Integral Transpersonal Journal 5 april 2014

Integral Transpersonal Journal of arts, sciences and technologies

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Eurotas Official Journal

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EDITORIAL INFORMATION SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR

Pier Luigi Lattuada

EDITORIAL STAFF

Giovanna Calabrese, editor chief

Ilaria Cislaghi, editor Daniela Giovine, consulting editor Patrizia Rita Pinoli, consulting editor Eleonora Prazzoli, consulting editor Silvia Lodrini, consulting editor Claudia Castiglioni, graphical project

SCIENTIFIC BOARD

Ingo Benjamin Jahrsetz, Germany

Jure Biechonsky, Estonia Bernardette Blin-Lery, France Gennady Brevde, Russia Steven Schmitz, USA Ingrida Indane, Latvia Dietrich Franke, Germany Magda Sole, Spain Lyudmila Scortesca, Moldova

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BOARD OF REVIEWERS REVIEWERS

Regina U. Hess, Germany - chief Lindy Mcmullin, Greece Rona Newmark, South Africa Elena Piccoli, Italy Luciano Ghisoni, Italy

TRANSLATORS

Timoty M. Perazzoli Valentina D. M. Lattuada

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INTEGRAL TRANSPERSONAL JOURNAL VOLUME V, NUMBER V, 2014 Editorial GIOVANNA CALABRESE, M.D., Ph.D.

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Contributions The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy VITOR JOSE F. RODRIGUES, Ph.D.

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Eurotas 2013 Keynotes Standing on the Threshold of the Future: A Transpersonal Vision for our Time JIM GARRISON, Ph.D.

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Resonance TOBIN HART, Ph.D.

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The Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist SERGE BEDDINGTON-BEHRENS, Ph.D.

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Transpersonal Studies - What’s Next?

STEVEN SCHMITZ, Ph.D.

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Contributions Accompanied Inner Communication: A Transpersonal Approach MARTINE GARCIN-FRADET, M.D.

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Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention with Cancer Patients Undergoing Chemotherapy INES TESTONI, Ph.D.

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From Head Trauma to Contact with Dead VINCENT F. LIAUDAT, M.D.

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Eurotas Events Invitation to the EUROTAS 2014 Conference in Crete

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Conferences and Workshops The “Western” Approach into the Transpersonal

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Seeing Beyond in Facing Death

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Authors’ instructions Authors’ Instructions Text Format

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Information about ITI

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Notice to subscribers

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Editorial

GIOVANNA CALABRESE, M.D. Ph.D.

I am glad to share with all our readers the words of the three key note speakers at the last EUROTAS meeting in Moldova.

It is very important that even those who could not attend the meeting can “hear� the words from Steven Schmitz, Jim Garrison and Serge Beddington-Behrens. Each one of them, speaking in their own particular and personal way, tells us how the transpersonal view can be applied at a social level.

Serge Beddington-Behrens speaks as a spiritual activist, Jim Garrison brings a transpersonal perspective in education with his Ubiquity University project and Steven Schmitz shares his experience of how spiritual and cultural events influenced his professional life.

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Editorial

There is also a very interesting paper by Vitor Rodrigues speaking about new possible evolution of transpersonal psychotherapy, raising interesting topics for future area of research and discussion.

All these papers reflect the spirit of the journal, open to every kind of contribution, aiming to stimulate the discussion in the big community of EUROTAS and even further.

There are also three interesting papers from Ines Testoni (et al.), Vincent Laudiat and Martine Garcin-Fradet, on clinical studies, in which three different possible applications of therapeutic approaches are described.

I hope that these three examples will stimulate other therapists to consider their practice with a research attitude, so that transpersonal psychotherapy can build stronger foundations.

On behalf of the editorial board, acknowledging a request by the EUROTAS board, I announce that from the next issue papers written by students will be considered for publication for clinical or research studies, following the editorial rules that can be found in the authors’ instruction section.

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The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy

VITOR JOSE F. RODRIGUES, Ph.D. Psychologist and Psychotherapist, writer (ten books published), Former Univer­ sity teacher and researcher in Psychology and Parapsychology. Trainer in the Transpersonal field for more than 14 years.

ABSTRACT: Transpersonal Psychotherapy is bringing together Science and Spirituality at the service of human beings in psychological distress. To do so, it emphasises consciousness and identity – as the main observable manifestation of it. In the future, we believe there will be an enormously bigger applied knowledge of means for inducing changes in consciousness states and observation. These will include refinements of what we can already use: from relaxation chairs with massage devices to headphones with sound “preparations” to coloured lights, to aromatherapy, flotation tanks, biofeedback, “entheogen” drugs. We will know more about how to use them in conjunction with meditation techniques, breathing, prayer, mantras and sacred chants. We will know a lot more about which techniques and strategies will suit better specific clients according to their identity structures and specific troubles. Muscle tension monitoring will include both striate and smooth muscles providing clues about deep emotional ongoing processes. New energy monitoring devices will also allow for direct, real-time management of states of consciousness as they allow for deep insight and healthy change. The training of therapists will include the same technological developments along with demonstrated knowledge of the energy space, the psychological space, and management of time. We will be able to know, with greater sophistication, when a therapist (or a client) are in “ego states” or “transpersonal states”. Ethics will then also become of paramount importance. Last, deep knowledge about mind-body interactions at the service of ending illness and promoting pure Health will develop at the frontier of physical and mental well-being.

KEYWORDS: Psychotherapy, human, identity, consciousness.

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The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy I have been pondering previously on the future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy as this is a very important field and, to my knowledge, the only one that is systematically concerned with bringing together Science and Spirituality at the service of human beings in psychological distress. Something of undeniable relevance if we consider the fact that some five-billion people in our world do espouse some sort of spiritual belief or practice (Koenig, McCullough & Larson, 2001). To me, some very important changes are already underway or close to happening in our field – and they are relevant to the whole field of Psychotherapy.

Similarly to other approaches, Transpersonal Psychotherapy implies a therapeutic relationship between a therapist and one or several clients. The differences concern, as one would expect, the specifically important target for observation and change: most Psychotherapy Models place varying degrees of emphasis on cognition, emotion and behavior while Transpersonal Psychotherapy is mostly concerned with the way the patient experiences himself and his life consciously and the way he includes cognition, emotion and behavior in his identity structure.

It honors the contributions and expertise of other approaches and integrates them into a perspective that places Consciousness phenomena at central focus. It acknowledges the fact that we, human beings, are mostly conscious beings. As we experience our body, feelings, and cognitions, consciousness – in the sense of self-aware experience – is fundamental. We are not humans if we are not selfaware. We consider the identity structure to be the most concrete, observable, manifestation of consciousness (about this, see Louchakova, 2004, where she found that Identity is the main experience organizer, and also McCombs (1989), when she conceptualizes the personal self as the active builder of the comprehension of, and the action upon, Reality).

Different clients place assign different degrees of importance to body sensations and movements, emotions or thought in their core identity or self-definition. In the same way, some clients will include in their identity spiritual experiences and a sense of the Cosmos around them. Anyway Identity can be thought of as the main intermediary between our life experience, with the many levels of learning it produces, and our concrete, outward, behavior. We behave partially according to the way we see ourselves as actors in our personal lives.

We acknowledge the fact that both conscious and unconscious processes can influence human behavior but we also assert that such influence is mediated by identity and consciousness states that account for the depth and quality of the access 13

The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy to identity and the possibilities of changing or strengthening it. So Transpersonal Psychotherapy is a model that systematically resorts to consciousness modifying techniques, using them to help patients gain access, in a fast and deep way, to their inner worlds of cognition, emotion, behavior and/or spiritual experience.

In the same process they also acquire, from these techniques, powerful tools for changing the corresponding patterns of thought, emotion, motivation, and behavior. From our point of view, experiential consciousness is the main defining variable for human beings since without it they cannot be considered humans and since the whole human Culture does not make sense unless we consider that it has been made for conscious beings.

Three other important characteristics of Transpersonal Psychotherapy should be kept in mind: first, as the main emphasis goes to Consciousness states, the therapist must be trained in the management of consciousness states (something Thomas Roberts (1989) calls Tertiary Thinking) and must himself stay in a somehow modified state during the whole therapeutic sessions or at least some important bits of it; second, expanded, non-pathological states of consciousness allow the access of both therapist and patient to a deeper layer of themselves (sometimes called the transpersonal Self, the Soul, and so on) and to a corresponding storage of wisdom, creativity and “radiant health” (see Wegela (2003) for this last concept); third, the idea that Love is extremely healthy and health-promoting and the patient will get high benefits from developing love for himself, others, and Nature, cultivating and expressing it during the therapeutic relationship is also very important (see Rodrigues, 2008). Now let us consider the consequences of this for the Future.

Transpersonal Psychology and Psychotherapy makes good use of knowledge from spiritual traditions. From classic Yoga came lots of meditation techniques, namely breathing modalities allowing for specific effects upon our psychic apparatus: increasing and decreasing general levels of energy, balancing energy and emotions, inhibiting or exciting chakras, inhibiting or exciting psychic states and qualities connected to each chakra. Yoguic practices gave us tools for developing concentration, memory, but also specific qualities. Buddhism gave us the same and also some extra ones. Indeed several big spiritual traditions, like Xamanism, Christianity, Judaism, brought us many techniques for Meditation, Prayer, inner exploration and inner “travelling”. They also brought us maps of conscious experience and broad perspectives of human development that 14

The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy included not just the areas described by classic Psychology (psychomotor, social, emotional, cognitive, motivational, and so on) but also spiritual realms. Many transpersonal practitioners and researchers got in touch with spiritual traditions, used some knowledge from them, even based many clinical practices in traditional “psychotechnologies� (Grof, 2000).

In the future, we can count on detailed improvements: 1. Aids for inducing modified states of consciousness are already at use in several combinations: we have very good relaxation chairs (some of which include massage devices), headphones with specific sound preparations (aiming at the changing of brainwave patterns, such as the hemi-sync that has been developed at the Monroe Institute, USA), colored lights (connected with specific states of emotion and quietness or arousal), aromatherapy, drumming. We have flotation tanks (Kjellgren, Lyden, & Norlander (2008).

2. Such aids can be used in conjunction with meditation techniques, breathing, prayer, mantras and sacred chants or by themselves. At the same time, Biofeedback can both provide: a) the means to monitor ongoing changes in brainwave patterns as an observable correlate of modified states of consciousness and b) a special kind of training – a shortcut for learning how to perceive and modify some very relevant processes in the body, like cardiac rhythm and brainwave patterns. This is already happening and we can expect that in the future all of this can be brought together after some careful research is done: we will learn what kind of consciousness modification will be better suited for each patient and for each pathology or individual development process. Existing questionnaires and tests for describing the individual relevance and state of specific, individual, areas of identity will be used differently: they will provide clues about relevant areas of intervention for each client as it would not make much sense to insist on delicate spiritual experience when working with a client focused on emotions as core identity. One probably very powerful future example of technologies to be used for the individual benefit of clients will come from the monitoring of muscle tension (and energy blocking as a correlate). This can be done both at the striate, voluntary level and at the smooth muscle level (more connected with the unconscious and with psychosomatic disease). Such monitoring 15

The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy devices already exist, to some extent, and they will be used differently, probably in conjunction with the devices in the next section. We know from clinical experience that many events in the lives of people can become functionally “imprinted” in subtle patterns of bodily tensions and postures. Later their exploration can help clients get in touch with past events and sometimes obtain deep insights about them and the way they produced inhibitions, self-limitations, prejudices, that show up in body tensions.

3. Further instruments for monitoring what is going on and what is worthwhile increasing in brain, body and energy processes are already available. One such example comes from Korotkov’s work with GDV (Gas Discharge Visualization) devices (see http://korotkov.org/index. php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 for a good general perspective).

They are already giving us very interesting details about “energy field” correlates of psychological and physiological activity. In the future, such devices will be used to monitor in real time changes in the energy field of patients, signaling to therapists the right way to bring in inspiration and deep insight but also the moments the patients are in touch with their deepest pains and anxieties as this also will show up as specific patterns in GDV and other devices. So the therapist’s intuition will merge with technical apparatus letting us know exactly what is happening with a patient’s energy and consciousness at a given moment – at least at some possible levels. Another powerful example of what can already be done comes from research at the Institute of HeartMath, showing that the physical heart can be used as a powerful tool to change stress and anxiety patterns (along with many other possibilities including Education) and to build new ways for personal fulfillment. Technology for measuring both the heart’s electromagnetic field and the heart’s subtle rhythmic patterns is already available (McCraty, Atkinson & Tomasino, 2001).

4. New specifics for psychological diagnosis will develop as we will be able to ask patients full classical and new psychological questionnaires while monitoring their answers at an energy level and at the brainwave pattern level – therefore uncovering reactions that are out of awareness for many.

Signs of inner conflict, fear, unconscious needs, inhibitions, will show up in monitors, helping us unveil their effect both on the body and mind in real time.

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The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy The preparation of therapists will become more sophisticated. We will be able to actually monitor their development using the same devices they will use later with their patients. At the same time, they will be trained to perceive their inner world of emotions, symbols and cognitions as it relates to the cultural and social environment. They will also receive intense training in perceiving their inner space of subtle energies and the way it interacts with the energy space of patients (and can become infected by it or help cleansing it). In due time, this too will be at least partially monitored by technical means. Special skills will be needed for dealing with the space of the session set, the space of the relationship, the space of energy between therapists and patient, and the inner space of the patient: the body and energy space and the sacred space of possible contact with his “Higher Self” or Soul. The perception of Space – and perhaps of a fourth dimension of Space (Rodrigues, 2003) will receive lots of attention. Therapists will learn how to help clients “feel” close and far away spaces and the inner space within as it resonates (eventually) with them; they will learn how to “gather” energy from Space, how to invocate energy from sacred spaces, how to send energy through space, how to use space to obtain powerful therapeutic results; how to qualify space with energy patterns, how to accumulate energy in space, and so on. Systemic constellation techniques are already a good example of how one can “assign” patterns and qualities of energy to groups or specific, limited areas or therapeutic settings, to obtain therapeutic benefits. In the future we will probably see the development of that at the service of healing communities, even Nations or the whole planet.

Another area of new sophistication in the training of therapists will concern time management: they will learn how to accelerate and how to slow down the time they perceive and experience – and later they will use this in their sessions with patients. This is already current knowledge for Hypnotherapy experts (see an excellent, updated reference to this field in Nash, Michael R. & Barnier, Amanda (2008)). Also they will learn how to project themselves towards the future in modified states of consciousness; how to regress towards the past; and how to intensify the experience of the Present time. Again, the perception of specific enclosures of Space as the theatre of past events and as the possible theatre of future ones will help therapists understand the way places can either damage or heal people.

The therapist, as he becomes aware of his role as a catalyst for the inner development of patients, can also assume his “self-development duty”: the way 17

The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy he stays in the therapeutic relationship implies responsibility for the quality of this relationship also at subtle, energy levels. He must be pure in intention, focused, loving, steady, quiet, accepting, powerful and gentle. He must work inside himself the dilemmas he helps his patients dealing with: sadness and frustration; fear, anxiety and anger; death and suffering; love and hate; the need for sense and general meaning in life. He must learn how to dive inside his own inner world without drowning and bringing treasures from each inner trip. He must develop intense awareness so that he can help the patient pay attention; he must develop deep quietness and trust so that he can help the patient deal with the troubles of life. He must accept himself and be full of joy so that he becomes able to face sadness and alienation in others and in the world. He must learn how to deal with space, time, and his personal vs spiritual identity. This is also not new to Transpersonal Psychotherapists. The novelty will come from the fact that knowledge about the correlates of being in an ego state or in a transpersonal state, coming from Biofeedback devices, GDV ones, and the like, will help establish new standards and practices for training and therapy. Even the supervision of therapists will find new ways as role-plays, descriptions of sessions and many other ways will get richer thanks to the previous possibilities. Of course therapists will put great emphasis in spiritual development.

Now as I said, research in our field will change so that we will know how to bring together the previously mentioned technology. I believe that in the future such transpersonal evaluation instruments as the ones described by MacDonald, Kuentzel & Friedman (1999a and b) will be used in conjunction with neurological monitoring and energy monitoring. And research on healing and the influence of Psychotherapy on physical illnesses and Health will be conducted combining the previous technologies with Medical examinations and blood samples, allowing us to uncover the correlates, in real time, of Psychological interventions aiming at improvement of the immune system, the equilibrium of the endocrine system and the harmony of the nervous system, both central and autonomous. The technological progress will also make everything easier and cheaper as new machinery will combine several channels into single devices. Probably therapists will learn how to help clients create new, healthier, patterns not just of behavior but of energy circulation inside their physical and psychological identity. Perhaps this will amount to using sound, visualization, movement, and deep focusing to influence even the DNA of their bodies and the deep patterns (archetypes, karmic patterns‌) that produce specific human identities.

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The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy REFERENCES

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Grof, Stanislav (2000). Psychology of the Future. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Kjellgren, A., Lyden, F., & Norlander, T. (2008). Sensory isolation in flotation tanks: Altered states of consciousness and effects on well-being. The Qualitative Report, 13 (4), 636-656. Retrieved from http://www.nova.edu/ ssss/QR/QR13-4/kjellgren.pdf

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Koenig, Harold G.; McCullough, Michael E.; & Larson, David B: (2001).

Handbook of Religion and Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Louchakova, Olga (2004, February 15). Phenomenological Architecture of Self-Awareness: Applications in Education and Transpersonal Psychotherapy.

Paper presented at a Transpersonal Psychology 2004 Conference of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and the Association of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, CA.

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MacDonald, Douglas A.; Kuentzel, Jeffrey G; & Friedman, Harris L. (1999a).

A Survey of Measures of Spiritual and Transpersonal Constructs: Part One – Research Update. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Vol. 31, Nº 2, pp.

137-154.

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MacDonald, Douglas A.; Kuentzel, Jeffrey G; & Friedman, Harris L. (1999b).

A Survey of Measures of Spiritual and Transpersonal Constructs: Part Two – Additional Instruments. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Vol. 31, Nº 2, pp. 155-177.

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McCombs, Barbara L. (1989). Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achievement: A Phenomenological View. Cap 3 in D. J. Zimmerman & D. H. Schmeck (Eds.) Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achivement. Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: Springer-Verlag.

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McCraty, Rollin; Atkinson, Mike & Tomasino, Dana (compilers, 2001). Science of the Heart. Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance.

HeartMath Research Center, Institute of HeartMath, Publication Nº 01-001.

Boulder Creek, CA.

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Nash, Michael R. & Barnier, Amanda (2008). The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis.

New York: Oxford University Press.

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The Future of Transpersonal Psychotherapy •

Roberts, Thomas (1989). Multistate Education: Metacognitive Implications of the Minbody Psychotechnologies. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Vol. 21, Nº 1, pp. 83-102.

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Rodrigues, Vitor (2003). A Consciência como Esfera de Luz Tetradimensional – Proposta de um Modelo Teórico. Pgs 158-173 in Simões, Mário; Resende, Mário & Gonçalves, Sandra (Eds.): Psicologia da Consciência. Lisbon: Lidel.

