Regardless if you work in traditional counselling, or aim deeper, into the transpersonal realm, there are a number of Basic counselling skills that must be well understood for any in-depth work to be safe.

In this chapter we cover some basic rules for safe and ethical conduct of therapy – not least the extra need for integrity that is a part of working transpersonal.

What is a Trauma? Anything that drastically exceeds the flexibility of the mind. The less flexibility you have in your mind, the more your life will be filled with traumas.

Stanislav Grof (born 1931 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology and a pioneering researcher into the use of altered states of consciousness for purposes of healing, growth, and insight. He operates with the following layering of the human psyche: The Biographical layer - Our personal history and our personal unconsciousness; The Perinatal layer - The encounter with birth and death, as they occur in the birth-trauma; The Transpersonal layer The consciousness expanded beyond the usual ego boundaries.

If an object vibrates at a certain rate of vibration, everything in its vicinity that has the same vibration as a dormant possibility will start vibrating at that frequency. This scientific law applies to everything, from subatomic particles to cosmic proportion.

The Quabalah attempt to describe the ladder from unmanifest unity with God, to individualized Man, dividing the path up in 10 stages or Sephyrots. The Sephyrots are ideal organising principles for the Major Arcana tarot pictures. They too are a ladder from God to matter.