Watching the Gurdjieff movement videos, I found them fascinating and strange, and strangely disembodied. The staccato of the movements was a little off-putting. The body is being used to represent expanded consciousness or cosmic laws, so is symbolizing anything other than interoception. The body is...
In the three forms of Buddhism presented this week, both Mahayana and Theravada share a worldview that the body is more than just an impediment on the spiritual path, it is foul, polluted and disgusting. In Theravada, the goal is to root out and eliminate...
I was surprised to find these three areas of life put together into one threshold until I heard the lecture (Erickson, class video) explaining that these three are potential exceptional human experiences (EHEs) that take us out of the mundane and put us in touch...
In this module we saw how Daniel’s (2008) extending line involves engagement with the community, family, and work in the world, and that these areas of love, atunement, and collaboration might be portals into spirituality or extraordinary human experiences. Most of us have been taught...
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...