Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

Checking In at the New CIIS Student Gallery

By MONICA MODY, writer and first-year PhD student in the East-West Psychology program. Monica assists at events and in the office at the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry.

The current exhibition of visual work and poetry displayed at the all-new CIIS Student Gallery is inspired by the question, “What is uniquely human?” The exhibition presents work by both students and alumni of CIIS, who inquire into the thematic question using a range of artistic practices.

The theme for the exhibition holds particular relevance for the CIIS community, engaged as it is in transformative practices that redefine what it is to be human and what it is to be in community—as humans—with other humans and non-humans.

“The CIIS community is grounded in the transformation of consciousness, healing, and deep emotional engagement: the show offers a mirror through which the university can see its preoccupations reflected back at itself,” says Jenelle Campion, who co-curated the exhibition with Daunielle Rasmussen. Campion and Rasmussen are both in their second year of MFA programs at the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry.

The show features works in mixed media, acrylic, and oil; pencil portraits; photographs; and poems. Together, these artworks are acute explorations of suffering and compassion, the emotion of happiness, religious and spiritual conflicts, what it means to be transgressive, the witnessing self, alter-selves, and relationships—including to plant forms and animal forms.

“The entries radiate with the heart the artists put in their work,” says Campion, adding that the curators were gratified by the student-body’s response to the call for submissions and the conviction in art-making it demonstrates. By inviting art that was not made only inside the MFA enclosure, their curatorial process turned the show into an investigation into why we make art and a call to widen our conception of art communities. “We wanted to challenge the image of the artist sitting in the dark hovel of art-making,” stresses Campion.

On Confidence

By ANNE BLUETHENTHAL, professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry and Artistic Director of ABD Productions

At a recent Saturday Night Event for the Writing and Consciousness and Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA programs, a question was posed to a panel of artists on the subject of confidence. To what do they attribute their apparent confidence? Is it a constant thing, or does it waver?

I thought it was an interesting question, particularly for a panel of mostly young guests who were discussing how to sustain a life as an artist. They were all eloquent, passionate, and intriguing interdisciplinary artists each of whom has carved out a niche or woven a tapestry of activities, pursuits, and art works into what appears to be a functioning, possibly sustainable life—not at all a simple or easy accomplishment.

The question sent me wondering about the question of confidence. What is it, exactly, that confidence is made of and how does it serve us? Is it a value, really, or is it something that, when possessed by someone, pulls us, attracts our attention, the way one is drawn toward authority? Are we drawn because of the exuding of authority, or is it an ardent interest that compels us—a sort of magnetism of curiosity?

If confidence is the “feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities,”¹  then how does an artist acquire this?

I don’t see artists being confident, so much as having a sort of courage of conviction. We are a faith-based community, often having little in common beyond our wild and unfounded belief that this thing we cannot articulate, this thing we can only sense in a most watery way, must be brought into being. We feel this with such zeal, we are willing to put words to it and imagine it, will it—carve, sculpt, dance, play, and dream it into being as thought our lives depended on it. And I daresay in some real sense, our lives do depend on it.

Profile of Professor Urusa Fahim, Department of Transformative Inquiry

By ZACK ROGOW, senior editor at CIIS. His writings include a recent book of poems, "My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers," from Kattywompus Press. 

Urusa Fahim brings to her teaching in the Transformative Leadership and Transformative Studies at CIIS an amazing variety of interests and experiences. She grew up in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and has studied or speaks six languages: English, Urdu, Arabic, French, Hindi, and Bengali. She earned a master’s degree in applied psychology at Punjab University, one of the leading centers of learning in South Asia. After graduating, she worked as a clinical psychologist both in private practice and in government-run hospitals in Pakistan, before taking a training in women’s leadership that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) offered.

“That workshop literally changed my career overnight,” she recalls. “I could see the application of concepts I was familiar with in a clinical context, how they could be used to train leaders and entrepreneurs.” By coincidence, the program leader was leaving right after Fahim took the training. Fahim applied to become the new director, and was accepted. She spent the next couple of years teaching women in Pakistan how to become managers, entrepreneurs, and trainers.

