The Spiritual Heart of Psychotherapy Bringing Integrative Health and Wisdom Traditions into Clinical Practice

Part I: Foundations of Spiritual Healing  1. Spirituality is Healing: Historical and Cultural Perspectives  2. The Problem with Pathology: Clinical Contexts  Part II: Welcoming Spirituality into Your Practice  3. The Self of the Therapist: Connection, Authenticity, and Session Preparation  4. Do No Harm: Understanding Social and Ancestral Contexts  5. Creating a Sacred, Clinical Space for Clients  Part III: Integrative Health and Traditional Healing Wisdom: Reimagining Your Clinical Practice  6. Ecopsychology and the Healing Power of Nature: Our Disconnection from the Natural World  7. Sound and Music Healing  8. The Sacred Role of Ritual and Ceremony in Healing  9. Community and Connection  10. Conclusion: On Behalf of Healing

Biography

Tobi Fishel, PhD, is an integrative clinical and health psychologist. She is the co-founder of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University and has a unique clinical practice where she incorporates self-compassion, movement, spirituality, body-centered practices, community, music, and the natural world. The guiding principles in her work are authenticity, meaning, and connection as she encourages a deepening relationship with the innate gifts of one’s own soul.

"Tobi Fishel’s book is the brilliant and essential text we have been waiting for to remember what true healing really is. At a time of global and national violence, despair, trauma, anxiety and loneliness, Fishel remembers and restores what we as a culture have forgotten, that healing is earth-based and spirit-based, and so is possible. When we read these mesmerizing stories of healing events, guided by this very skilled and experienced health professional, we learn how to meet the souls of our patients. And by the time we finish the book (reading it now also for ourselves) our own souls will be vitalized."

Deena Metzger, activist and author of Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing

"With rich cultural analysis and moving stories of heart and spirit, The Spiritual Heart of Psychotherapy offers a crucial challenge to psychotherapy providers and their allies to finally transcend the limits of incomplete ‘models’ and bring healing of the soul to the center of the work."

David Edward Walker, PhD, and author of Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir and Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America

"This beautiful gathering of personal stories, science, and cultural intersections offers thoughtful and heartfelt ways into deep healing, whether between clinicians and patients, friends and family, or the individual asking for a true, living sense of belonging. It is offered in respect of the need to be enjoined with all of life, no matter where we might find ourselves."

Stan Rushworth, author and co-editor of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth

"Based on both professional and personal experience, Tobi Fishel knows first-hand what Indigenous healers have known since time immemorial: that no real healing occurs unless spirituality is welcomed into the field. The Spiritual Heart of Psychotherapy shows the need for western counselors and therapists to create space for mystery, story, and the unexplainable."

Dahr Jamail, co-editor of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth