livingfromlove

Goodbye g.o.r.i.l.l.a...

I've taken the opportunity of a holiday space to rethink and refurbish this Action Research enquiry into facilitating the power of love and confronting the love of power.

To more clearly underline the aims and intentions of the enquiry, I've changed the title from g.o.r.i.l.l.a. to livingfromlove. This may also help me manage the incoming tide of powerfreakery that here, as in the rest of life, tends to swamp the living from love.

To make the unfolding of the enquiry more easily accessible I've created a separate CONTENTS listing the material as it emerged... from earliest to latest.

In honour of the antecedents of this phase of the enquiry, I'll quote a few paragraphs from its opening statement

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posted at: 11:31 | permanent link to this entry

Giving children the education they deserve.

As the scale and depth to which domination and the love of power is entrenched in our daily lives become visible, a question that arises real fast is, how do we move from the love of power to the power of love?

So far as we become aware of this distortion of human potential in ourselves, we do what we can to rectify it. And then comes another question: how do we help ensure that our children or grandchildren don't become affected (I was going to say infected) by the cultures of dominance that we inhabit?

Conventional education, at least in the UK, too often seems to amount to 'schooling', regimes of deference of one or another kind in which, in classes of 30 or more, the child is required to drink from the fountain of a 'one fits all' state-defined curriculum.  Many, perhaps most, seeing the 'jobs', 'career', 'qualifications', writing-on-the-wall shut down creativity, imagination and self-direction, and get on with the hoop-jumping that is demanded. Not surprisingly, a substantial vein of children decline this opportunity, embrace some form of  'Oppositional Defiant Disorder' and find better things to do with their minds and energies, with corresponding benefits and drawbacks

So if this is indeed the prospect for your child, what do you do? One option - a tough option - is to found a school which - and how curious that it even needs to be said - educates in a child-centred rather than adult-centred way, as state and private education too often is.

In response to these kinds of concerns, a colleague, Richard House, was instrumental in the founding of a Steiner (Waldorf) school in Norwich, Norfolk, UK. I asked him to tell me how he did it. He replied:

Well, that's a big question, with many facets.

I have had seven or so years' experience of the Steiner schools movement now, since undertaking my first, Steiner Class Teacher training in the late 1990s. As well as being involved in the founding of a new Steiner school here in Norwich over the same time period, I am a trustee of a major and long-established Steiner teacher training course and a regularly published writer on educational issues.

The  decision to found a school in Norwich was very much a collective decision taken by a diverse group of people (of which I was a part) who both had major reservations about the nature of mainstream education and schooling systems, and also greatly admired the holistic educational experience that Steiner (Waldorf) education offers. I could say a great deal about each of these motivations, as I personally identify strongly with both of them.

There is currently very little if any choice for parents and families who are dissatisfied with 'mainstream education' (in which category I include both state schools and independent schools which broadly follow the national curriculum, and which mimic the testing and assessment regime of the state sector). Of course, families can opt for home education - and indeed record numbers are doing so; but for those parents who are either not inclined to home-educate, or for whom it would be quite impractical, Steiner schools, Montessori schools (which only commonly go up to about 8 years of age) and schools in the 'human scale education' (HSE) movement are just about all that is on offer in the UK.

Geographically, seven years ago there were just two other Steiner schools in the whole of East Anglia - a small one in rural Norfolk and a larger one in Cambridge. I know a number of families who have actually changed careers and life-styles in order to relocate their family so that they live near a Steiner school - there must be literally hundreds of families who have done this over the years. Norwich is a very independently minded part of the country, with lots of radical thinking people - the kind of medium-sized city that is a potentially ideal location for a Steiner school. (Note, however, that across the globe there are numerous examples of Steiner schools which are thriving in what are environmentally very unfavourable circumstances - not least, in sparsely populated rural areas. And despite a great amount of research having been conducted into what makes for a successful school, there still remains something of a mystery as to why some schools thrive in inhospitable circumstances while others struggle in what appears to be an ideal milieu. Perhaps the deep spiritual impulse that underpins these very special schools has something to do with this phenomenon.)

