As long as we use the experience of others to order our lives, and thereby act from a 'following, going along with, or conformist' mentality - wanting a pattern, a guide, techniques - we will not value the development of our own 'inner guidance system.' Then, when anything 'out of the ordinary' occurs, something not covered by our pattern expectation or carefully gathered technique toolbox, we are lost, and we will usually attempt to cover this lost-ness by faking it or making something up - choosing something that is expedient, or that shifts attention away from us, anything not to be found out, to be left feeling ignorant.

Nowhere is this tendency more evident today than in my chosen profession of counseling - where some aspect of our population have been avidly following the 'medical model' in order to gain respect or parity in the professional world, mostly to get health insurance reimbursements, reportedly. Conference after professional development seminar, I am assailed with 'best practice' and 'evidence-based practice' lectures, which show me statistics and charts designed to convince me that some theoretical model or another has been demonstrated to be the 'best' way to practice counseling, to provide relief of emotional stresses and behavioral dysfunctions in the clinical setting.

There has evolved an entire layer of our profession, just as in the medical profession we sought to emulate, of bureaucratic oversight, paper-handlers and pencil pushers and bean counters, upgraded, of course, by fancier technology available today - the HMO office workers, running our profession from behind desks, often never not themselves counselors. The care we can provide is "managed" by accrediting agencies which are the gateway to assuring that our billing is received and paid rather than questioned or rejected out of hand by insurers. So I am told via the clinical director what to write and how to phrase it and when I must update my first impressions and what is the best practice for addressing the issues presented - all without the managing agency ever having met and spoken with this particular client, a real, live person with real, messy problems. And I am to 'accept' that all the regulating and managing of what I can say and do regarding this client, this real person, will somehow assure them of receiving a higher quality of service from me.

What is more real is that I am put in a position to apologize for the questions I must ask at intake which have nothing to do with what they came in for. I am to believe that by this intrusive interview that must be completed before we even know why we have come together, I can - by complying with regulations and policies external to us both - form a close alliance with this stranger who has come to see me for some relief from emotional strain. It is intolerable!

What it is designed to do is to micro-manage me into being just a mouthpiece, speaking the prescribed phrases that have been shown in research done in laboratory settings to be the best practice for relieving the stress of this or that kind of symptom. I am dehumanized, this client's feelings and concerns are marginalized as measurable and predictable, and the professional training I acquired by four years of college followed by two years of the Masters - note the term - program, and for me, followed again by four more years of doctoral studies and two years of hammering out a volume of dissertation research of my own. That 10-12 years of professional education and the experience gained between educational periods is deemed to be highly - what? - suspect? Of being somehow insufficient to give me the skills to develop rapport and provide insightful care on my own? Evidence of the necessity for me to comply with policies promoted by accrediting agencies? Do I really need or benefit in any way from all this "management" of me and my training and service? Does the client benefit in any way, more to the point?

I don't think so. What I think has happened is that we have been led down a deep, dark rabbit hole by our worry about whether we were seen as 'professional enough,' and in response to that fear, we have been given all the trappings and regulations that tend in our society to 'define' a "Profession," which has had the ultimate effect of reducing the counselor, the psycho-therapist, the direct service provider, to being a mere cog in the great gears of the machine of 'behavioral health.' This behemoth of regulation and oversight has had the effect of making us practically interchangeable with any other counselor anywhere else in the country - and that seems to The Profession to be a good thing. It is the end-effect of Descartes' division of the human being into a brain and a body as separable and distinct aspects, independent of each other - that truly reductionistic thinking that was pervasive throughout the medical field at the end of the last century and has begun to yield to the combining intent of psycho-neuro-immunology, body-mind training, and complementary medicine.

Well, I'm perhaps a lone voice, crying in the wilderness, but I think what our strength as counselors has always been is our unique individuality and personal style of doing therapy. It is the serendipitous meeting of need and response, the synergy that develops between client and provider, that creates the change, not defined techniques and mountains of paperwork and management of our productivity. The rubber meets the road behind the closed door, in the dance of therapy - and it is this very dance that cannot be managed and planned for weeks or months ahead of time, or from miles and agencies separate from the direct contact. You try dancing from a book - it will be a very sterile act and it will not stimulate the neurotransmitters that are released by the brain during direct contact. It is the RELATIONSHIP between dancers that stimulates the positive feelings, and between counselor & client that creates change, and nothing about managed care promotes relationship between therapist and client.

In the same way, our entire society may be seen to be 'de-constructing' among all the attempts to manage and develop patterns of activity for it. Every time we are told what to do and how to do it, instead of 'just being,' we are participating in the process of dehumanizing ourselves. We are becoming, presumably, predictable cogs that will turn the wheels of society in 'desirable' (by whom is this manner desired?) ways, stripped ever more and more of our uniqueness and individuality. That is its goal, this enforced sameness, to strip us of what is not allowed or not desirable in order to 'manage' the population.

Are you enjoying being managed and being told what to do and how to do it? Does it make you feel joy, or serenity, about being alive? Or are you, like millions upon millions of persons worldwide, on a treadmill of effort expended day after day, to acquire more income to buy more things (or make the required payments on the things you have already bought which are already deteriorating) so that someday you will have the comfortable life you had imagined? Or have you already given up on ever having those dreams from childhood, have no dreams any more, and have settled for just getting by, just making it through each day with your possessions still intact and your family still in one place?

