Interview with Leonard Shaw - Page 1 Shaw
has shared his new approach to therapy, which he calls "Love-and-Forgiveness-Ego-Death-and-Surrender,"
with students in Seattle, Toronto, Frankfurt and Copenhagen and clients
around the world. For the past 17 years he has volunteered at a state
prison in Monroe, Washington where he leads three-day workshops in love
and forgiveness for inmates and their families.
Jeni Armstrong:
In your workshops you describe experiencing a spiritual shift that had
a great effect on your work as a therapist. What happened to make you
rethink your whole approach?
Leonard Shaw: Several things came together in my life
about 25 years ago. Gerry Jampolsky's Mini-Course (which uses lessons
from "A Course in Miracles") was an influence, as was the work
of Sydney Banks, a teacher who was living in Canada at the time and doing
some really interesting work in bridging the gap between psychology and
spirituality. He had a very gentle kind of "we are all brothers and
sisters" approach that appealed to me. Around the same time I read
a review of Tibetan Buddhism and in it read that we are not our egos,
we're not our minds, we're not our emotions, that we're something grand
and mysterious beyond all that. It became clear to me that while I was
trying to teach all of these things, I hadn't really surrendered to the
truth of it myself.
It took a really big ego-death of my own for me to start "walking
the walk" both spiritually and professionally. I had just completed
a seminar led by a friend of mine and he turned to me and said, "I
just want you to know that everything that you and John shared this weekend
came from your ego." Which meant that I was saying things that I
thought would impress other people or would make me look good. I started
to resist and get defensive - and I realized in that moment that I just
didn't want to go down that road again. I looked at George and I said,
"you know, you're absolutely right." And man, was that a powerful
experience. I felt my character armour just crumbling to the ground. At
that point I went from being the Gestalt expert to being a spiritual toddler.
It was very humbling.