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Rodrigues, Vitor (2008). L’Amour, la Santé et L’Éthique. Synodies, Automne 2008, pgs. 36-45.

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Wegela, Karen Kissel (2003). Nurturing the Seeds of Sanity: a Buddhist Approach to Psychotherapy. Chapter 1. In Mijares, Sharon G. (Editor) Modern Psychology and Ancient Wisdom. New York: Haworth Integrative Healing Press.

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EUROTAS 2013 Standing on the Threshold of the Future: A Transpersonal Vision for our Time

JIM GARRISON, Ph.D. Jim Garrison became President and Chairman of Wisdom University in 2005.

Previously, he founded and served as President of the Gorbachev Foundation/ USA and the State of the World Forum.

He teaches several of the core courses at Wisdom University.

Ph.D. at Cambridge University M.T.S, Harvard Divinity School B.A., University of Santa Clara; B.A. in World History, University of Santa Clara; M.T.S., History of Religion, Harvard University; and Ph.D., Philosophical Theology, Cambridge University. He has written several books concerning history and theology.

ABSTRACT: Jim Garrison’s keynote at the XV EUROTAS Transpersonal Conference in Mol­ dova on September 19th, 2013.

Topic: education for the future.

KEYWORDS: humanity, crisis, innovation, technology, spirituality.

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Eurotas 2013: Standing on the Threshold of the Future...

In May of 1992 we took Mr. Gorbačëv to the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City, which is the premiere institution on foreign policy matters in the U.S.A., and he gave his lecture. When he finished his lecture, Henry Kissinger, who was the dean of the CFR, asked the first question. He said: “Mr. Gorbačëv, why did you fall? Why were you forced to resign?”, and Mr. Gorbačëv at first was taken aback! But then he said something I will never forget, he said: “There are many political-economic reasons for my fall, but the essence was I did not analyze reality ruthlessly enough”, and that hit me like a diamond bullet. And if there is one thing that I’ve been devoured to do since then – as I have lived my life and built the institutions in which I’ve been involved – is to start with this ruthless analysis of reality as I possibly can!

So, I would like to set forth my analysis of human reality circa at 2030. I believe that there are four major megatrends, two negative and two positive, that are shaping the human condition at the present time.

Let’s start with the negatives first. The single greatest megatrend influencing and shaping planetary affairs now is the escalating crisis of climate change. Several months ago, scientists announced we have now passed the milestone of 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. In the pre-industrial times it was 285-286 parts per million. We are collectively emitting into the atmosphere every 24 hours over 100,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide: it’s the equivalent, in terms of heat, of several hundred Hiroshima bombs every 24 hours! And as a result, for the first time in planetary history, for the 4,5 billion that I heard it’s been here, a species is dramatically influencing the climate of the planet, and doing so in a very short period of time by unleashing major gases into the atmosphere that should have been kept into the earth.

The major result of this change is the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events. Since 1985 the number of extreme weather events have increased fourfold! There is the drought you will remember here in Moldova, Ukraine and Russia in 2009; you probably witness on the news the hurricane Sandy in New York, that flatted the city of New York; I live in California, several years ago, in one afternoon, there were 1900 lightning strikes that caused that many fires across the state of California, that in 24 hours burned down a million square acres of land! All of us, the world over – whether it’s typhoons in Bangladesh, hurricanes, floods, droughts – are been victimized by the fact that we relentlessly are burning tons of fuel, whether the result is the melting of the glaciers, the melting of the 22

Eurotas 2013: Standing on the Threshold of the Future... ice on Greenland, the Arctic, the Antarctic… Scientists predict that when all of the melt has happened, sea levels will rise about 75 meters: think about what that means! There are 220 major seaports around the world: if we don’t stop global warming, all those seaports will go under water! That’s Saint Petersburg, that’s London, that’s Rio De Janeiro, that’s Sidney, that’s Los Angeles, that’s San Francisco! And it’s already started!

One of the consequences of this, is rising civil strife. They released a study about a month ago saying that of the 17 countries where we have civil strife in the last three years, every single one of them had major climate change activity as the substrate of the civil disturbances. Syria! We are all focused on chemical weapons, but Syria today is experiencing the worst drought in its entire history, and the history of Syria goes back 10,000 years!... The drought is so severe that upwards to 70% of all the small farmers have been forced off the land. We think of the “Arab Spring”, we think of Tahrir Square, the young people with their Twitter accounts fomenting revolt… but in Tunis and in Egypt the civil unrest was not started by a demand for democracy: the civil unrest was started by a demand for the government to lower the food prices, because one of the effects of escalating climate change is turbulence in the farmland and the collapse of the world food supply. So climate change is the number one and it’s affecting everybody all over the world, whether you are transpersonal or not!

Number two is the rise of national security states, in the face of climate change, and the prospective that, if we do not stop global warming, civilization itself will be forfeit. Our governments are essentially doing nothing, and we all know that! Further more: in virtually every country in the world are governing élites, are stripping down the social resilience that we need to deal with the crisis that climate change produces! It’s happening in Moldova, in Russia, all over Europe and it’s certainly happening in the U.S.A. . Education is being stripped, social services are being stripped, and people more and more are being forced to deal with their future on their own.

There is another aspect: we are the first generation in the history of the world to be what I would call “post-privacy”, and the national security states would probably be better called (as Edward Snowden put it) “national surveillance states”! The government of the U.S.A. monitors all the phone calls going internationally everywhere! Our National Security Agency in monitoring every phone call going in and out of Moldova, in and out of Russia, etc., with huge computer systems that are placing on permanent record your e-mails, your phone calls, your text, 23

Eurotas 2013: Standing on the Threshold of the Future... your twitter, your feeds! And what that means is that, while there may not be an observable police state, if they do start to focus on who you are, you are completely defenseless and without any civil libertarian defenses against their capacity to monitor everything that you are doing, and to arrest and keep you without trial for as long as they want. And in the U.S.A. they do now have the right to execute you if necessary, if there is a suspicion that you are a terrorist!

We don’t live in democracies anymore! And we all need to understand that we live in what I would call “totalitarian democracies”! They let us vote, but money rules, the major corporations control. And so these two megatrends of climate change and the increasing disruption of our ecological equilibrium, on the one hand, and the creation of national security states on the other, is something that every person in the world has to understand: it is the context within which we now live and breath and have our being.

But there are two other megatrends. One is the burgeoning innovation of technology: the extraordinary paradox of our time! We are not in a crisis because we don’t have the technology that can solve the problems: we are in a crisis because we are not politically willing to use technologies that are already here.

One hour of sunlight, if fully absorbed and utilized, could provide most of the world energy needs right now. We have wind, we have geothermal, we have all kinds of things in nature: little algae that can eat up oil spills, mushrooms that will eat up nuclear radiation spills, and they are not being employed! So when we talk about consciousness revolution, it could not be more urgent!

Number four, we are just the supreme paradox of it all: even though there is only a couple of hundreds of us in this room, we in fact are the moral majority!

If you were back in Europe a thousand years ago, there was only one value system, and that was the Church, the Mother Church. In the beginning of 1400 the Renaissance emerged, and then the Enlightenment, and they began to move into the European consciousness a new value proposition, that was based not on the Church but in human reason, not on the Bible but on the scientific method.

And, for several centuries, as we all know from our history books, much blood was spilt in the Thirty Years War, in the Hundred Years War, in the Reformation, in the Inquisition, etc., over this question of which value proposition was going to be allowed to hold sway. There is still conflict between the Church and secular society, but coming into the 20th century the traditionalists, conservatives and moralists, and the scientific secular consciousness have reached an uneasy equilibrium. In the U.S.A. half of the people were traditionalists, half of the people were seculars.

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Eurotas 2013: Standing on the Threshold of the Future...

Then in about 1960s sociologists began to observe a new phenomenon, that at first they didn’t understand and it kept growing: 2%, then 3%, then 5%, then 10%, and now in the U.S.A. 35% of all the American adults are what Paul H. Ray calls the “cultural creatives”! Similar studies have been done all over Europe and in Japan. Who are the “cultural creatives”? They are people who have gone through the social movements that have characterized the post-world war: civil rights, environmental, gay-lesbian, preventing cruelty to animal, the transpersonal movement, etc.; the people who are better informed, looking for new ideas; they are also the people who are very deeply spiritual but they are not religious, which is a new phenomenon in the western civilization, if not in human history! A hundred years ago, if you were spiritual you were religious, you were either a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim! Or in India you would be an hindu, or in China you would be a Confucio followers. I would dare to say that if we took a poll of this room, most of you are deeply spiritual and very few are orthodox religious. The “cultural creatives” embrace technology, we all have our cell-phones, we are online, but we also are environmentally concerned and we embrace community. The “cultural creatives” are pragmatically political and not ideological, they just want to solve the problems and get together with people in a similar vein. The irony of the “cultural creatives”, which are now the moral majority, certainly in western civilization – and studies are indicating most of the cosmopolitan cities around the world – is this: “cultural creatives” look out into the world and see the traditionalists and the modernists that control the media, control the civic institutions, control the religious institutions and control the prevailing culture, so the “cultural creatives” feel that they are alone! They have done studies all over the world, but the feeling of isolation, the feeling of “I’m the only one herein”, catch now!: it is transpersonal, it is universal, but it is extraordinary! The studies done in the “cultural creatives” indicate that there is, for example, more of a similarity between a “cultural creative” in Tokyo and one in Moscow, than there are similarities between that “cultural creative” in Tokyo and his or her Japanese neighbor! Which means that the “cultural creatives” is not a western phenomenon, it’s a global phenomenon, and it’s emerging, just like the technologies, right at the moment when our crisis demands a systemic, fundamental change in consciousness.

So the single most crucial question before us – whether it’s in a transpersonal conference, or a conference in renewable energy, or in the transition towns, seeking to innovate at a community level – is how do we reach a critical mass. So let me summarize.

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Eurotas 2013: Standing on the Threshold of the Future...

If you look at these four megatrends together – climate change; the rise of the national security state or “national surveillance state”; burgeoning technologies that can solve the problems; and the emerging of this new consciousness, that has not happened for 800 years since the Renaissance – you have four contradictory megatrends that are interacting very unpredictably. As Lester Brown, who follows these matters extremely closely, has said: “we are in a race of tepee points”, because we never know when a development in one sector is going to burst out, and don’t know how it is going to affect the whole. Our generation, perhaps more than any generation, certainly in recent history, is experiencing what they call “black swan events”: they are events that are considered to be impossible by the conventional wisdom, and then all of a sudden they happen! And then, once they happen, everybody says: “Well yeah! That was inevitable!”. It’s called “black swan” because British scientists asserted categorically that there is no such thing as a black swan, and then in Australia they found some! September 11th of 2001 was a black swan event. The rise of Gorbačëv was a black swan event: a week before Gorbačëv, there was not a sovietologist in the world that predicted that Gorbačëv would articulate Glasnost’ and Perestrojka. What happened in South Africa with Mandela and De Klerk, and the emergence of democracy there in 1995 was a “black swan event”. The totalitarian systems here in Eastern Europe, in Russia and the Soviet Union was considered so powerful, that even after Gorbačëv nobody expected the fall of the Berlin wall, and it happened over a week-end! So, when you are in an integrated system, with all kinds of tepee points happening in an unpredictable way, you get “black swan events”.

In my view, what that means for all of us, contemplating the future of transpersonal movement, is we all need to understand that: context matters! The transpersonal movement cannot be seen as a private thing that you do in your own personal life and has nothing to do with anything else! Transpersonal is political! Transpersonal is ecological, is cultural, is social! We are all living in a world of the “butterfly effect”, where the flap of butterflies wings over China eventually causes a storm over Moldova or the U.S.A. or Peru. In this new interactivity, how we act and what we do, matters more than we could possibly imagine, because small perturbations in the system, if they resonate through the total system, can have extraordinary effects.

This leads me to the final area that I want to explore. What do you do in the face of climate change? What do you do in the face of a national security state that is monitoring everything that you are communicating, that can access your bank 26

Eurotas 2013: Standing on the Threshold of the Future... accounts, that can even use your cell-phone when is turned off to listen to what you are saying? I believe that the beginning of what we must do was put into a single phrase by Albert Einstein, that I like to call to all your memory because I know you all know it. What he said is that the consciousness that produced the problem cannot solve the problem, and it’s probably the truest thing I know. What it means is that we need to understand that the nature of social change is not so much “petitioning our governments to do the right thing”, in a world where we may have actually passed the point of no return, we have to put our petard into the ground and recreate the world anew, to the degree of which we can have the strength – individually and in our numbers, for example here in Moldova – in the face of the grip of the scientific reductionist establishment, to found a conference on transpersonal: that is founding the new.

It’s worth remembering that the Renaissance was not started by the explosion of art: what happened in Florence, beginning in the fall of 1402, was two Florentine chancellors of the city decided that the crisis that Florence was undergoing was so severe that there is nothing that they could any longer do to change the problem.

They decided to change the educational system of Florence, they did something completely counterintuitive, and they held a series of meanings. They decided: we need to shift the basis of education away from the Church to the Greco-Roman civilization, away from the Bible to human reason, and that’s what they called “Civic Humanism”. It was the change in education, a new basis for education that ignited what we now remember as the Renaissance.

The transpersonal movement needs to create the world a new and dedicate itself, as we are doing in this conference, to educate it toward a new kind of human consciousness: it’s the only thing left for us to do, in the faith that the small little acts that we commit, even here like acts elsewhere, can be taken by the spirit that governs the affairs of human kind, like a little speck of dust in the gust of wind, and then great change takes place. The grounding of this new way of being in the world, I believe – and there are many of you who know a lot more about transpersonal than I do – the grounding that we need to create the world anew is in shamanic consciousness. At the time when the world itself is made more turbulent and the Earth is rising and may slough us off as a species if we are not careful, the greatest ground of spirituality is not in the Bible, is not in the “Koran”, is not in “Torah”, is not in the “Upaniṣads”, is not in the “Analects”… it’s in the Earth herself.

The shaman knows the language of nature and then the language of society, the laws of the visible realm and the laws of the invisible realm. The shaman is 27

Eurotas 2013: Standing on the Threshold of the Future... the translator between the realms on behalf of society and on behalf of nature. I have a university, and we say to our students that if we’ve learned enough French, German, Greek and Hebrew, etc., we need to learn the mother tongue: we need to learn how to drum again. We need to learn how to commute, and in fact communicate, with the trees, with the stones, with the water, with the wind… I believe that it will be to the degree to which we can learn the mother tongue – at the moment in history when the Mother is coming at civilization with the fury, like Kālī! – that we will begin the resonance between humanity and nature that we’ve sawed, fundamentally lost, as we’ve constructed our modernity.

People in the transpersonal movement are actually midwives, they are midwives of the future. I believe that the integral theory and practice and the transpersonal theory and practice may be on the margins now, but if we are to survive we’ll become mainstream probably sooner than we can imagine.

At this time when everything may look dark, this is the time when we have to keep faith! This is the time when we have to embody the future!

Let me close with a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke, who distilled down – as he did in so many areas of human affairs, both of the mind and the heart – into a few lines who we are and what we need to do at this moment: “Again and again in history some special people in the crowd wake up.

They have no ground in the crowd, and they emerge according to much broader laws.

They carry strange customs with them, and demand room for bold actions.

The future speaks ruthlessly through them.

They save the world.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1899)

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EUROTAS 2013 Resonance

TOBIN HART, Ph.D. Tobin Hart, Ph.D. serves as Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia as well as President of the ChildSpirit Institute, a nonprofit educational and research hub exploring the spirituality of children and adults. His work lives at the nexus of spirituality, psychology and education. His most recent books are The Secret Spiritual World of Children (New World) and From Information to Transformation: Education for the Evolution of Consciousness (Peter Lang). Two forthcoming books are The Four Virtues (Simon and Schuster) and The Integrative Mind: Transformative Education for a World on Fire (Roman and Littlefield).

ABSTRACT: Tobin Hart keynote at the XV EUROTAS Transpersonal Conference in Moldova, on Sep足 tember 20th, 2013.

We are in the midst of an epochal change in the landscape of knowing. Contemporary education is operating from an outdated modernist episteme inadequate for the challeng足 es of the 21st century. The solution for culture and classrooms is not in a change in cur足 riculum or technology but instead in a change of consciousness, that is, a change in how we know. Two fundamental ways of knowing are articulated. The proposal is to develop and integrate a more intimate empiricism to balance the detached knowing so predomi足 nant today. This epistemic shift is consistent with insights from transpersonal psychology supported by recent neuroscience. Five gateways to engender this shift in knowing are named.

KEYWORDS: Education, knowledge, science, global society.

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Eurotas 2013: Resonance Consciousness, Culture and Classrooms: Integrative Knowing Education is preparation for an uncertain future. The intensity of change– technological, social, and environmental–in the 21st century makes this rivetingly clear. From access to instantaneous global communication, to giant buildings collapsing before our eyes, to a wind or a wave that drowns a shoreline, stunning and unexpected change seems to define these days and presumably those to come.

But is our current emphasis on information acquisition and on basic literacy and numeracy sufficient to prepare our charges the near horizon? It seems increasingly clear that our largely 19th century (industrial age) model of learning is out of date and in desperate need of an upgrade.

Living virtually as live electronic nodes on the information superhighway gives instant access to nearly anything and everything. But I have become less concerned about whether our charges will keep up with the information deluge and more concerned that they will be able to figure out what’s worth keeping up to. How will education for the near horizon help them learn and discern? How will it engender creativity and insight and embody virtue and value beyond facts and formulae? Where do we look for an upgraded vision of education? Does transpersonal psychology have anything to offer?

Central to the nature of the transpersonal is some type of expanded experience of reality, one that moves through or beyond (the meanings of the preface trans) the personal and individual. Virtually all transpersonal experience and theory implies a significantly expanded or deeper knowing that is characterized as more direct, immediate, and intuitive. This experience of knowing may give us a clue to the front edge of the evolution of human consciousness, culture, and even classrooms. This clue points not so much toward what we know, but instead toward how we know.

Ways of Knowing At an essential level, there are two ways of knowing. That is, two fundamental ways that the mind works to know the world. Of course knowing is complex and multifaceted. There are myriad variations to be sure and certainly plenty of other ways to slice this rhetorically, but most critically knowing comes down to this.

One way is categorical. This knows the world through abstraction, through labeling it, separating it from us, through taking apart to understand. Categorical awareness narrows focus, seeks precision, detail, and objectivity. It simplifies 30

Eurotas 2013: Resonance and represents, proceeds linearly and sequentially. As we dig deeper with this tool everything is reduced to parts, to lowest units that are differentiated and catalogued. It reaches its current apex in metaphor of computer zeros and ones.

Our schooling emphasizes this way of knowing, and for the most part, only this.

The other knowing is through contact instead of category. It is direct, embodied, recognizes wholes and connections. It is intimate, holistic, relational, and dynamic.

Awareness through contact enables a broader view, one connected with the world and the body. This knowing seeks novelty, picks up implicit meaning and metaphor, reads faces and other cues of individuals instead of simplified broad categories of identity. Knowledge through contact is evolving, implicit, and largely indeterminate and is consistent with the fundamentals of transpersonal knowing (Hart, Nelson, Puhakka, 2000).

