Posts tagged psychology

I am interested in radical change.  As individuals and as a species we need to understand Ecopsychology.  Everything is combined, everything is connected, how can it not be?  We are in a web, we are a web— our Earth. We are our Earth, we are a part of Her. I believe we can save/salvage our planet through science, but we can only save ourselves as a species through compassion.  I am interested in people, compassion, and relationships as part of the solution to our unhappiness, unhealthiness, and fear on this planet.  I am ready for change, and I am looking for preparation.

Recently, things feel like they have been picking up speed.  My knowledge base is expanding in many directions, and my past experiences are combining together to be useful in a way that I don’t quite understand yet.  Undergraduate Chemical Engineering studies in high math, physics, chemistry, and industrial practices required a new way of learning for me that opened up what I understand now to be neural pathways essential for learning how to learn.

I left chemical engineering because I wanted to be with people, and I wasn’t getting a broad enough range of knowledge. Psychology was my choice as a science and also a language, as a background, and something every human should know- an operations manual for the body, really or a chemistry/geography textbook.  I was curious though, in my undergraduate, about the seeming lack of spirit in psychology.  It’s so obvious, I think.  There is more going on than there is going on with the body, beautiful chemistry and all.

In 2005, I began working as an international humanitarian clown with Gesundheit! Institute (under the guidance of Patch Adams and Johnny Glick). This is where I first learned to explore deeply, with strangers, the levels of communication between people without language.  How to communicate my care, my love? Strange as it sounds, as clowns we provide support in many emotionally difficult settings.  Frequently I meet people in hospitals who, with a small caress or heartfelt smile, accept relief and fall into my arms. Practice with eyes and touch allow suddenly for strangers to share something else, something necessary—a desire to divulge the truth, the hardship, the heartache, the sadness in lonely human situations.

Several years ago, while in Iquitos, Peru with Gesundheit!, I had a visionary experience that was surprising and frightening, where I was afraid and in the void and was looked upon nonchalantly by a passing child.  Because of the presence of my mentor Johnny and his belief in my process, I learned to explore my strange state, and to accept this vision as a part of who I am.  Exploration of this vision brought my compassion and belief systems to a higher level.  It has helped me to understand my responsibility of being on the planet.

I do not know yet what routes I will pursue professionally.  I want to be able to ease transitions on personal and global levels.  I am interested in psychotherapy, I am interested in the ministry of love, I am interested in biomass char, but I am most interested in the combination of knowledge to save us as a species and a planet.  I communicate and use my knowledge to help people every day, and I will always continue to do so.

My goal in education is to continue to pursue the changing perceived edge of knowledge available to humans, and to keep pushing the edge of exploration.  In only fifty years we have jumped from black and white television to compiled images of the Hubble space telescope.  Can I imagine what will happen in the next fifty?

With this program, I hope to find mentorship.  I would like to have some really intelligent guidance and questioning.  I need the education for a high skill level in my future.  When I am done I hope to have learned the tools to assist my community of relationships locally and globally to understand the changes happening around them.  We are in a crisis here on Earth, as individuals seeking advancement in knowledge of communities and technology, as a species doing the same, and as a planet being mistreated and misused.  The question What are we doing here? exists in many realms.

Naropa is the most interesting/appealing school to me because I think that everyone there has a high quality of mind and is practicing mindfulness.  When I attended just a week of the SWP in 2006 (with Jack Collum), I was immediately immersed in a pool of creative thinking, staff and student alike.  My experience there was very freeing, and provided an opening for many, many conceptual seeds to be planted.  I loved being able to sit with and talk to great and beautiful minds like Anne Waldman, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka.  How thrilling to be engaged in information exchange with brilliant radicals!

I am also drawn to the holistic approach to learning that other schools do not offer.  I think that contemplation is a guiding hand to all learning.  There will always be questions, and thought on those questions, as long as there is time.  A contemplative education is a natural one.  And for experience, what are we humans, if not that?  To be human is to perceive experience. I feel like my intentions for study in Transpersonal Ecopsychology are aligned with the mission of Naropa as a center for experiential and contemplative learning.

Hi everybody, here is a conceptual example of spherical education that you can perform easily and then get my drift if you are a little fuzzy on it.

