THE RENEWAL OF PERSONAL ENERGY (Author: David E. Hunt) (original) (raw)

Remaking Ourselves

The Buddha’s Gift: A Life of Well Being and Wisdom, 2017

Through objectification, we learn to observe and analyze how we think, what we feel, how we react, and understand better how our biases and egotistical conceit influence everything we believe, say or do. In addition, since we understand better how our thoughts and feelings are fluid and relative, they lose their autocratic importance that they once had when we were subjectively absorbed in them. We learn there is not a substantial ‘me,’ but only my ongoing experience of life that I interpret and narrate, in which all experiences pass, no matter how painful or how wonderful. We come to understand that with the subject/object dichotomy if we attach and cling to the egotistical and static ‘I’, the correspondingly ‘me’, ‘mine’ objects must be created and craved for. Through the right understanding, we more surely and easily accept the process of dis-identification and transcending the ‘I/me’.

A Creative Exploration of Self. Wholeness. Bardsley_ lara .pdf

Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine, 2019

Narrative is intricately embedded in human experience and is a potent means of shaping self-identity, imbuing meaning, facilitating insight and transforming awareness. This article reflects on the creative findings of a three and a half year exploration of self. Through the researcher’s auto-ethnographic reflections, her experience as an artist and psychologist, the power of the humanities as a method of becoming whole are explored. This article discusses cultivating a state of awareness where it is possible to compassionately witness the narratives of many selves both our own and in the people we work with, and how such a practice can inform healing.

Moving psychology outwards from the self

Theory & Psychology, 2019

The venerable city of Worcester, Massachusetts has been the geographic and professional center of Mark Freeman's life for a third of a century. Just graduated from the University of Chicago, he arrived there in 1986 to join the psychology faculty at the College of the Holy Cross, where he continues to teach. With its 11 hills, multiple ponds, lakes, and streams, Worcester and its environs has provided a stimulating locale for Freeman, an avid cyclist, who regularly explores the city by bike and, as he details throughout this book, travels more personal and reflective paths in considering where psychology has been and where it needs to go. The overall direction for the field, he argues, "cautiously, is that a portion of psychology would do well to shift its long-standing emphasis on the priority of the self-however relationally or dialogically conceived-to the priority of the Other" (p. 1). To make his case, Freeman invites his readers to share in a broadly phenomenological series of reflections on concerns that are often neglected by many psychologists (e.g., daily practices of attention, devotion, freedom, art & aesthetics, transcendence, God, mysticism, value, and truth) and to dialogue with a host of 20th-century philosophers and seminal theorists ignored by or outside the disciplinary canon of contemporary psychology (particularly Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Iris Murdoch, and Simone Weil). Facing the reality that human beings live only one life, Freeman tries to elucidate what we ought to be caring about in this life, by shifting from a stance of unreflective daily humdrum to uncover a sense of being more fully human and free: "the experience of moving ever closer to what is there, in reality, and thereby lifting ourselves beyond the restricted, at times positively blindered, view of things that so often characterize our relationship to the world" (p. 184). At the end of this search, Freeman proposes tentatively a life lived "ex-centrically," where our selves are directed outward from "our inattentive, preoccupied, ego centric ways" (p. 180) to the "Other," conceived capaciously as "generative in some way" (p. 186) and leading toward "something. .. more" (p. 211). The manner of such an ex-centric life requires a kind of 21st-century asceticism, a commitment toward a non-theological but nonetheless "disciplined practice directed outward. .. that reorients the ego's inward energies" (p. 193). At the heart of this ascesis and potentially contradictory to psychology's emphases lies the dictum that "The Other

Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2021

This essay explores touchstones in the thought and teaching of Paul Rabinow, connecting his work on biosociality and modernizing practices to deeper commitments. The theme of "experiments in form" is explored and the question of the value of a life of inquiry is touched on.

