Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

The Portrait Project

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

 This post was written for Cindy Shearer's CIA 7712: MFA Project. In these blogs, students are sharing their discoveries, reflections and learning as they enter the process of creating a body of art work and culminate their degrees.

My MFA project currently consists of several self portraits. Through the process of creating these I am honing in on and exploring ways of articulating my personal experience and emotions. Through this work, I hope to convey not only these personal aspects, but a larger concept.

I’ve attempted to base most portraits around an emotion that I have felt or was feeling at the time of creating the piece. To avoid a kind of staged look, I attempt to take photos of myself while in the middle of a thought or feeling—not a simple task. I hold my camera comfortably while resting my arm on something and try to forget about the fact that I’m about to take a picture of myself. I am typically inspired to do this when I am feeling something—anxiety, sadness, joy, etc. However, sometimes I don’t feel any strong emotion. I’ve taken a few pictures of myself while meditating; I then choose a photo and draw it. Recently I’ve found myself drawing the portraits while listening to jazz.

I’ve discovered that many of the drawings resemble what I feel I look like when I feel emotion. When feeling anxiety, the lines are thick and hard and my face is somewhat distorted. To me, it appears to be holding a significant weight of some kind. The line quality varies greatly according to the way I am feeling when drawing these images.

To Be Myself Completely

By LISA MARIE BAUTISTA, student in the Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program

 This post was written for Cindy Shearer's CIA 7712: MFA Project. In these blogs, students are sharing their discoveries, reflections and learning as they enter the process of creating a body of art work and culminate their degrees.

 I have a hard time with comfort, like the time I was sitting in my car, listening to Ani Difranco’s song, Superhero. “I used to be a super-hero no one could touch me, not even myself. You are like a phone booth I somehow stumbled into. And now look at me I am just like everybody else.” I was thinking about my marriage. I was having such a difficult time understanding what I felt, until Ani put it into words that expressed my relationship regrets. I had realized I had to end it yet actually leaving took me weeks, maybe even months, to allow myself to be uncomfortable; so I could start the separation.  I did not know discomfort could be helpful.

Standing on stage in front of people, is like this discomfort I am describing. To walk onto a stage is like trusting the unknown. I have no idea what might happen, but I have expectations. I trust in the universe.  I much prefer committed performances due to the intense responsibility to show up.  I can’t say no to a committed performance.

 

Photo by Lestat (Jan Mehlich): Creative Commons)

 

I step onto stage and I am no longer myself. But the challenge is to be myself completely. This is what the audience wants from me. They want my soul, and I’m not against giving it to them. My instinct is to share with the world because I am part of our collective existence already.

Two Ways to Celebrate Dia de los Muertos with CIIS

CIIS is hosting two events this weekend in coordination with Día de los Muertos. Start your weekend in celebration on Friday, October 26, from 6-9 pm in Namaste Hall for the 4th Annual Día de los Muertos Celebration hosted by the School of Undergraduate Studies. Please bring a non-returnable photocopy picture of a loved one to honor on the community altar. The theme of this year’s event is Borderlands—acknowledging the borders that exist within us all. This event is free and open to the public.

Join CIIS Public Programs & Performances on Saturday, October 27, at 8 pm for Not in Our Name, featuring Latin jazz by John Santos Sextet at the Brava Theater. Not in Our Name is "a call to spiritual arms, as we ask for the blessings and assistance of our ancestors in defense of our beloved home, the planet Earth."

The East Bay Express calls the John Santos Sextet "perhaps the most innovative Latin Jazz group playing today outside Cuba...highly innovative, intimately explosive."

CIIS faculty, staff and students receive a 20 percent discount for tickets to Not in Our Name.

Thoughts from Kyoto Part II

By DON HANLON JOHNSON, professor in the Somatic Psychology program. 

Don is currently in Japan to present a lecture and symposium for the Japanese Transpersonal Association meeting at Kyoto Bunkyo University. He will also visit Kyoto University to meet with faculty and present at lecture at Kansai University.

There are some very specific things that come up in trying to express why my experiences in Japan and with Japanese people over the years have been so meaningful in my life.  One are devices for listening to the earth, literally.  You see them everywhere­–in gardens, shrines, temples, ordinary backyards:  2-inch diameter bamboo pipes sticking up from the ground, some sunk very deep into stream beds or hollows, others not so far under the surface.  People are always stopping to bend over and listen.  The sounds vary from the dramatic and contrapuntal to simple whispers.

Another is the commonplace practice of honoring roots of large trees.  Because Japan is a country of slopes everywhere with little land that is level, the roots of large trees are often exposed.  And you see people paying attention to these roots.  Near where I am staying there is a ridge covered with rare old-growth sequoias.  The summit is a web of very large exposed roots, and is a shrine, marked by flags and various ritual objects. People walk among them bowing and touching their intricate surfaces.

