Person
Raphaele G. M. Schlitt, Medical Doctor for Internal Medicine/Psychotherapy, 1992 – 2005 working in her independent practice for Psychosomatic Medicine, 2006 – 2009 sojourn of twenty-four months in northern and southern Indian Sri Aurobindo Ashrams to study and prastice Integral Yoga. This provided the basis for Raphaele to develop ‘Field Dynamics’ in 2010/11, accompanying a series of lectures comprising 10 sections at the Sri Aurobindo Center in Berlin.
About the Name:
On an Easter Sunday morning in 2004, during a silent retreat, the name Raphaele (Hebrew “God heals”) came to me. Actually, when I was born my parents had already wanted to give me this name; but first came the promising name Gabriele Maria.
The central theme of my life vibrates in this name as it is about healing that, after all, can come only from the Divine. This gave rise to a long path of development, from orthodox medicine to psychosomatic therapy and psychotherapy, from cognition (Ken Wilber) to spirituality, experiencing and understanding the soul and the self by encountering awakened beings and through the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. All these levels wanted to be experienced, studied and prasticed. They needed to be understood and unfolded in a continuous process of change and integration, which led to the development of ‘Field Dynamics’.
It started with all the members of my original family being physicians. So I had to first free myself by specializing in internal medicine, before I was allowed to turn towards psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy. I practised ‘integrated medicine’ for 14 years in my independent practice: based on the new paradigm of the medicine of Th. v. Uexkuell and in his study circle, I worked with an amalgam of deep psychology and humanistic psychology (GT according to Rogers), Focusing (according to Gendlin) and Concentrative Movement Therapy (KBT) and I introduced this work to my colleagues at conferences. It was about finding a way from body symptomatic, that can be observed more or less objectively, to its significance in the subjective physical experience of the patients. It was about growing awareness of the inner dynamic, its release and integration into the personality, the I.
Having extensively levelled out the opportunities within this field (at a panel doctors’ office providing 30 hours of treatment weekly), I got a vague idea of the vastness of the self behind the I. My spiritual search began, at first studying Advaita Vedanta and other traditional paths while still working. This was followed by various spiritual experiences in satsangs with contemporary awakened masters, which led me to sell my flat and office in 2005 in order to be able to totally devote myself to the search for divine healing. The year after I was called to Pondicherry and Auroville in Southern India, where as a student of Sri Aurobindo and his companion Mirra Alfassa (called the Mother) I studied and practised Integral Yoga. In their cosmology and philosophy I found a broad map of existence, in their lives and their teachings the guide for a threefold transformation: psychic, spiritual and supramental.
From this Yoga emerged the Hladina method of the American psychologist Soleil Lithman, which I experienced myself and later practised. She inspired me, as she shows a path between physical experiences, outer personality and inner person, basically of the same pattern as my previous psychosomatic work, but deepened in various respects.
In the meantime this last but one spiritual therapeutic experience, connected to all my previous experiences, expended into ‘Field Dynamics’.