Erickson opened this class by talking about the “rare and precious” quality of silence and solitude, which I would certainly agree with and add that for some of us it is so precious we make and have made time for it daily. Our lives are...
I was especially moved by the writers collected in Johnson’s book Borderlands (2018). I had no previous experience of the first-hand voice of an autistic person, especially not such an articulate one as Nick Walker. I could clearly see how socially indoctrinated I had become...
In the readings and video for this module I was happy to be exploring the erotic and the body, as sex is my main area of research in my doctoral work. I was surprised to learn in Erickson’s video (2023) that Jung had said the...
One of the challenges in transpersonal psychology is that it is most often attempting to study the non-rational with the rational mind. As transpersonal psychologists, we are trying to put into words the ineffable, or, that which cannot be expressed in words. We attempt to...
When talking about how writing and the academic journey may be self-transcendent, it is important to first distinguish what we mean by the term. The problem with the word transcendent (Daniels, 2001) is that it is commonly perceived to mean rising above the self, the...
As transpersonal psychology has evolved to include the horizontal and participatory points of view, the individual’s relationship with ecological systems has become increasingly important. The field has broadened the definition of self-identity to include other beings, the natural world, as well as the cosmos (Davis...
In 2014, an author wanted to title her book Shortcuts to Enlightenment but saw that “mindfulness” was the current buzzword and that Shortcuts to Mindfulness might sell better. She was right. Mindfulness had gone mainstream.For millennia, mindfulness had been a Buddhist meditation practice that was...
In the introductory class for the CIIS doctoral program in Integral and Transpersonal Psychology, the required text is the Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology (2015), out of which the 38 articles presented as essential to the field, nine were written by women. A perusal of...
Mainstream, conventional higher education emphasizes the cognitive, the rational, the verbal and written word (Wexler, 2011). Wexler also points out that despite this emphasis, students are graduating deficient in writing skills, mathematical understanding, or the ability to think critically. On the contrary, an integral education...
The next wave of transpersonalism can be inferred from the surprising mainstreaming of psychedelics. Although our field has been exploring the therapeutic and ecstatic use of psychedelic substances and the altered states they provide for decades, no one paid us any attention. Now that the...