A recipe for sanity:  listening to the earth, and paying homage to the roots of old growth, expressing gratitude for the wonders we are given.

Thoughts From Kyoto

By DON HANLON JOHNSON, professor in the Somatic Psychology program. 

Don is currently in Japan to present a lecture and symposium for the Japanese Transpersonal Association meeting at Kyoto Bunkyo University. He will also visit Kyoto University to meet with faculty and present at lecture at Kansai University.

I am sitting in my inn, an ancient building in a park surrounded by temples and monasteries in the ring of hills that encloses the city. As always, I come here to this ancient seat of wisdom wondering what on earth I, of an adolescent culture, child of rough-and-tumble gold rush immigrants to Calfornia, have to offer people growing up saturated by wise practices and thoughts, gardens and trees sculpted to carry one's eyes out on into the far skies, the constant sounds of deep monastic bells, thousands of texts about what it means to sit, walk, breathe?

So I respond almost automatically by going into a deeper sense of inquiry than usual. For instance, I did a four-hour workshop yesterday at Kyoto Bunkyo University for about 50 members of the Japanese Transpersonal Association, about 30 of whom were grad students; the rest clinicians. The somewhat daunting topic I was assigned was The Body and Sprituality. Not being so foolish as to propose any sort of answers, I settled on four specific inquiries.

One was what happens to our consciousness when we settle more sensitively into the outside environment, cultivating our body' capacities for opening to sounds, colors, space, textures, light. For this particular hour, I asked people to gather in a garden in a quiet corner of the campus. Unlike the transcendental gardens of Kyoto where the placement of stones, bridges, carp, shaping of trees and course of the paths carry the visitor far beyond the distant hills out into the ozones, this one was somewhat dried out, murky ponds, somewhat feeble trees, sparse grasses, sounds of traffic. All the same, it was still a tranquil and living place on an otherwise sterile modern campus with few signs of natural growth.

Californians to Vote on Food Labeling for GMO Foods

Dr. Meg Jordan, PhD, RN, CWP, is a clinical medical anthropologist and Dept Chair of Integrative Health Studies and Somatic Psychology.

Do you want to know what is in your food? Or do you blindly trust any food manufacturer or processor to simply deliver the goods, without disclosure of contents, without reference to how it was grown, produced or processed?

Californians will let the government know soon enough how they feel on the issue. A landmark decision will be made by California voters in this November election on proposed statute Proposition 37.

Do you want to know what is in your food?

This statewide initiative would require all food distributors, retailers and manufacturers to add labeling that would identify ingredients from genetically modified sources—the so-called "GMO foods." It's a serious law with real "teeth" that would impact the entire sequence of farm-to-table stakeholders, but most of all, could mean a new era in accountability from Big Food.

For decades, Big Food manufacturers have put pressure on FDA and federal and state legislators to resist any attempts to label foodstuffs out of fear that if consumers knew they were eating genetically-modified ingredients, they may choose something else. Yes, it's likely they would. It's called a basic instinct for health and survival.

Just 10 days ago a damning report was released that presents documentation that advisors at the FDA have known about the deleterious health affects from genetically modified foods for some time, and yet, have done nothing but protect marketers and manufacturers.

A Tanka for Silicon Alley

By ZACK ROGOW, senior editor at CIIS. His writings include a recent book of poems, "My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers," from Kattywompus Press. He also maintains a blog called Advice for Writers.

CIIS is currently surrounded by construction sites, part of the boom in San Francisco now called “Silicon Alley.” High-tech firms like Twitter, Yammer, and Dolby, and service businesses such as Whole Foods, are moving into the South of Market neighborhood near CIIS as fast as the cranes and crews can build their sites. As a result, even our peaceful retreat atop our building is now touched by the sounds of new structures going up. I wrote this poem in response to that, using the traditional Japanese tanka form. This condensed, five-line form lends itself to bringing together opposites.

Urban Tanka #8

in a Zen rooftop garden
plants trill their green fingers
as high-rises sprout nearby
Why is everything always
under construction

Fall Brown Bag Series Kicks Off with a Performance from Turquoise

We're kicking off our Fall Brown Bag Series with a performance from the Turquoise a capella ensemble on Tuesday, October 9, from noon-1 pm in the 4th floor staff lounge of the CIIS Main Building.

Turquoise is an a cappella group composed of women and gendervariant individuals from within the CIIS community. Since the founding of the group a year ago, it has quickly become a favorite at the Institute, making a sensation at the CIIS commencement in 2012. "We offer music in service of helping others to feel, to heal, and to awaken to the presence of beauty. The songs in our repertoire tell stories from many cultures, and we strive to hold these narratives with responsibility, respect, and care."

The Brown Bag Series features artistic work by CIIS faculty, staff, students, and alums, and is sponsored by the President’s Office and the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry. The series continues on Tuesday, Nov. 6, with MFA program alums Karina Jacinda Small and Lois Smith.