She attributes her ability to exercise authority and train future leaders partly to her mother. “My mother had the equivalent of a sixth grade education, but she headed a department in an international hotel. She always told me I could be anything I wanted. It wasn’t till later that I realized that not all girls were being given that same message. Understanding that was a factor in my wanting to train women leaders.”

New Research Takes Slight Increases in Blood Pressure Seriously

By MEG JORDAN, professor and chair of the Integrative Health Studies Department. She is a clinical medical anthropologist, behavioral health RN, author, and international lecturer.

I was always in the camp that considered the less medical intervention, the better, especially when it came to blood pressure readings that were a little above the ideal. It was easy to accuse Big Pharma of simply pulling off one more marketing ploy to get millions more on anti-hypertensive drugs when new recommendations came out to consider treatment for "prehypertension."

Hypertension (same thing as high blood pressure) is diagnosed when the pressure across the arterial walls increases beyond an optimal level. This number has increased over the past decade as research indicated that pre-hypertensive levels would benefit from earlier pharmaceutical management. Before the mid-1990s, a blood pressure of 140/90 was considered on the high end of normal, but not worthy of drug treatment.

Normal is 120/80. Prehypertension is a systolic of 120-139, and a diastolic between 80-89. But it's hard to argue with a well-conducted study by the CDC that is reporting a rise in strokes, especially in the under-50 age groups and in children.

In addition, a University of California, San Diego, study looked at over one-half million records, and concluded that individuals with this slightly higher reading (prehypertensives) had a significantly higher risk of strokes—by almost 50 percent. That is troubling indeed. For most folks walking around with a blood pressure of 139/89, they have no idea that their pressure is high. No obvious symptoms send you running for a check-up or blood pressure reading.

What causes high blood pressure? Any number of risk factors have been implicated, from physical inactivity, metabolic syndrome, obesity/overweight, kidney disease, family history, advanced age, to one of the more serious risk factors—smoking. Some of these risk factors such as obesity make the heart work harder, pumping circulation around more miles of adipose and body mass. A build of plaque in the coronary arteries is blamed for narrowing the pipes, also increasing pressure. Cigarette smoking is implicated with arteriosclerosis or hardening of the arterial walls. As the wall become less flexible, the pressure builds up.

The Importance of a Business Card

By LOIS KEANEY SMITH, student in the Writing and Consciousness MFA program and intern in the CIIS Communications Department.

Recently, I attended the opening night party for LitQuake, the Bay Area’s nine-day literary festival. I snagged this plum invite because I was reading in LitCrawl, the literary “pub crawl” portion of the festival. None of the other readers from my MFA program could make it, so I went to the party by myself, feeling like a teenager who shows up to prom without a date. No one was dancing when I arrived. A disco ball whirred on the ceiling, a dj spun a danceable mix, and literary folk milled around wearing devil horns (the party’s theme was The Devil’s Lexicon.) Knowing that writers can be shy, the LitQuake organizers very kindly provided us with an ice breaker: literary bingo. I wandered around, searching for writers who had a literary tattoo, or whose book had been made into a movie (both boxes on the literary bingo game).

The ice breaker worked wonders. I met an MFA student from another school, as well as the editor of a literary magazine, who helped me cross off a lot of squares on my bingo game. At a certain point in the conversation, he asked me the dreaded question: What do you do?  I told him I was an MFA student, and, of course, a writer. Then he asked me, “Do you have a website with your work on it?”

I hesitated. I didn’t have a portfolio website yet, but I managed to name a site where I’d published an essay. Balancing his LitQuake program on my knee, I scrawled down the URL, smearing the ink slightly with my hand (I’m left-handed, so I do this all the time). I returned the program, feeling slightly sheepish; a moment had presented itself, and I was totally unprepared. I had no cool-looking business card to give him, only a messily scrawled address to a website that wasn’t even mine.

