Welcome to my personal web page, my "dwelling" within the world wide web. Traveling so quickly over the world across the web can really disseminate and tire one's being. How easy is it for one's original intention or "query" to become fragmented and dispersed with a simple click or key press? Our attention is distracted and sent on a course which may lead us away from our roots and our original intentions. You were wondering about something with that last search...What were you truly wo(a)ndering about, and how did that "search engine" help you refine your question? Or did it take you away from you intention? What is the nature of the question you ask... your question? Formulating your question is the way the seeker molds the verbal question into an embodied (gestural ) one. We do this constantly, everyday of our lives...from feeling a desire for something to asking for it yourself, , or asking another for it.
In response to your visit I invite you to settle in, explore, and spend some time here. A sanctuary is a sacred and protected place, originating from the latin sanctum, which meant an inviolably private place. It is a place of refuge and retreat from our "everyday" existence, of reposing and composing, of re-collecting and giving thought to our experience. It is a place of quiet and stillness, qualities which lend themselves to meditation and reflection. This site was designed to be an invitation to reflect, the "first philosophical act".
The words and images you'll find here were chosen with care, my intention to invoke the phenomenologist in you. A phenomenologist is what may be called a rational mystic- one who attempts to reflect on the pre-reflective, to speak that which is lived yet unspoken in another and in oneself. It doesn't matter if you don't know what phenomenology is. These words may not interest you. The images exist in their own right.
What is helpful is that you bring a sense of to your life (and browsing), that approach to the world which children possess before they are socialized out of this natural capacity for sanity. What I ask is that you put aside what you expect to find and allow yourself to be surprised. What you will find here are all sorts of things related to my varied interests, intellectual and otherwise.
Over the years I have collected a number of links to sites related to existential-phenomenology as well as Freud's Psychoanalysis and Jung's Analytical Psychology. I am in my fifth year of training towards a Psy.D. in clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Before that I received a M.A. in phenomenological psychology from Duquesne University. Previously I earned a B.A. in psychology (minor in philosophy) from the University of San Diego (what's with all those Catholic universities anyway?).
I am also beginning a career in bodywork by training to be a massage therapist at Alive & Well!: Institute of Conscious Bodywork. Here you will find links related to massage therapy and aromatherapy. Look for a new website in the near future (called Sanctus Bodywork) showcasing my bodywork practice.
This is a copy of my curriculum vitae.
And here you will find some papers that I have written (sadly, none yet published), for example (Un) Boxing Helena: A preliminary feminist and psychoanalytic analysis, On the Structure of Human Existence: A brief ontological description of the human kind of being from an existential-phenomenological perspective, Introduction to an Existential-Phenomenological Narrative Approach to Psychopathology: The meaning of repressed memory reexamined, and Embracing the Body of Culture: Understanding cross-cultural psychology from the perspective of a phenomenology of embodiment. I intend to write my dissertation on the essence and meaning of gesture and language within the therapeutic interaction. Specifically I wonder how gesture and language differ in the ways they communicate one's experience, as well as how the process of expression itself changes our experience.
If you are interested in doing phenomenological research I have compiled a bibliography of sources and examples.
Care for some existential grounding? Then you may wish to read a brief meditation on losing a loved one.
You can visit my biographical page should you desire more information about who I am.
I have had many influences in life, love, and thought. The most important are the people who inhabit my life such as family, friends, teachers, co-workers, and mentors. As this site grows I will tell you more about them. Take care of your body/spirit/soul, which is to say take the time to reflect on and be who you are.
"We merely work with practical means toward an
adult version of the quiet, open, curious attitude which healthy children
have to the world they are born into- a world they never tire of investigating."
Charles Brooks describing the work of Sensory
Awareness. From: Sensory Awareness- The Rediscovery of Experiencing,
p. 14.
Please
e-mail with any questions or comments.
Last updated on: 7/2/01
The location of this page is: http://home.earthlink.net/~rationalmystic/main.htm