The point of this exercise is to notice how many ideas are attached to each individual idea, and that ideas cannot simply be compared on a binary scale.  Ideas have connections to other ideas on millions of binary scales, that, put together, make a dense conceptual/contextual sphere.  My argument is that this is how our brains can  really “see” ideas, but not necessarily how we are taught.

So, here goes:

PART ONE: DANDELION

1.  Hold up your index fingers several inches or a foot apart.  This is your binary scale. ((Binary-has two termini/end points…one thing VERSUS another).

2. Assign opposite terms to each finger.  Let’s go with WAR and PEACE.*

3. *Already you may have made another binary assessment of GOOD or BAD (whichever one you choose for which is personal/cultural)…but another binary scale does not fit on the binary scale you have! You only have TWO points of reference on the binary scale.

4. Go back to WAR and PEACE.  Look at the WAR finger.  Think of several topics related to your idea of WAR.  Imagine the topics floating around the WAR finger.

5. Still looking at the WAR finger, imagine, across from each of the floating topics, the “opposite” of that topic.  Imagine that the floating topics and their opposites are forming a spherical shell, like a fluffy dandelion head, around the WAR finger.

6. You can do the same for the PEACE finger, or for ANYTHING else.  Look around. Now, when you compare WAR and PEACE, do you just see the words?  Or do you see the spheres of linked ideas surrounding them?  How do you now compare the two?  It is impossible to “weigh out” the concepts…why?  Because it’s more complex than that!  (Let’s just say for calming purposes that peoples worldwide at any place in time have never been totally at peace, or totally at war.)

PART II: DENSITY

1. Go back to the WAR and PEACE fingers with their fluffy dandelion spheres of ideas, like many tiny binary scales with opposites across the sphere from one another.

2. In the space between your fingers, imagine a few concepts between the extremes of WAR and PEACE.  Perhaps struggle, diplomacy, gunfire.  Build a sphere around each of these concepts as well.

3. Looking at your once-binary scale, you now have WAR and PEACE and several more ideas, all with other ideas in spheres around them, like a whole row of fluffy dandelions.

4. Imagine a pair of opposites floating in the fluffy dandelion sphere around WAR.  Do the same “middle ground” exercise in step 2 (imagine a few concepts between the extremes), “filling in” the space on the scale.

5. Do this for EVERY pair of opposites in the fluffy dandelion head, “filling in” your sphere around WAR.  Now for PEACE, and the other concepts on the once-binary scale.  “Filling in” the scale shows that the concept is not just a shell of binary scale opposites, (the fluffy dandelion head) but a true sphere with a density of ideas.

PART III: GOING IN ANOTHER DIRECTION

1. Still with the WAR and PEACE fingers, and other concepts in between, all with spheres dense with ideas clouded around each idea, STOP thinking about WAR and PEACE as the basic concept.  Put your fingers down and stop thinking about them.

2. Okay, imagine the sphere of ideas around WAR.  Now just imagine a sphere, empty of ideas, a dense cloud.

3. Look at the spherical cloud, waiting for an idea to be inserted.  This is just a cloud, no ideas, no central point.

4. Now, imagine WAR and PEACE on opposite sides of this spherical cloud.  The middle ground on the scale between them fills up with concepts, each concept has its own spherical idea cloud surrounding it.  The large cloud becomes denser with the new weight of all of the ideas surrounding other ideas.

5. In your mind, ZOOM OUT.  Bring your index fingers back, now with the concepts FAIRNESS and EQUALITY.  Apply the cloud from the previous step to the FAIRNESS finger.  Now WAR and PEACE are just tiny parts of the sphere surrounding FAIRNESS (or EQUALITY for that matter :) ).

Pretty cool, huh?

Why complicate things?  Because things are complicated.  By looking at ideas on binary scales, we are not only denying ourselves the understanding of the true nature of things, we are denying our BRAINS the ability to create the neural pathways necessary for understanding.  In essence, by comparing ideas on binary scales, we are teaching our brains to only think of things in a binary scale, hence missing out on all of the connections that are actually going on.

IT’S YOUR BRAIN, USE IT.  Plus, the world needs you.  Start checking things out in a “spherical” way.  Your brain will begin to adjust and to create new pathways that allow you to see beyond the binary.  Resist frustration, it takes time!

With love,

c