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Welcome Introduction

Hello...fellow journeyors. If you are reading this you either know me somewhat and/or someone has shared this link for your curiosity to see what kind of teaching (and therapia [1]) I am bringing to the world. The notion of "trifecta" means three points, vectors, angles or perspectives, which when they converge and unite a great force occurs (trinity becomes unity)--in the case of my life, now at age 72, it turns out the trifecta is all about truth that I know is true via (personall and collective) empirical evidence of practicing this truth which is undeniable and sacred.

What I will share in this resource page about my leadership and teaching is the three practices (and some theory): (1) LIBERATION PEER COUNSELING, (2) SPONTANEOUS CREATION-MAKING, (3) FEARLESSNESS(izing) KNOWLEDGE. These may interest you in whole or in part; there is no one and only proper formula to working with them to improve your life and the world. I can only testify, and a lot of other people who have worked with me also have shown these to be powerful "soft technologies" of healing and liberation--although, I never see this kind of work as an end, rather a process always evolving, with great surprises and unknowns. Yes, Mystery still remains alive and well in this liberation work. You are welcome to keep practicing the traditions (e.g., religion) or other means as you already do--the trifecta is a complementary process not a replacement for anything you find is already positively helpful to your life. 

I list them in this order because that is how they emerged, as 'fear' vaccines, in my own awakening and path of fearlessness [2]. To be clear at the start, the trifecta is not personal development psychology alone--it is a deep truth trifecta that changes and transforms one's life purpose, if the conditions are right and the disciplined learner-practitioner works with them for some length of time. Working these in support ally groups is most effective. The trifecta, is more about psyche, soul and culture, nature, politics, history, evolution, worldviews, spirituality--all in a holistic-integral interrelationship. Note: to see where my focus is on repair and vision of healthy Green-meme politics go to my recent blog. I started the peer counseling study in 1983 to learn how humans are hurt and how they heal; the spontaneous creation-making in 1988 in groups but my art practice (CVArt RMF.DOC) worked with art-therapeutic modes since the late 1970s; and since 1989 I developed the systematic study of fear and fearlessness knowledge.   

R. Michael Fisher (1952-) [3], Ph.D. in Education Curriculum & Philosophy, MA in Adult Education, Grad. Dipl. Counseling-Rehabilitation 

For my full background of experience and education, CV (resume) cvRMF2024.doc.  

A few Endorsements over the years: 

“A developmental fearologist...only one out there...if we had a thousand of you out there, maybe we might get somewhere.”  -Layman Pascal, Integral Stage Podcast, Sept. 10, 2024

“I love what you are doing. Your work is so special Michael.”  -Dr. Don (Four Arrows) Jacobs, Prof. Leadership, Fielding Graduate University, San Francisco, CA

"I'm a big fan of your work, which, as you know, I find very important in this "fearful" world." -Dr. Clifford Mayes, Prof. Educational Psychology (Jungian therapist),

Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

 “Michael Fisher is an expert on fear, one of the world’s few ‘fearologists.’” -Rex Wyler, Eco-activist, Reporter (co-founder of Green Peace) Shared Vision, June, 2004

A Liberational Life

To grow one's spirit, a life-long adventure, turns out to be more complex than I first thought [4]. Recently, I have located my vocation as a spiritual educator.

I embrace the secular and spiritual paths of development, each serve their purpose. I have no attachment to any religious tradition but I identify as a spiritual person which arose naturally with my long love of Nature, and later I cut my teeth on the Human Potential Movement. I BEGAN officially a liberational life, leadership, and teaching because of a powerful mystical experience that transformed my soul, identity and life-purpose in late 1989. From this co-loving visionary awakening of being, things began to manifest rapidly into a spiritual-philosophical mission to bring healing and education through what I called In Search of Fearlessness Project. For more info. on that radical mission-project in adult education click here. The Project was named that way because part of my vision was to counter as an activist-educator the vast harm and toxicity, insanity, suffering and unsustainability that the 'Fear' Project has brought to this planet for millennia. 

