remains vital for contact with the depth.

Each of the workshops will be held live, on the Zoom platform.

You will receive the link to the Zoom meeting along with the password one day before each workshop session. There will be technical support available.

In 5 days after each live session, you will receive access to the recording. The recording will be available in your Life Architect Account, so you can go through it at your own pace.

Remember that you get unlimited access to the workshop recordings, which means you will be able to view them in a year or even in a few years.