"In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful"
Having received full or partial funding throughout the first three years of my doctoral studies is systemic practice, the sad passing of the organisation's founder meant all future funding was paused hence my reaching out to help cover the remaining £3,000 of this year's academic fees.
As a systemic psychotherapist whose Islamic worldview and intellectual tradition shapes my understanding of perception and the cosmos in which I inhabit, having to imbibe these assumptions during my training and subsequent practice requires the bracketing of religious beliefs and experiencing the dissonance this entails.
This study seeks to gain rich descriptive accounts from spiritual guides regarding the experiential nature of their relationships with their mentors. The purpose of this exploration is to gain insight into how spiritual relational states are experienced and applied in their relational context and contrast this with my own understanding and practice of ‘Spiritual Reflexivity’ as a Muslim systemic psychotherapist.
This investigation has the potential to aid the field of systemic psychotherapy in its understating regarding the nature of the self and broaden its conceptualisation of reflexivity to incorporate the non-empirical. The nature of spiritual reflexivity is one that originates and is experienced in the heart, embodied by the limbs, intuited by the soul and rationalised by the intellect. The notion of the traveller or spiritual wayfarer (sālik) is often used as a metaphor for one embarking on the spiritual path in Islamic mysticism. This research project aims to traverse some of the artistic, spiritual, philosophical and theological valleys of Islam and Islamic spirituality as a living embodied tradition and its relationship to my practice as a Muslim systemic psychotherapist and researcher.
