Ekphrasis of the Imaginal
The Greek word ekphrasis signifies the verbal description of a work of art, or of a scene. It’s a rhetorical device, a genre of writing that might seem especially unpromising….
A Grief Ritual
This is the continuation of a story that I related in my talk Transpersonal: Integrative Therapy for Past-Life Trauma. It concerned a tragic accident in which a 17 year old…
Spanda: LeGuin, Woolf and the Wave in the Mind
Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep…
Cryptozoology
Like a big cat in the Norfolk Fens or a towering simian figure in the American backwoods, a neurosis is a real experience that doesn’t belong. I want to talk…
What the mushrooms said
Human beings have always changed their consciousness by ingesting substances. Alcohol, tobacco and caffeine are legal means to do this in our society, while cocaine, heroin, cannabis, ketamine, LSD, MDMA…
Being Amphibious
In 1899 Sigmund Freud declared dreams to be “the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”. Just three years later, William James wrote, Our normal…
Stalking the Body Zone
The body is a device to calculatethe astronomy of the spirit.Look through that astrolabe and become oceanic Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks Somatic or bodily experience is a realm that…
What is Weird Therapy?
Weird Therapy is an approach to psychotherapy that embraces a vision of reality as weird. What do we mean by ‘weird’? The word first appeared as wyrd in Old English,…