For centuries, acknowledgment of the sacred, the divine, spirituality, and organized religion have been cornerstones in the helping tradition of many cultural and ethnic groups, including African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and immigrant groups such as Haitians and West Indians. Indeed, for many historically oppressed and disenfranchised groups in America, it is the embrace of a transcendental “higher being,” belief in the interceptive powers of ancestors and related psychic and spiritual forces that has consistently sustained their health and well-being during periods of intense maltreatment, genocide attempts, and related crimes against humanity. International groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Al-Anon, Narcotics Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous have historically based their therapeutic “step approaches” to health and wellness on the fundamental acknowledgement of and submission to the power of a higher being.

Martin and Martin (2002) succinctly and correctly assert: “In the Black helping tradition, spirituality is defined as the sense of the sacred and divine. Spirituality gave Black people the strength to go on when there were threats to their very existence, self-worth, and dignity when oppressive forces were seeking to strip them of their humanity, hope when there seemed to be none, a way when there was no way, and even joy when confronted by nothing but a daily rhythm of hardship, frustration, and pain. In the face of the most demoralizing circumstances, spirituality gave Black people both courage and encouragement, and even in the midst of suffering and death, it gave them a will to live and the determination to make life worth living” (p. 1).

In New York City’s historic Harlem Sugar Hill and East Harlem districts, respectively, John L. Bolling, MD, and his collaborator, Gilberto Alvarez, MSW, CSW, are engaged in cutting-edge, innovative psychotherapy and community interventions where the soul is the major focus of therapeutic intervention. Indeed, for these professional mental health practitioners and their colleagues at the Mandala Center Institute, the concept of the “soul” is the organizing paradigm for health and wellness.

The Mandala Center Institute
Bolling is the founder and current director of the Mandala Center Institute located in the heart of New York’s Harlem on West 138th Street. Not only is Bolling the Institute’s founder, but he is also the driving force, major public advocate, and seminal voice communicating the history, mission, goals, and objectives of this unique spiritual health and wellness center to diverse constitutes throughout the country. Bolling, an African American, graduated from Howard University’s medical school in 1966 and was a Josiah Mercy Fellow in child psychiatry at New York University-Bellevue Hospital Center. For the past 30 years, he has served the New York City community as a clinician and psychiatric director of several mental health clinics. The lion’s share of Bolling’s research and medical practice has focused on the self-concept and identity of black children and the soul-centered approach to integrating spirituality and psychotherapy.

Alvarez, Bolling’s colleague since the 1970s, is of Puerto Rican descent and a major player in the history and current functioning of the Mandala Center Institute. He holds an MSW degree in bilingual studies in alcohol and substance abuse from Rutgers University. He is an accomplished drummer and actively integrates his musical training and expertise into his soul-centered workshops, family, group, and individual treatment sessions conducted at his East Harlem office, at the Mandala Center, and in workshops and educational sessions throughout the country. Alvarez found a natural affinity for the soul-focused nature of his current mental health work given the spiritual-based nature of AA, Al-Anon, and other chemical dependency programs he was trained to work with as a professional social worker.

The interdisciplinary mental health team of the Mandala Center Institute workshop facilitators, consultants, and co-facilitators consists of child and adult psychiatrists, MSW social workers, MDiv pastoral counselors, PhD educational psychologists, PhD clinical psychologists, and MA counseling psychologists. Bolling says that the major purpose of the Mandala Center Institute is to help clients on the way to inner self-discovery and self-fulfillment utilizing the soul-centered, psycho-spiritual integrative model. The Mandala soul-centered model grew out of a need to employ new and holistic psychotherapeutic healing approaches in mental health service delivery to nonmainstream populations regardless of sex, race, gender, or socioeconomic status.

The center provides literature; soul-centered art works; drumming workshops and other forms of musical intervention; online discussion forums; workshops; individual, family, and group counseling; and training of professional, paraprofessional, and lay groups and places special emphasis on self-help techniques. Workshops offered by the Mandala Center include Rites-Of-Passage in the African American Community, America’s Soul at the Crossroads, The Integration of Religion and Spirituality in the Therapeutic Healing Process, The Unrecognized Crisis of Black Women, The Resolving Crisis of the Black Male, The Pathology of Racial Integration, and Black Male-Female Relationships.

The Mandala soul-centered cultural model of therapy evolved out of an effort to integrate many years of multicultural research, education, insight, and observation into a workable multicultural model. The model is based on the concept of the “magic circle” of the Mandala as a symbol of the soul. As such, there is an open-systems, stage-related, ever-evolving process of inner psychospiritual development.

