Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Dissertation Project submitted as part of RSPOPUK Diploma Programme, 2007
Local notes
http://www.processwork.org/files/Finalprojects/Fredenburgh_I_2007.pdf
INTRODUCTION
This dissertation represents both a research journey and some steps in a journey of individuation, or 'coming to selfhood' (Jung 1977ed.). I took as my field of study, my experiences within two paradigms that are important and meaningful to me - Process Work and shamanic ceremony, and my struggle to find my own ground and practice in relation to their divergent aspects. In the course of that struggle, I show the deepening of my awareness of both paradigms, and of the self who struggled with them. Moving through different levels and kinds of awareness, the transformative effect of this struggle enabled a new synergy to emerge from what seemed like polarised or unrelated frameworks and perspectives. I examined the frameworks of the two paradigms, and the personal framing of my own individual and collective history around pertinent issues, participated in medicine ceremony with ayahuasca, a vine from the Amazon, and used Process Work awareness skills to continue unfolding the emergent process. I was challenged by my material to grapple with issues that emerged around power and authority, which have both an individual and collective significance. Using my own journey of awareness through these issues as my medium of research, I have demonstrated a process recognizable as the 'transcendent function' (see below) in relation to my experience of a paradigm clash. It turns out that the function of the clash is to create a disturbance which attracts my attention and leads me to unfold information and awareness into a deeper and more fluid unified perspective: then the disturbance fades away, its catalytic work done. This reflects the pattern of any self-organising system, be it individual or collective: The intent of this new information is to keep the system off-balance, alert to how it might need to change... stability comes from a deepening centre, a clarity about who [the self-organising system] is, what it needs, what is required to survive in its environment. (Wheatley 2006) Change and leadership are themes which became more personally accessible to me through this unfolding of disturbance. Engaging with roles of power, authority and rebellion enabled me to go beyond my initial responses of fighting or collapsing, and led to a more unified ability to be fluid or fixed, process worker or ceremonial shaman, identifying and disidentifying more readily in relation to the environment and the moment. Because my research is rooted in unfolding personal experience, the research method I have used is auto-ethnography, which is ' the study of the awareness of the self within a culture' (Koshnick, 2007). Each of us faces challenges to fully embody our capacity for leadership in one way or another, and we live at a time when current thinking suggests a need for interactive rather than hierarchical leadership. For this reason I hope to have usefully dusted one corner of the amphitheatre of shared practice.
INTRODUCTION
This dissertation represents both a research journey and some steps in a journey of individuation, or 'coming to selfhood' (Jung 1977ed.). I took as my field of study, my experiences within two paradigms that are important and meaningful to me - Process Work and shamanic ceremony, and my struggle to find my own ground and practice in relation to their divergent aspects. In the course of that struggle, I show the deepening of my awareness of both paradigms, and of the self who struggled with them. Moving through different levels and kinds of awareness, the transformative effect of this struggle enabled a new synergy to emerge from what seemed like polarised or unrelated frameworks and perspectives. I examined the frameworks of the two paradigms, and the personal framing of my own individual and collective history around pertinent issues, participated in medicine ceremony with ayahuasca, a vine from the Amazon, and used Process Work awareness skills to continue unfolding the emergent process. I was challenged by my material to grapple with issues that emerged around power and authority, which have both an individual and collective significance. Using my own journey of awareness through these issues as my medium of research, I have demonstrated a process recognizable as the 'transcendent function' (see below) in relation to my experience of a paradigm clash. It turns out that the function of the clash is to create a disturbance which attracts my attention and leads me to unfold information and awareness into a deeper and more fluid unified perspective: then the disturbance fades away, its catalytic work done. This reflects the pattern of any self-organising system, be it individual or collective: The intent of this new information is to keep the system off-balance, alert to how it might need to change... stability comes from a deepening centre, a clarity about who [the self-organising system] is, what it needs, what is required to survive in its environment. (Wheatley 2006) Change and leadership are themes which became more personally accessible to me through this unfolding of disturbance. Engaging with roles of power, authority and rebellion enabled me to go beyond my initial responses of fighting or collapsing, and led to a more unified ability to be fluid or fixed, process worker or ceremonial shaman, identifying and disidentifying more readily in relation to the environment and the moment. Because my research is rooted in unfolding personal experience, the research method I have used is auto-ethnography, which is ' the study of the awareness of the self within a culture' (Koshnick, 2007). Each of us faces challenges to fully embody our capacity for leadership in one way or another, and we live at a time when current thinking suggests a need for interactive rather than hierarchical leadership. For this reason I hope to have usefully dusted one corner of the amphitheatre of shared practice.