Drawing from a vast body of neuroscientific and phenomenological data, Iain McGilchrist (2009) contends that these ways of knowing have neurological substrates corresponding to the anatomically distinct hemispheres of the brain.

Though there was some popular interest in right-left hemisphere distinction at the later part of the 20th century, the common understanding was largely inaccurate, often reducing the left to basic logic and the right to creativity. Both hemispheres are involved in logic and creativity along with most other functions involving all of which involve complex interaction across brain and body regions.

However, today we are recognizing that left and right hemispheres of the brain provide us with two fundamentally different ways of relating to the world.

Left brings that categorical, narrowed, discriminative focus while the attention of the right is broad and flexible, connects directly and recognizes connected wholes as opposed to the left’s individual parts. These seem perfectly designed to complement one another and both ways of knowing are essential to human understanding. The problem is that their essential partnership has come unhinged.

One of McGilchrist’s primary insights is that the left hemisphere does not have the capacity to integrate the right. By its very nature the left cannot process or value in wholes or draw material from the body and senses so readily. (Most sensory and body-based information connects to the brain neuroanatomically through the right hemisphere.) On the other hand, the right is largely integrative and naturally incorporates the data from the left, and is thus positioned to serve as the dominant driver of consciousness.

However, because of the powerful rise of categorical consciousness reinforced through objectivism and reductionism and the education that both derives from 31

Eurotas 2013: Resonance it and reinforces it, the right has lost its primacy; the left is running the show.

Inevitably, the show it can see is limited, an abstracted or virtual view of the world but one thought to be real and assumed to be complete.

Ultimately the most important consideration here is not where these functions are identified anatomically. We know from the history of science (e.g., The world is flat; the sun orbits around the earth.) that especially in such a complex area as consciousness that our explanations are likely to change. What is most essential is not the location but instead the capacities or function of mind, the ways that we attend to the world.

Both ways of knowing are critical. Both impact how we see, what we see and ultimately how we treat what we see. But in human culture and classrooms the last several centuries have increasingly emphasized one aspect of mind–categorical consciousness–to the exclusion of the other, and the consequences have been monumental.

Abbreviators This emphasis on categorical consciousness was catalyzed by the great rise in the scientific method beginning some four hundred years ago. This shift in knowing has helped us to distinguish, dissect, define and build in so many domains. This has been incredible by any measure.

This individual, detached, differentiating perspective is hinged on a way of knowing that separates the object we are perceiving from us–objectification–and by reducing it to parts–reductionism. Objectification and reductionism, alongside assumptions of materialism, dualism, mechanism, and determinism, are the primary tools of the modernist way of knowing and tend to engender knowing by a kind of domination. In a sense the “other” is to be known by detachment from it and our dominion over it. Whether the atom or our neighboring state or a competing ideology, we might say the work is to capture and tame it to our will.

Sir Francis Bacon, instrumental in the formation of the scientific method through his articulation of inductive reasoning, understood just what categorical knowing implied for education: “Mastery of nature for the relief of man’s estate begins to become the governing objective of education” (Bacon, 1900, p. 315). The aim was now to “enlarge the power and empire of mankind in general over the universe” (p. 366). It looks like we have succeeded remarkably well in expanding our powers over the universe. In Rene Descartes’ (1994) words, “[We have rendered] ourselves the lords and possessor of nature” (p. 46).

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Eurotas 2013: Resonance As powerful and valuable as this is–and there is absolutely no denying it’s worth– we are recognizing the limits and unintended consequences of this as an exclusive way of knowing. For all its power and value, this modernist direction for knowing and for education profoundly inhibits other ways of knowing.

Leonardo da Vinci understood the problem of what he called the abbreviators approach. His words seem stunningly prophetic now 500 years later.

The abbreviators of works do injury to knowledge and to love…Of what value is he who, in order to abbreviate the parts of those things of which he professes to give complete knowledge, leaves out the greater part of the things of which the whole is composed?.... You don’t see that you are falling into the same error as one who strips the tree of its adornment of branches full of leaves, intermingled with fragrant flowers or fruit, in order to demonstrate that the tree is good for making planks. (As cited in Capra, 2007, p. 12) Da Vinci’s approach was an integrated science, philosophy, and art of quality and wholeness, an exploration of patterns and the interrelatedness of things, more complete than the mechanistic and reductionistic understanding. He intimately understood the mechanics–he designed hundreds of mechanical devices and carefully studied their properties including detailed understanding of things like the human arm or of the flow of fluids.

But while he understood full well that the arm, for example, provided mechanical utility and could be dissected into individual categorized components, he did not reduce the arm or the human or nature-at-large simply to parts. His profound reverence for natural creations born of intimate contact and his ability to recognize patterns and interconnecting phenomena provided an integrated way of seeing the world. Without this more intimate and integrated way of knowing, as he says, we “do injury to knowledge and to love.”

To what extent does our prevailing educational approach leave out ways of knowing and thereby foster the same kind of injury? Today, how do we reconcile mastery of nature with mastery over ourselves, reconcile mechanistic and holistic understanding, quality and quantity, subjective and objective, awe and information?

Episteme Civilization moves through various eras or epochs of knowing, that is, the grounds on which we constitute truth and knowledge. Philosopher Michel Foucault (2002) referred to this as the episteme of an era. (Kuhn, 1962, spoke of scientific paradigms 33

Eurotas 2013: Resonance in a fairly similar way.) Basically, the episteme is made up of the assumptions, rules, roles, standards and methods of knowing that guide and limit how we think and know. We can’t quite see this; it is a kind of epistemic unconscious that we operate within. Such an epoch of knowing is thought to last a few centuries, emerges from, overlaps with and then eclipses the previous episteme. The enlightenment saw the rise of the individual and the application of a scientific, materialist knowing as the ultimate standard for truth, bit by bit overturning the authority of the church in many respects. This naturally has led to public education that emphasizes facts, measurement, reduction, materiality, objectivity and the like.

More recently, the post-modern turn has opened cracks in the modernist episteme. It helps us unpack “facts” and ask critical questions about categorical knowledge. For example, truth and knowledge is often tied to power. When we ask, “Who funded that research?” we are recognizing the mutability of “objective fact.” Truth is meditated by our intent, expectations, social status, language, race, history, and more. “Facts” can be a product of power and spin, not only reduced, objective, measureable truth.

This in no way whatsoever diminishes the importance of science or facts or measurement but it helps to place them in the context of human discourse and culture. It helps us think critically and go behind the curtain of so-called objective knowledge, recognizing that “truth”, to one degree or another, is socially construed.

The modernist era has helped us to distinguish in so many ways. The post-modern has helped expose how culture and context shape what we consider to be true and good and beautiful.

Today, after four hundred years of a modernist backdrop recently modified by the post-modern turn, it appears that we are on the cusp of a new episteme. This shift requires a fundamental recalibration in knowing that is implicit in transpersonal experience and relevant in daily life. The front edge of culture and consciousness, evolution and education, involves a reemergence of more intimate and integrative ways of knowing. The challenge for this age is not just about more information and faster connections, more differentiation, domination, and deconstruction.

Instead it is to find a way to bring together the bits and the bytes in living the integrated life in a world of global interconnection. Goethe (2008) said it this way: “To find yourself in the infinite you must distinguish and then combine” (p. 48).

The modernist age has helped us to distinguish, dissect, and define in so many domains. We have focused on the function that takes things apart, meets the 34

Eurotas 2013: Resonance world at arms length, and is self-generating and self-reinforcing. We also need to connect, meeting the world up close and in person, to feel it in our bodies, to be moved, to find context, meaning and beauty so that the bits and bytes make sense. We don’t want to just catalogue our life; we want to enter it.

After centuries of increasingly one-sided knowing, we are called to find a balance between: subjective and objective, meaning and “fact,” unseen and seen, rhiozomatic and viral development beside linear and sequential, intuition and logic, systems and components, compassion and calculation, reason and feeling, forest and tree, mystery and certainty.

Gateways How do we balance the powerful precision of categorical consciousness with the big view and intimate touch of contact? How do we improve our ability to not only generate consciousness but also to receive it? Is it even possible or practical to go about this in our daily life and in contemporary education? There is no switch to flip or control knob to turn, but there are gateways to an integrative mind and more intimate knowing.

Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make you accident prone” (as cited in Chang, 2006, p. 265). In the middle of this moment, this day or even a school assignment there are certain activities that help open the aperture of consciousness, welcoming contact and engendering a more integrated knowing. These could be thought of as gateways to an integrative mind. A very brief thumbnail sketch of five of these gateways relevant to education may give a sense of the kind of activities or approaches that open knowing. These are elaborated in detail elsewhere (see Hart, in press).

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Contemplation

“Pay attention” is perhaps the instruction we implore most often in education.

Yet we rarely help students to do this, we just insist that they do. To deploy, shift, sustain and open awareness gives us power to use the mind intentionally. The most basic and universal practices of contemplation do just this, developing the strength and flexibility of the muscle of attention. In addition, the contemplative mind allows us to do more. With just a little practice we can turn our gaze inward, witness the content (sensations, thoughts, feelings) and the process of one’s own consciousness, helping to clean and even reground the lens of perception in order to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly.

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Eurotas 2013: Resonance This reflection leads to meta-cognition, which allows us not only to inquire into the question at hand but also toward the asker of the question. We can become the object of inquiry as well as the instrument, as we look into self and subject. Ultimately, the contemplative allows us to interrupt habitual patterns and reactions and stay awake to new ways of thinking and seeing, to the immediate flow of consciousness inside and out.

In addition, the attention to attention has a variety of related effects. This inner technology allows us to steady the mind and modulate emotional reaction, reduce stress response in the body, and foster executive function especially important at a time when outer technology is pushing so much, so fast at us. We discover that this way of knowing has the potential to alter the function and even the structure of the brain and with it shift long-term traits such as compassion and emotional balance (see Hart, 2008). The simplest of activities, such as a moment of silence, mindful attention, or quiet reflection, can help to open this gateway in a moment in or outside of the classroom (see Hart, 2004). •

Imagination

In general, there has been a tendency in the modern West not to take imagination seriously. The non-observable, non-logical nature of imagination renders it difficult to pin down and thus awkward in a rational, materialist backdrop. Imagination has been mistaken as merely a colorful accent to life, and largely dismissed in an educational age anxious about meeting standards and status. However, we do not outgrow imagination individually or culturally, as this process is fundamental to our knowing at every level of development and across every significant domain.

We hear, for example, that imagination is the source of insight from scientific discovery to artistic innovation to practical problem solving. Improvisation, divergent thinking, play, fantasy, myth, spontaneity, irony, metaphor, and design are at home here as we imagine possibility beyond the information given, so essential in this dynamic age.

We might imagine ourselves as a cancer cell or bacterium, as did the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk (1983) or conduct thought experiments like Einstein imagining, for example, what would happen if we traveled at the speed of light.

The moral imagination of Mother Theresa or the “dream� of Martin Luther King, Jr. opens new possibilities changing both consciousness and culture. Essentially, imagination builds a bridge between the known and the unknown. It enables us to work through problems in the laboratory of our minds and perhaps reach into 36

Eurotas 2013: Resonance hidden realms, the mundus imaginals, as Henri Corbin (1972) named it.

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Beauty

The ancients knew that somehow the goal of life was not only about the good and the true; it was also about the beautiful. Whitehead (1967) claimed that the “teleology of the universe is the production of beauty” (p. 324). Somehow beauty embodies something both immanent and transcendent that resonates deep within us. It awakens emotion and we know emotion is central to deep learning.

We recognize it, we seek it, we base decisions on it, we might call it “quality.” Even in science we discover beauty may be the prime mover. French mathematician and theoretical physicist Henri Poincaré (2003) understood the role of beauty in science in this way: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful” (p. 22).

One of the primary sources of beauty is nature: a spectacular sunset, the redness of a rose, the majestic flight of a hawk. Nature serves as wonder for the mind.

We know that most descriptions of transcendent ecstasy are triggered by nature (Laski, 1968) and ecstasy reflects a profound opening of consciousness, hinting at a move from category to contact. In intimate encounter with the natural world, we so often come to recognize that we are part of nature rather than detached from it and as such our sense of belonging and responsibility is radically amplified.

Attention to beauty, quality or an aesthetic is not ancillary but instead central to an integrated mind. In this day or this assignment we may lead with appreciation instead of categorization, try to behold rather than just label, encounter first hand the tension of contrast and harmony in an assignment or any moment, and work to manifest our own beautiful expression in the world.

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Embodiment

From Augustine to Descartes the body has been understood as primitive or mechanistic. But contemporary neuroscience and our lived experience begins to paint a picture of a body–feeling, sensation, movement, physiological processes– that is not separate or inferior to thinking but instead central to knowing. For example, the discovery of neuropeptides and their receptor sites, assumed to exist only in the brain and associated with thinking, have been discovered in the gut (Pert, 1986). This enteric nervous system alongside other body-based systems such as the heart, appear to be central to knowing. Thinking is a more embodied 37

Eurotas 2013: Resonance process than we may have assumed.

From this new understanding, education is dramatically catalyzed by attention to the body, developing an embodied mind we might say. The mind-body unity helps put our parts back together and with it comes a richer, sensual, more robust way of knowing cultivated by attunement to the body. Asking simple questions such as “Where am I now? “What do I notice in my body?” turns us toward the felt sense (Gendlin, 1988) that incorporates a more immediate and integrated knowing.

• Empathy While science claims a detached, objective gaze, the way some great scientists do science is often quite different from the way we teach it. Specifically there is a less detached empiricism at work where the gap between knower and the object of study is reduced. Nobel Laureate in genetics Barbara McClintock says it this way, “You have to have a feeling for the organism, you have to have an openness to let it come to you.” (Keller, 1983, p 198).

Not only in science, but in all domains, a capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes provides a multiplicity of perspectives, helping us understand how a terrorist might, from another point of view, be a freedom fighter or visa versa. This allows us to reconsider our own assumptions as well as the other’s vantage point.

As we close the distance between self and object something else happens. We become less willing to do violence to the other, whether a tree or our neighbor.

In fact, empathy has been described as the trait that makes us most human (Azar, 1997) and the foundation for morality (Hoffman, 1990). Thus, a more intimate empiricism has profound implications for values and virtue, caring and civility, domains that education has been tasked to develop. When we open to this level of understanding we find the mind most often naturally includes the heart.

Empathy is about a way of meeting the world, a participative way of knowing. It opens the possibility for collaboration, community and communion and with it a more intimate sense of interconnection and interdependence.

Conclusion As a global society we are in the midst of epochal change. As an educational culture we have been uncertain how to move forward. More emphasis on standards, new revised curriculum, more testing, and fresh technology has not improved education in any fundamental way nor does it seem likely to. The solution at the 38

Eurotas 2013: Resonance edge of this new episteme is not so much about what we know but especially about how we know.

In every moment we stand poised between moving on and moving into our experience, between differentiation and integration, between categorizing or making contact with our world. The return of a more intimate, direct knowing in balance and integration with the powerful analytic mind gives us a chance, in the words of Thomas Berry (2000), to see the world not as a collection of objects but instead as a communion of subjects. When we do so, we stop doing injury to knowledge and to love.

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Eurotas 2013: Resonance REFERENCES

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Azar, B. (1997). Defining the trait that makes us most human. APA Monitor, 28 (11), 1-15.

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Bacon, F. (1900). Novum Organum, I. 3; I. 129, in Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. New York: Willey Book Co., p. 315, p. 366. (p. 45).

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Berry, T. (2000). The great work: Our way into the future. New York: Random House.

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Capra, F. (2007). The science of Leonardo: Inside the mind of the great genius of the renaissance. New York: Doubleday.

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Corbin, H. (1972). Mundus imaginalis or the imaginary and the imaginal.

Ashuelot, NH: Golgonooza Press, p. 1-19.

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Descartes, R. (1994). A discourse on method: meditations and principles. New York: J. M. Dent.

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Foucault, M. (2002). The archeology of knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith.

London and New York: Routledge. original work published 1969

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Gendlin, E. T. (1988). Focusing (2nd ed.). New York: Bantam Books.

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Hart, T., Nelson, P. L., Puhakka, K. (2000). Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness. Albany: NY: SUNY Press).

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Hart, T. (2004). Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. Journal of Transformative Education 2 (1) 28-46

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Hart, T. (2008). Interiority and education: Exploring the neurophenomenology of contemplation and its potential role in learning. Journal of Transformative Education. 6(4) 235-250.

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Hart, T. (in press). The integrated mind: Transformative education for a world on fire. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Hoffman, M. L. (1990). Empathy and justice motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 14 (2), 151-172.

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Keller, E. (1983). A feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock. New York: Freeman.

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Eurotas 2013: Resonance •

Krishnamurti, J. as cited in Chang, L. (2006). Wisdom for the soul: Five millennia of prescriptions for spiritual healing. Washington, D. C.: Gnosophia.

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Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Laski, M. (1968). Ecstasy: A study of some secular and religious experiences.

London: Cresset Press.

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McGilchrist, Iain (2009). The Master and his Emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Pert, C. B. (1986). The wisdom of the receptors: Neuropeptides, the emotions, and bodymind. Advance, 3(3), 8-16.

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Poincaré, H. (2003). Science and method. Mineola, NY: Dover (Original work published 1914)

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Salk, J. (1983). Anatomy of reality: Merging of intuition and reason. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Whitehead, A. N. (1967). Adventures of Ideas. New York: Penguin.

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EUROTAS 2013 The Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist

SERGE BEDDINGTON-BEHRENS, Ph.D. Serge Obolensky Beddington-Behrens started out as a stockbroker, before mov­ ing into book publishing and running an art gallery in Central London, and then relocating to the U.S. to train as a Transpersonal Psychotherapist, Life Coach and Relationship Consultant. In the 1980’s, he co-founded the Institute for the Study of Conscious Evolution in San Francisco.

For the last thirty-five years, he has lectured and taught workshops and spir­ itual retreats all over Europe, the U.S. and Russia. He has had a spiritual advice column in the magazine Kindred Spirit for many years. He wrote a book entitled Awakening the Universal Heart: A Guide for Spiritual Activists.

ABSTRACT: Serge Beddington-Behrens keynote at the XV EUROTAS Transpersonal Conference in Moldova, on September 21st, 2013.

Topic: exploring the many faces of the spiritual activist.

KEYWORDS: Changed world, conflicted world, environment, heart, human beings.

