Claudio Naranjo: “The Death Of My Son Transformed Me”

Today the psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo is a wise man. An 84-year-old doctor with the appearance of a prophet: bushy, wild eyebrows. The cottony, polar hair.

I have always been struck by the contrast between his features, the poised features of a cultured, noble man, and the casualness of his clothing: he usually wears cheap clothes. It should not surprise me: the most conscientious people do not give too much importance to the material, or to money.

The event that most marked him in his life, many years ago, was the death of his son. Until then, Claudio was a not very affectionate person, not very expressive, “not very lively”, in his words.

The death of your child: a before and after

Claudio was already a seeker, but he did not have much love capacity. “I put off my son a lot,” he says. I spent little time with him. He was an absent father. “When he passed away, I realized in retrospect how much I had missed and how much I had missed from loving him well.” That greatly influenced the rest of his life.

“I had to go through the death of my son to wake up.”

Spring 1970. Good Friday. According to Javier Esteban in the book Claudio Naranjo: life and its teachings (Kairós), that same afternoon, Claudio had attended the funeral of his old teacher Fritz Perls, when his wife and three children (one of them from Claudio), they had a car accident. A call from the police confirmed that his only son, little Matías, who was 11 years old at the time, was the only one of the four occupants of the vehicle who died in the accident.

For whom is death a tragedy?

For a time, Claudio accompanied his wife to the hospital. He was busy with his recovery. But after a few weeks, she returned home and lay on Matías’s bed to cry. And after crying a lot — he cried non-stop for two months — Claudio wondered who he was crying for: Matías, or himself.

“I realized that he was not crying for me, because I could perfectly bear his absence if it had made sense, as if it were a long journey; But I realized that I wasn’t crying for him either, because I had faith that he was in a better world and that death was not a tragedy for him ”.

In this way, the suffering was transformed into a strong presence of Matías. Naranjo felt then that he loved him again in a more intense way than he had loved before, when the child was alive. He felt like he was bathed in it, and he knew there was no point in crying for him anymore. “I didn’t have to cry for him or for me.”

In that terrible circumstance, Claudio’s spiritual rebirth was conceived. On the other side of suffering from the grief of his only son, acceptance and love transformed Claudio’s existence.

He went into the desert for forty days: that changed his life.

In the desert the days passed in a solitary retreat, in a semi-fast, where someone brought him water and some food prepared every few days and left it nearby so that contact would not occur and the process would be interrupted.

The most important thing was to bring the hara, the energy center of the body, to earth. Drop it to the ground. “Lower the hara so that light would enter my head.” From that moment, his body began to receive something from above that was opening and transforming him, as if another new body were incubating within him.

The physical sensations of the body were accompanied by color. It was like a continuous circular of energy and his hands moved as if in orbits around him. “It was as if I was weaving my own body, weaving a chrysalis.”

The connection with the sacred through Nothingness

Claudio went through many states. The deepest thing was Nothing. The non-thought and the intuition that the All was there.

“Impossible to put words. Also the intuition that a seed was being planted in me and that it would bear fruit throughout my life ”.

Three months later, everything happened to be made sacred to him. It was like living in the world of divinity.

Give back what was received: teaching

It was then that Claudio started teaching. In the desert, Claudio had met himself. Filled with a new energy, he began to give back to the world everything he took from life.

He created the SAT program, a Sacritic word that means Being and Truth. He felt like he was being inspired. Things developed organically, as in fairy tales: “He who is too stubborn about what has to come, does not see what happens on the way. And sometimes the one who is sufficiently attentive to what comes out to him is the one who in the end receives the secret information of the gnome ”.

Claudio always asks groups, people — he is not a gregarious man, and yet there are always groups of students around him — what they have learned most about in life. And the answer never changes: from hard experiences, from losses. This was also his case.

Without a doubt, the death of her son opened her heart. Since then, Naranjo has been allowed to flow. He has had teachers of all the fundamental traditions, and from them he has learned a truth that has nothing to do with intellect or emotion. A truth that has a lot of humility. It’s about trusting life. It’s about emptying yourself. “When one is emptied, all the riches come to him”

Claudio Naranjo

• He has been developing the wisdom of the enneagram for forty years and has created the psychology of the enneatypes.
• As a disciple of Fritz Perls, he has become a world leader in Gestalt therapy.
• He is a professor at the University of Berkeley and a member of the Club of Rome.

Your ideas

Enneagram

It is a personality map that you created as a discipline. He recommends that it be combined with psychological practice, gestalt, and self-observation.

The others

Advise search engines to be interested in the idea of ​​the service. It’s about healing yourself in order to heal others.

Not to do

Your spiritual work is more about not doing than doing. In “not being”, in the sense of disidentifying.