Approaching the Numinous in Psychotherapy
An Evening with Tim Lyons: August 5, 2022
Exploring our deepest secrets has the potential to generate precognitive and synchronistic revelations leading to numinous experiences. Jung stated: “… the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology.” How can we use psychotherapy as a container to embody the healing energy of these experiences is the goal of tonight’s discussion.
The numinous is the experience of a higher dimension of human existence, an archetype of our own deepest nature. Paradoxically, the source of its power, is its mystery. This most profound level of consciousness generates an initiation into the numinous world that can help us dissolve the mundane alienating conceptions we may have about ourselves. Then, as Jung noted, “even the very disease takes on a numinous character.” Secrets hold seeds of our greatest potentials in the same way a dragon hoards a treasure. But the dragon cannot utilize the riches, it just guards them. It takes a hero to slay the dragon to actually unlock the premonitory energy and higher purpose of the secret in order to be nourished by its liberated riches.
We are bound to secrets through collective, cultural and religious taboos. Our inner voices whisper, or demand, to not to be seen for fear we will be shunned or damned. The old adage “we are only as sick as our secrets,” applies especially to the intergenerational family secrets tied up with procreation and death, physical and sexual abuse, passion and addiction. Some pain identity secrets involve low self-esteem that may bind us to chronic dissatisfaction, neuroses, compulsions, and phobias. Shameful object relations secrets include codependence, affairs and unrequited love, non-conforming gender orientations, and the resulting unlived lives. There are the secrets we are aware we are keeping and those we are not aware of that may emerge within the psychotherapeutic container.
The more we become familiar with the secrets of our inner reality, the more we can become aware of manifestations of precognition and synchronicity. These exciting dynamics can optimize the therapeutic alliance. The numinous becomes the catalyst to motivate our individuation and fulfill our unique potentials.
Timothy Lyons 