I hope you are well. I’m curious, what is your current take on Somatics? It’s hard to believe our training was ten years ago now! I did not finish the training or ever practice HSE in any professional sense, although I continue with my set of personal practices that incorporate much of the somatic perspective. Anyway, whatever you are doing these days, I hope it’s enjoyable and fulfilling.

Take care!

Bob

Kabat-Zinn's abstract says, " …He stresses the importance that MBSR and other mindfulness-based interventions be grounded in a universal dharma understanding that is congruent with Buddhadharma but not constrained by its historical, cultural and religious manifestations associated with its countries of origin and their unique traditions. He locates these developments within an historic confluence of two very different epistemologies encountering each other for the first time, that of science and that of the meditative traditions….The author's perspective is grounded in what the Zen tradition refers to as the one thousand year view. Although it is not stated explicitly in this text, he sees the current interest in mindfulness and its applications as signaling a multi-dimensional emergence of great transformative and liberative promise, one which, if cared for and tended, may give rise to a flourishing on this planet akin to a second, and this time global, Renaissance, for the benefit of all sentient beings and our world. "

Shinzen Young (also a very sharp guy, I think) expresses much the same idea this way:

"Science has beauty, depth, power, and practical utility. I believe that the two most impressive discoveries of our species are the Eastern method of meditative exploration and the Western method of scientific exploration. Some people claim that meditation and science have mated, but I think they are just starting to date. I believe the true mating will occur sometime later in this century and will give birth to a world-transforming paradigm shift. "

There are, of course, other countervailing tendencies, so it's hard to make really firm predictions, especially about the future. Still, Kabat-Zinn tells us:

"On a two-week vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1979, while sitting in my room one afternoon about Day Ten of the retreat, I had a “vision” that lasted maybe ten seconds. I don’t really know what to call it, so I call it a vision. It was rich in detail and more like an instantaneous seeing of vivid, almost inevitable connections and their implications. It did not come as a reverie or a thought stream, but rather something quite different, which to this day I cannot fully explain and don’t feel the need to.

I saw in a flash not only a model that could be put in place, but also the long-term implications
of what might happen if the basic idea was sound and could be implemented in one test
environment – namely that it would spark new fields of scientific and clinical investigation, and
would spread to hospitals and medical centers and clinics across the country and around
the world, and provide right livelihood for thousands of practitioners.

Because it was so weird, I hardly ever mentioned this experience to others. But after that retreat, I did have a better sense of what my karmic assignment might be. It was so compelling that I decided to take it on wholeheartedly as best I could."

[end of quote from Kabat-Zinn]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, the issue of how to best articulate the principles and practices of transpersonal psychology is tricky. Like Daniels, I tend to translate things into secular terms, including concepts of god and the divine. In my experience, I have found that those two concepts mean very different things to different people, and so I haven’t figured out how to make good use of them when getting down to core principles. I agree that exploration of the unknowable is an important aspect of transpersonal psychology that distinguishes the field from humansitic psychology. However, I don’t see any reason why this exploration can’t effectively be done using secular terms, like how the concept of mindfulness has very effectively been applied to a variety of fields without relying on any religious terminology. Of course, precisely because so many people do indeed frame transpersonal experience in terms of god and the divine, these concepts cannot be left out of the discussion. I’ll have to ponder this some more…

I look forward to exploring your website.