I’m taking a class this semester called The Business of Art, in which MFA students from the Writing and Consciousness and Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts programs learn techniques for marketing ourselves as “cultural producers.” Our professor, Christian L. Frock, is a cultural producer in her own right: She’s an artist, writer, and independent curator, as well as the creator of Invisible Venue, an enterprise that collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings.

Frock is consistent in stressing the importance of a good business card and a “web presence” as vital components in a successful networking strategy. Early this semester, she asked us to make the leap and to create our own cards. I poked around several business card-making websites, and found a few design templates geared towards writers. One had a typewriter on the front, which looked okay, but a bit generic. Another used a graphic of a pen, which, again, seemed a little obvious.

A Recipe for Art that Moves

By SARIA IDANA, student in the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program

This post was written as an assignment for professor Cindy Shearer’s CIA 7091: MFA Interdisciplinary Arts Workshop. As part of a community of artists working across art perspectives, students in this course get the chance to teach each other about their art form(s), practice, lineage and influences, and are challenged to inquire into the interdisciplinary arts as well as forms new to them.

Where and What Moves?
Since I was a small child, I have sought to understand why some works of art, music, and performance leave a more lasting impression on me. This affect often feels like a large change, a shift in mental or emotional perspective as if the work reaches inside and literally moves something; sometimes moving it out entirely and sometimes relocating it, thus shifting the forms of my thoughts.

After much investigation as a writer and performer, both of ensemble and solo works, I think I have found a recipe for art that moves. While the bulk of my experience is as a performing artist, I have seen this recipe work in the process of visual artists as well. But before we get into the recipe, a few observations:

Art is full of tensions and contradictions. It is both selfish and selfless. Art is the process of cracking open to human experience, letting light shine through those cracks and basking in the discoveries the light illuminates. This initial act is often deeply personal and private. A skilled and generous artist offers themselves, their experience of cracking open, and their discoveries, with audiences. This is a risky and highly public act. The first action is the artist being moved, the second is the artist making an offering so that the audience, the public, might be moved. The first can appear extremely selfish; the second is often quite selfless.

The Recipe
Willingness --> Vulnerability --> Investigation --> Willingness

Note: This is the most effective order I have found for adding the ingredients, though other orders might work, and quantities always vary.

Vulnerability
In order for an artist to crack open to the creative work they must be vulnerable to the topics and of the work, to all the information coming to them the five senses as well as thought and emotion. If the work being created is collaborative, they must be open to all the information that presents itself to their collaborators. This is tricky and it is helpful for collaborators to have common vocabulary so that they can communicate fluidly and respectfully.

Investigation
Once there is an open channel for letting in all the information offered, it is essential to investigate it without judgment. Often it is important to do research on the topics to give work historical or societal context.

Willingness
Willingness is essential for both vulnerability and investigation to be achieved. It is the most important ingredient for translating the information received by the artist in a manner that an audience can digest. Sometimes the artist chooses to share only the information that was discovered and sometimes they offer a window into their process of cracking open. Each artist is different and each work is different.

Willingness is also needed for the work to make its way to public venues. An artist must be willing to not only seek public venues in which to present but they also must be willing to receive both praise and criticism; both are inevitable.

The Dish
The dish prepared by this recipe is Catharsis; a purifying or purging of repressed emotion or thought. Catharsis is achieved by audiences receiving a reflection of human experience, identifying with it, and then releasing the entangled emotions and mental patterns associated with that experience. It might be an experience that the audience members have had themselves, or it might be an experience they know nothing about personally but through the art they have opportunity to learn and release any thoughts and emotions they have entangled anyway. In his book "Theater of the Oppressed," Brazilian theater artist Augusto Boal traces how the location of Catharsis within theater has shifted through history from a more distant experience for the audience to one of extreme engagement. Catharsis, I would add “of an unselfish nature," is now more than ever an essential process for creating personal and social transformation.

The Gift
In my opinion, all artists involved in any creative process must experience some type of catharsis or shift for themselves in order for the work to have any real merit. The artist must be moved, so that the audience has the opportunity to also be moved. This challenging and vulnerable work is the gift that artists give to our society. This is what allows us to understand our past and imagine our future, to make new moves.