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Eurotas 2013: Exploring the Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist The Situation We are all living today in a very conflicted world. On the one hand we are surrounded by many outmoded institutions, organisations, behaviours and values, which are both holding our evolution back and destroying our planet. If we are to survive, they need to die, yet they are fighting hard to maintain their positions. On the other hand, we are seeing many movements for change, led by people committed to working for a new and healthier world. And this fact gives me great hope. Indeed, I believe all of us today who are concerned about the state of our planet, excepting those who are destitute or ill, or who live in a failed state or a war zone, need to recognise that we have a responsibility to act for change in some form or another. I think that the more we advance into the twenty-first century, the more we are all being challenged a) to stop being selfish, concerned only with what happens to ourselves and our immediate kin, and b) to let go of solely seeing ourselves as being citizens of a particular country or race or religion or culture. I think we all need to start envisioning ourselves transnationally, that is, as citizens of the whole planet first and foremost, and to see this as more important than what particular country we happen to have been born in, what colour our skin is and what religion we happen to ascribe to. I also think we can no longer just sit back and allow our politicians, our generals, our bankers and so on to continue running the show and controlling everything (not least because in so many instances, they are the ones who have got us into the many messes which we are in today.) We all need to recognise that if we want a changed world, then it is up to each of us to take responsibility for bringing it about. In the words of Barack Obama, ‘Change will not come about if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek.’ And as Eric Assadourian put it, ‘Salvaging our society requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns, a dramatic shift in the very design of human societies.’ So if we are concerned with the issue of poverty in the world, if the issue of gay or women’s rights is close to our hearts, if we are angry about corporate corruption or political dishonesty or the destruction of our environment, if we believe that a higher consciousness needs to come into the world, or whatever it is that most concerns us, then it is up to us to do something about it.

However, as Gandhi so wisely put it, ‘If we want to have change come about, we need to be the change we wish to see happen,’ implying that it is not enough merely to know – in our minds – about what is wrong with our world. Rather, in 43

Eurotas 2013: Exploring the Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist the way we see the world and actually live, move and generally ‘have our being’ in it, we need to embody the changes we wish to see. So if, for example, we want a more tolerant world or one without war, we need to see that there is tolerance and peace in our own hearts. If we want the rich to be more generous towards the poor, then we need to set an example of this in our own lives, and, if we ourselves happen to be wealthy, see if we really need to surround ourselves with all our opulence, especially in view of the terrible poverty all around us. A most wonderful Indian holy man called the Shivapuri Baba was asked (when aged 112) how we can best help our world. His reply was, ‘To think only good thoughts of others, speak only good words of others, do only good deeds to others and give of our substance to help others.’

The Significance of the Heart Here is where the Heart is so important, for I don’t believe we can do this or make these shifts without having worked at opening our hearts, as without an open heart, we won’t care enough about people or situations which don’t have an immediate impact upon our own lives. And if we don’t care enough, then we don’t do things; we don’t act, and being an activist is all about our taking the right kind of action. Yes, many of us may think the world would be better if we had peace not war or that large corporations should do more to help the planet, or that something needs to be done about climate change, but if we don’t have Heart, we don’t tend to get off our backsides and actually go out and do something about it – unless, of course, there is some personal incentive for ourselves! The historian Arnold Toynbee understood this when he told us that ‘the greatest threat to mankind’s survival can be removed only by a revolutionary change of heart in human beings’. And while we all possess a physical heart, this by no means implies that its emotional or spiritual dimensions, or those parts of it that enable us to care and share and feel compassion, have necessarily been awakened.

Indeed, the sad thing is that in far too many of us, these dimensions are quite dormant and this is connected to why our planet is in the state that it is in. For me, then, the big human problem is the ‘Heart problem’, or the fact that there is not enough Heart in the world. Yes, we have many very clever people on our planet who perfectly understand all that is wrong with society, but because their comprehension lies solely in their minds, and is not embodied in their being, they still remain part of the problem and not the solution. And consequently nothing 44

Eurotas 2013: Exploring the Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist shifts. In other words, because we have not yet awakened genuine compassion inside our hearts, far too many of us are quite indifferent to human suffering (so long as it is not our own). Similarly, we are full of hate because we’ve not opened to the heart of forgiveness, or we are greedy or destructive because we’ve not yet opened to the spirit of abundance or equanimity. So if we are to be effective activists, we have to be able to care, we have to be in a state that enables us to be moved deeply; we have to know that the many qualities residing inside our heart and which are only operational if our hearts are open – qualities such as kindness, courage, love, wisdom, a desire for truth and justice –serve as antidotes to the darkness out in the world today; but so long as they are not operational, the darkness will not be dissolved.

Awakening the Universal Heart We will know when our hearts have begun to open when we observe ourselves feeling huge indignation at all the injustice in the world or when we feel spontaneously moved to help those who are destitute or feel propelled to work for a cause which involves a lot of hard work and discomfort and where there is no tangible benefit to ourselves in any way, or when we observe ourselves feeling great affection towards people whom we’ve never met and who could not be more different to ourselves in race, religion or culture. Our hearts are very powerful. Teilhard de Chardin suggested that there was more power inside the human heart than inside an atomic bomb and that’s an awesome thought. I see our hearts as being our greatest weapon of mass construction. Indeed, the more we can be in touch with the fire inside our hearts, the more passion we will have to bring to bear upon whatever cause or causes we feel moved to champion. The religious philosopher Andrew Harvey talks about the idea of the sacred activist, which for him implies the fusion of the mystic’s passion for God with the activist’s passion for justice, creating a third force: the burning sacred heart that longs to help, preserve and nurture every living thing. I love that concept.

The Ten Faces of the Spiritual Activist I see there being ten main ways that we can express our activism and I will briefly list them.

• The Radiator Radiator activists make a difference by radiating healing, loving and transforming energy out into the world. Their doing is through the quality of their being; 45

Eurotas 2013: Exploring the Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist their work helps lift the vibrations of the environment around them. They bring calmness and light into the darkness, and in our fragmented and speedy culture, this work is very important.

• The Initiator These people are the movers and shakers, the instigators of new projects to bring benefit into the world. They are always out there in the thick of it, often fighting to bring change into corporate and political structures. They have visions of how a new world might look and they are committed to trying to bring it into expression.

• The Infiltrator Infiltrators are the transformational equivalents of the ‘double agent’! They work their way into old-style organisations and subtly try to introduce new ways of looking at the world without rocking the boat too strongly. (There is a lot of resistance, on many people’s part, towards change.)

• The Proclamator Proclamator activists heal through the power of the spoken word, like Barack Obama, who won his election because he made people believe that with him in the White House, all would be possible. Their role is to inspire us to think and act in new ways.

• The Innovator Like a Jung or an Einstein or a Ken Wilber (for me the new Plato), Innovator activists bring something entirely new to the kitchen table,. They inspire us to open up to new ways of thinking and acting and seeing the world.

• The Investigator The role of the Investigator activist is to investigate the Shadow side of life, to bring what is dark or hidden to the surface so it may be seen for what it is and thus become ‘disinfected’ by the light. This can be a dangerous path as many kinds of regressive forces hate being ‘outed’. They will often fight back strongly and do their best to destroy those trying to expose them.

• The Educator Educator activists take it upon themselves to make people aware that it is possible to see the world in a new way, that a new paradigm is emerging and that there is 46

Eurotas 2013: Exploring the Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist also knowledge to be gained from inside ourselves if we make an effort to look.

Many Educators work to remind us that, as the character in the film Avatar told us, ‘so much of what we believe is true is false, and so much of what we think is false is real.’

• The Protestor Going out into the streets as a expression of the stand one takes on a particular issue is a powerful act, especially if many people do so. Here, we remember that ‘people power’ brought down the Iron Curtain and more recently, in the Middle East, it also downed a bevy of dictators. It is a very powerful way of letting the world know about some issue which one feels strongly about.

• The Agitator The job of the Agitator activist is not to make people feel calmer and more at ease – that is the Radiator’s role. Rather, they do their best to shake us all up out of our evolutionary lethargy so we may either reach into our pockets more generously or generally do more to help a new culture come into expression. Their gift to us is that they light rockets under our backsides in order to wake us up to take action and not leave the business of change to others.

• The Dissident Of all the many paths available to the activist, that of the Dissident is perhaps the most noble and requires the greatest courage to choose. Invariably, it encompasses the willingness to sacrifice one’s comfort, as generally the Dissident’s role is single-handedly to confront totalitarian regimes, an activity which invariably leads to long spells in prison. The power of this activist stance is beautifully embodied in Aung San Suu Kyi .The shifts in Burmese society over the last three years are a tribute to her great courage and commitment.

Conclusion One may be an activist in one, two or more of the above-mentioned ways, although most are active in just one or two ways. The key thing is that, having worked at opening our hearts, we then follow them and we do the work we feel committed to do – what we feel our souls have determined to be our unique remit. We mustn’t feel we have to do everything. (The great myth keeping so many of us inactive is the belief that we have to ‘save the world single-handedly’!)

The truth is that there will always be others doing what we cannot. Often, our 47

Eurotas 2013: Exploring the Many Faces of the Spiritual Activist work requires a great deal of bravery and commitment as certain activist paths challenge us to confront powerful forces that oppose change. At times these forces, terrified of losing their power and control, can be extremely violent, as for example, the Green movement in Iran discovered a few years ago, when they protested against rigged elections. Whatever path or paths we may choose, it is most important that we always hold a positive vision of the future and encourage others to do so, as at present, there are so many ‘fear currents’ circulating. In the words of Fred Polak, a Dutch futurist, ‘Bold visionary thinking is in itself the prerequisite for effective social change […] in every instance of a flowering culture, there had been a positive image of the future at work, and when the opposite happened […] the culture decayed.’ As activists, then, our main challenge is to try to hold the next step of our human and planetary evolution optimistically inside our hearts and inspire those around us to do the same. What particularly excites me is to see how many committed, brave people there are in the world today, and to know that every year, more and more activists are spontaneously emerging out of the woodwork. Sadly, in our movies and our newspapers, we only see the negative things going on and so can be lulled into thinking everything is hopeless. It isn’t. The truth is that there are many wonderful initiatives being pioneered by brave, big-hearted, committed individuals all over the planet, and this fills me with great hope. Twenty years ago, Sir George Trevelyan wrote, ‘Out of the confusion of a crumbling society will emerge individuals who are touched by higher guidance. These will inevitably flow together with others of like inspiration and a new quality of society will begin to form.’ Well, I can honestly say that today, these individuals have now emerged. A new quality of society has already begun to form and is growing stronger every year.

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EUROTAS 2013 Transpersonal Studies What’s Next?

STEVEN SCHMITZ, Ph.D. Dr. Schmitz is a professor at Sofia University (USA) and the Integral Transper­ sonal Institute (Italy). He has a private practice in Transpersonal and Shamanic Counseling. He is an international teacher, speaker, and seminar leader on the topics of transpersonal psychology, shamanism, and conscious couple relation­ ships. Dr. Schmitz is Board Secretary for EUROTAS and Co-President of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP).

ABSTRACT: Steven Schmitz keynote at the XV EUROTAS Transpersonal Conference in Moldova, on September 22nd, 2013.

Topic: stories of a life lived in a transpersonal way.

KEYWORDS: Education, experience in life, Church, individuation.

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My talk will be two poems and three stories. You have heard enough lectures in this conference, so I won’t lecture. Instead, I will share stories as to why I am here, why I am a transpersonal psychologist, and why transpersonal psychology is so vital and important to my life. It is a part of my daily life, not just something I do when I teach or do workshops. I live my life from a transpersonal vision.

The first poem, by the German writer Hermann Hesse, comes from the book, “Journey to the East.”

He who travels far will often see things Far removed from what he believed was truth.

When he talks about it in the fields at home, He is often accused of lying.

For the obdurate people will not believe What they do not see and distinctly feel, Inexperience, I believe, Will give little credence to my song.

When I first read this poem in my adolescence, it had a profound effect on me.

I felt I had discovered an ally in Hermann Hesse. There was somebody else who actually understood who I was, how I saw the world, and what was important to me.

My very loving Catholic family raised me in California, and I became a very loving Catholic boy. I tried to do everything right. I followed the doctrine. I attended Church. I was an altar boy and helped the priests serve the Mass. I wanted to go to heaven. I certainly did not want to go to hell. And the Church had a way of teaching - be aware of your sins, ask for forgiveness, go to church, respect the one God, and honor the one Church. Though I did all these things and I was told, “This is the way,” “this is the salvation,” “this is the one true belief,” I always felt a knot in my stomach. Something was not right. At the time I could not understand what was wrong. I also could not talk to anybody about it.

I was a spiritually oriented person when I was young. When the Church talked about the “guardian angels,” that was not just a concept for me, that was not an act of faith, it was an experience. I connected with my guardian spirit. I could not talk about this with my parents, because they did not have that kind of an experience. I certainly could not talk to any of my friends. They just wanted to ride bicycles, climb trees, and play ball. I had no one in my life with whom I could 50

Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies... share these experiences.

I felt very alone. I felt a lot of pain. I wondered if I were strange. Was there something wrong with me? If I were to have said what I was experiencing to my friends, they would have laughed at me. There were no allies. That was one of the reasons I appreciated that poem by Hesse when I first entered high school.

My early years were full of suffering. And now I am grateful for that. Now I can see the suffering I went through was part of my education. We are talking about education at this conference. Education does not only happen in schools or colleges or by reading books. It also happens with direct experiences in life. My direct experiences in life have been some of my greatest teachers.

I had an experience when I was about 12 years old that radically changed my life.

I was a shy, sensitive, somewhat socially awkward young boy. I did not have a lot of self-esteem or self-confidence. And for some reason, the most attractive girl in my class took a liking to me. I usually describe this as a mystical experience. I say this because I am convinced that Spirit guided her. I cannot think of any other reason why she would have been attracted to me at that time in my life. Plus, this seemingly simple event brought about a major transformation in my life.

She was one of those girls who matured a little earlier than others. She was mature in many ways. One afternoon after class she took me up to the choir loft in the back of the Church next to the Catholic school. She introduced me to a very interesting practice that I continue to this day called French kissing.

That day I discovered that this practice was amazing. I really enjoyed it. It felt good.

I did not feel guilty. I did not feel bad about this. It did not lead to something else.

It was just a friendly kiss, and it was very pleasurable.

The following Sunday in Church during Mass I looked in the missal that had the service program in it. In the back of the book were listed the sins. For the Catholic Church there are two kinds of sins. There are mortal sins, which are extreme sins, and there are venial sins, which are minor sins. In the venial sins list there was “prolonged kissing.” I looked at that, and I was astounded. I could not believe my eyes. It caused an extreme existential dilemma within me. This was the “truth” and everyone knew it. It had been around for thousands of years. Tens of thousands of Roman Catholics supported this doctrine every Sunday. It was telling me that my truth was wrong, that it was not okay. It was bad. This was a strong experience for a twelve year old.

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Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies...

It is paradoxical that I would become involved in transpersonal psychology, because I was a rational, logical mathematics major. Math was an easy subject for me to understand. So with my rational abilities I thought, “This is very pleasurable.

I cannot see any harm in it, yet the Church is telling me this is wrong.” I struggled with this real dilemma. On the one hand I wanted to be a true Christian and go to heaven, because that is where we all want to go, right? And, on the other hand was this more rebellious voice, “This does not seem right. There is something about it that I cannot explain. I do not have the understanding. Yet, it does not seem right.”

Though I did not know it at the time, I was experiencing (what I found out later Carl Jung had written about) the transcendent function. I held the tension of these two opposites, the “true Christian” and the “rebel.” I did not fall into the trap of either/or thinking: “I will ignore my own feelings and go with what I am told or forget what I am told and I will just go with what I think is important.”

This experience took place in 1962. There was no one I could talk to about the process I was going through. I did not know about transpersonal psychology, as the field had not been developed yet. So I had to struggle alone with this.

Fortunately, I did stay with the struggle. I did not take the easy way out. I stayed with and held the tension of the opposites. What emerged out of it was a third thing - to understand that the Church doctrine was a foundation I was given, something I could build upon, and to appreciate that. I do not have any regret or feel any animosities about my Catholic upbringing. I appreciate my parents caring enough to bring me to an understanding and value of religion. I also appreciate that I listened to my intuition. I chose to follow the path of individuation. I needed to find my way within the social context I was being raised.

One of the things I realized was before this situation I did not like myself. I did not like my family, the world, or my life. I was always wondering, “Why am I here?”

This helped me see what I needed to do for my own benefit. It also gave me the courage to question. Not to rebel and not to just take it on faith, rather to question. To me that has been the important thing. It is important to question, not with antagonism, not with “of course,” instead to question and inquire from a neutral place of not knowing. “What is the answer?” “What do I think it is?” And discovering this, does this bring an “aha” experience for me?”

I have learned that what is important is not that you are the best expert in the world or you know everything. What is important to me is the discovery process 52

Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies... that brings an “aha” experience for me. Jeremy Taylor, who teaches dream work, said, “Look for the ‘aha’.” If there is an “aha,” there is truth in it for me.

By following what I felt to be true I left the Church and its doctrine. To fill this void in my life I did some searching. I had heard of psychology. I knew it was about human behavior and ways to help people with their lives, so I decided to do some reading.

In the library, at that time, they had card catalogs for the books. I figured that the person with the most cards must know the most about psychology. At that time it was Sigmund Freud. I took out some of Freud’s books and did not like what I read.

He seemed to be only focusing on pathology and did not have much positive to say about spiritual and mystical experiences. I took the books back.

The author with the second most number of cards was Carl Jung. Even though, at the time, I did not fully understand much of what he wrote, I did feel a resonance with his writings and was introduced to Eastern religions and spiritual traditions.

This opened up a whole new area of exploration for me.

With Carl Jung I had found an ally who seemed to understand what I was experiencing. His works provided a helpful and supportive framework for me to work with. His writings helped me to understand the process I was going through and to feel okay about the person I was. I realized I wanted to provide that help and support for others. This led me to counseling.

The second story is about experiencing another culture. A friend of mine, who was a German foreign exchange student, invited me to come to her country, to a little town near the French border. Her brother had left home and his room would be available to me. I could stay for one year in Germany for free. As an adventurous 20-year-old, with questions needing answers, I thought that would be exciting. I would go to Europe for a new experience. I had never been there before.

Being young and naive I had a very limited, ethnocentric view of the world. I understood that in Germany they spoke German. What I did not fully understand was that not only did they speak German, all the radio stations, all the television stations, all the newspapers, and all the labels in the stores were in German. That was an awakening surprise for me.

The other important event that happened was that before I went to Europe I had been involved in encounter groups. These groups were based on the personcentered approach of the Carl Rogers, an American psychologist. The groups 53

Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies... met with a trained facilitator to increase self-awareness, foster sensitivity to others, improve the ability to express emotions, and to change behavior through interpersonal interactions. It helped people to be honest with what they were feeling and to speak from their hearts not just from their intellects. The idea was to be authentic to who you really were.

This experience created another major change in me. That knot in my stomach that I told you about earlier disappeared. The people in the group were helpful, and fortunately I had a good group facilitator. They said, “You are trying to please us. Stop trying to please us, just be yourself.” To which I responded, “Who is that?”

They replied, “We will help you find that out.”

With this group experience I went through another transformative experience.

I began to get a clearer picture of who I was and to gain the ability to express myself fully and openly. For the first time in my life I did not feel I needed to appease others. I became ecstatic. This process was very healing for me. So in my enthusiasm I became an encounter group zealot. “I am going to teach this to the world! This is going to save the world.”

I went to Germany very excited. I was excited about this new truth I had discovered that would save the world. So I went to this small German village in 1970, not in 2013. With long hair and a full beard, I walked up to people on the street and said, “Hi, I am Steven from California, how are you today?”