The original founding group of the Norwich school consisted of three parents of young children who wanted a Steiner Kindergarten and school for their children, and an elderly anthroposophist who has been a student of Rudolf Steiner's manifold cultural contributions for many years. ('Anthroposophy' refers to the spiritual stream founded by Rudolf Steiner after the First World War, a movement which draws upon Steiner's many 'spiritual scientific' insights into humanity, life and the cosmos.)

As I understand it, this is fairly typical of the way in which Steiner schools first begin. And although there is a lot of support available for new initiatives from the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (based in Forest Row, East Sussex),  new schools necessarily emerge from the independent initiative of local groups who see a vision for a new school in their area and/or for their children, and set about bringing it about. But needless to say - founding a new school which is independent of the state system, and which has to be entirely self-financing through the efforts of people who are commonly not materialistically oriented people with lots of spare wealth and resources at their disposal, is far far more easily said than done! But I guess your next question will perhaps take us more into the actual process of founding our school - though of course (and as Steiner himself always emphasised), schools are always and necessarily unique.

It will be useful to say something about Rudolf Steiner and his wide-ranging work and influence, against the cultural backdrop of a Western education system which is in abject crisis. But before this, I will set out ten summary 'recipe-points' for all those considering starting their own school:


If you succeed in achieving some or most of these 'founding principles', it is very likely that before too long, you will have set up an organisation and a community of parents that will generate its own self-sustaining momentum -  not least, because there is so much general disquiet with mainstream education that you will draw to yourselves a great deal of interest, once the quality of what you are offering is recognised in the local area.  


More, now, about Rudolf Steiner himself and the educational system he spawned, as a kind of mystique often surrounds the man, which it is best to demystify at the outset. Not least, it's a mystery to many just how one of humanity's most original and wide-ranging thinkers and seers is so comparatively little recognised in the range of fields on which he has had, and continues to have, such a profound influence. The author of over 30 books and the deliverer of over 6,000 lectures in his lifetime,  his full collected works (in German) come to a staggering 350 volumes; and his lasting legacy includes uniquely innovative 'impulses' in fields as wide-ranging as curative education and social therapy (the world-renowned Camphill Communities movement); biodynamic agriculture (a precursor of organic agriculture, and to which Prince Charles is the latest high-profile convert!); holistic (anthroposophical) medicine; architecture and design; the arts (Eurythmy, painting, speech and drama); organisational consultancy; ethical banking and finance (the Triodos Bank) - and, of course, education.

Steiner held passionately to a consistently holistic,  non-mechanistic approach to human experience; and it is only now, when so-called 'new paradigm' cosmologies are beginning to undermine the Zeitgeist of a one-sidedly materialistic 'modernity', that Steiner's remarkable insights are beginning to attract the widespread attention across the world that they richly deserve. Not least, this is because modern scientific research is consistently yielding results which amply corroborate the indications laid down by Steiner in a whole range of fields nearly a century ago.

Some 80 years after the first 'Waldorf' school was founded with Steiner's blessing in Stuttgart (in 1919), Steiner Waldorf is now the world's largest and most rapidly growing independent schooling movement, with approaching 1,000 schools and 1,500 Kindergartens worldwide. So flexible and adaptable has the Waldorf educational approach proved to be in different cultural conditions that it is represented in countries and continents the world over.  Steiner's educational philosophy is developmentally informed, with the teacher's task being to provide the appropriate learning environment consistent with the needs of the unfolding child. This in turn requires, on the teacher's part, a profound understanding of the subtleties of the developing child; and much of Steiner's educational and other writings are taken up with a detailed articulation of such an understanding.

There is a lack of competitive testing and examinations in Steiner (Waldorf) education, with co-operation and 'community' being far more valued than the individualistic competitiveness that inevitably creates winners and losers. The recently articulated notions of 'emotional intelligence' (Dan Goleman), 'spiritual intelligence' (Dinah Zohar) and multiple intelligences (Howard Gardner) were quite explicitly prefigured by Steiner in his educational philosophy, critical as he was of the one-sided intellectualism which he saw as giving a severely limited understanding of the world.

Steiner also saw education as very much a living creative art rather than as a programmatic science, with human relationship being an absolutely central aspect of any educational experience. In Steiner education, what we might call the being-qualities of the teacher are seen as being far more important than the amount of purely factual information that the teacher knows; and it follows that the teacher's own personal (not narrowly 'professional') development is seen as being a quite crucial aspect of being a successful Waldorf teacher. For Steiner, education at its best is also seen as being an intrinsically healing force for the child - and sometimes for the teacher too.

