Waking From Sleep

"I wanted to include this book because we’ve talked about the fact that, in many ways, trauma is an injury to the soul, and, therefore, finding a way to heal the soul or grow more soul is the most promising pathway to helping people to recover. As I said, in our very secular society, this is something that makes people uncomfortable. You won’t hear many therapists or psychiatrists working for the NHS talking about the soul. But actually, what Steve Taylor has done—he is a lecturer in psychology at Leeds University—is that he’s taken an academic approach to examining what we mean by a spiritual awakening. He sets out his findings with academic rigor in his book, Waking from Sleep. A lot of the time, this is a conversation that has a religious or a new-age context. Steve Taylor has done an amazing job of bridging the divide with the world of contemporary academic psychology in Britain, and providing a very clear account of what it means when somebody ‘wakes up,’ when they start to see beyond the voice in their heads, the usual patterns of their thinking, into much deeper parts of themselves. Anybody could do that in their daily lives, of course, but as Steve points out, it is often an experience that happens to somebody when they reach their lowest point, when it seems that there is no other way. It can often be that that darkest point is where the breakthrough takes place. It’s about understanding this breakdown not so much as a dysfunction, as a symptom of a spiritual crisis, and the way forward is to explore that and embrace it, and then rise phoenix-like out of the ashes. For a lot of the men I met in the book, the trauma forced them to undertake a journey of self-discovery that they would have missed, otherwise. Steve Taylor’s book sets out that journey in very clear, academic, empirical terms, almost, in so far as we can talk about this as an empirical field. It’s a very valuable book for anyone who might be struggling or trying to think about this awakening process with a more academic perspective. There are all kinds of spiritual paths that people choose to pursue. In my book, I write about equine therapy, or working with horses. At first, I thought it was a case of a man feeding some ponies apples. Actually, it is a very profound methodology for bridging the gap between neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality. I met veterans who went through a very clear awakening in spirit, who began to live life in a completely different way, as a result of work with the horses. This “awakening” can come in many forms, but it is a real thing. As a society, with the multiple crises we’re facing—environmental, mental health, and just as a species—it is something we need to be focusing our attention on at a cultural level, rather than relegating it to the fringes. This idea—that there is a spectrum of consciousness and that we are able to move along it and work on ourselves to become more in tune with a higher self—is an important idea that shouldn’t just be the problem of religion. It should be something that is embraced by the mainstream."