PSYCHOSYNTHESIS INSTITUTE

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Tools for Personal & Social Transformation 

Psychosynthesis: At the Still Point of Consciousness

We are more than our stories, roles, wounds, and symptoms. This reflection explores the psychosynthesis understanding of the Self and why reconnecting with our inner center matters, not only for our own lives, but for the world we are creating together.

Listen   or read, below.

 

We each have a still point, a center of pure consciousness that is more than our stories, roles, wounds, or symptoms.

In psychosynthesis, this is the Self, the “I”, a space of clear awareness from where we can observe, choose, and relate to our experience without being reduced by it.

To be told, “You have a Self” is both a simple declaration and a radical one. It names a center of consciousness and will that cannot be reduced to story, diagnosis, or role. And this is not only a personal truth.

We, have a Self.

We share a human capacity for self and other awareness, an “I and Thou”. We have the capacity to choose, individually and together, about the ways we carry responsibility for one another and toward life beyond our own time. How we connect and act, from, or away from, our inner center shapes our collective life.

We are living in a moment when identity is increasingly organized around trauma language, diagnosis, and personal narrative. This narrows us, as it is amplified by powerful social and cultural forces. Appearance, gender identity, skin color, ethnicity, financial status, professional roles, the brands we wear and carry, and even the number of “likes” we accumulate quietly seep into our individual and collective consciousness, shaping who and how we are seen, valued, or erased.

These forces do more than describe us; they condition us. Our wounds are amplified, our attention is fragmented, we become increasingly challenged in hearing, let alone responding to our creative imagination to manifest the fullest potential of possibility for our lives.

This ‘noise’, these forces that combine to separate us from our “self” is more than the loss of a sense of personal empowerment. These messages and actions reduce our capacity to live from a deeper center of awareness and will. Connection to self, the psychosynthetic process of Dis-Identification, facilitates our ability to silence the noise in order to hear own voice. This is a fundamental step in claiming our natural impulse to grow whole as individuals and as a humanity.

The idea that there is something in us that is not defined by internal and external story can feel almost subversive. Contemporary psychology is primarily focused with naming and treating wounds and trauma. In many ways, this has brought real compassion and visibility to suffering that was once ignored or minimized.

These understandings and healing approaches matter. They can help us gain insight about what has happened to us, individually and collectively, even as they risk becoming the whole narrative. When pathology and wounding becomes the primary lens through which identity is understood, something essential, our very spirit, may quietly contract.

Psychosynthesis offers a different orientation. It does not deny our personal, social or collective trauma; it does not suggest we bypass the very real injuries carried in bodies, families, and cultures.

Instead, it asks deeper questions: What within us can hold this without being consumed by it? What allows us to meet pain without becoming completely identified with it?

“I have, you have, we each have, a self” names that possibility.

This points us to a center of consciousness and will that is not erased by suffering, even when suffering has shaped us deeply. As Roberto Assagioli wrote, it is “independent of outer circumstances.” Our ‘self’ is the place from where our embodied soul and spirit can be expressed through purpose, choice, and good, strong and skillful will. This matters not only for our individual life creation, it matters for the social transformation that offers the possibility of a humanity where love, peace and joy can be fully expressed and lived.

When we as individuals are organized primarily around unintegrated wounds, the collective will tend to reproduce those fractures, in polarization, reactivity, and cycles of harm that repeat rather than transform. We must heal, but this is only a step to becoming fully whole. We also need internal coherence and integration, to build our capacity to hold and weave together our many threads of internal and external experience.

Roberto Assagioli designed psychosynthesis with the understanding that personal integration and social transformation are not separate projects. Each are different expressions of the same movement toward synthesis.

As we learn to identify and disidentify from our many inner experiences and ‘parts’, and then connect to our inner center of ‘Self’, something shifts outward as well. Listening to our inner call and the connection with others, deepens. We are able to choose from a place of purpose, and our actions becomes less reactive and more intentional.

In these fractured and tumultuous times, the notion that you, I, we, have a ‘self’, is not an abstract idea, it is a practical one. Our collective wounds, racism, displacement, violence, ecological loss, are not only lived “out there,” but also within our individual and collective nervous systems, identities, and inherited patterns of response.

We need more than awareness or outrage or hiding away just to survive each day.

These times call us to the work of staying centered in the presence of turmoil, our own, that of others, as well as the wider currents moving through the world.

It requires us to act from a will aligned with the very best of ourselves, with courage in the face of fear and the capacity to experience a joy that endures beyond the changing conditions of our lives.

“I have a Self” is an invitation into that experience. It is a simple sentence.

And it can begin to transform everything.

~ Originally published on Synthesis Muse, Susan Jewkes Allen’s Substack publication exploring psychosynthesis, inner work, and the call of the self. Republished here with permission as part of Psychosynthesis Musing