What is the Soul?
In his groundbreaking book The Heart of Soul, Bolling describes the soul as an invisible, multidimensional multiaxial reality being connected to a common center or heart—the heart of soul (p. 1). Cognition or “knowing” is the major function of the soul. This multidimensional, multiaxial nature of the soul can be likened to the multifaceted nature of a gemstone. Even though each facet of the gem has its own uniqueness and sparkle, its essence is its central sparkle of heart, which is the culmination of the collective sparkle, contributed by all of the facets. The Mandala soul-centered model is an attempt to create a paradigm shift in mental health service delivery by providing an integrative psychology between traditional Africentric spiritual beliefs and traditional Western fields of psychology and religion. The soul is the organ of knowing for both the external and internal worlds and is not restricted or bound to the body (p. 8).

Bolling points out that the Mandala soul-centered model is designed to incorporate components of inner, cultural, ethnic, and spiritual development that are often missing from Eurocentric. “The traditional Eurocentric models of psychology are often devoid of cultural-ethnic-spiritual considerations, which are of importance when working with individuals within the ‘Soul-Culture.’ As a consequence, ethnic cultural groups outside of the mainstream often find that they are unable to relate to the approaches of traditional Western psychology,” says Bolling. A resulting negative consequence is that critical cultural-ethnic-spiritual issues of these groups out of the mainstream frequently go unaddressed and unassisted.

Bolling explains that even though psychology, from its inception, was the study of the soul, the seat of cognition shifted to mental-rational-intellectual (left-side) brain processes. Essentially, the left side of the brain helps humans validate experiences using the five senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. This shift of the seat of cognition has serious consequences for therapeutic healing interventions and bicognitive learning processes for those both within and outside of the mainstream. Bolling asserts that the soul can be understood as our “sixth sense” and is a critically important right-side-of-the-brain mode of cognition. His concept of the soul strongly emphasizes right-brain processes that include emotions, intuition, and the more “feminine” aspects of personality.

The Art of The Spiritual Healing
In the Africentric worldview of soul, the soul symbolizes itself through a variety of symbolic modalities such as music, rhythm, dreams, inner voices, art, diseases, visitations from the ancestors, slips of the tongue, slips of the pen, and synchronicities (Bolling, 1990). Bolling says, “With the soul connecting the visible material world and the invisible spiritual world, we live not only the symbols we encounter consciously from our daily encounters with our environment, but we also live the unconscious memories and symbols from our ancestral past. Many readers will undoubtedly interpret this as a Jungian psychological perspective of the collective unconscious.” Bolling quickly points out that his concept of the soul is eclectic and incorporates not only the works of Jung, but also W.E.B. DuBois, the psychological literature of Greg Goddeck, Perl’s Gestalt therapy, and other cultural, historical, and psychological writers.

Bolling incorporates the use of African statues, pictures, and artwork, as well as music and dance, into his soul-focused psychotherapeutic interventions. His methodologies also include dream analysis and self-help techniques such as asking clients to place a container of water in a particular room to draw in unwanted spiritual forces and referring them to botanicas to purchase candles, statues, and other spiritual healing resources. Bolling frequently utilizes the consultative services of a Cuban spiritualist in his psychiatric practice. She is a woman in her 60s whom he has known and worked with for many years. Because of the woman’s limited English, Alvarez is often called upon to interpret during these sessions. Bolling also readily shares his personal dreams, intuitions, spiritual insights, and synchronicities with his clients as important components of the therapeutic healing process and their soul development. He views such personal sharing with his clients as important factors in trust building and role modeling and as powerful venues for helping clients to encounter their own souls as “teacher, guide, best friend, mother, father, spouse, lover, confidante, judge, limit-setter, visionary, and much more” (Bolling, 1990, p. 7).

Soul Work
Bolling’s emphasis on soul-work is heavily influenced by the value-laden, negative experiences of his African American, African Caribbean, and Hispanic clients whom he frequently witnessed during his clinical psychiatric training. He says, “On many occasions, I would often defend many of the experiences of black and Hispanic children as being cultural experiences as opposed to pathological experiences. The intuitive-spiritual experiences that these children were having could not be understood within this ego-centered model of psychiatry, devoid of a soul. For instance, one of the frequent presenting complaints of many of the children—African American, African Caribbean, and Hispanic—was the experience of an inner voice telling them things to do. This was often accompanied by visual experiences of dead relatives, such as grandparents or other loved ones, many of whom had died before these children were born.” Bolling emphasizes that such intuitive-spiritual experiences always ultimately ended up being misdiagnosed and mismanaged in the psychiatric clinics.