Values of a Creatrix

By NICOLE KLAYMOON, dancer, choreographer, storyteller, and artistic director of a local dance company called Embodiment Project. Nicole is a student in the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program.

This post was written as an assignment for professor Cindy Shearer’s CIA 7091: MFA Interdisciplinary Arts Workshop. As part of a community of artists working across art perspectives, students in this course get the chance to teach each other about their art form(s), practice, lineage and influences, and are challenged to inquire into the interdisciplinary arts as well as forms new to them.

Making art is like giving birth. Once the idea is set in motion the art becomes an entity separate from myself. It is one of my greatest challenges to get out of my own way and honor what the art wants to communicate. In my ever-evolving identity as a text-based dance maker, I have conceived my own definitions of the following artistic values: time, space, emotionality, embodiment, channeling, and duality. These concepts guide and support me as one of the many creative midwives of this dimension.

I am drawn to create art that offers an alternate way to experience time that is not linear. I often lose my sense of time passing while I am immersed in the creative process just like in the dream world. There is a difference between “timing” and using time as a space holder. Timing is cyclical and in rhythm with the seasons. I know that I am in line with my destiny when my timing draws out impeccable coincidence or a déjà-vu.

Space is air, listening, stillness, nuance, and a willingness to exist inside of the unknown. I am governed by the idea that space is a distance that can be measured in the external world. However, in my art-making process space is my ability to listen and allow an idea to immerge from inside and exist without definition.

You can train a dancer in technique but you cannot teach them passion and heart. It is either there or it is not. Emotionality or E-motion is E(energy)-in-motion. I interpret soulfulness as art that invokes feeling; the souls attempt to make sound. It is my responsibility as an artist to give voice and value to my emotional truths and to take the risk to be seen for who I truly am.

Finding Artistic Identity

By MICHELLE CHAMPLIN, student in the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program

This post was written as an assignment for professor Cindy Shearer’s CIA 7091: MFA Interdisciplinary Arts Workshop. As part of a community of artists working across art perspectives, students in this course get the chance to teach each other about their art form(s), practice, lineage and influences, and are challenged to inquire into the interdisciplinary arts as well as forms new to them.

I applied to the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts program because I wanted to create art for a living. Since graduating with a BA in English with a studio art minor in 2004, my work experience has mostly consisted of clerical, office management, and administrative support—basically picking up tasks that nobody else wanted to do. I was sick of ordering supplies, cleaning up after people, and wishing it were Saturday every day of the week. Most of all, I was tired of working for someone else. I was ready to create my own life—something with meaning. I wanted to start something that would allow me to give what I have to offer—to help people directly through creativity and share my expressions with the world.

When I entered CIIS, I thought I would simply utilize the time and resources available to create a career for myself. What I’m realizing, however, is that this process involves learning about myself and art on a much deeper level than I anticipated.  I thought I knew myself as an artist and, though I did on some level, I am finding that I am just now forming my artistic identity. I’m learning what is at the core of my work and what I am truly expressing through my work. I’m finding this entails digging deep and looking at what is at my core as a human being. Though it’s clear to me that I am constructing my artistic identity, it is a notion that I am still defining for myself.

Though I am currently concentrating on my visual art, I also write, create music, and have worked with film. When I began this program, I didn’t want to define myself as a specific type of artist because I didn’t want to feel boxed in. I felt defining myself as just a “visual artist” meant that people would see me as that and nothing else. I’m now finding that it is easier for me to call myself a visual artist because I truly am one. Placing that label on myself does not make me any less of a writer and it doesn’t mean I can’t create music or film. It just means that I am committing to the fact that I am a visual artist. As I write this, I’m actually wondering whether my resistance to “label” myself has partially stemmed from a fear of failure. Committing to a path—choosing one of my interests and focusing on it enough to turn it into a career—scared me. It still scares me, but I’m walking through the fear.