The people gave me surprised looks, then turned and walked away. They looked at me like I was crazy. They must have thought that I was very strange.

This situation became another dilemma for me. My truth was that this way of being was wonderful. It was great to open up, to speak from the heart. This was the way to be. However, the people I met said, “No it is not the right way. Not here anyway.” I was culturally and globally naïve. Looking back I am very appreciative of the lesson that happened from this experience.

The other circumstance that happened was my German friend who had invited me to Europe, had opened up to her feelings and self-expression while in California, because it can be a very open place. When she went back to Germany her new way of being was not validated. The people could not understand why she was smiling. “Are you laughing at me? Is there something wrong with me?” Not only was her new way of being not appreciated, there was no support for it. So my friend shut down emotionally. When I arrived in Germany, being very open and 54

Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies... excited to see her, she rejected me and pushed me away.

My sense of reality was shattered. My way of being was not validated. My expected support person in Germany was not there for me. I had a seemingly psychotic type of experience. My sense of what is right was destroyed. There was absolutely no support for me in this environment for me to be or do what I knew to be “true.”

The mother of the family spoke very little English and the father spoke no English, so I could not talk to them. My friend did not want to see me, so I could not talk with her. And I did not speak German, so I had a difficult time talking with the people where I was. I went into a severe identity crisis. I found out later that I went through an experience similar to what is now called “spiritual emergency.”

When someone experiences a spiritual or mystical experience that is so intense, that is so overwhelming they lose touch with a clear sense of reality, they go into a psychotic-like experience and have a difficult time functioning in their life.

Transpersonal research has shown that some situations that are diagnosed as psychotic are actually part of the process of intense transformative experiences or the overwhelming emergence of spirituality in an individual. With understanding and the appropriate support these crises can become very powerful healing experiences.

I think this is important for our transpersonal field that we discover, acknowledge, and appreciate that there are experiences like spiritual emergencies. It is important as transpersonal psychotherapists and counselors that we know how to differentiate between a spiritual emergency and a psychotic episode. Dr. Stan Grof. Dr. Christina Grof, and Dr. David Lukoff have written about this important topic if you want to learn more.

Again, I learned much from this powerful crisis experience. I learned that spiritual emergency was a natural process. I needed to go through it. I needed to go through, like the EUROTAS logo of the circle, the full cycle of that death and rebirth process. I am glad that I was not given psychiatric “help” at that time – that is, “You are not in touch with reality; you have bizarre ideation; and we need to put you into a safe environment, a locked ward. We need to give you medications to stop this process.”

Later, during my early career, I worked in a locked psychiatric ward. I found that those facilities were not safe for many reasons. In a spiritual emergency, the problem with locked wards is, not only is the process stopped, that person’s 55

Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies... ability to go through the full process and have the understanding of what was happening is interfered with. Also traditional psychiatric intervention interferes with people developing the confidence that no matter what happens, it will cycle around and they will come back to a more healthy and stronger place. They will have learned much and been transformed by the whole experience.

I mention this because I work with people who go through spiritual emergencies.

I know about this healing process from my own experience. I did not only read about it. I did not just go to a lecture about it. It is not just knowledge. It was an understanding because I had a direct experience of it. I have a trust for the process. This is important.

While I know that knowledge is good, I have found that trust of the process is also important. In my practice of transpersonal counseling I do not interfere with my clients’ natural processes. I will suggest; I will invite; and I will share what I know. I do not dictate, direct, or manipulate their processes.

I have found over the years as a counselor that the key for me is to allow the process and to be present, to be a companion, so the person has an ally and is not the little child who has no one to talk to. All of you are the ones that people can go to on a daily basis, all over the world, and talk to about circumstances that other fields of psychology will not even entertain. You and the work you offer are extremely valuable.

During my stay in Europe I learned much. I also learned a valuable lesson in multi-cultural awareness. By living in another culture very different from my own I was able to expand my consciousness to see beyond my own limited cultural perspective. I was able to understand and value other ways of viewing and being in the world. I was able to be enriched from the experience and appreciate the differences rather than find them to be a point of conflict. This experience opened me up to a more inclusive and global perspective, which I think is also important for the field of Transpersonal Psychology.

When I returned to the USA I went back to the university to complete my studies in psychology. As other presenters have mentioned, I was not really engaged with my clinical psychology classes. The classes were too focused on psychopathology.

I thought, what about health and how to maintain a healthy way of being?

My experiences of breaking away from the Church, going to Europe, and having my whole sense of reality turned upside down and destroyed then reconstructed 56

Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies... were all very healing and empowering. They had provided me with powerful insights and understandings, had made me a stronger individual, and opened my eyes to a more inclusive global reality. They were not pathological. You can see how those experiences I have shared could be seen as pathological from a certain viewpoint. I could have been told that I did not know how to deal with reality, when in reality I had some aspects of myself that needed to be shifted. This is one of the reasons I appreciate the practice of shamanism. It is about shifting, and helping a healing process.

I do not deny that there are people in the world who have psychological disorders, nor do I refute the value of good clinical practice. There are people with disorders who need clinical therapeutic interventions. However, it is often overlooked that there are also healthy people who go through major crises, struggles, or challenges who do not need psychiatric help or medication. They need a companion who knows the territory so they can safely and fully navigate natural cycles related to transformative experiences and come through in a healthier state.

When I returned from Europe and the university I noticed a class called humanistic psychology. I read the description, and I thought it was good that this field of psychology looked at health as a part of human nature and did not just focus on psychopathology. With this class I found the professor to be another ally on my path.

While in this class I wondered where could I finish my degree in a humanistic psychology program. At the time only two schools in the USA offered this type of degree, Sonoma State University in California and University of West Georgia, on the East Coast. I enrolled in Sonoma State University, and experienced a few more transformative experiences.

At Sonoma State University I felt like I found the oasis in the middle of the desert.

There were people at the University who talked like me, who understood my experience, my pain, my desire for mystical and spiritual experiences, who saw the “both/and.” They did not deny the consensus reality of classical psychology, they just said, “And, there is also something more.”

This was very meaningful and helpful to me. I found not only one or two allies.

I found a whole department of people who shared my paradigm. I found a supportive community of people where I felt I belonged.

Several important and influential experiences happened to me while at Sonoma 57

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State University. I will mention two here. First I took a class in zazen. Kwong, Roshi, a student of Suzuki, Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center taught it. I learned to appreciate the difference between following a spiritual practice and taking on a spiritual doctrine. I realized also that I did not have to become a Buddhist to practice zazen. Many of my friends became Buddhists or Hindu and took on other cultural ways of being. That was not my cultural background.

I appreciated that he taught me the practice and how to practice. He did not teach me to sit for a specific reason or an end result. Among the many lessons Roshi taught me was to, “Just sit.” You know how contrary that is to Western thinking. “What do you mean, just sit? No, I will sit in order to reduce stress, to work through my issues, to be mindful, whatever.” Roshi said, “Just sit. This is nothing special.” So I listened to this wise man and just sat.

In the mid 1970’s, in the San Francisco Bay Area, when every Rinpoche, Llama, Swami, Yogi, Roshi, and spiritual Guru were coming to California, many of my friends shaved their heads, dressed in saffron robes, and wore big medallions of their gurus around their necks. This did not seem true for me. I did not want to give up who I was in my culture. I wanted that “both/and” experience.

So I just sat. I bought a zafu and a zabutan, and I sat with no end point, no “gaining idea,” no idea of where I would be at some point. I did this for many years on a daily basis. I found there is a real value to committed and disciplined practice, not as a technique, not when it is convenient, not just once a week on a Sunday. Instead, to practice everyday with no idea of where you are going and being open to what you find opens the doors for learning that can be beyond your imagination.

One of the pitfalls of spiritual practice and transpersonal psychology can be the need for an aim or goal. “I will meditate, and then I will be mindful, then I will be peaceful, then I will become enlightened.” By needing to have a fixed end point to a spiritual practice, we interfere with the natural process.

This realization gave me an appreciation of spiritual practice vs. spiritual doctrine.

I did not want to repeat what I had received from the Roman Catholic Church. I did not want to be a Buddhist or Hindu or any label, I wanted to be Steven. I was interested in knowing who I am and how to honor that.

The second experience happened during the same year of my initiation into Zen practice. For the final paper in my clinical methods class I was approved to go on 58

Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies... a vision quest alone in the wilderness. I felt drawn to experience that indigenous rite of passage for my own spiritual development and wanted to investigate how it might be used for psychological healing.

On the first night of my quest I was introduced to shamanism and initiated into shamanic practice. This event changed my worldview, my way of being in the world, how I practiced counseling, and my paradigm of what was true and healthy.

I will not share the entire way I came to this initiation. I will say Spirit brought me to this work. I did not ask to come to this work. I did not go to a workshop or a teacher. Spirit created a very unusual experience for me while I was on the vision quest.

Spirit made the sound of my heartbeat audible. I say Spirit influenced this because being able to hear my heartbeat had never happened before in my life nor has it happened since. My heartbeat became like the sound of a shamanic drum.

Listening to this sound helped shift my consciousness. I was then taken on a shamanic journey, even though I did not know what journeys were. It was very profound to journey between the two worlds, to step between the material world and the spiritual realm. I made contact with spirits, as shamans have done for tens of thousands of years. It was clear to me that this was not my imagination, a fantasy, or a hallucination.

When I returned from this journey I experienced “unitive consciousness.� It was an extraordinary state of being to witness. It was another example of having a direct experiential learning of spiritual phenomena I was studying in school.

Before this experience I knew nothing about shamanism, so I did not have any pre-conceived notions. I learned from my direct experience. It was powerful to experience the different realities, and not confuse them. This seemingly simple experience opened many new doors for me.

Shamanic journeying is not, as some people say, a schizophrenic-producing practice. I have found it to be the opposite. Because I am very clear when I am in the material world, I am fully here. When I am in the spiritual world, I am fully there. When I am in non-ordinary reality I do not bring ordinary consciousness to it, and when I am in ordinary reality I do not bring non-ordinary consciousness to it. I know the difference. There is no confusion between the two for me.

About the same time as my first journey experience, a new field of psychology emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was called Transpersonal Psychology.

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Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies...

Some of the psychologists who founded Humanistic Psychology thought that while it did acknowledge the healthy aspects of human nature, it did not go far enough. They also wanted to include mystical and spiritual aspects of human nature, the world’s spiritual traditions, and transcendence in their inquiry. They wanted to investigate the full spectrum of consciousness. These were the missing pieces I felt that classical psychology had left out. This new field offered a framework to investigate, educate, and work with the numinous, synchronistic, and anomalous experiences that I found to be so powerful and meaningful.

In Transpersonal Psychology there is no single founder or leader. I appreciate what Jure Biechonski said in his presentation, that transpersonal psychology does not have one leader and that is good. Transpersonal Psychology is not something that can be put into a box. It is a fluid, on-going, vital, living organism that keeps growing. When I look back at Transpersonal Psychology in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and view what is happening now, I see that the field has grown to something more than it was. It is ongoing.

Looking forward, you may ask, who are the emerging leaders of our field? All of you are. All of you have this potential. Every one of you can contribute to moving the field forward.

How will this happen? In relation to the theme of this conference, “Human Potential, Education, Conscious Evolution,” you will become leaders with your true education relating to your human potential that feeds your ongoing conscious evolution. You all have that ability within yourselves. I say that one of your best educational teachers is your own life experience. I invite all of you to honor that.

What is true education? I will offer this explanation. True education is shown by speaking from one’s own direct experience in life rather than only accumulating someone else’s knowledge. Does that mean you do not listen to anyone else? No, I have a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology, because I also value the education process. Gaining knowledge through study is important and learning from direct experience is as important.

Here are four suggestions for action. One is to write a psychological/spiritual autobiography. As I have related my life experiences, do the same for yourself.

Look at the transpersonal and transformative experiences that have happened to you. Remember the allies who have come into your life to help you with changes.

Learn the dynamics, the patterns, the core issues, the processes of psycho/spiritual growth, and the aspects of healing from what has happened to you in your life.

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Eurotas 2013: Transpersonal Studies...

And think about how that changed you, how that contributed to who and where you are today.

The second action is to do the necessary psychological/spiritual work. I found this to be important about education, to do the inner work. It is beneficial to acknowledge the inner work we have to do and commit to doing it.

The third action is to bring Transpersonal Psychology and your spiritual practice into your daily life. This is not something to do occasionally, not just something to talk about at transpersonal conferences, and pat each other on the back about.

The idea is to live it. Walk your talk. Do the practice. Allow what you are learning about to have an impact on how you live your life.

The fourth action is to break the illusion of the “promise.” The Catholic Church promises if you live your life its particular way you will get to heaven. I invite you break through the illusion of the promise, even the transpersonal promise. Do not get caught up in the promise.

I want to leave you with one thought. This is from the poet, Rumi. It seems that the Rumi has been the poet laureate of the 2013 EUROTAS Conference in Moldova.

He has been quoted many times. If you take only one idea from my talk today, please take this:

The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you Don’t go back to sleep!

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep!

People are going back and forth across the door sill where the two worlds touch, The door is round and open Don’t go back to sleep!

My final message is, “Don’t go back to sleep.”

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Accompanied Inner Communication: A Transpersonal Approach

MARTINE GARCIN-FRADET, M.D. MD of applied linguistic, EUROTAS certified transpersonal psychotherapist, teacher of “Transpersonal Inner Communication” practitioners, she also conducts systemic constellations and is a certified member of DGfS, (Deutsche Gesells­ chaft für Systemaufstellung).

She created and developed “Accompanied Inner Communication”, as a direct result of her life’s path. Many year in foreign countries, and ten years in Japan, prepared her to constantly enlarge her belief system for the benefit of a vision of the human being that integrates various representations of the world and life.

Her meeting with Pierre Weil was a decisive element that nudged her towards the transpersonal dimension of psychotherapeutic care.

Publications: “Accompanied Inner Communication, a path to the Being”, “What if our ancestors were talking through us?”, “When the Hand becomes the Heart’s messenger”, “The voices of the Hand”, “A path to Self”.

Web site: www.communication-profonde.com

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Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach ABSTRACT: This article presents “Accompanied Inner Communication” as a transpersonal approach. It is a therapeutic method, which reveals a dimension of consciousness usually unexplored.

By following movements above a computer keyboard, the facilitator allows the accompanied person to express his or her consciousness. The goal is to allow a unification process of one’s being and to expand one’s consciousness through the recognition and acceptance of all aspects of being, reconciling underlying oppositions. This transpersonal approach is aligned to the consciousness of one’s heart – as an extension of Françoise Dolto’s and C.G. Jung’s discoveries. Inner communication facilitates the connection with the transcendent aspect of one’s being (Self) and contributes to unlocking human potential. Texts that emerge from people unable to speak show that they feel what is experienced far beyond their own lives, they in fact live within the transpersonal field. The theory of John Eccles, suggests the following hypothesis to explain the Accompanied Communication Process: the facilitator’s brain may act as a decoder for the consciousness of the accompanied person. Listening is an essential aspect of AIC. Through this listening and the text, which emerges, the person is put in touch with his or her profound being.

KEYWORDS: Transpersonal communication, consciousness, connection, Inner Communication, silent partner, witness, Self, Unity.

Introduction Accompanied Inner Communication (AIC) is a still unknown yet very promising accompaniment technique, which can contribute to unlocking human potential.

This approach, when used as a psychotherapeutic aid, has revealed a dimension of the consciousness which is not usually explored. The process can be resumed in a few words: By accompanying the hand over a computer keyboard, expression emerges from a part of ourselves that we do not usually have access to. As a facilitator, I accompany a weak, but tangible, impulse that I perceive from the accompanied person’s arm, allowing access to the keys on the computer keyboard.

It is an approach aligned with the consciousness of one’s heart – as an extension of the French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto’s and C.G. Jung’s discoveries.

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Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach “Dolto’s psychoanalytic approach focuses on language and is based upon the power of the spoken word.” (Walter 2010, p.11) Communication is an inherent phenomenon that human beings enjoy when they meet. In essence, man is a being who communicates (Dolto, 1977) and, since the beginning of humanity, has pooled life experiences that were obtained through drawings, cave engravings, and gestures. From birth, the human being is immersed in a communication bath; he or she cannot develop without these stimulations. Communication with the newborn baby largely takes place via touching and physical contact.

Etymologically, communicate comes from the Latin “communicare” which means “to impart, to share”. Accompanied Inner Communication associates words with touching, by establishing contact and cupping the accompanied person’s hand.

Listening in Accompanied Inner Communication is connecting the person to his or her inner self. This mode of communication is above all a welcoming of the individual, allowing each accompanied person to better structure himself or herself and to expand the expression of life experiences. The goal of accompanying is to facilitate the emergence of past experiences from the person consulting so that he or she can live in the present with increased awareness. It is about letting emerge what the person needs at that specific moment, allowing him or her to live consciously in the present, unhampered by projections from the past.

It seems to me that inner communication has existed since the beginning of time.

Very young children, so receptive to their family and friends, have the ability to perceive what emerges from each person’s heart. But the ability to put it into words, to express the feeling, is not yet available to the child, and the family might not understand what is being felt in his or her heart.

Accompanied Inner Communication was elaborated within the field of transpersonal psychology, combining the methods of Facilitated Communication, “An assistive communication technique in which the primary message receiver makes physical contact with the sender to help them overcome motor or emotional problems.” (Crossley 1994, p.131) and Family Constellations, an approach initiated by Bert Hellinger “for revealing the hidden dynamics in a family so that they can be 64

Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach worked with and healed.” (http://www.familyconstellations.com. au/fc_explained.html) I met Pierre Weil, a pioneer of transpersonal psychology in France, and became aware of an important milestone, which prepared me for the creation of Accompanied Inner Communication “a transpersonal type of communication” (Garcin-Fradet, 2009). Pierre Weil, who died in 2008, was a peace educator, Doctor of Psychology, and teacher of Cosmo drama; he used a synthesis of Eastern wisdom and Western scientific approaches as a source for his work. He focused his teaching on peace, particularly peace in one’s heart (Weil, 1994). With Pierre Weil’s support I came to the realization that everything and everyone is connected. This realization helped me to put into words my own inner experiences and to connect with a sacred area that I had always felt, but had not cultivated. Pierre Weil’s teachings helped me to unify the awareness I had experienced since childhood and to integrate my experiences and insights after fifteen years spent in Asia, principally in Japan.

Having experienced how everything and everyone connects with each other, was good preparation for practicing inner communication. Soon afterwards, I took a training program in Facilitated Communication (FC), developed in Australia by Rosemary Crossley (Crossley 1994). This type of communication is used as an alternative for non-speaking people, no matter what their handicap is.

The Practice and Setting As an accompanying helper who supports the hand of the person writing, I sit next to him or her and make sure that our chairs are parallel so as to avoid any twisting of the shoulders. The right hand is opened upwards, towards the sky, offering a cupping handhold. I welcome the person’s left hand palm to palm, extending my fingers outwards, with the exception of the index, which is folded inwards. The individual’s index is free and ready to press the keys on the computer keyboard in front of us. I take the time necessary to center myself and to “listen” to my partner’s hand. This means that I put myself in a state of receptivity to perceive the beginning of movement. After a few seconds, I feel an impulse coming from the person’s hand. The movement that I accompany is initiated. My partner’s hand takes me to the keys on the keyboard and words are formed. The goal is to help the individual in need find a more self-directed life with the support of the accompanying helper, who facilitates the communication impulses. In some cases total written autonomy has been achieved. Accompanied Inner Communication opens up access to a deeper level available to all.

