I am doing a lot of these, I’ll add more to this post under the fold, and also make new posts from time to time.
Continue reading “Faces”
Aroha
Welcome to the very small web page for aroha.net
www.aroha.net provides email addresses for those who serve in the spirit of aroha
Aroha is a Maori (and now New Zealand English) word with many layers of meaning. The light translation is love.Teacher and tohuna Ruth Makuini Tai explains:
“The word Aroha holds a premier position within the Maori language of Aotearoa New Zealand. Maori language and practise holds the memory of a time when the force of Aroha was understood and respected by all. Aroha is the creative force behind all dreams. Aroha defines great leadership, ensures personal success, inspires us to go the extra mile. Aroha means Love. However when we explore its roots Aroha yields a profound message about love that is not widely understood.
ARO is thought, life principle, to pay attention, to focus, to concentrate
RO is inner, within, introspection
HA is life force, breath, energy
OHA is generosity, prosperity, abundance, wealth“Aroha may be described as the binding force of all that is.
Faces
I’ve been doing quite a few… they come out unbidden. Who is this?
Art & Christchurch
http://www.artbash.co.nz/article.asp?id=1574
An item on ArtBash, by someone who may or may not be Christopher Moore on the devastation in Christchurch and how it impacts on the art scene.
Harville Hendrix workshop
More reports and reflections on the Harville Hendrix workshop for Imago practitioners in Auckland on 20 March 2011. Most of what he said was not new to me, and what I will note here is mostly what I heard him say. What was unexpected was the power of his ability to do, be in the moment with us what he was talking about. Present, connected, empathic, and making eye contact in such a way that if let at times he was talking just to me, in fact he was, totally there with me in those moments.
The Importance of Theory.
The theory allows the practitioner to know what to do beyond the application of techniques. H also mentioned the importance of research. Brian mentioned there was a swag of research quoted in Wikipedia Imago entry.
Relational Paradigm
The main theory he presented for most of the day was the relational paradigm. Summed up thus: being as relationship. Thus placing this as a shift in consciousness going beyond the philosophers of being such as Heidegger and Sartre and also Ken Wilbur, who has a heirachy of consciousness that is about individual beings.
“Being as relation, that is a revolution in thinking.”
Did Harville say Ken was stuck in the past? I think that he is as this relational thinking is deep and profound, and changes everything. This became really evident to me later in the day as H spoke about self. Self is a negative or remainder once all projection and judgment is withdrawn.
Relationship is a spiritual practice one can do any time when there is another.
“Empathy without judgment is my spiritual practice. Everyone offers you an opportunity.”
See the other as Thou
Observer Effect
H referred to quantum physics. I heard a new angle on this, not just that the observer changes that which is observed, but that the thinking the observer brings to the observed, the intention and attitude will change the situation. What power we have, for good or ill!
The medical model is challenged with this understanding. If we see people as sick, then they can’t get well. It might work with physical illness but not in the psychological world.
“It is important how we see people who come to see us.”
Empathy
How to be with people, we can’t be other than how we are. The essence of being in relationship is to be in empathy.
“Empathy is felt connection.”
When a group member suggested that Maori were a people who were in a connected state H noted that this was an earlier level of connection, more like fusion of the tribe. The empathy he spoke of was connection from a differentiated self.
“Move from the imagined connection to the felt connection and there is participation in that. Getting otherness is terrifying, you have to surrender. To abandon the world you have imagined is terrifying.”
The other person “experiences you experiencing them”. Or even further … They then experience you experiencing them experiencing you… the empathic stance:
“I’m experiencing you experiencing me having my experience. ”
Why people come to us…
“Something has punctured their ability to be connected. They are scared. Some are really scared.”
Thus we make a safe place and there is a transference to the space. ‘This is the place we feel safe, you won’t let us fight.’
“How we hold them in our mind is how they respond to us.”
