Mariana Caplan is an American psychotherapist, yoga teacher and writer whose books look at what goes wrong on the spiritual path, above all in Halfway Up the Mountain (1999), on claiming an attainment not yet reached, and Eyes Wide Open (2009), on learning discernment. Her central point is that spiritual practice does not by itself heal psychological wounds, and that the ego can turn even spirituality to its own use. Her work can be set beside Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on spiritual bypassing, and on why claiming to be a shaman is a bit like claiming to be an enlightened being or guru.
Who is Mariana Caplan? #
A psychotherapist and teacher who has spent her working life where psychology and spiritual practice meet. She studied cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, took a master’s degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and gained a doctorate in contemporary spirituality from the Union Institute and University in 2002.1 She is a licensed psychotherapist and a yoga teacher, has taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies and at Naropa University, and founded the Yoga and Psyche Method, which brings yoga and psychology together.2
Her early books were on families and on touch; from Halfway Up the Mountain onwards they turn to the spiritual path itself, with The Way of Failure (2001), Do You Need a Guru? (2002), Eyes Wide Open (2009), The Guru Question and Yoga and Psyche.13
What is Halfway Up the Mountain about? #
One mistake, looked at from every side, which is claiming, or being credited with, an enlightenment that has not been reached. Caplan interviewed more than thirty teachers, practitioners and psychologists for it, among them Joan Halifax, Claudio Naranjo and Christina Grof. Its title comes from a Zen story in which a teacher throws a blissed-out student out of the interview room. If the student wants to enjoy the view from halfway up the mountain, that is his business, but he is taking the seat of someone with real aspiration.4
Her argument is that the ego does not simply get in the way of spiritual practice. It takes the practice over, and uses mystical experience, teachings and a spiritual identity to build a more sophisticated version of itself. Nor is this only a problem for charlatans, because, as she writes, “The presumption of enlightenment is much more common than we think.”4 See Who is Joan Halifax?
What does Eyes Wide Open say? #
That discernment, the ability to see clearly and choose well on the spiritual path, has to be cultivated over a lifetime and is never simply handed to us by our experiences. Eyes Wide Open is the shorter and later of her two books on this territory. It names a set of common failings she calls “spiritually transmitted diseases”. The first is fast-food spirituality, in which a culture of speed and instant gratification produces movements and books that “promise a lot and demand very little” of the people who follow them. Others include faux spirituality, looking and sounding the way a spiritual person is imagined to, and mixed motives, where the wish to be loved, to belong or to be special drives the seeking.5
She takes John Welwood’s term “spiritual bypassing” for the use of spiritual ideas and practices to step around psychological wounds, and shows how profound spiritual experiences can leave whole areas of a person’s psychology untouched.6 She also writes about the body as a necessary part of the path, and about the shadow. Every mystical journey, she writes, involves a descent, and “The trek into the shadow world is a voyage of retrieval.”7 Her picture of spiritual maturity is a grown-up one, of self-responsibility, practice and discernment together, not fireworks. See Who was John Welwood, and why did he coin the term “spiritual bypassing”?
How does her work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
The teaching can be set beside hers at several points, though the two come at the territory from different directions. Caplan writes from psychotherapy, yoga and the Eastern traditions; Therapeutic Shamanism from shamanism and animism, with psychotherapy brought in alongside.
The first meeting point is spiritual bypassing. In Therapeutic Shamanism it means using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid painful feelings and unresolved psychological wounds, and it is easy to fall into, because most of us have little desire to face our pain, let alone enter it and work with it.8 Seen in a larger context, bypassing is also a symptom of our disconnection from nature, so it cannot be fully healed on a psychological level alone.9 See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
The second is the teacher. To claim to be a shaman is a bit like claiming to be an enlightened being or guru, a state few people in the West will truly reach, and the title is generally given by a community, never claimed by oneself.10 Therapeutic Shamanism is also a Spirit-led practice,11 and its healing work gives no messages, no ‘shoulds’ and no telling the client what to do, so that nothing in it takes away their power.12 See How can I tell whether a spiritual teacher, group or practice is healthy?
The third is descent. Caplan’s “voyage of retrieval” into the shadow is her own image, from depth psychology; in Therapeutic Shamanism the journey downwards is a literal practice, to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, and the parts of us that have been lost are found and brought home in soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer. See Why does Therapeutic Shamanism begin with the Lower-World? and What is soul retrieval?
Does Caplan think spiritual teachers should be avoided altogether? #
No, and she says so directly. The writers Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, in The Guru Papers, looked closely at authoritarian power in spiritual groups and concluded that, because corruption runs so deep, all spiritual authority should be avoided. Caplan includes their analysis in Halfway Up the Mountain for its thoroughness, and then draws an entirely different conclusion. People who have been burned by a teacher often decide that integrity in spiritual life is impossible, and to assume that is, in her view, to give up on one’s own highest possibility; the teachers she interviewed show that integrity and virtue on the path are possible.13
Therapeutic Shamanism also keeps human teachers without making any of them the final authority. Nothing in it has to be believed or taken on faith; its teaching is a set of suggestions and practices for each person to try out and test in their own experience.14