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Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach From Facilitated Communication to Accompanied Inner Communication (AIC) From an Asian viewpoint, the palm of the hand is another center for the heart’s energy. We can interpret supporting the hand as a gesture that connects heart to heart the accompanying and the accompanied persons. Accompanied Inner Communication is related to a transpersonal type of communication in that there is an expansion of consciousness during the session. This accompaniment permits a progressive liberation from the sensation of fragmentation, which stems from repressed wounds and it allows one to find consciously a feeling of unity. Painful memories emerge from the unconscious and are integrated into a consciousness that grows with each session. Accompanying helps to establish contact with what I refer to as the “center of truth” and from this center, the accompanied person welcomes and integrates all of the hidden or sometimes dissociated aspects of his or her personality. The goal is to allow a unifying process of one’s being and to expand one’s consciousness by the recognition and acceptation of all of aspects of being, reconciling oppositions. In fact, this approach allows transformation because the therapist is in alignment with the heart’s consciousness, while the problems stemming from the past were created at a lower level of consciousness.

As Einstein stressed: “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.” (http://www.mountainman.com.au/albert_e.html,) The Accompaniment Another essential aspect of AIC is accompaniment. This takes place on two levels: •

Firstly, from a gestural point of view, because accompanying the impulse gives access to the computer keyboard.

•

Secondly, from a psychological point of view, as the person accompanying is like a well-meaning witness, who welcomes what is typed. He or she is also there to provide a safe area that the accompanied person did not previously have; without it, he or she felt overwhelmed and alone. The goal is for the person to integrate slowly, bit by bit, the unacknowledged aspects of his psychic whole.

Accompanied Inner Communication: A Transpersonal Approach During a session of Accompanied Inner Communication, access to an experience 66

Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach which cannot be expressed through conscious speech is facilitated by the modified state of consciousness in the accompanying and the accompanied persons.

As facilitator, I am vigilant, having the discernment required for all therapeutic accompaniments, while at the same time being present in the moment in a state of consciousness close to what I experience when meditating. Furthermore, I have no memory of what was typed. The positioning of the therapist is essential to the quality of the session. It is about balance, like a tightrope walker’s movements.

During my work, I am connected to the sacred dimension of my heart, as well as to the accompanied person’s. I am fully present in the moment, free from all anticipation.

Access to Transcendence in Everyone Actualizing this sacred potential, while removing obstacles that block fulfillment, is one of the main objectives of Accompanied Inner Communication. Being reveals itself beyond words or rather via the words that emerge from the plenitude of each person’s symbolic expression. The process itself, thanks to the “heart to heart” contact guaranteed by accompanying the gesture of the hand, connects the person with her or his Essence. AIC facilitates communication through a “silent partner” being in a meditative-like state of consciousness and, welcoming the accompanied person without judgment. During a session, the two protagonists are liberated from time and the resulting transformation takes place within the intangible silence that paces breathing. It is the deep silence which exists between each of our thoughts, between each inhalation and exhalation, transcending time and space. It is as if one were connected to a frequency of the Self. Therefore, the person whose hand I am accompanying is “Automatically connected with her or his own frequency, at the level of the Self.” (Garcin-Fradet 2009, p.45) It is as if I allowed the personality to be in tune with the sound of the Self and to vibrate in harmony with the soul’s melody. I see myself simply as a mediator enabling the essential note of Being to exist in tune with that of the personality.

The people I help through Accompanied Inner Communication often describe the feeling as a “numinous” experience. For the person experiencing it, reaching a deep reality connected with the energy of life in its essential form becomes a source of profound transformation.

However, before the Self shows itself completely, one must remove, or rather 67

Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach integrate via transformation, the numerous veils that hide it. We must consciously look at our attachments, our conditioning. We must bandage our childhood and adult wounds, and take into consideration our unconscious loyalties to family patterns. Finally, little by little, we dare to let go of our appearances in order to reach the essence and to express our uniqueness, beyond masks and conventions.

AIC is used with people who cannot speak, as well as with those who can.

The vision of handicap undergoes a quantum shift. The typed texts show that, no matter the handicap which limits communication or speaking, an intact consciousness unfolds at a level of reality different from that of the cognitive or sensorial systems. The support of the hand opens access to this intact part of the individual. Actually, no matter the state of the accompanied person’s brain, the facilitator acts as a motor, a sensorial, and cognitive moderator, which means he “lends” his or her “communication tools” to his partner.

A Hypothesis to Enlighten the Accompanied Inner Communication Process From the neurological point of view, the theory of John Eccles, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, suggests the following hypothesis: the facilitator’s brain may act as a decoder for the consciousness of the accompanied person. In the last book he wrote, which is entitled “How the Self Controls the Brain”, John Eccles included a new attempt to explain mind-brain interaction via a quantum process affecting the release of neurotransmitters. He postulated the following thesis: “There is interaction of two distinct entities, the spiritual self and the material brain.” (Eccles 1995, p.173) This implies that any person, no matter their handicap, originates from an intact consciousness which deploys itself at a different level of reality than that of the cognitive and sensorial systems. By making himself or herself available, the facilitator becomes the conscious receptor of his or her partner in communication.

The person can thus express himself or herself using the brain of his facilitator, which will compensate for the deficiencies of the sensorial and cognitive systems.

Therefore, the person I facilitate benefits from my own vocabulary and mental structures, made available via the hand I support. Such a hypothesis is in harmony with my own personal experiences. It is also confirmed by the teachings of different spiritual traditions as well as in the field of transpersonal psychology. In the Christian worldview, for instance, the soul is an intangible, immaterial reality, 68

Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach which nevertheless is considered to be the essence of the person. In the area of transpersonal therapies, the states of modified consciousness explored during holotropic breathing – as the inner healing intelligence is guiding the process – bear witness to an underlying reality including a transpersonal Self which is probably the origin of consciousness.

In the area of quantum physics, according to the physicist Emmanuel Ransford, (Ransford 1997) reality is psycho-material: •

Psycho material or holo-matter unifies matter and spirit, which allows us to shed light on the mystery of the conscious brain.

•

It weaves invisible links that transcend time and space and it creates networks of solidarity

•

They carry and transmit information of a psychic nature, called “suprels” by E.Ransford.

•

He specifies: “The psycho-material, with the strength of its subtle psychisme, opens upon a world which is invisible and ‘inhabited’.” (Ransford 1997, p.290)

•

The Facilitator seems to be in connection with these suprels during the AIC sessions.

Jung also mentioned this in his conversations with Richard Evans: “The psyche is nothing different from the living being. It is the psychical aspect of the living being. It is even the psychical aspect of matter.” (Evans 1964, p. 83) My attention was drawn to the content of the texts that emerge from people unable to speak. In my work with AIC, I experienced something specific when accompanying such individuals: They feel their life experiences far beyond their own lives, as they are interconnected within a transpersonal field of consciousness.

They are in contact with what is outside of their own body, interrelated with the world around them. Person X, an adult with autistic disorders, evokes her access to the transpersonal field. She says : “Deep down, I exult to be the one who knows what is happening behind the threads of destiny. Juxtaposition of words to tell my 69

Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach difference. I know the things beyond time and I trace a line to separate yesterday from today. Do you know I live outside of time?

I am a sponge that adopts within its bumps and dents all of the detours connected between themselves by the thread of destiny. Go between the lines and see the cross-country skiers’ tracks become clear in the snow” (Garcin-Fradet 2009, p.92) A capacity to know what is happening to their family members and friends, even those living in another town or another area, is also characteristic and emerges in texts written through IAC. There is an immense contradiction between the depth of what is felt, the thoughts expressed through AIC and the behavior of most people who cannot speak. Physical or mental challenges often prevent them from leaving their mark on social life. Thanks to accompanying the gesture of the hand, a written work, in fact a masterpiece, is born; it gives them a place in the social community. The possibility of self-expression through the keyboard has a positive effect on the structuring of inner life. Person X writes: “Holes of silence widen to clearings of words.” (Garcin-Fradet 2009, p.89) AIC shows that behind the suffering personality, the Self is still intact, no matter the disability.

Conclusion This approach has very wide-ranging implications, not only for people deprived of speech but also for those considered to be “functional”. It also raises many questions. Accompanied Inner Communication was built upon the foundations of Facilitated Communication. Facilitated Communication gives access to the needs, wishes and desires of a person deprived of speech. For AIC the situation is quite different. Before being an aid to dialogue, AIC allows speech. The communication involved is not so much exchange as it is communication with one’s self.

Although the profound needs of a person may emerge in AIC, the risk would be to consider whatever is written as informative. Even if important confirmations are regularly found in the texts created through inner communication, what emerges from this process cannot be considered as information. A text written through AIC expresses a feeling. It does not have the value of historical truth or 70

Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach witnessing. The written texts are an expression of a unique moment in time, the moment of the session.

Another risk would be that the accompanied person identify with the memories which sometimes emerge from the texts. These memories are related to the experiences that the person has when he or she is writing in inner communication.

They can be considered as a symbolic content whose transcendent function allows a transformation of the psyche. In situations of handicap, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish that which belongs to the conscious from that which belongs to the unconscious. Very concrete contents such as “I’m thirsty” may emerge while the person is plunged in profound considerations, as though there were no border between the personal and transpersonal fields. This also raises questions. What do we really know about what accompanied people experience consciously?

Where does Facilitated Communication end and Inner Communication begin?

In particular, could it be that people deprived of speech live day-to-day in a transpersonal realm?

AIC does not claim to present a new theory of man or of life. On the other hand, it cannot be considered as a simple technique. It is an approach, a precious tool in the hands of two craftsmen of life. AIC is an opening posture, a welcoming, an accompaniment. Listening is an essential aspect of AIC. Through this listening and the text which emerges, the person is put in touch with his or her profound being. Although this approach raises questions, it also represents a great hope for giving meaning to each individual’s life.

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Accompanied Inner Communication, A Transpersonal Approach REFERENCES

•

Crossley, R. (1994). Facilitated Communication Training. New York: Teachers College Press. p.131.

•

Dolto, F. (1977). Tout est langage. Paris: Pocket edition.

•

Evans, R. I. (1964). Conversations with C.G.Jung and reactions from Ernest Jones. New York: D. Van Nostrand Co. Ldt. p.83.

•

Eccles, J.C. (1995). How the Self controls its brain. P.173. Berlin: Springer.

•

Einstein, A., A selection of quotes, http://www.mountainman.com.au/albert_e.html.

•

Garcin-Fradet, M. (2009). Quand la main devient messagère du cœur.

Aubagne: Quintessence, p.45, p.89, p.92.

•

Hellinger B. http://www.familyconstellations.com.au/fc_explained.html.

•

Ransford, E. (2007). La nouvelle physique de l’esprit. Agnières: Le temps présent. p.290.

•

Walter, P. F. (2010). Françoise Dolto and language, Book, Review, Quotes and Comments. Newark: Sirius C Media Galaxy LLC. p.11.

•

Weil, P. (1994). The Art of living in peace: towards a new peace consciousness.

Findhorn: Findhorn Press.

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Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention with Cancer Patients Undergoing Chemotherapy INES TESTONI, Ph.D. Ines Testoni is professor of Social Psychology and director of the Master Death Studies & th End of life (University of Padova). Her principal themes of research and interest concern the relationship among death, psychological discomfort, ex­ istential suffering, representation of the death. Specifically, in the field of social psychology of health, she studies bereavement and anticipatory mourning, health psychology and psycho-oncology / end-of-life, mental and social representations of health and illness. The theme of death is the pivot through she moves other aspects of her psychological research, where the questions on suicide and eu­ thanasia are particularly studied. In this field and in the interest in a epistemologi­ cal re-foundation of the relationship between philosophy and psychology, specific themes are increased: cultures of death and Terror Management Theory; social and cultural psychology of religion; ontological aspects of the social construction of meaning; Death Education; thanatology; educational/formational processes and thanatology; informed consent between social representations of illness and those of cure; the function of psychology in the solution of bioethical problems; conceptual dynamics emergent from the concept of the identity “mind/brain”; rep­ resentation of death and strategies of social and individual coping; psychosocial factors and suicide; prevention of suicide; social representations of the body; nihilism and suffering. She has written 8 monographs, she has edited 9 book and published 50 scientific national and international articles.

Co-authors: Department FISPPA - Section of Applied Psychology, University of Padua. Pro­ fessor of Social psychology - ines.testoni@unipd.it: ELENA GABRIELI, LUCIA RONCONI, DORELLA ANCONA, SIBYLLA VERDI. Oncological Institute of Veneto (IOV – IRCCS). Psychologist, Psychotherapist: ELEONORA CAPOVILLA. 73

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention...

ABSTRACT: This article presents the results of a qualitative research study exploring the role that mu­ sic intervention plays in helping cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Music therapy sessions were administered and followed by a narrative discourse revealing the signifi­ cance of this experience. The role that music plays in providing palliative support is exam­ ined through the reported perceptions of the meaning of the relationship between emo­ tions and music of 25 cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy at an Institute that treats cancer patients in Northern Italy. A constructivist research approach with grounded theory design was applied. Data included transcripts from semi-structured research interviews and the results from the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (CORE). Interviews were conducted with the patients after the music therapy sessions. The results show that music intervention alleviates patients’ distress. Positive effects may carry over into the self-repre­ sentation of the body by allowing the patient to manage the physical pain and to engage in anticipatory mourning due to the feeling they have of being between life and death.

KEYWORDS:: Music Receptive Intervention, Cancer Patient, Emotion, Textual Analysis, Constructivist Perspective.

Introduction The term “music therapy” goes back to ancient Greece, and today can be applied through two methodologies: receptive, or passive, music therapy, where the patient listens to recorded music chosen either by her or by the therapist; active music therapy, where the patient creates music through the use of musical instruments, or sounds and noises, with the help of the therapist (Alvin, 1986; Benenzon, 1988, 1999; Gfeller, 2003; Ezzu & Messaglia, 2006; Muret, 2005; Postacchini, Ricciotti & Borghesi, 2001; Bruscia Kenneth, 2008; Frumento, 2008).

In oncology, music therapy is applied with different objectives, such as reducing anxiety and stress, gaining better control of pain and a better compliance to treatment, and as psychological support to the patient and her relatives.

In the field of oncological and palliative care, music therapy falls within the area of therapeutical and supportive intervention, aimed at reinforcing the intrapsychic and interpersonal aspects, weakened by the illness, with 74

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... a focus on alleviating the correlated symptoms (pain, anxiety, depression, social isolation, etc.).

There is scientific evidence of the effects of music therapy treatment on the biological aspects of a person, such as Yamasaki et al. study’s (2012).

The research has established a role for music in the regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, the sympathetic nervous system, and the immune system, which have key functions in the regulation of metabolism and energy balance. More recent findings have shown a role for music in the metabolic recovery from stress, the regulation of gastric and intestinal motility, the moderation of cancer-related gastrointestinal symptoms, and the increase of lipid metabolism and lactic acid clearance during exercise and post exercise recovery (Yamasaki et al., 2012).

Most of the research, however, has focused on the supportive aspect of such treatment from the point of view of helping to adapt to new conditions of life - as in the case of oncological patients - in order to sustain and elaborate a new sense of self after having experienced a sense of fracture, brought on by the disease, in one’s autobiographical continuity.

Clements-Cortés (2004) show a music therapy treatment applied to 3 patients who reside in a palliative care center at the “Bycrest Center for Geriatric Care” (Toronto, Ontario). The study is descriptive, and aims at evaluating the efficiency of different music therapy techniques at reducing symptoms of depression, of social isolation, and at raising at higher levels communication, self-expression (by stimulating biographical memories), and enabling relaxation. In the conclusions, the music therapist is of the opinion that music and music therapy techniques can facilitate emotional expression, and dampen the feeling of loss, in terminally-ill patients. The examples described, furthermore, demonstrate the efficiency of a music therapy intervention in reaching pre-defined objectives. Even though the research lacks quantitative data, the author brings into evidence the results reached through a personal analysis of the patients’ experiences, referring the detailed answers of each one regarding the objectives. The methodology specified individual sessions on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, over a variable period of time, taking into consideration the progressive advance of the disease in the patients. A music therapy intervention based on such criteria allows the patient to feel sustained or stimulated in a constant manner, creating with the therapist an affectionate relationship 75

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... which can influence and therefore modify one’s own emotional experiences.

By analyzing the objectives that music therapists have posed themselves and discussed in the literature, we can see that music therapy seems to permit a global involvement of the patient (Bonomini & Giannotti, 2008), allowing the therapist to act simultaneously on the intrapsychic, interpersonal and symptomological level. Gfeller (2002) divided the patient’s needs that respond to music therapy into two main types: physical and psychosocial needs. Aldridge (2003) emphasizes, however, that music therapy should mostly focus on changes that may seriously threaten the sense of self and personal identity of patients.

Pothoulaki, MacDonald and Flowers (2012) show

recurring themes in

patients’ narrations revealed a variety of social and psychological benefits related to the experience of music therapy, such as facilitating peer support and group interaction, increasing self-confidence, relaxation, the generation of positive feelings, stress relief and feelings of enhanced communication through music. There was also an emphasis upon the importance of social interaction and communication.

The importance of music therapy as a powerful tool in palliative care has been demonstrated in many studies. For example, Gallagher, Huston, Nelson, Walsh and Steele (2001) and Gallagher, Lagman, Walsh, Davis and LeGrand (2006) described the positive impact of music therapy on patients, their families, and staff, in addressing the many exigencies in severe illness and at the end of life. Renz, Schütt and Cerny (2005) describe the ways in which music therapy addresses patients’ spiritual needs, improves expression of emotions, improves verbalization (Gallagher, Lagman, Walsh, Davis & LeGrand, 2006), and helps to overcome distress, which can lead to anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Burns et al., 2008). Lee, Bhattacharya, Sohn & Verres (2012) in their study investigated the relaxing effect of monochord sounds for patients during chemotherapy compared with progressive muscle relaxation, an established relaxation technique. Monochord sounds are used in music therapy for the alleviation of pain, enhanced body perception, and relaxation. This study shows that both listening to recorded monochord sounds and practising progressive muscle relaxation have a useful and comparable effect on gynaecologic oncological patients during chemotherapy, with partially overlapping but also notably divergent neural correlates.

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Regarding the benefits of music therapy before or after chemotherapy, Lin Hsieh, Hsu, Fetzer and Hsu (2011), investigated the effect of music therapy and verbal relaxation on anxiety states and anxiety-induced physiological manifestations among patients with cancer before and after chemotherapy.