Organisationally, the Steiner (Waldorf) school has a 'flat', 'post-hierarchical' (or 'holonic') structure, with no headmaster/mistress, and with a College of Teachers which works consensually to decide matters of school policy, administration etc. In Steiner's time this was a quite unheard-of social innovation; and it is only in recent years that the emergence of similar, non-hierarchical forms is beginning to make itself felt within 'new paradigm' organisational arrangements. Freedom is, therefore, a central aspect of the education - not least, freedom from the quasi-authoritarian ideology and unquestioned 'regimes of truth' that, almost unnoticed, dominate so much conventional schooling. Finally, Steiner was a fierce defender of the right to a childhood unburdened by imposed and misguided adult-centric agendas.


The extraordinary neglect of Steiner's vast corpus probably has at least something to do with Steiner's thorough-goingly holistic, non-mechanistic approach to human experience, which, early in the last century, was quite literally decades ahead of its time. It is only now, when so-called 'new paradigm', 'transmodern' epistemologies and cosmologies are thankfully beginning to undermine the Zeitgeist of modernity, that Steiner's remarkable insights, which both incorporate yet also transcend modernity, are beginning to attract the rich attention they deserve.  To give just one example, over a century ago Steiner was the leading international scholar of Goethe's much-neglected scientific works - and yet it is only in recent years (cf. Henri Bortoft's The Wholeness of Nature, Floris Books, 1996) that Goethe's scientific worldview is beginning to gain widespread recognition within the emerging paradigm of 'New Science', the burgeoning growth of the global Scientific and Medical Network, and the like.

For Steiner, between birth and seven, the child learns predominantly through imitation, repetition, rhythmical activity and free, unhindered play; and her main task is the (unconscious) development of the will in a milieu of reverence and beauty, with the developing senses being protected as far as possible from unnecessary technological intrusion and over-stimulation. In this schema, formal, intellectual learning is carefully avoided until the change of teeth (between six and seven), and Steiner stressed how the introduction of formal, abstract learning (e.g. reading and writing) before this age was positively harmful to the child - a finding which is at last beginning to be confirmed by recent child-developmental and even neurological research. (This is indeed a common experience - that modern scientific research announces allegedly newly discovered knowledge about human development, yet which on closer examination, Steiner had himself systematically articulated in the early decades of the last century.)

The 'death of childhood' (cf. Professors Neil Postman, David Elkind et al.) is a theme that is increasingly echoing throughout modern culture, and Steiner was a fierce defender of the right to a childhood unburdened by imposed and misguided adult-centric agendas. Overall, Steiner's educational philosophy and Waldorf praxis together provide an impressively coherent and comprehensive 'new paradigm' antidote to the worst excesses of a materialistic worldview that has brought our world to the foothills of ecological disaster and unsustainability;  and in this sense it is supremely relevant as we struggle through the death throes of modernity and towards a new post-materialistic worldview.

Here are just a few quotations from Steiner on education which give a flavour of his philosophy:


It will be pretty clear from the above discussion just what kind of motivations underpin our disillusionment with modern mainstream schooling systems and our desire to create something better for our children. But where to start?!...

The devastation that has recently been wrought in Britain's Early Childhood sector is symptomatic of the pernicious cultural forces that currently hold such uncritical sway in modern culture. Thus, modernist culture's 'managerial' ethos of over-active, prematurely intellectual intrusion into the very being of young children is part of a formal-schooling ideology which, since the mid-1990s, has been colonizing England's early years policy-making and practice - with the relentless bureaucratization of early learning environments stemming from, for example, mechanistic developmental assessments, centrally dictated 'Early Learning Goals', and the imposition of a 'curriculum' on to children as young as 3. These trends are, moreover, widely observable in the educational systems of Western world. In England, for example, we read in the Times Educational Supplement of 17th January 2003 that reception teachers are now having to work their way through no less than 3,510 boxes to tick, as they are forced to assess every child against a staggering 117 criteria. This story broke again last summer, when in the Daily Telegraph of the 21st June 2004, we read of teachers having 'to write reports the size of novels' alongside test scores for five-year-olds. David Hart, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, was quoted as saying that 'I cannot think of another Government intervention which has caused so much anger among teachers of the early years'.