Coaching to the Human Soul Ontological Coaching and Deep Change Volume III

Coaching to the Human Soul Volume III, 2012

Acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on Ontological Coaching, Alan Sieler again breaks new ground in the coaching literature in his third volume of Coaching to the Human Soul. In this book he brilliantly articulates the indispensable role of biology and the body for the transformation of being and sustainable change. Through his careful research of biology of cognition Alan makes complex scientific ideas intelligible and accessible, and skilfully provides a practical understanding of the inevitably biological nature of the change process in coaching. Alan also masterfully draws together the thinking of major philosophers and renowned somatic practitioners to provide a robust framework for coaching to the body as an integral part of the facilitation of deep change. Like the two previous highly acclaimed volumes of Coaching to the Human Soul, this book is an immensely rich source of personal and professional learning. “In this stunning third volume of his work Alan brings together the next piece of the Way of Being jigsaw of Ontological Coaching. He has used his rigorous research skills exquisitely to provide practitioners and lay people with a sound theoretical foundation and practical skills about the relevance of biology and the body for profound learning and deep change. This includes skilfully weaving knowledge gained from his extensive coaching experience with the insights and wisdom of great masters in the somatic realm. Lyn Traill, Director of Traillblaze Author of Sizzling at Seventy: From Victim to Victorious

Paradigms of the Self

Hakara , 2020

This article focuses on the nature of my art practice where I have explored ideas based on aspects of the self within the context of humanity at large. The human form carries within a representation of an archetypal image which is both a portrayal of the individual and the masses. By merging the self into the other I have shown that the individual is a fragment of a larger entity where all life forms are connected by an underlying principle which is all pervading. When an individual is part of a larger social framework, there is bound to be a dependence on transfer of knowledge from a group or ancestry. It is in this transfer that an individual is bound to humanity for direction and guidance. This inter-connectedness does not end here and is carried on to other living and non-living entities. There is a larger force at work representing the self, humanity and beyond which is like an energy that connects us all with everything else. These ideas have helped me to shape the human form in newer ways than earlier imagined.

Book Review: The Phenomenology of Learning and Becoming: Enthusiasm, Creativity and Self-Development.

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2019

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50 (2019) 249-272 brill.com/jpp pheno menol ogical psych ology jour nal of Book Reviews ∵ Eugene Mario DeRobertis (2017). The Phenomenology of Learning and Becoming: Enthusiasm, Creativity and Self-Development. New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2017, 230 pp. ISBN 978-1-349-95203-8 (Hardcover). $109.00. The non-reductive and holistic nature of phenomenology serves as an important approach to studying the unique subject matter of human learning and self-development. DeRobertis (2017) writes, "[h]umans are learning beings par excellence, capable of sustaining a world-spanning, open realm of perception, concernful dwelling, and meaningful questioning" [italics original] (p. 8). It is the unique affinity of human beings to learn and develop through using language , sociality and meaningful engagement with the world, that makes this taking of a humanistic approach to learning so important. There is more to becoming a human person than simply acting in one way or another. Early humanistic psychologists critiqued the earlier learning theories because the behaviorist-based research upon which the mainstream perspective was founded utilized animal subjects (e.g. pigeons and rodents) or college students (Bugental, 1963). Giorgi (2001) was a critic who pointed out that psychology's subject matter had deviated away from the psyche and become over focused about behavior or cognitive processing (neo-functionalism) that the soul of humanity had been lost or ignored along the way. DeRobertis (2017) presents a deeper view of learning theory as it is actually situated in both its sociality and practicality. Moreover, the role of learning in human development (becoming) provides a view of knowledge beyond that which is what we know but in the context of becoming who we are as an ongoing developmental project. Plants and animals live in environments, but humans world their worlds through active social engagement and thriving with motivation to transcend their natural conditions. Meaning making is a unique human project that becomes quite elaborate in terms of our sense-making. Sense making is always personal and has relevant practicality to navigating one's world. All knowledge JPP_050_02_05-BR_Broome.indd 249