The Trifecta of Truth is not fully covered here on this webpage, and I will focus mostly on LIBERATION PEER COUNSELING (LPC). IF you want more info. in depth on my Fearlessness(izing) Knowledge stream (and philosophy of fearism) search this Fearlessness Movement ning and click here for an interview on my views about fear(ism) OR see my Youtube Channel (190 teaching videos) OR search my name on Google Scholar for many free publications in peer-reviewed journals, books and other published sources. I have published a lot of work under a joint Canadian publishing house In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute (1991-) (with Barbara Bickel). For more in depth information on Spontaneous Creation-Making (and art-care theory and practice) see the co-authored book by Bickel & Fisher (2023) and/or go to our Studio M* website. So, now let me turn to the feature subject of this website resource page: 

Liberation Peer Counseling (LPC) 

I am returning to teach LPC as a fundamental 8 wk course (theory and practice) in late 2024 and into 2025 [5] to see how much interest there is online, and potential local groups in my area who can meet face-to-face. Contact me if you are curious and want to know more or want to sign-up on waiting list: r.michaelfisher52 [at] gmail.com [I live in Nanaimo, BC, Canada, with my life-partner Barbara Bickel who has also been studying LPC with me for 34 yrs] 

I have taught LPC  [6] (my version of Re-evaluation Counseling or RC for short) since the 1980s, so it is very natural for me and I still practice it with a co-counselor once a week for a 1 hr exchange--it is my most reliable 'medicine' of staying in recovery above the troubled waters of my distress and 'fear' patterns (i.e., oppression of all kinds) that assault us everyday in many forms. For a recent demo example of a technique called "Think and Listen" peer counseling I did with my co-counselor click here. I gave an LPC talk on a technique of "Counseling Outside of Distress" click here and I created a few years ago the LET program (Life Enhancement Training video) on similar principles as LPC. 

The quickest summary information about LPC can be found in the following brief documents (produced in 2014; somewhat dated but still the same basic info. is really useful): 

The LPC Intro LPC brochure 2014.pdf (2014)

TheLPC History.pdf

LPC: LPC HURTING.pdf (defined) 

LPC: LPC HEALING c.pdf (defined/methods) 

LPC:LPC Theory.pdf

LPC:LPC Philos.pdf

LPC: LPC Politics.pdf

LPC: LPC Practice Cautions.pdf

LPC:LPC Wide worldpptx.pdf

9 Natural Healers of LPC 

End Notes

1. I am a "cultural therapist" and have done all kinds of therapeutic work since the 1980s, both recovering and healing from my own life, and offering therapeutic services to others--but ultimately, my work is a cultural therapia (similar to Erich Fromm) and a kosmotherapia (similar to Ken Wilber). Yet, I have my own spins as to what emancipation and liberation mean and the requirement to do our healing work in such processes--towards true Love and Freedom and Justice. 

2. This ethical-spiritual path can come with many other names like "liberation" or "enlightenment" (or "endarkenments") depending, but the important thing to note here is that I have otherwise been both rational and transrational in my fantasizing or imagining of possibilities. The Fearlessness Project (Paradigm) is based on the fascinating hypothesis: That humans do not have to be saddled or satisfied with a fear-based civilization; they can live and design a fearlessness civilization. See my initiative to re-vision the very nature of Psychology as we know it, via "Fearlessness Psychology 2019.pdf" and "Metapsychology." 

3. My name is The Fox (shortened: call me Fox), as of Oct. 25/24. 

4. The simplicity and complexity of life and evolution (development as "radical wholeness") is a wonderful spiral web as I see it. The path of fearlessness is not straight forward. I think "Growing Up" is one of at least four other types of work that are important practices--using critical Integral Theory--the other four defined by the developmental philosopher Ken Wilber are: "Waking Up," "Opening Up," "Showing Up," and "Cleaning Up"--the last one is also called Shadow work which is my forte'. 

5.Note: this is a radical departure from other peer-counseling models I have seen; we also charge a very affordable fee, with subsidies, so that it is not an elite practice for people with lots of expendable income. Fundamentals course (8 wks) may cost from 40-250 Can. $ sliding scale, depending on costs of teaching it etc. Fee mainly pays the instructor. Once you finish the fundamentals class, or even an Introductory talk or short workshop on LPC, you are able to work with others who have also done so and there is no fee exchanged for peer sessions. You build a support network of co-counselors for yourself--literally at your finger tips.    

6. Barbara Bickel and I decided to develop our own version of Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), based on Harvey Jackins et al. (now 80 years of history around the world of RC practitioners and leaders/teachers experiences)--we included some of John Heron's ideas (Co-Counseling International) and our own unique ideas into the practice. I have taken two RC Fundamentals courses from certified RC teachers (1983, 2022). Thus, my teaching of LPC is inspired by RC and what I have gleaned as its best knowledge and practices and added my own approaches over the decades. When I teach I represent no co-counseling organizations nor do I promote such organizations. You can find these organizations on the Internet if you wish. Also, thanks to my intrepid co-counselor Linda Roan for inspiring me to teach LPC again.      

