Meditative Dialogue: Cultivating Sacred Space in Psychotherapy – An Intersubjective Fourth?

Abstract

Meditative dialogue offers a simple way to cultivate sacred space in psychotherapy and in one's life. Through mindfulness and meditation practices, client and therapist together develop the capacity to enliven their embodied experience of living truths and to deeply invite life into their lives. This article offers a review of theoretical and conceptual literature on spirituality, intersubjectivity, relational practice, and meditation and mindfulness practices as applied to psychotherapy. It offers a discussion of meditative dialogue as a method through which sacred space can be accessed as therapist and client engage collaboratively in the quest for transformation through psychotherapy.Truth makes little sense and has no real impact if it is merely a collection of abstract ideas. Truth that is living experience, on the other hand, is challenging, threatening, and transforming. The first kind of truth consists of information collected and added, from a safe distance, to our mental inventory. The second kind involves risking our familiar and coherent interpretation of the world-it is an act of surrender, of complete and embodied cognition that is seeing, feeling, intuiting, and comprehending

Meditative Dialogue: Cultivating the Transformative Theater of Psychotherapy

“…This literature has focused on such issues as the importance of respecting and incorporating clients' spiritual beliefs in therapeutic work (Blanton, 2007;Griffith & Griffith, 2003), the enhancement of relationship skills that mindfulness practices can offer (Bell, 2009;Blanton, 2007: Brown & Ryan, 2003Germer et al, 2005;Hick & Bien, 2008;Linehan, 2003;Surrey, 2005), stress reduction and self-regulation (Kabat-Zinn, 1994;Linehan, 1993), and the cultivation of curious and open co-constructive and collaborative relationships between therapists and clients (Lord, 2010;Surrey, 2005).…”

“…I have written elsewhere about the cultivation of a spiritual sacred space in psychotherapy through a discipline of using Meditative Dialogue guidelines to connect with the energies and wisdom of the numinous and access change processes (Lord, 2010). This sacred space is "a place that I experience as not me, not my client(s), and not the jointly created field of the intersubjective third (Benjamin, 2002(Benjamin, , 2004(Benjamin, , 2006Ogden, 1994Ogden, , 1996Ogden, , 2004Stolorow & Atwood, 1992), but rather a fourth space, a disciplined and carefully tended crucible that we develop together as a source of spiritual energy and healing" (2010, p. 270).…”

Meditative Dialogue: Cultivating Compassion and Empathy with Survivors of Complex Childhood Trauma

“…This literature has focused on the importance of respecting and incorporating clients' beliefs in therapeutic work (Griffith & Griffith, 2003), and the enhancement of intimate relationship skills that mindfulness practices can offer (Barnes, Brown, Krusemark, Campbell, & Rogge, 2007;Burpee & Langer, 2005;Carson et al, 2007;Gambrel & Keeling, 2010;Jacobson, Christensen, Prince, Cordova, & Eldridge, 2000;Pruitt & McCollum, 2010;Wachs & Cordova, 2007). It has begun to examine the cultivation of curious and open coconstructive and collaborative relationships between therapists and clients (Griffith & Griffith, 2003;Lord, 2010;Surrey, 2005), and mindfulness as a method for developing one's capacities for empathy and compassion (Bell, 2009;Block-Lerner et al, 2007). In my work with survivors of CCT we focus on developing empathy and compassion through a collaborative coconstructed meditative dialogue process.…”

“…(pp. 94-95) The meditative dialogue process is instrumental in cultivating collaborative, sacred space in psychotherapy (Lord, 2010). The discipline of sitting and meditating together allows for an intimacy and a depth of "just being" that can become a huge resource for therapists and clients, and for the therapy that they coconstruct.…”

Meditative dialogue: tuning in to the music of family therapy

“…We begin each session with the meditative dialogue process that quickly moves family and therapist(s) to a deep level:

Somehow the shared communion and the shared fanning of the flames of meditation heighten the energy and sense of possibility in the room as we work together on the material that arises from the space in between. (Lord, , p. 279)

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