He was firmly convinced that many of the African American and Hispanic children being treated by himself and his white colleagues were presenting with “spiritual” as opposed to “clinical” issues. It was this misdiagnosis of African American, African Caribbean, and Hispanic youths that led to Bolling’s early research into black identity formation in black children and ultimately his work on the culture of the soul as it relates to mental health and wholeness. He credits much of his current psychiatric insights and successes to regular consultation with his Cuban spiritualist of many years and the spirit of his great-great Irish and Indian grandfather who regularly communicates with him, thereby providing the source for many of his ideas, theoretical insights, and treatment strategies.

Bolling and his colleagues at the Mandala Center Institute are not alone in incorporating the soul into the therapeutic healing process. Historically, spiritualists, shamen, traditional African tribal healers, Native American spiritual healers, and Chinese Qi Gong energy healers have focused on “the life force,” “spirit,” or “soul” in preventing illness and restoring wellness. Within contemporary society, professionals practicing various forms of integrative medicine, complementary health approaches, shamanic psychotherapy—including the ancient Hawaiian shamanistic science of Huna—and Reiki energy work also focus on the soul in working with clients.

Bolling says that while many other traditions and helping professionals have historically focused on the soul in their work, he is one of the few practicing African American psychiatrists to do so.

Therapeutic Models of Intervention
Bolling and his colleagues at the Mandala Center Institute specifically target their mental health services to poor, marginalized, vulnerable, and at-risk populations. The center’s emphasis on community-based and self-help techniques and interventions has resulted in greater access to mental health services for these groups. Bolling says that his clients range in age from 3 to 93. Referrals to the center are varied and include self-referrals, referrals from family members and friends, referrals from social workers and other professional healthcare providers, and “word of mouth” knowledge of the center’s Africentric, soul-centered treatment interventions.

The need for a mental health model emphasizing holistic health, community group sharing, and self-help is underscored by the fact that in Africentric culture, the self was traditionally never seen as individual. The larger self is always located in and identified with the collective group or clan. Alvarez provides a poignant example illustrating this principal from his experience in Ghana, West Africa: “A child whose mother was dying was sitting inside of a circle composed of family, friends, and community members, publicly grieving his loss. Those around the circle were not only witnesses to the child’s grief but were active participants in his mourning. The drummers provided powerful solace for the collective depression associated with their collective loss.”

Alvarez credits his witness to this moving event as a major factor for his own paradigm shift away from the more individualistic focus of many traditional mental health models to community-based and self-help therapeutic models of intervention. Alvarez grew up with a deep appreciation for the significance of religion and spirituality in the helping process, as his mother was a practicing spiritualist. He felt an immediate need to professionally collaborate with Bolling after meeting him, since he quickly recognized that they were engaged in very similar spiritually based mental health work. He described his philosophy of healing as one that focuses on self-help and is short-term and spiritually-based. Building trust and helping clients “let go” and close doors to fears and anxiety feature prominent in his therapeutic interventions that include drumming workshops, self-help techniques, individual and family sessions, community-based interventions, and the use of literature designed to help clients get in touch with their “inner-child.” Alvarez describes his mental health work as a process of facilitation with clients and succinctly sums up his approach with the following statement: “If you don’t have a guide, you will need a lifetime for a two-day trip.”

Bolling uses a holistic approach to mental health and wellness in his work with clients. In addition to self-help strategies and Africentric treatment strategies, Bolling utilizes many of the traditional psychiatric techniques he was trained to use at New York University-Bellevue Hospital Center and St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. He occasionally prescribes psychotropic medication for his clients, but does so only after a comprehensive assessment validates that medication is warranted. For example, he explains that he trains his staff and colleagues to differentiate between “spiritual” voices and “pathological auditory hallucinations” to ensure accurate diagnosis and treatment planning with clients.

Future Directions
Although Bolling and Alvarez’s current clients, workshops, lectures, and consultative assignments keep them and their colleagues at the Mandala Center Institute busy, it is clear that the center has both charted and uncharted growth areas. Alvarez identifies soul-focused individual, family, group, and community interventions targeted at ethnic and minority lesbian, gay, transsexual, and transgendered groups as important areas to expand the work of the center. These individuals and groups frequently experience compounded discrimination, stigma, isolation, and oppression as a result of their sexual orientation, which place them at risk for increased mental health challenges. He feels that extending greater mental health service to these groups is important, and he is hopeful that the center will be able to do so in the very near future.

Further information about the work of the Mandala Center Institute and the soul-centered integrative model of therapy can be obtained from the center’s Web site at www.mandalarisingpress.com, Alvarez at gilberto.alvarez@att.net, and Bolling at jlbolling@mail.arczip.com.

— Estella Norwood Evans, MSW, CSW, ACSW, is immediate past director of the Greater Rochester Collaborative MSW Program and professor of social work, Nazareth College of Rochester, NY.

References
Bolling, J. L. (1990). The heart of soul. New York: Mandala Rising Press.
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