With OFSTED (the UK's Office for Standards in Education) taking over responsibility for early-childhood settings, we are witnessing a 'surveillance culture' ideology cascading down the education system, right to the earliest of ages. Not without reason did the prominent sociologist, Professor Nikolas Rose, write some years ago that 'Childhood is the most intensively governed sector of personal existence'. A whole range of factors continues to reinforce the one-sidedly cognitive 'hot-housing' atmosphere pervading modern mainstream education.

There is little if any empirical research being carried out on the medium- and long-term effects on children's overall social and emotional development of the soullessly mechanistic educational 'regimes' and one-sidedly materialistic values and practices to which young children are being unremittingly subjected. This is nothing short of a national scandal, at which future, more enlightened generations will surely look back aghast at our wilful neglect of what really matters in living a healthy life. Yet in the face of the mounting malaise and anomie experienced by young people in modern culture,  the mechanistic, 'modernizing' juggernaut simply ploughs on, apparently quite impervious to the insight that its own policies and practices are substantially contributing to this cultural chaos, and are storing up an anti-social disaster whose dimensions and ubiquity can scarcely be dreamt of.

One common effect of these disturbing trends is what can be called the dismembering of childhood (cf. Neil Postman's seminal 1990s text The Death of Childhood). Certainly, there is a growing 'counter-cultural' public mood which is clamouring for a humane and demonstrably effective alternative to the deeply unsatisfactory fare currently on offer in 'mainstream society' - and Steiner education is just one of the many humane cultural initiatives which are increasingly challenging the one-sided materialism of the modern age. Certainly, there are new Steiner education initiatives springing up all over the UK at the moment, so what we are doing here in Norwich, while of course unique, is just a part of a far wider cultural impulse.

Finally, I would be happy to receive communications about, or questions arising from, this posting - to richardahouse[at]hotmail[dot]com. And a big "thank you" to Denis Postle for extending this welcome opportunity to 'spread the word' about this wonderful educational approach more widely through his excellent website.

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posted at: 06:20 | permanent link to this entry

Metaphor power

As I completed a previous day's blog entry, God Invades White House (a title that, having now finished reading Esther Kaplan's book With God On Their Side seems to me very apposite) I  was left with a sense that those of us who might wear a 'liberal', 'nurturant', 'progressive' label, whether we chose it or not, have a special difficulty in contradicting or interrupting the very cohesive 'big ideas' of conservative politics. A special difficulty due in part to our preference for plurality, diversity and above all reflexivity.

I ended:


Part of an answer emerged as I got this item ready for posting, when I discovered George Lakoff's book(let) Don't Think of an Elephant, written for liberal activists in the US to use in the 2004 Presidential election. Lakoff recycles his notions about 'Strict Father' politics and 'Nurturant Parent' politics detailed in his previous longer book Moral Politics—coming up with recommendations about strategies for promoting 'liberal', 'progressive', 'nurturant' political notions. It's short, cheap, direct and to the point, and worth every penny.

If you want a taste of what George Lakoff has to say in Don't Think of an Elephant , here are links to the online originals of several of the chapters.

A Man of His Words
The Progressive Morality
What's in a Word
Metaphors of terror
Metaphor and war Again
Betrayal of Trust

Other relevant articles by George Lakoff.
The Power of Images 
Metaphor and War:
I'll come back to all this. I include it in Satygraha because, much as some of us would prefer it, it is not enough to devise ingenious  alternatives that contradict the top down givens of naturalized domination, we have to be equally ingenious in finding ways of bringing these institutions and propositions to the attention of the rest of the world.

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posted at: 07:39 | permanent link to this entry

Action research - learning from experience

If you have read some of the earlier entries you see that I regard this blog as a form of research, albeit haphazard, unfunded and outside of academe. And yet it's style has a history and a location in the story of research in general. So... when the The Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at the University of Bath sent me a flyer for a conference on Action Research, 'Emerging Approaches to Inquiry 10', I signed up.

Having led and participated in Cooperative Inquiry style Action Research for around 20 years, I wasn't looking for some seal of approval. I wanted to check out how this weblog sat in relation to the current perspectives and learning about the Cooperative Inquiry tradition. This four day conference provided a welcome return home in which I was well able to do this.

