Aired 29 January 2020 – 5:00 PM EDT
Interview with Psychologist and Educator Robert Strock, Author of “Awareness That Heals”
“We all have the wherewithal for change. Having the aware-with-all is the all-important first step.” — Swami Beyondananda
One of my favorite cartoons of all time is a two-panel piece that I first saw in a psychotherapist’s waiting room. In the first panel, a boy being swept under in a raging river calls out to his dog, “Lassie, get help!”
In the second panel we see Lassie on a psychiatrist’s couch.
We are living in the “self-help” generation, and yet so much of this self-help comes from outside ourselves. Well, what if we actually DID develop the inner resources to be truly helpful to ourselves? What if we able to find and cultivate an inner voice that is wise and loving, gentle yet firm, that speaks softly yet with authority? And what if this voice can provide comfort and wisdom, not just for our internal crises, but in dealing with the external ones as well?
Our guest on Wiki Politiki this week Robert Strock, a psychotherapist in practice for half a century, developed what he calls “awareness that heals” while dealing with a dire personal crisis. 25 years ago, a hereditary condition required him undergo a kidney transplant. The medications he had to take to prevent the new organ from being rejected by his system created a chemical and emotional imbalance that left him alienated from his own emotions and own self. “It was as though I had a ‘heart-ectomy’. I felt as if my heart had been taken away.”
In response to his crisis, he was able to find an inner guide that allowed him to accept his feelings and hear the messages clearly from the intuitive intelligence of his own heart. (Or as Chris Padgett put it in his book of the same name, “I’m not okay, you’re not okay … but it’s okay!”) By cultivating what he terms “the friendly mind”, Robert Strock saw his way through his own crisis, and found similar heartening results with his therapy clients.
Robert Strock, L.M.F.T. has been in private practice for nearly 50 years, and is the originator of “Humanistic Spirituality”, a way to access “invisible” resources without the burden of religious dogma. He has co-founded the Global Bridge Foundation whose purpose is to “contribute to the creation of a more compassionate, just, and peaceful world that honors the dignity of all beings.” He is also the originator or “Psycho-Economics” (not to be confused with the “psycho economics” that seems to have been in charge of our system for the past two generations) and more recently “Psycho-Politics”, both of which help us use our inner resources to face and transform global challenges.
If you’re ready to discover and cultivate an inner resource you probably didn’t know you had, please tune in.
To find out more about Robert Strock and Awareness That Heals, please go here.