The Art of Purposeful Being:
Your Destiny Project

By Phil Winkelmans, PhD

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Little did I realize what powerful changes I was facing while flying to Hawaii in December of 1992. It had been a depressing fall. As a professional counselor in a private practice, I had recently handled some heavy cases that I had found quite stressful. This and a personal problem added to my being in a fairly depressed mood.

I had spent Christmas with my family in Vancouver, Canada, which had given me an opportunity to spend time with my mother who was in her late eighties. She was a very wise lady and had always been quite supportive. Therefore, during one of our times together, for the five-hundredth time, I asked her something about my childhood. I was hoping to find the elusive answer to my lifelong problem of bouts of depression.

She responded by asking: "Phil, how long are you going to keep digging in the past? When will you get a life?"

My initial reaction was one of shock. Did she not know to whom she was talking? As a professional counselor, I prided myself on taking clients into their painful memories. I was an expert at helping people go back into their past trauma, drama and pain. Like a lot of others in my profession, I thought we were making them better by digging up all their past hurts. How wrong I was.

On the plane, it hit me that for up to 30 years I had been involved in personal growth, first for my own health, later as a professional. Yet, after all this input, there were still these times when I would experience depression. My mother was right: I did not have a life. I was looking for answers in the swamp of past hurts, traumas and emotions.

Over the years, I had tried every form of personal growth and therapy imaginable, including spiritual pursuits. I was even a leader of a faith-healing charismatic prayer group. Through my counseling profession, I developed skills in breath and bodywork, art therapy, group therapy, dreams, regressions, hypno-therapy and others. My degrees were in spiritual psychology. I did not just learn these subjects, I experienced and taught them. Yet here I was flying to Hawaii and still depressed. I was the doctor who could not heal himself.

I found myself wondering why it was that our profession has the highest suicide rate. Perhaps it was because we take on a lot of our clients' problems. Maybe it was because we often feel like a failure when we cannot help all who come to us. Or was it because we are trying to heal everyone else at the expense of trying to heal ourselves? Or all of the above?

My most recent cause for being stressed and burned out was due mainly to two clients, one who I got to know quite well and felt very in tune with. When I heard that he had died, it came as quite a shock. No one had heard from him for a month or more. Then we received news that he had drowned on a boat trip in Israel. Due to his mental state and the conditions around the boat mishap, all of us who knew him suspected it was suicide. Prior to his running off, he had been seeing both a psychiatrist and myself. Yet together we were unable to prevent his death.

The other client was a person who was then labeled as having a multiple personality disorder. Beyond a doubt, this was the heaviest and most draining case I had yet encountered. Until Christmas of that year, there had been little headway.

My personal problems were due to my recovery from a recently dissolved relationship. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. On an impulse, I decided on a three-week holiday in Kona, Hawaii.

On the flight over the Pacific, I had plenty of time to think. I realized that I had no idea what I would do, or where I would stay when I got there. This added a level of excitement and adventure to the trip.

I arrived in Kona on New Year's Eve, stayed in a hotel for a couple of days and then rented an apartment for the next three weeks. Now I was ready for action, so the next thing was to find out if there were any retreats or special workshops going on. There was nothing. Evidently Hawaiians go to the mainland for Christmas and New Year's celebrations, and everything else slows down.

You might wonder why I would look for a place of healing on a holiday in Hawaii. Why would I not just hang out and let loose? Close to 30 years I had been obsessed with healing, and nothing else had held my attention as deeply as this subject had.

One day as I was walking downtown in Kona, I came across a little bookstore. Inside and at the back was a bulletin board that advertised up-and-coming workshops and seminars as well as practitioners for various types of alternative healing. My gaze fell on a brochure about a person who claimed to have the gift of reading one's inner mind. Being in the frame of mind that wanted to try something different, I decided to give him a call.

Over the phone, he said he liked to interview his clients before taking them on, so we arranged to meet for coffee. The next thing I knew I was talking face to face with a rather likeable chap, Roger Cotting, and his partner, Dr. Diane Mistler.

Roger was 62 years old and a retired architect. He had been studying various forms of spiritual psychology for some 20 years or more, and one day he began receiving words that he knew were not about him, but about those around him. He has worked with this ability ever since.

His motivation to heal was due to some family problems he had had some years before. This led him to study psychology and see if he could make sense of what was happening. As with a lot of keen analytical minds, he was able to spot weaknesses in many of the standard psychological approaches being practiced at that time. He further enhanced his knowledge by delving deeply into metaphysics and spirituality.

We seemed to hit it off and I made an appointment. The next day I found myself sitting in his den, feeling slightly apprehensive about what might happen next.

Roger set up a tape machine so that I could have a copy to refer to later. And when we were both comfortable, he closed his eyes and began talking.

Later, he said he is always conscious while this is taking place, and is aware of everything that is happening. Over the next couple of hours, he revealed things about me that even I did not know, or had long since forgotten. He described my struggles, hopes and dreams, my disappointments and failures, along with my strengths and weaknesses, and the many things I had kept hidden from others and myself.

He also mentioned how, in recent years, I had turned away from my former spiritual pursuits and understandings and had kept that knowledge secret. He mentioned a vision that I experienced some years before when I was told that I had the gift of healing, yet had denied ever since. Instead, I had relied too heavily on the psychological aspect of my career, at the expense of my spiritual insights and abilities.

I was in total awe. Never had so much been revealed so clearly. At last I could begin to see myself as I really was. He talked about the way that we generally practice therapy and how traditional therapies do not go far enough. Not that they do not work, but often they do not help people truly understand who they are or where they are going with their lives. Without this understanding, people flounder around looking for an identity in the things they do.

Furthermore, Roger felt that it was unfortunate that in most counseling situations, little is said about the meaning of spirituality and the great potential it offers for living a fulfilling life.

Over the next three weeks and the years that followed, we continued to meet. The following year, I visited them again. Over a period of three years, Roger and I communicated by phone, letters and tapes. Together we worked on ways that people could incorporate some of these ideas into their lives. For the first time, my clients began to experience exciting new differences in themselves, their relationships and their lives. As time went on, I began putting together workshops and seminars under the title The Art of Purposeful Being: Your Destiny Project, which continue to meet with outstanding acceptance and success.

Because of my professional and religious beliefs, many of the ideas that Roger presented met with a lot of resistance. It was a constant inward battle to give myself permission to try these new ideas without comparing them to old ways of thinking and doing things. Yet, right from the beginning, I was experiencing more freedom and inner strength than ever before. It was these experiences of seeing myself and others become more alive and energized that kept me with the process.

Roger has never claimed to be a therapist or counselor. My take on it would be that he is more a philosopher of spiritual psychology than anything else. As for myself, my interest was to put these ideas into a practical experiential form to which my clients could relate. I am more the teacher, facilitator and counseling therapist.

Ultimately, it was this difference in our personal visions that motivated me to strike off on my own and continue developing a way that suited my personality, professional training, talents and abilities.

The following is the result of many seminars, workshops, and professional training sessions, as well as my own and my clients' experiences. I am sure you will find it rewarding.

Read or listen to the first chapter of Dr. Winkelmans' book, The Art of Purposeful Being: Your Destiny Project.

Sign up for Dr. Winkelmans' free, one-hour teleseminar in which he'll demonstrate how you can use his unique tools to improve your life. (This is a $150.00 value to you.)

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