For every movie which shows us a delightful scene of a spirit soaring and drudgery transcended, there are two made and widely distributed which glorify and magnify the dark, dreary, and hopeless about human existence, and it is an error to say that this reflects the 'truth' about life today - what is True is that what we focus on expands around us - believing is Seeing. If you want a world that is orderly in a quirky way, that reflects the infinite uniqueness of who and what we are, then we must never settle for less than this in our daily lives. And I suggest that we have gotten almost totally out of touch with this wonderful quality of individual quirkiness, and that it is time to reclaim the natural heritage of our humanity.

This is what the adolescents of every generation rise up to show us and to demonstrate for us, until they, too, as we often were, get drawn down into the muck, far too often these days into detention centers and jails and prisons, diverted into drug-filled lives of desperation, or 'transformed' into spirit-numbing sameness, going through the motions modeled by the adults around them, making love and babies and paychecks and credit card, rent and car payments for decades until they can die. Ugh!! We need a new Way of Being, and we needed it yesterday!

In fact, we have all the 'new' spiritual, uplifting and joy-generating ways of being available to us that we can possibly ever need. The issue is more that we need role models showing us that these quirky, individualized ways of being which are spiritual and productive are the way out of the isolating desperation. It has for generations not been enough to tell people to go to church, to 'have faith' - they have developed plenty of faith - in what they have seen and hated, that 'what you see is all there is to get,' and that its not likely to ever get better than it is now, which is pretty lousy, or difficult, or unfulfilling over time. We are too quick to distance ourselves from being 'like' those whom we see to be 'better than us' when all that is true is that they are living in a better way than we are - they are not gifted, or special, or blessed in some way that we are not. We are too easily diverted from following a spiritual path, which has proven viable and successful for thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of persons, as being too weird or strange, yet could there be anything more strange than choosing, either passively or actively, to continuously wrestle within one's thoughts over whether one deserves a better existence, rather than to make the leap and try it? We have an inherent striving to feel a part of our 'place' in the world, and yet this quality is being trained out of us by mechanization and factory production systems, in the name of progress.

Which reminds me of an interview I heard this week on National Public Radio with the author of a book titled The United States of Europe. He spoke of the immense welfare state that the European Union of 25 countries has developed, which has no army but has free health care, and has decriminalized all street drugs so that addicts and abusers can get health and counseling services rather than jail and prison terms, and you cannot get laid off so you always have income to pay your bills and buy your needed items, at surprisingly highly-taxed rates. One of the most interesting observations he made was that the religions have all faded out of popularity, for reasons Europeans have not openly articulated. Well, I had a theory upon hearing the interview - that what we flock to religious groups and facilities for is now incorporated into the very fabric of their society to such a degree that faith has become a far more private matter. Its not that the State has become or replaced God, its that - since most of society has become far more humane and service-oriented in daily life - religion is no longer needed as a buffer against all that dehumanizes us. There may indeed be a generation living now that does not feel the impetus to crave for a better world/heaven because this world is pretty fine.

What will emerge in the populace living in this manner will be whatever true desire we have within us for that which transcends us. And this quality IS an integral part of who and what we are, at least in my belief system. What if we were involved with religion for what it teaches us rather than held there by what we are to give to it? And how will we know this quality, recognize this ability of a thing, or belief system, or person, to truly teach us something that we crave to know, if we have become automatons, unable or unwilling to ask if a thing 'fits' for us? If we have accepted that we should or must accept what is passed to us from those above or beyond us as 'truth' or 'right,' how will we retain the capacity to identify something that does NOT serve us?

I am here to assert to you, even to implore you, that we absolutely must - for our own spiritual and human welfare - NOT accept what is told to us and provided to us, unless we are first willing to run it by the internal review process, a sort of screening device or capacity, which is intuition. When we get too fatigued to question authority, too dulled by sameness to make individual effort on our own behalf, when 'raging against the machine-like qualities of life or society' seems like it would too much trouble, then we are set up to be controlled. And then we are fodder for evil, out of laziness and hopelessness. Look within your Self, see if you are content with your ability and willingness to take a stand on things that matter to you and your family & friends, or if you have become complacent to accept what authorities tell you.

I tell you that the same aspect of divinity within you that questions outer 'authorities' over your own good sense and intuition can be that 'gives up' and gives in to the perceived power of others to be 'more right' or smarter than you are about what you need and what is good for you. Never give that power away, and do not sell it cheaply - make any authority to which you hand over your faith and allegiance first demonstrate its value and worthiness to you, directly. You are a most powerful being, a Human Being carrying the fire of divine light, a Child of God, who stands to inherit all that God is and does, IF you will accept it or even just desire it as your celestial heritage from having been born. It truly is given to you to become the Divine Being that you were born to be, without any accomplishment except to persevere and not grow faint and weary. I call you to be bold, to stand tall and proud within your inner self, and to claim your inheritance as a divine child of the Creator. If you feel you need training in this, do not hesitate to contact me or any other spiritual teacher to whom you may feel drawn by the interface between your heart & mind - that special place that is the seat of your intuition. Be well, and at peace in the world, and become who you really are!

Namaste, beloved.