Their study suggests music therapy had a greater positive effect on postchemotherapy anxiety than verbal relaxation and control groups and a significant increase in skin temperature. Patients with a high state of anxiety receiving music therapy had a greater drop in postchemotherapy anxiety than did the normal anxiety state subsample. They urge Oncology nurses to offer music and verbal relaxation as adjuvant interventions to reduce chemotherapy-induced anxiety and enhance the quality of care (Lin, Hsieh, Hsu, Fetzer & Hsu, 2011).

O’Callaghan, O’Brien, Magill and Ballinger (2009), have shown the role of music therapy in supporting care for young patients (O’Callaghan, Barry & Thompson, 2011) as well as in pediatric supportive care (O’Callaghan, Baron, Barry & Dun, 2011). We share the same perspective of O’Callaghan (2009), whose opinion of the efficacy of music intervention has been proven in various studies (1983 to present) in oncology and palliative care settings. In fact, from the success of that research, music therapy has been acknowledged as an accredited discipline that increases the quality of life and promotes wellbeing of individuals in palliative care. (Dileo & Bradt, 2005).

Differently from O’Callaghan’s (2009) perspective, we are interested specifically in considering the influence of music on the emotional experience of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy (Sabo & Rush, 1996). In particular, we consider the empirical perspective of the constructionist approach useful because it is aimed at understanding participants’ subjective experiences in order to improve their resilience and coping strategies, which may be analyzed through interlacing quantitative and qualitative instruments. On one hand, we are following the qualitative researcher’s approach to palliative care introduced by Glaser and Strauss (1967), which has been widely developed into the multidisciplinary use of narrative methods in contemporary health and social care (Charon, 2006; Gunaratnam & Oliviere, 2009). On the other hand, we are focusing on promoting a solution to the dichotomy indicated by O’Callaghan (2009) between “objectivist and constructivist approaches”, where the former uses quantitative and the latter qualitative methods to describe the psychological dimension (Bruner, 1990; Neimeyer & Mahoney, 1995).

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This research describes an interventional study in support of cancer patients. If cancer patients are not supported, their distress can lead to anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder; related to both the cancer diagnosis and treatment.

The purposes of this study were: verify if music therapy intervention has a positive emotional effect on patients undergoing chemotherapy, and if it allows them to elaborate the cure and self-perception with higher levels of positive emotions; to determine the feasibility and possible benefits of receptive music intervention in reducing anxiety and sorrow, through the use of a quali-quantitative technique that provides an answer to the methodological criticisms that are often made in this field of study.

Method To pursue our aim, we used a computerized textual analysis in our research to establish constant factors in systems of meaning, extrapolating them from symbolic data belonging to a specific linguistic context, respecting the criteria of credibility and validity, i.e. the possibility of replication, and the effective quantification of the object under consideration. Indeed, the Lexical Correspondence Analysis, which from a statistical point of view is a type of factorial analysis, as a textual analysis it is both a form of analysis of content, and a semantic quantitative analysis which utilizes the word as a unit of classification, applying analysis of correspondence (AC) for textual data (Doise, Clemence & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1995; Krippendorff, 1980).

The reason we chose a quantitative methodology derives from the realization that in spite of numerous studies that demonstrate the action that music therapy plays on the psychological well-being of the seriously ill patient, there is a significant challenge in demonstrating to the scientific community through data, the substantial results of direct clinical observation. In particular, two recent methodological reviews of the literature reveal the presence of numerous biases that would render less reliable the results that show that there is an increase in the quality of life of the patients (Pothoulaki, Flowers & McDonald, 2006; Dileo & Bradt, 2010). The methodological solution to this particular dilemma of the research is to create a study that employs a quantitative part supported by a qualitative component.

This is the reason why we wanted to use a quali-quantitative methodology, in order to be able to disseminate to the scientific community the results of the research in an understandable language that at the same time does not betray 78

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... the profound effects of music therapy, which often are difficult to communicate with quantitative data.

Participants and Music Receptive Intervention Considering that there are a multitude of studies confirming the efficacy of Receptive Music Intervention on cancer patients (Bradt, Dileo, Grocke & Magill, 2011; Kenny & Faunce, 2004; Waldon, 2001), 25 adults receiving intensive chemotherapy (16 men and 9 women; inclusion criteria: patients aged 23 to 83 - average age: 53; exclusion criteria: unfavorable prognosis and patients under psychiatric treatment) participated in standard care plus a music intervention session at the hospital. The participants took part in Receptive Music intervention, the oldest kind of Music Therapy where the patient is not asked to be active in making music, but just to listen to the music. It is defined as “passive” to distinguish it from the “active” use of musical instruments. The authors preferred this method because, for our objective this was the best and most convenient method to enhance the patients’ own perception of themselves (Grocke, Wigram & Dileo, 2007) within the limits of the hospital’s aseptic environment. Furthermore, this method does not require complex equipment and can be set-up anywhere.

The research participants were volunteers. The request for participation was made through a proposal from the physician or attending psychologist. After the selfselection was made, the patient signed the consent form and an agreement was reached as to what day and time the session would take place.

Following the analysis of the anamnesis/prognosis and after obtaining patients’ consent, individual Receptive Music Intervention was started. Each individual and single music therapy session of 50 minutes per patient consisted of three moments: preparation with relaxing, musical stimulation and then listening to one of two different specific music programs. This was followed by an induction of music to direct attention away from pain or anxiety. No images or imagery was suggested to the patient by the therapists, but if images did emerge spontaneously, the therapists, worked on elaborating and amplifying them.

The choice of which musical pieces the patient listened to was often determined by his or her musical taste (when known) or by specific issues that emerged during the music therapy. For instance, in one case the authors used songs by Led Zeppelin as the opening music, as it was precisely this kind of music that, based on the patient’s personal history, was reassuring to him. While a complete background check on the musical history and preferences of each patient was 79

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... out of scope for this study, we did make use of a life-review component which can be obtained through the music and through the information provided by the subjects during the initial consultation.

The number of songs that were played to each patient varied, and was determined based on the need to put closure on a topic, or to help the person come out of a particular emotional state evoked by the music played earlier. The authors did follow a set structure during the sessions; the aim was to offer an opening song that introduced the situation and that was reassuring and friendly. Then a second musical track was played that mirrored the information disclosed during the initial intake and themes that came up and a third piece of music that dove deeper into these themes followed by one last closing piece. Below is a complete list of the music tracks that were used.

Table 1 -The following table sets out a list of the songs played during the sessions. We only specified songs, musicians and play frequencies for the initial songs and the exit songs; in which we used a standard (for example, classical music by Vivaldi, Mozart and Allevi are very popular and attuned to the culture of the patients).In regards to the other songs, we listed some examples but it is not an exhaustive list. These songs were proposed on the basis of the personal history of the subject, the themes that came up during the sessions and the culture that the subject belonged to.

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In order to consider the effects of listening to the music, the patients underwent an analysis/discussion and life review after the session. This moment began with discussing broad issues end later in the conversation led to focusing on emotional and somatic impressions. This discussion and review period took place during the 50-minute music intervention session.

The Study Design The study design is composed of measures including the Profile of Mood States (POMS) (McNair, Lorr & Droppleman, 1971, it. Franè, Sebellico, Gnugnoli & Corallo, 1991) which was administered before and after the music session.

Next a semi-structured clinical interview was conducted and we taped the patients’ conversation. Lastly, the narrative was transcribed and e-processed through Spad-T. The POMS test is a scale that measures transient mood states at the current time (for the past week, including today), composed of sixty-five adjectives on a 5 point Likert-type scale, measuring six factors: 1. tension/anxiety; 2. depression/dejection; 3. confusion/bewilderment; 4. anger/hostility; 5. vigor/ activity; 6. fatigue/inertia; where only the 5th represents positive expressions (vigor – activity). The test is simple to administer (it takes only 3-5 minutes to complete) and it is considered the single most reliable, valid and inclusive measure of mood states relevant to the assessment of emotional distress among persons suffering from pain (Zaza & Baine, 2002) including cancer patients (Baker, Denniston, Zabora, Polland & Dudley, 2002). The data was processed by SPSS-17 software.

In order to analyze the post-intervention narratives of the patients, we used Analysis of Textual Data (ATD) methodology. ATD is used in narrative medicine and psychology research. It is a process of acquisition, synthesis and restitution of the information that is present in a text (Tuzzi, Popescu & Altmann, 2010), through a direct approach to its content without a priori reading. The text that is processed is named “corpus”. According to Tuzzi, Popescu and Altmann (2010), from the viewpoint of ATD, a corpus is a collection of texts and each text is composed of words. Words are sequences of letters of the alphabet isolated by means of blanks and punctuation marks. In this study, the corpus concerning the music experience is composed of the patients’ narrative recorded after the music intervention. In this research, the corpus is composed of 240 occurrences from a vocabulary of 9193 different words; if the ratio between the number of the whole words and the number of different words is 25.9%, then the corpus is sufficient to be statistically analyzed. The initial sample of 1000 words was broken down into a set of 600 final 81

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... analysis units (Bernardi & Tuzzi, 2011).

In order to investigate the structure of the musical experience, we created a specific kind of ATD: an explorative analysis based on Correspondence Analysis (Lebart et al., 1998; Greenacre, 1984; 2007). The correspondence analysis shows on a Cartesian bidimensional plan similarities and differences in terms of lexical profiles. From a statistical point of view, the ALC is a type of factorial analysis; as a textual analysis it is both a form of analysis of content and a semantic quantitative analysis which utilizes the word as a unit of classification, applying analysis of correspondence (AC) for textual data (Benzecri, 1973). The corpus was processed using the SPAD computer program (Sisteme Portable pour l’Analise des Données Textuelles: Lebart & Salem, 1988; Lebart et al., 1993; http://www.decisia.com).

Correspondence analysis translates the frequencies of the words into coordinates for each title/newspaper and therefore into mutual positions on a Cartesian plan (Bernardi &Tuzzi, 2011).

Before processing the text, each word of the entire text underwent disambiguation, through lemmatisation, and this helped to make the information simple and transform it into its canonical form. In the lemmatisation phase, particular graphic signs were used to write out the key words of the various answers, so that each word token, corresponded to the original meaning. To maintain the sense of the expressions, the words are linked in lexical forms, appearing as occurrences. In regards to the frequencies of the lexical forms considered, the threshold of “6” was chosen.

The main aim of the analysis is to study the lexical structure of the patients’ narration after the music intervention. The data on the frequencies is translated in distance, through the chi square statistic and their simultaneous representation on a factorial plane (Tuzzi, 2003). Then, a contingent table called “words per patient” was created, where the rows contain the words, the columns the patients’ names and the cells the relative frequencies, from which orthogonal factorial axes were calculated to explain the total inertia. This analysis defines the active variables which compose the factors and projects the illustrative variables.

Results The results revealed a major shift in the emotional state of patients before and after the music intervention and discussion period about the music they listened to during the receptive music therapy intervention. In particular, the analysis of data obtained through the double administration of the POMS test has enabled us to verify the change of state, while the analysis of the textual data helped to 82

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... clarify how the music may have acted to achieve that change.

Data Analysis of the POMS Test Table 2 describes the score between the first and the second administration (T1/ T2: before and after the treatment).

Table 2 - Cronbach’s alpha of POMS Scales on first (T1) and second (T2) administration.

There is a significant time effect on all scales of the POMS (Table3). In particular, there is a decrease in scores between the first and second administration for all scales, with the exception of / vigor / activity / whose scores increase.

Table 3 describes the values of Cronbach’s alpha and the statistic T-test for paired samples (comparing the scores between T1 and T2).

Table 3 - Descriptive Statistics of POMS Scales and t-test for paired samples on first (T1) and second (T2) administration.

From the tables we observe a highly significant reduction in clinical scale scores 83

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... from the first administration (T1) to the second (T2) administration, with the exception of the scale “force”, which rises in Q2. It can be concluded therefore that music therapy made a strong positive impact on mood; in particular it resulted in a significant decrease in levels of anxiety, depression, confusion, anger and fatigue, while there was an increase in perceived strength.

Analysis of Textual Data The Factors.

Table 4 describes the inertia explained by the 5 factors we have extracted from the LCA.

Table 4 illustrates the share of inertia explained by the first five factors extracted in the analysis of lexical correspondence which together account for about one third of the overall variability.

The first factor “Music as an integrative experience “ represents music as the context

84

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... in which it is possible to deal with anticipatory mourning due to an imminent end resulting from the illness. It minimizes anxiety because the music therapy allows the patient to perceive that the body has been released from the “prison” of hospitalization. This feeling is described as resulting from a melding experience in which the body is wrapped up in ecstasy which allows the patient to deal with the thought of death without distress. This melding experience produced both a different feeling in the body (to quote the patients: “The body is light,” “I feel as if I were flying,” “the music makes me feel detached from the world”, “I feel transported and that’s all”) or a universal feeling (“I hear all of nature,” “colors, the world”, “I feel as if I were in the fresh air”, “I feel all life around me awakening”).

The second factor “Oscillation of pain”, describes an interesting psychophysical phenomenon of music on pain perception, which couples the experience of the body of pain fluctuating between maximum intensity to its disappearance. This experience produces a return of the anxiety when the peak of pain is reached, but is also reassuring because the music becomes a tool that connects the reaction that makes the suffering vanish. The third factor “Music as a weapon to fight the disease”, strengthens the aforementioned: the feeling that with music you can fight the pain becomes associated with the representation of music as a tool to fight the disease. For example, the portrayals (images) were arranged from the descriptions of war and marked by feelings ranging from aggression and negativity to expressions of peace, serenity and good health.

The fourth factor “Living the dying “ describes how on one hand, the fear of death, and on the other hand, the musical experience is perceived as an opportunity to feel protected and finally begin living, knowing that you will die and therefore embrace all the opportunities that give meaning and fulfilment to the time that remains.

The fifth factor, “From Here to Eternity”, summarizes all the previous points: the bodily experience of melding with the music which fluctuates with the pain perceived. Overcoming the pain allows the patient to feel in the here-and-now already projected into infinity beyond death and recognize a life beyond the disease.

Factorial Design.

Since the fifth factor is the summary of the previous 4, for the construction of the two factorial designs, we crossed the first with the second and the third with the fourth. Only the words with the highest contribution in the factors (a 30% threshold cut) were projected. Both graphs clearly outline how individuals 85

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... respond to the music intervention. On the graphs, we projected the results of the POMS T1 as explanatory variables in order to detect where to place the various emotional states of the subjects before the music intervention and therefore on the final narrated result.

Graph 1 “From fighting the pain to the will to live” describes the crossroads between the first and second factor, in that it clearly shows the importance of the experience, which music enables, of feeling one’s own body, in order to address the illness in the here-and-now even when the pain becomes more intense due to the strong concentration on the self. The contrast between fighting and peace unfolds as the will to live and fight the disease. We can see clockwise from the top left 4, the following areas of semantic prevalence: the “body as an imaginative space, being in the “here-and-now” in a hospital without seeing the sky, “dealing with the pain” and “the fight against the disease”. (Pic. p. 87) Graph 2 “From fear of death to the search for meaning” contains the words that music conveys in order to accept the disease as a condition of being between life and death. We can see clockwise from the top left, four areas of semantic prevalence: a reaction of “serene acceptance of death”, the “search for why”, the “restraining pain” and ‘”the openness to experience pain” that music makes bearable. (Pic. p. 88) Discussion and Conclusion The purpose of the research outlined here was to investigate the real possibility of introducing an effective and inexpensive musical intervention in oncology and radiotherapy hospital wards. The psychometric evaluation found that all subjects achieved a significant positive change in levels of anxiety, depression, vigor, fatigue, confusion and anger, with a general improvement in the level of perceived well-being. The therapy is therefore considered highly suitable for producing a change in the state of mental well-being of cancer patients admitted to hospital.

From the analysis of the content of the narratives generated, it emerged that music can act in different ways, adapting to the personal needs of each patient.

The main effect of music is that it seems to allow patients to live intensely the experience of grief and mourning, finding in this manner a “place” to process their own suffering, without this being perceived as destructive. It is also particularly relevant that the language that music evokes is placed at the level of images, impressions, metaphors, and synaesthesia. Patients mostly reported music’s 86

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention...

87

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention...

88

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... calming, relaxing and supportive effects, which alleviated the hardships associated with cancer. Music elicited helpful physical, emotional, and imagery states that provided supportive messages, and enabled personal and shared understanding about the relationship with their own body.

The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility of introducing music therapy intervention in a cancer ward, by studying the effects of listening to music on the status of the patient receiving chemotherapy. In particular, we analyzed the effects of the musical material through a specific test accompanied by an analysis of the patients’ narratives after listening to the music.

Compared to the integration of the qualitative and quantitative method obtained by the projection of the six POMS scales on the two graphs, it can be concluded that patients whose results are within the statistical norm, and those above the norm, are clearly separated into different quadrants on the two graphs. It can thus be observed that those individuals that prior to the music therapy were in a state of psychic equilibrium, can find opportunity in the music to process and express their “mourning�, and their fears for their own suffering. In addition, through the strong anchor to the reality experienced, an attitude of soul searching about the meaning of their lives develops. Lastly, it seems that those whose answers to the test are initially outside the statistical norm, achieve a greater benefit by listening to the music. In fact, it activates a level of self-expression that is painted with images and metaphors, that is detached from the reality of the illness and, through aesthetic appreciation, the patient is able to develop this experience using music as a bridge to greater self-expression and their own pain.

In a constructivist perspective, music therapy interventions guarantee these results not only for the psycho-physical benefits, but thanks to its operating at different levels.

In our view, we consider music as a social language capable of transmitting symbolical meaning, and transporting a socially-codified language to express existential experiences and accompany them. it is because of this that such an experience - even with a single session - produces several effects in terms of deconstruction/construction of the chemotherapic experience.

It can be concluded that music intervention in an oncological environment is a particularly appropriate intervention,, given the almost immediate opportunity that music offers for open communication but also the possibility to use a musical way of communicating, which if properly utilized, can open important communication 89

Emotions and Music: an Individual Music Therapy Intervention... channels without the person feeling threatened or forced to address issues that they are not ready to. In a sense, music lets itself be interpreted and in this way can accompany and accommodate the patient’s experience, without forcing a discussion about important issues.

Furthermore, the combination of the quantitative with the qualitative methodology (quali-quantitative) has enabled us to effectively communicate the results and procedures, thus emphasizing the importance of conducting studies and research in the field of music therapy that analyze the process from several points of view.

Despite this fact, we consider essential that future studies investigate this issue further, and involve a greater number of participants. It would also be interesting to use and compare different music therapy techniques and understand in more detail the different modes of action. Finally, please note that this study only involved a single session of music therapy for each participant. It would therefore be fundamental that in the future, a long-term study be implemented, focusing on the intervention strategies in a series of music therapy sessions and the changes those produces in the patient.

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From Head Trauma to Contact with Dead Grief Work Through Breathwork Subjective Experience of Contact with a Deceased Person

VINCENT F. LIAUDAT, M.D. Dr Vincent Liaudat, Swiss boarded certified psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Holotropic breathwork practitioner.

This article has been reviewed by a member of the editorial board (G.C.). The revision has been accepted by the author.

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a clinical case study of a 60 years old female patient diagnosed with a dysexecutive syndrome induced by head trauma and with comorbidity of mild depression and anxiety.