I'm delighted to share the first advertisement for the book my partner and I just completed. It is our second book together on the use of spontaneous creation-making process (we label a "fear vaccine"), in which our first book on our experiences of using this method and the guide for how to do it came out in "Opening Doors: A Guide to Spontaneous Creation-Making" (pubished by In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute). Many years later, in this new book we reflect on the process in greater detail, and offer readers a look at how we applied this method to the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown around most of the world, and for a year we invited a group of people to share this experience creating online and building a community of care. Hope you can take a look at this work, as it also provides a guide of how to use it in any communal setting.  -rmf

Untitled by Amaris - watercolor on paper, Feb. 17, 2022   (published with permission)

This image is recently created from a participant in a Spontaneous Creation-Making (SCM) group session (on Zoom), which Barbara and I had initiated decades ago, and currently Hallie is running a group. It is amazing what births shows up when we have time to connect communally, slow down, and then each go off into our own homes for 25 min. creating something completely unplanned. One does not need to be an artist to do this. All medium and found objects, and performances, have shown up over the years. This one above happens to be a stunning water-color painting. Barbara and I have called this SCM practice and the care that goes in sharing the creations in the group sacred circle after, a 'fear' vaccine process since the early 1990s. Why? I'll get to that later. 

First, I'll share the story of the 'artist' (creator Amaras) behind this image, as they recently shared this image from a SCM session, as I was interested to put a quote to the piece. I discovered the quote some days after in reading a book entitled "Mary Magdalene Revealled" (by Megan Watterson) of which Barbara was reading and showed me some quotes related to fear in the soul/archetypal register of experience. So, here is the quote that I found and immediately. It seemed like a 'response' to the painting and how it was shared that night on Zoom. 

Watterson wrote in a poetic-trance like 'prayer':

"IF I could start again, it would be in the darkness. 

And in the darkness, all we would see is a hand suddenly extending out toward us.

And the invitation would be terrifying. 

Seeing this hand would compel our heart to start beating....

The fear comes from feeling out of control. 

We want to leave and we want to stay in equal measure.

We want to know what might happen next and for everything to remain exactly the same. 

Taking this hand is a choice to surrender." (p. 13) 

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Amaris replied to the quote: 

"This is an absolutely incredible gift...It captures the feeling that I had while painted--fear and rebirth, including moving through fear and lack of control within the internal space. Fear that holds immobile in stasis but can give way to room for creation and joy. Thank you so much. 

When I mentioned I wanted to publish their creation, they wrote, "I would love to read a blog about art and fear. These are themes that resonate with me very much, especially as it relates to phobia of one's inner experience. Art has been such a part of that personal exploration for me regarding this fear."

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I suggest anyone reading this, take time also to be with the creation--and imagine its creating--itself. Wet and unabashedly a singularity of flow and ecstasy, and of course, with all birthing there is fear, perhaps terror, perhaps many sensations and feelings that only later we conceptualize as terror. The painting itself is important also as a process, not merely for Amaris, as she connects memories and investigates the "phobia of one's inner experience"--as she wrote of it later. It is important collectively, and that is significant for the group of SCM with it happening. What an interesting phrase that is. Like their painting emerging, a phobia is emerging to the light, with all the attention of the creator/artist entering into the unknown and unexpected that began with a paper with 'nothing' on it and then the materials and water and colors and rhythms became alive, like a "surrender" --and, ultimately this creation process is still going on, and is now going on in this digital medium of a blog.

I share this all because of the art itself and the process of SCM which I highly recommend as a practice of liberation--and, yes, I also share this 'story' because it challenges what Alan Watts wrote of (Zen style) in the 1970s in a book, I always enjoy going back to, "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are." In oppressive societies that 'shut down' early in our lives the full re-membering of the matrixial (mother-child-birthing)--and deny its true importance to our being on this planet in a body--I think arts-expressive modalities are a tremendous gift to 'touch' again the rich sensory experiences of who we really are--embodied that is, and yes, for us to stand back and feel the "room for creation and joy" as Amaris says. 

So many layers of interpreting and being/with are possible here... I am mostly aware of the power and healing that comes from wit(h)nessing, as Bracha Ettinger speaks of it and when 'more than one attends the fear' and re-births the fear--as communal practice in a sanctuary of art-care. My acknowledgement of gratitude to Amaris for sharing this with us. 

Thanks be, to Creation.