Facets of a Diamond - Blog

The word safety comes from the Latin salvus and it means to be healthy, whole, uninjured therefore without fear, without stress. When you feel safe, you have no fear and therefore no stress.

This relates to meditation, in that it has been said that the feeling of meditation is like the feeling of going home: a home where there is no stress, no fear, a safe place, a sanctuary where you believe your mother loves you.

There is a paper I believe should be required reading for anyone in the healing arts. It was written by Louis Cholden, M.D., a psychiatrist who tragically died young in a car accident in 1956. Cholden believed what he termed “a drive towards health” is inherent to human nature, and that there is a vital force within each patient which he termed an integration factor, and which, as he put it, “desires fulfillment, maturation and development.” (That vital force is what I call Life Energy). He advised the therapist:

“The therapist must constantly keep in mind – medicus curat, natura sanat, the doctor looks after, nature heals – that he is not curing a disease. Rather he is creating an environment of safety, trust in people and faith in living, which allows the natural forces of health within his patient to flourish. He is allowing hope to rise for future relationships, by comfort in the therapeutic relationship. The silent hour may accomplish this better than one filled with brilliant interpretations.”¹

This paper made a very deep impression on me when I first read it. And the idea of the therapist creating a safe space, a sanctuary, for the patient to enable the “integration factor” to operate has been central to my work ever since.  It has to be a place where there is no fear, no stress and above all, a place where you feel that your mother loves you.

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1. “Observations on Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia” in Progress in Psychotherapy 1956, ed. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and J.L. Moreno. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1956, pp. 245-6.