I explicitly see my psychotherapy work with clients as inquiries and I hadn't been in doubt that what I'm doing with the g.o.r.i.l.l.a.weblog was a valid inquiry too. As I listened to the chat about Action Research and the varieties of experience it entailed, I was surprised and pleased to realize that the life of the Independent Practititioners Network [IPN] group to which I belong has the form of an inquiry. I saw that in an equally informal, haphard way, both it and the broader IPN Network are forms of Action Research. In each, the action and reflection process is intrinscally cooperative and the research outcome is holding accountability to clients. These interleaved processes of inquiry and reflection inform what you are presently reading, and affirmation of them warmed me up considerably.

Discussing this weblog and its intentions with conference participants led me to wonder whether I needed to pay some attention to accountability. To cut to the chase, I realized that, if I don't find, or connect with, a community of other co-inquirers, then some kind of supervision is appropriate, and I'm looking into organising that.

Making Satygraha
Action Research in its several varieties, ranging from strong to informal, is a core example of what I mean by satyagraha - positive programme, 'making the thing we want'. If you are in a situation where you are seeking to live, work, or organise a piece of life in ways that step aside from hierarchical, patriarchal structures of domination, into 'living from love', I believe you'd find some form of Action Research a promising option. Even, I'd go so far as to say, if you manage to make the move to living from love, the result is likely to resemble Action Research. Because for me living from love is not a passive state of grace in which, once it has descended (or we have ascended) we have got 'it'. Living from love implies inquiry, a process of action and reflection, even struggle, to find meaning and validity, preferably while held in a community of other inquirers.

If this sounds very fancy, idealized, out of reach - that would be a pity because in my experience Action Research, at least in the variety I know well, Cooperative Inquiry, is something anyone can learn and practice. For example here is an account of an Inquiry into 'How to Move From Survival and Recovery into Flourishing', that Annie Spencer and I led a while back, and here, as a download excerpt from Letting the Heart Sing - The Mind Gymnasium, is a recipe for setting up a Cooperative Inquiry used in that and other inquiries, and which I have found works very well.

I found 'Emerging Approaches to Inquiry 10' warm, welcoming and very well focused and I'd recommend it's bi-annaual successors to anyone with an active need to develop cooperative or peer assessment structures. If there was a downside, it would be that, on the basis of my experience of this conference community, Action Research seems paradoxically dominated by academic 'discourse', and a puzzlingly symbiotic relation to the process of writing a PhD. As though action research could only be led, or usually is led, by someone with, or researching a PhD. Perhaps as a primarily visual, aural, intuitive person I was blindsided to the value of such determinedly taxonomic conversation as I very often heard in these four days.

And perhaps this is part of the price that has to be paid for establishing this new paradigm of inquiry in the face of a dominant research culture that still believes in doing research 'on' people rather than 'with' people. Holding and nurturing the Action Research tradition as Peter Reason and Judi Marshall at the University of Bath, and John Heron and others have done, is a tremendous achievement. I salute them.

If Action Research as a form of Satygraha still remains a mystery to you, albeit I hope an appetizing one, here are some links through which you can follow it up:
The opening chapter of this Handbook by Peter reason and Hilary Bradbury, and this Introductory article by Peter Reason and John Heron provide concise overviews of Action Research. The Introduction to Geoff Mead's PhD thesis outlines many of the key elements of Action Research, especially the 'first person' inquiry style that this blog follows. Elsewhere, the South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry holds and reports on inquiries, and publishes introductory material on Action Research.

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posted at: 13:20 | permanent link to this entry

Living from love

The Enlightenment project - Descartes, Locke, Kant - that began to free us from the headlock of the heritage religions also set in motion the engines of industrialization and modernity. But modernity for all its virtues has a serious limitation. It carries forward the deep seated belief that dominance is intrinsic. That 'freedom' i.e. freedom to use and abuse others, is for those who deserve it, which in practice means those who are already free.

Modernity is still with us and post-modern approaches to daily life seem fragile shoots, constantly in danger of falling victim to the anxieties of people who feel threatened by them.

And yet, once we wake up to the intolerable burden of domination, we are faced with the task of moving out of the alienation,fragmentation and damage of modernity and into a life lived from love i.e. free of coercion and domination.