“We can hold them if we are not anxious”
You can’t connect with a person you are merged with. Differentiation is a sort of birth for each. The self emerges not by saying “I am me!” It is by releasing the other, tolerating the differentiated other. Imago is a process of giving birth to the other person. I’m the mother of their birth. and this is where my birth happens as I am the remainder, what is left as I surrender.
How to be non-judgmental with violence. (( missed a lot of this discussion))
Thou.
“You are as dangerous to them as they are to you.”
“You are the co-creator of the transaction.”
Vicarious introspection
I understood this as seeing through the violence to the wounded child and reflecting that back to the person. I think of doubling as we use it in psychodrama.
The talking cure is the listening cure.
Book: Biology of Belief, Spontaneous Evolution (Bruce Lipton) – culture is the petrie dish of the cell.
Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here) – Kindle edition by Bruce Lipton. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks
“all negativity causes chaos”
I am nudging, nudge nudge, nudge. It is facilitation not therapy.
Phrases Harville used in a dialogue:
Make eye contact. Feel your eyeballs and relax so your pup is will increase in size and that will relax her. Deepen your pupils by taking a deep breath.
Breathe together, set up a resonance.
Look when that happens you see a glow on her face.
Stay with the terror till it passes.
Lead lines
Am I getting a good sense of that now?
When I feel this frustration in the future I’ll …
… and the gift to our relationship is that …
Reference
Lipton, Bruce (2009), Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here) – Kindle edition. Hay House. Amazon
Nothing humanitarian about U.S. intervention
I can never really understand what is happening in the world till I read what the socialists say. I am not sure I really have a handle on it, but this is worth a read:
Nothing humanitarian about U.S. intervention | SocialistWorker.org:
WORLD LEADERS and their defenders in the mainstream press are praising the West’s “decisive” military action against Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, but as the long record of “humanitarian” intervention demonstrates, the governments with the ability to use force in Libya have aims and strategies that will not serve the Libyans they are supposedly there to help.
Harville Hendrix 3 questions
I just read Maya’s three questions she asks before commencing relationship therapy.
How do they compare with Harville Hendrix’s ones we just heard in the Auckland workshop?
1. What do you want in this relationship when you finish with me?
2. What have you done to prevent this from happening? (You, not the other partner)
3. What has to be taken out? What has to be put in? What will you take out, put in?
If you have the power to make it this bad, you have the power to make it good.
This couple could be creative and take self responsibility”
Just compared them and you can see who taught her!!
Maya’s three questions : https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2009/three-relationship-questions/
Helen LaKelly Hunt
Radio New Zealand National : Programmes A-Z : Saturday Morning with Kim Hill : 2011 03 12:
Helen LaKelly Hunt Author and activist, and founder of Women Moving Millions, an initiative for the advancement of women’s lives through a massive change in giving to girls and women. She also co-founded the Institute for Imago Relationship Therapy and has co-authored several bestsellers with her husband, Harville Hendrix. (duration: 34′59″) Download: Ogg Vorbis MP3
Interesting, and interesting how well she puts the idea in my previous post on relationships being the healing force. (Of course I learnt it via Imago… but it is not just an idea, we have expereiice in common about this stuff)
Stanislav Grof on Future Primitive
Personal Experience and Spiritual Quest « Future Primitive Podcasts:
Stanislav Grof, M.D., is a psychiatrist with over fifty years experience researching non-ordinary states of consciousness.
There are two things that I’ve appreciated about Grof that have made a real difference in the way I do psychotherapy. One is the importance of perinatal experience, traumatic and otherwis3. The other is Co-ex systems. Both come up in this interview, though the latter is not named specifically.
The relationship has the answer to the relationship problem
I like the related posts feature in this blog. Just noticed one that had this passage. Fits well indeed with the previous post:
… right here, now, in the relationship is the solution to the relationship problem. How to get there might be painful and hard, you will need to learn skills, make effort, but individual therapy or leaving, or searching for a better mate has all those problems and will lead to similar relationship problems, or to no relationship at all.
(me quoting myself)