Introducing Myself

Introducing Myself

I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself in this context.  I am a counsellor living in North Vancouver, Canada.  Married with three children.  Have studied integral psychology for about 10 years.  In terms of fearlessness, I tend to orient to the psycho-spiritual aspects and also the biological/neuroscience aspects, so Michael's broadening of the frame to include socio-cultural and critical theory perspectives is really helpful and much needed.  

I have struggled with "anxiety" quite a bit in my life, and so this topic has a personal relevance as well as for so many of the clients that I work with.

I have used Ken Wilber's AQAL quadrants to come up with an inquiry-based approach to working with fear or anxiety at the individual level.  I have uploaded a visual summary of it here.

We need to address fear collectively as well, which is what Michael addresses in his work (and he does more than this, bringing in a developmental approach).  Still working my way through Michael's book on the topic.

I am looking forward to learning here, and seeing what might emerge at some point in terms of action projects.

Durwin

P.S.  In integrally-informed contexts, my major strength seems to be as a connector.  Malcolm Gladwell writes about connectors, mavens and persuaders in his book, The Tipping Point.  I appreciate Michael's "maven" role in this context!

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  • I wrote this here; it's a draft, and any input is appropriately registered by the wonderful technology of "Medium":  https://medium.com/@durwinfoster/-8b63e0f31d68

    • Yes, Durwin, I say first off--for you efforts to find an integral way to work with helping others and yourself with anxiety. Thank you also for your kind acknowledgement in your short article re: "complementary" work I am doing with fear (a la integral)... and I agree in general with that; I guess the challenge is to figure how to bring all the quadrants into the mix, when some clients just want a "quick fix" technique... I'll say more later on this issue because I wrote a whole page of notes after reading your article, and I said I would further respond with some feedback... two things you may find interesting: (1) the Adyashanti nondual message "Let Everything Be As It Is" you have put in the center of the quadrant map (quadrivium approach?)--and my first thought was this ought to go on the very outer territory of the quadrants because the quadrants are an articulation of the developmental-evolutionary spectrum of holarchic growth from centre to periphery--often there's a spiral unwinding from the center or there are the traditional diagonal arrows--And then I thought well maybe Adyashanti's phrase can be utilized at both ends of the spectrum--that is, in the middle of the quadrants is the earliest stages of development of consciousness or most 'simple' systems and thus the phrase could be worked with at the PRE- end of the spectrum and then moving out to the TRANS- end which I indicated above as my first thoughts; (2) I have just added a piece of artworkings on Matrixial and Phallic aesthetic representations in contrast, to show the quadrants -- your quadrant representation, although an improvement on the JFKU one in the photo image I posted, is still rather heavy Phallic-- which raises questions as to then how you are representing "Anxiety" or locating it with a certain aesthetic bias--which, raises all kinds of queries. So, there's a first go at my quick responses that are easier to communicate on this ning... anyways, thanks for pursuing this topic and as I say there is such a large "need" to figure out the reasons for the 18% (av.) rate of Anxiety Disorders (diagnosed) in the USA, and some 15% (av.) rate world-wide (which to note, the World Health Organizations says on their website the rate is higher in women--which is something that requires a lot of critique, and that more developed countries have generally higher rates than developing countries... and that is a pointer to a whole lot of other interesting hypotheses-- we have our work cut out for us, hey, mate!

    • it's not necessarily the clients who want a quick fix; i am working in a corporate setting of short-term counselling, too.

    • For sure, I like doing brief/strategic work as well with clients; that said, anything you do with them or any setting/context, is something you are doing with the world-- that would be another transpersonal (even nondual) systems articulation-- not sure if that means anything to you--but holons to social holons to global holons--you know the integral pitch on this-- the more nuanced application of that in a one-on-one brief/strategic approach gets to be more interesting but a much longer conversation. Second thing, in terms of my PRE- and TRANS- suggestions, there's another angle on that worth looking at, and that is, that most everyone who begins to direct attention to "Let Everything Be As It Is" pretty much is staring at the Shadow collective (including their own) which goes with the territory of integrating PRE-Shadow and TRANS-Shadow material--and where there's Shadow there's... you guessed it... fear (and 'fear')... the 'Fear' Project in the deepest ontological way. That's taking the integral psychotherapy into therapia (a la Wilber).

    • so the company also wants our work to be relatively brief

    • I can't seem to find the piece of artworkings....the quadrants feedback -- yes, that sounds good.  balancing and integrating masculine and feminine is an important project that I have taken up in some forthcoming work on leadership.  Would be good for me to integrate that back into the anxiety work...

    • check the PHOTOS part of the ning

    • thanks for your feedback. 

    • this draft was started some time ago...

  • btw, Michael, would you like me to post your Fearlessness movement social network on my Slack website as well?

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