Within an 11 sessions of transpersonal psychotherapy using verbal and non-verbal interventions (holotropic breathwork) the patient went into a deep mourning process. The subjective experiences of contact with a deceased sibling contributed to a major clinical improvement. Cognitive and executive functions appeared to be massively restored and depression and anxiety disappeared.

KEYWORDS: syndrome, sleep disturbances, holotropic, brain, dysfunctions.

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From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead Introduction Dysexetive syndrome (DES) is a functional syndrome with complex clinical presentation including cognitive deficit, behavioral and emotional (Manchester D. 2004, Canali 2011).

The cognitive impairment affects mainly the executive function (memory, attention , abstract thinking). Usually patients present also depressive and anxiety symptoms (Stuss 2007).

It has been described in patients with frontal lobe damage, either from head trauma or ischemia (Pa 2012).

In this paper I present a case of DES caused by a head trauma, complicated by a depressive syndrome secondary to bereavement.

The patient was in charge of a general practitioner and a neuropsychologist for the DES and I followed her for the depressive syndrome. In the treatment an unconventional method, holotropic breathing was used.

Holotropic breathing is a method developed by Stan Grof (1987) in order to induce a non ordinary state of consciousness. In such a state the subject can be in contact with a spiritual, archetype level to express.

As defined by Grof Holotropic means “oriented toward wholeness� (Grof 2013), and refers in general to non-ordinary state of consciousness.

The holotropic breathing, involving some breathing exercises and evocative music, is usually used in the context of psychotherapy or evolution setting in transpersonal oriented approaches. There are no description in literature of the application of this method in the medical field.

Case description Ms. I. is a 60 years old patient referred for consultation by the service of neuropsychology and neuro-rehabilitation of the city University Hospital.

Ms. I. is not known to have medical problems, except for Raynaud’s disease.

She accidentally fall down the stairs and was found unconscious (she might have been unconscious for six hours) and bleeding on the stairs. Physical examination in the emergency room (ER) revealed superficial wounds to the face and skull (temporal hematoma) and shoulder pain. Neurological clinical examination was normal, brain CT and MRI were negative for brain lesions, in particular no intracranial hemorrhages were detected.

She returns home but ultimately needs to remain in bed for a week due to severe dizziness, balance disorders and headaches. During this period, the patient must also deal with the death of her twin brother, due to cancer, already diagnosed 97

From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead several years before and after a week the birth of her granddaughter.

The clinical presentation declines so that Ms. I. does not remember the previous day, when her daughter gave birth. She is unable to hold a conversation and is having difficulty making sense of things. She dials her deceased brother’s phone number wanting to talk to him. She suffers from loss of appetite and disabling headaches.

Clinical neurological assessment is negative and brain imaging again does not show any brain lesions.

However, the second neuropsychological assessment showed a significant decline with a slowing down of psychomotor function and worsening of cognitive dysfunction with onset of anterograde memory disorders, attention disorders and aggravation of the executive dysfunction. There is also a gradual appearance of post-traumatic complaints with symptoms of the anxiety and depressive type.

Neurological examination was still negative for any possible brain damage.

However, a ban on driving is pronounced.

Clinical observation following first interviews She was referred to me for the psychological symptoms. At the first interview Ms. I. is alert, self oriented, space and time orientations are preserved. Her attention remains focused. Her cognitive impairments are subtle accompanied by some memory problems. There are no psychotic signs or symptoms.

She feels empty, depressed, with tension in her solar plexus. She suffers from recurrent bouts of uncontrollable crying, feelings of guilt for not having seen or spoken more to her brother. She suffers from significant sleep disturbances with difficulties in falling asleep and maintaining sleep, leading to daytime fatigue, which aggravates her states of confusion. There is no suicidal ideation.

Progress and development of the therapeutic process Session from 1 to 3 The first thing Ms. I. mentions in the first session is: “there are too many things, the death of my twin brother, the birth of my granddaughter, falling down the stairs, I cry a lot and I can’t sleep anymore. - I can’t assimilate anymore”.

Her twin brother had suffered for some years with lung tumors that invaded the artery. She wanted to give him a lung. She saw him for the last time shortly before her accident. “We were supposed to see each other again”.

Initial discussions focus on the loss of her brother, the evaluation of anxiety and depressive symptoms and the management of the anxiolytic and hypnotic 98

From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead medication she was taking, prescribed by the attending physician. ”I do not accept the death of my brother. There’s something about me that is gone.

We were so close. I feel that there is nobody left.” ”I feel guilty for not having been closer. He used to say to me: - Listen, I’m ready, I can go – I did not answer him and I changed the subject, I did not want to know, I did not want him to go”. ”I told myself he had no right to leave me”.

Ms. I. talks about the practice of her Catholic prayers and seems very open to other spiritualities, so I proposed the reading of the book “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” by Sogyal Rinpoche.

At the end of the third session, a one on one session of holotropic breathwork is proposed.

There are two aspects to be considered for this proposal. The first one is that clinical presentation is worsening, the medication treatment seems not satisfactory. Ms. I. presents a state of confusion at times, of misplaced bouts of crying and severe sleep disturbance that aggravate her attention the day after a night of insomnia.

The attending physician has known her for thirty years and he is very concerned as he has never seen her like this.

The second one is that considering the cognitive and memory problems the patient is developing a no-verbal mode would be more indicated.

Ms. I. never heard of such a method. She considers this proposal and gives me her positive response at the following meeting. She spoke about this proposal to her daughter who supported this approach, having experienced breathwork sessions herself. In parallel, the anxiolytics are lowered and a herbal treatment as a relaxant is introduced.

In view of the signs of post-traumatic brain dysfunction, particular attention is paid to any contraindications to the practice of a holotropic breathwork session.

The extensive review conducted at the University Hospital allows us to reliably exclude any medical conditions that could compromise the indication of a session of holotropic breathwork, namely: heart failure, heart rhythm disorder, coronary heart disease, hypertension, aneurysm, glaucoma, epilepsy, asthma, chronic headache, migraine, diabetes, osteoporosis, recent post-surgical procedure status.

As far as the neuropsycological symptoms controindicating the breathwork session are concerned, the only one would be mental confusion. This was not the case for Mrs I., whose brain dysfunction symptoms were mild. However, her husband’s supervision during the session was organized.

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From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead The first individual session of holotropic breathwork Her intention for this first session is to be with her brother, to know if he is doing well.

The induction of breathwork goes well. Ms. I. enters the phase of hyperventilation following the instructions. The musical stage begins with heart music. The music of the heart was chosen because of the mourning theme she was focused on.

The meeting is quiet except for a phase of sobs that are stuck at the diaphragm.

After the breathwork, Ms. I. recounts having seen a scene with her and her brother at school when they were little. At the end of the session, she saw a coffin, “but not my brother”. She seems to be disappointed with this fact.

An incentive to pay attention to dreams is given.

I Session after breathwork Ms. I. feels better, more serene. The evening after the breathwork session, she slept straight through the night without the aid of sleeping pills.

The next day, in her neighborhood, she came across her doctor, who said to her: “But you are resurrected! “. To which the patient responded: “In any case, it is not you who resurrected me!”

She was able to look after her granddaughter alone for the first time.

II session after breathwork The patient refers that crying is less intense and less frequent. Memory is much better,. Sleep disorders are still present, but lessened.

“It’s a vacuum. I feel I no longer have someone to call.”

“We cannot get him back”.

“I feel that a part of me has gone. Whatever I needed, I could call him and we would meet halfway.”

The second individual session of holotropic breathwork She lost her sister-in-law a few days ago.

She dreamed of her brother: ”I walk into a room, there are many ladies, I do not see their faces. My sister-in-law is in the middle. My brother passes by and says: - I’m going to rest - He disappears.

My sister-in-law tells me: - He has gone to rest Her intention for this second session is to be with her brother.

The induction of breathwork goes well. The musical stage begins with rhythmic songs.

In the session, she moves her hands as if she wanted to shake hands with someone without being able to do so. She then experiences strong pain in her solar plexus 100

From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead with irradiation at the belly and hips. She expresses a fear of fainting.

Intervention by the therapist involves applying his hands on the area of the ​​ heart and stomach to enable the block to circulate, pressing heavily as requested. Her pain eases up.

At the end of the session she chose to remain silent.

Session after the second breathwork experience ”It was quite a session. I cried a lot afterwards, I do not know why. I miss him, but it’s better than before” “I can no longer have the same contact I had with him before. It’s time to let him go” “After the accident, I had periods of confusion; I even forgot that he was dead” Ms. I. made contact with her brother during the breathwork session. He appeared before her and told her he was fine and he was going to rest: “And my brother went quietly. I saw him walk away” Ms. I. has come to accept the fact that her brother is dead and begins to talk about it with people around her. She also reports that her doctor finds her better.

Following sessions Ms. I. feels much better. She resumes her work at 50%.

Her sleep disturbances persist as does a fatigue to concentrate. The rest of her cognitive impairment is amended.

She misses her brother - but not like before. At times, she still finds it difficult to accept the death of her brother.

She often shares her thoughts on death in connection with the reading of the Tibetan book.

End of therapy The last sessions are spaced several weeks apart as she canceled a few sessions.

She feels better, calmer. She was able to renounce the sleeping pills. She managed to tell her older sister: “yes, he died”.

She is able to look after her two grandchildren at the same time.

She mentions that on the night of her brother’s death, just before the phone call came announcing his death, she saw a shadow, a skeleton, in front of her, without a head.

Therapy ends nine months after the first consultation (11 sessions in total). Ms. I. is doing well. She has no trouble sleeping. At times, she has a vision of her brother facing her and telling her to think about him. “I remember the moment when he told me he had chosen his space at the cemetery”.

She relies on several practices from the book by Sogyal Rinpoche.

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From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead Discussion Ms. I. shows a dysexecutive syndrome associated with head trauma. No visible organic lesion is apparent. She subsequently develops a depressive state accompanied by anxiety for which a doctor would usually prescribe an antidepressant, especially if there is a negative trend with regard to neuropsychological symptoms. Ms. I. arrives in consultation with two types of psychotropic medication (hypnotic and anxiolytic) introduced by previous doctors.

We are in the presence of a “mixed” case: executive dysfunction, which could be explained by the trauma with possible brain contusion and anxiety and depression in the context of bereavement (psychological explanation).

The handling of mixed cases is generally long and complex. Indeed, patients may experience being shunted around the health care system. Also, it generally takes time to obtain a global view of a mixed clinical situation (Sinanović O 2007).

When the case was first taken on, the cause of the aggravation was not clear and several doctors gave their opinions, which were sometimes conflicting. It quickly became clear that Ms. I. was in a phase of mourning and had an adjustment disorder in addition to the neuropsychological dysfunction. The depression linked to the mourning was accentuating the neuropsychological disorder. The psychiatrist was put under pressure to prescribe an antidepressant. However an antidepressant did not seem appropriate at this stage, given the early stage of mourning she was in. Moreover the anxiolytic and hypnotic medication already prescribed could have aggravated cognitive function. Therefore a “non verbal” method was chosen.

A “fast and efficient” therapeutic strategy had to be found because the cognitive symptoms were getting worse.

The two breathwork sessions did not show the typical matrix phases (Groff 1987).

However they allowed the patient to access a transpersonal field. This is most likely due to the general psychological state in which the patient found herself coupled with the fact that the work of breathwork on a one to one basis differs markedly from that done in group. In particular, the first session began with music touching the heart, which more than likely contributed to the evocation of the theme of loss.

Each time, the theme of the brother emerged, at first in the form of a revival and then in the form of making contact with a message resembling a last farewell.

It appeared, notably, that in the second session, Ms. I. interacted with her late brother. The atmosphere in the room was different, peaceful and clear. Ms. I. was 102

From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead neither frightened nor disturbed by this contact. She joined in this phenomenon quite naturally.

Later, Ms. I. was increasingly able to recognize her feelings of guilt surrounding the death of her brother (not talking to him about his approaching death and feeling reproachful that he left her). She was able to incorporate the reality of the loss of her brother, in part thanks to a decrease in general anxiety.

She was first able to consider the idea of ​​going to her brother’s town, idea she categorically refused at the beginning of therapy, to eventually being able to go to her brother’s grave in peace.

She continued to read the book of Sogyal Rinpoche and to put into practice the things that she could relate to. She even reads some passages to her husband.

Her vision of death has changed as well as her vision of spirituality. She has incorporated some of the meditations into her Catholic spiritual practices, inspired by the reading of this book.

With the psychological improving the dysexecutive function improved as well, till disappearing.

Conclusion Ms. I. had two subjective experiences of contact with a deceased person (one in breathwork and one in a dream) in the course of the treatment, including an experience induced by a session, which is unusual.

Most experiences of contact with a deceased person occur spontaneously and for no apparent reason (except in cases of induced after death communication) The breathwork sessions allowed Ms. I. to begin a psychological process aimed at working through three important dimensions of bereavement: recognition of the reality of the loss, strengthening internal links with the person lost, taking into account feelings of guilt. The post-mortem contacts facilitated the integration of the messages received by the bereaved, the management of the loss of a loved one and the broader spiritual transformation including a new way of conceptualizing death.

The therapeutic effect of a subjective experience of a post-mortem contact is powerful. This promoted the amendment of symptoms of depression and anxiety, so that helped psychotropic medication were first reduced with the aim to stop them. Both the improvement of psychological symptoms and the reduction of medication contributed to the restoration of cognitive and executive function.

The psychotherapeutic work benefited greatly from the two breathwork sessions.

It should be noted though, that the sessions were not given with the aim of 103

From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead communicating with the dead, but that it was Mrs. I.’s intention to do so. This work of mourning, incorporating the possibility of contact with a deceased person, has given permission to receive messages for the bereaved, and facilitated their integration into the management of the loss of a loved one.

This has led to a broader transformation on a spiritual level including a new way of conceptualizing death and a redesign of the sense of death

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From Head Trauma to Contact with the Dead REFERENCES

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Canali, F., Brucki, SMD, Bertolucci, PHF., Bueno, OFA. (2011). Reliability study of the Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome adapted for a Brazilian sample of older-adult controls and probable early Alzheimer’s disease patients. Rev Bras Psiquiatr. 2011 Dec;33(4):338-46

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Grof, S. (1987). The adventure of self-discovery. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Grof, S. (2013). Revision and Re-enchantement of Psychology. In Harris L. Friedman, Glen Hartelius (Eds.) The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology. Wiley Blackwell, West Sussex, 2013

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Manchester, D., Priestley, N., & Jackson, H. (2004). The assessment of executive functions: coming out of the office. Brain injury, 18, 1067-1081.

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Pa, J. Boxer, A., Chao, L.L., et al. (2009). Clinical-Neuroimaging Characteristics of Dysexecutive Mild Cognitive Impairment. Ann Neurol. April ; 65(4): 414–423.

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Sinanović, O. (2012). Psychiatric disorders in neurology. Psychiatr Danub.

2012 Oct;24 Suppl 3:S331-5.

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Stuss, D.T., Alexander, M.P. (2007). Is there a dysexecutive syndrome? Phil.

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XVI INTERNATIONAL EUROTAS CONFERENCE In collaboration with ITA & ATP

“METAMORPHOSIS”

Crete, 1-5 OCTOBER 2014

SYNTHESIS (Hellenic Association for Transpersonal Psychology & Research) would like to invite participants to register for this historic event that brings the Global Transpersonal Community together on the magical island of Crete.

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XVI INTERNATIONAL EUROTAS CONFERENCE www.eurotas2014.com

Invitation Dear Friends & Colleagues, We would like to remind you to register for your participation in the XVI EUROTAS conference in collaboration with ITA & ATP, to be held in Greece. This is a historic event that comes at a very crucial period in time.

At the core of our transpersonal vision lies the idea of metamorphosis, the ability of individuals, cultures, and organizations to transcend the limited sphere of mind associated with the ego, and to live in ways that incorporate a richer and more interconnected consciousness. Metamorphosis teaches us of the progression through disintegration to reintegration, a lesson of immense importance in our day as systems collapse globally. Transpersonal Psychology brings together the profound lessons from mythic and mystical systems of thought with the rigor of psychological science to address these issues. We are interested in a multidisciplinary global collaboration that explores the best of research, scholarship, education, and practice having a transpersonal orientation.

We look forward to your participation in this historic event in service to the planet, in raising consciousness, and in promoting the Transpersonal Perspective. We are privileged to be able to offer you an unforgettable experience on the magical island of Crete, paying homage to all those who have pioneered a deeper understanding of human nature and its potential.

Light and Love, Lindy McMullin Conference Director President SYNTHESIS 107

Conferences and Workshops Seminars by Ralph Wilms

The “Western� Approach into the Transpersonal r.wilms@mindchange.ch - www.mindchange.ch Academy for Transpersonal Coaching Tel: +41 91 649 38 01 The Transpersonal Coaching Course Start: 12-13 July (German) Autumn 2014 (English) Place: Zurich (CH)

Towards a Corporate Culture of Mindfulness 3-5 September (German) Place: Tegernsee (D)

The Transpersonal Self 4-5 October (German) Place: Kartause Ittingen (CH) In the old Greek tradition the term Incubation described a practice in which someone, who visited the healing temple of Asklepius, would lie down in a cave to find healing or inspiration.

The practise of Incubation is the appropriate method today, to shift the consciousness of the Western world on a larger scale. Incubation offers an easy approach to get in touch with the transpersonal realm involving the senses and the body.

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University of Padua Master of “Death Studies & the end of life� in Partnership with International Associations presents

Seeing Beyond in Facing Death 25 - 26 - 27 September 2014 Centro Culturale San Gaetano; Via Altinate, 71 Centro Universitario di via Zabarella, Via Zabarella, 82 Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Piazza Dei Signori Seeing beyond is an international multi-disciplinary conference which explores dying cultural processes and death representations analyzing the different ways culture impacts care for the dying. Over the past decades, scholarship in End-of-Life field has increased dramatically.

Seeing beyond wants to develop the dialogue among the different perspectives that explore and analyze the interrelations and interactions between death and the different cultural viewpoints of spirituality.

Seeing beyond welcomes submissions that produce conversations engaging medical, psychological, philosophical, religious, sociological, historical, ethnographic, normative, literary, anthropological, artistic, political or other terms that elaborate a relationship between death, spirituality, care-cure and culture.

Seeing beyond presents the state of the art of studies and responses to the question about the meaning of death and how to deal with it, focusing on the spiritual dimension and how it intervenes in care practices.

More information: www.endlife.it 109

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Journal Article: Herbst-Damm, K. L., & Kulik, J. A. (2005). Volunteer support, marital status, and the survival times of terminally ill patients.

Health Psychology, 24, 225–229. doi: 10.1037/0278-6133.24.2.225 Authored Book: Mitchell, T. R., & Larson, J. R., Jr. (1987). People in organizations: An introduction to organizational behaviour (3rd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Chapter in an Edited Book: Bjork, R. A. (1989). Retrieval inhibition as an adaptive mechanism in human memory. In H. L. Roediger III & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Varieties of memory & consciousness (pp. 309–330). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Upon approval for publication authors will be asked to provide a short biography of first author (250 words).

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