Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

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.

The Integration of Psychology and Spirituality at CIIS

By BRENDAN COLLINS, core faculty in the East-West Psychology and Integral Counseling Psychology departments. Collins is also the co-director of the Chaudhuri Center for Contemplative Practice, Interreligious Dialogue, and Social Justice at CIIS.

CIIS Professor Brendan Collins

Today a doctoral student in our East-West Psychology program, Dave Odorisio, sent me a link to an article in the New York Times on Columbia University's new concentration in spiritual psychology, the first time an Ivy League university has offered a master's degree integrating psychology and spirituality.

CIIS was mentioned as already teaching from a "similar perspective" (the reference to the Institute of Transpersonal Studies was actually an error—the reference should have been to ITP, now known as Sofia University); but CIIS has pioneered in the integration of psychology and spirituality for over 40 years; no university has been doing it longer or more comprehensively.

I appreciated the distinction made by Julie Exline, president of the APA's Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, who pointed out that Columbia's (and CIIS') approach to psychology and spirituality is very different from that offered by faith-based schools, and it is rare in academia.

The most wide-ranging approach to the integration of psychology and spirituality at CIIS is actually in the School of Consciousness and Transformation, particularly in East-West Psychology, because there are limits to how much spirituality can be formally incorporated into the curriculum of license-eligible clinical degrees. In our clinical programs the spiritual component is typically, and notably, embodied in the teachers (and students). Still, I believe it is possible to make spirituality even more explicit in our clinical training programs (as we are doing in the Mindfulness and Compassion in Psychotherapy certificate offered through CIIS Public Programs & Performances).

The Internal State of the Psychotherapist

By ROB FISHER, MFT, co-developer and lead instructor of the Mindfulness and Compassion in Psychotherapy Certificate Program at CIIS.  He is the author of “Experiential Psychotherapy With Couples, A Guide for the Creative Pragmatist.”

Most psychotherapists want to do excellent work with their clients. They take courses to study techniques that enhance their abilities to intervene in effective ways to promote human change and to alleviate the symptoms of suffering. Research studies show that more important to the successful outcome of psychotherapy than any technique is the relationship between the client and the therapist. Clients change when they are motivated and ready. 

What can we do to inspire this readiness?  Most graduate programs in the field provide abundant information and studies required for state licensure, but, given the time frame of graduate school, can only marginally address the issue of how one creates a relationship that inspires a client to evolve emotionally and psychologically. The Certificate Program in Mindfulness and Compassion in Psychotherapy at CIIS is one of the few programs in the country that addresses this issue. The program features internationally acclaimed speakers and researchers in the use of mindfulness and compassion in the realm of psychotherapy.

Mindfulness has recently become a popular approach that is used in a variety of ways in psychotherapy as well as in meditative practice. It has been researched and shown to be effective on issues as diverse as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, sleep disorders, and even psoriasis. Mindfulness involves attention to the present moment without attachment or judgment. Mindfulness involves welcoming and allowing, rather than resisting one's experience and trying to change it.  Using mindfulness in psychotherapy can help the practitioner become more aware of the fine grain of their client’s internal experience as it unfolds moment to moment. It is like shining the spotlight of attention on one's thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, memories, and impulses in order to recognize the subtle details of what is available in the moment. Exponentially more information becomes available to both therapist and client alike by using this approach. It is also effective at transforming one's relationship to one's own experience so that we do not generate additional suffering by becoming adversarial to our own internal worlds. There are many approaches in therapy that use mindfulness. These include: Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Hakomi Mindfulness-Based Experiential Psychotherapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and others. In MCP we include all these approaches so that participants can develop their own portfolio of knowledge about how mindfulness can be used to deepen the therapeutic encounter.

We also focus on the emotional state of the therapist. How does one become a person with whom people want to expose their deepest and most delicate emotional parts?  We need to cultivate qualities such as warmth, wonder, deep curiosity, and compassion.

Tips for Aspiring Writers

By Lynne Kaufman, author of 15 full-length plays and three novels. Lynne teaches writing at CIIS, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dominican University of California, and Esalen Institute.

A group of stellar writers, editors and agents came together June 4-6 in Namaste Hall at CIIS for the second-annual Wisdom Writing Conference. Through presentations, writing exercises, and lively question-and-answer sessions, these professionals instructed, enlightened, and dialogued with 50 enthusiastic aspiring writers.  What follows are a few pieces of advice from the presenters.

Writing Either Fiction or Non-fiction

• Be present in the moment, and don’t rush yourself. Avoid abstractions and generalities. Instead, embrace specifics. The best detail is the one that most evokes an emotional tone. Use all of the five senses and create an experience for the reader.
• Be curious about the world and your own individual responses to it.
• On connecting the personal and the public: The personal is the political. Both viewpoints can be woven together by the use of montage or juxtaposition. Let the reader make the connection. 
• Ground your dialogue in action and subtext. For instance: “Can you bring back some milk?” she asked. He never remembered the milk because he drank his coffee black. Somehow he always remembered the beer.
• Have things go badly for your character. We get to know someone’s true character when he or she must act under stress.


Exercises
 
1. Write about the scariest, most dangerous thing that ever happened to you. If you can’t think of anything, write about why nothing scary has ever happened to you.

2. Write about a personal issue of importance to you. Connect it with an historical or political issue that you care about.

Writing Habits

• Set aside a regular period of time to write daily.
• Set yourself a goal, perhaps two pages. If you find you have nothing to say, write two pages on why you can’t write. 

Selling What You Write

• Amazon.com has many packages to assist in self publishing.
• If you want to sell to a publisher, get an agent. For information on agents, visit the Association of Artists Representative (AAR) and Agent Query.
• Before sending your manuscript to an agent, hire the services of a freelance editor. (Poets and Writers magazine is a good source.)
• Create a hook when you are sending a query letter to an agent: one sentence that sums up the book in a compelling way. Include in the pitch: What problem is addressed in the book?  What is the answer? Why you are the right person to tell the story?
• Develop a platform as a writer: Build a website, write a blog, use social networking sites, join community organizations, and develop public speaking or media connections

Future CIIS Public Programs Events for Writers

Writing the Memoir: Finding the Universals with Meredith Maran
Writing and Selling Non-fiction: Confessions of A Bestselling Author with Don Lattin

Of Special Interest to Writers

The Enneagram: Helen Palmer
The Red Book of C.J. Jung: A Work of Conscience with John Beebe