I learned a lot about how to do this from John Heron and the shifting population of the Institute for the Development of Human Potential [IDHP], the Human Potential Research Group at the University of Surrey [HPRG] and the UK co-counselling community, including notably, Anne Dixon, who also introduced assertiveness training to the UK.

Stirred into this engaging and profoundly transforming mix was Cooperative Inquiry, a way of doing research with people rather than on people. More recently, establishing the Independent Practitioners Network [IPN] has shown how an ethically sound post-modern form of accountability for psychopractitioners can be organised.

If you would like to follow up some of this satyagraha - positive programme - here are some more links:

John Heron maintains the South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry

John Heron: Transpersonal Cooperative Inquiry
This paper gives a short account of some issues involved in using co-operative inquiry as a method of transpersonal research, outlines a relevant cartography, and presents a prospectus for future inquiries.

John Heron: A Little Book of Co-creating '...A rewrite of the theory and method of co-counselling from a transpersonal perspective..... it derives from an inquiry with twenty Co-counselling International teachers this summer...'

John Heron: The Life Divine and a Self-generating Culture:
'I give here a short account of the kind of religious innovation with which we want to engage. The 'we' here refers to all those whose vision is in tune with the content of this document...'

John Heron: Space and consciousness
'...Each person can be construed as a multispatial imaginal, that is, a conscious being that is involved in creating a set of different, yet interrelated, imaged spatial worlds. The word 'involved' is important here since a person participates in the creativity, refracts it, manifests it, relays it, gives idiosyncratic form to it. It is a life-given power of the mind, like breathing is life-given power of the body; and as with breathing, we can influence and modify it, but we do not produce it...'

My recent CDROM
Letting the Heart Sing - The Mind Gymnasium provides an extensive and detailed account of what is involved in trying to live from love

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posted at: 08:57 | permanent link to this entry

Finding a voice

I'm getting to like satygraha even though it still seems strange and unprounceable. It's good because it reminds us of the importance of moving from 'bystanding' to action. And in a pointer I want to make today, it reminds us of the vital importance of being able to find a  'voice' that matches the life tasks we meet.

Such a voice, one that is up to the task of confronting the love of power and speaking to the value of love can be hard to find both in the world and in ourselves, so examples matter. Here is one of them.
 
Following the 9/11 events in New York, my friend Vincent, who I have already mentioned in connection with his tapeworm story, sent me, along with other friends, this message.

It speaks from love and it confronts the love of power. Take a look at it.

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posted at: 07:54 | permanent link to this entry

Satyagraha

I got going with this blog because I felt overwhelmed by the sheer weight of evidence of domination coming at me. Being sensitized, some might say over-sensitized, to this comes from paying a lot of attention to the power of love and trying to live from love, and today I want to start a new section that makes a place on the blog for this. I'm going to call it Satyagraha. Gandhi argued that an essential accompaniment to the non-violent direct action which accelerated the exit of the British from India was the development of 'positive programms'. He called these Satyagraha and I've adopted it here for organisations, groupings, actions events that demonstrate living from love.

If you want to have more detail on the origins of Satygraha Jonathan Schell in his highly recommendable book 'The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People' gives a lot of space to it and Gandhi.

That a positive programme is an essential ingredient of resistance and critique isn't a new idea for me. Left-wing analysis of social ills often seems to me very one-sided in the direction of too much intellect and not enough positive programme. Too much god (Marx/Freud) and not enough love.

Also, paying as much attention to creating what we want to have as to the critiques that come so easily to our dissociated lips really matters. Why? Because sustained critique can have the unintended effect of unconsciously replicating in us the style or dynamic of the oppression or injustice we are busy resisting or contradicting.

Resist and confront domination yes, but also create, devise, test, build, institutions that not only avoid reproducing domination, but are shaped by love and living from liking. As and when I find them, the Satyagraha section here will point to examples of this. Here's one.

Birth Matters
I want to celebrate a film about the pyschology of birth which comprehensively provides pointers to what is adrift in our medicalized approaches to child-bearing and child-care, and what to do about it. 'The Psychology of Birth: Invitation to Intimacy', a 53 minute documentary currently released on DVD and VHS, outlines an approach that emphasizes 'welcoming' the coming child into a community of carers and 'sharers'(as one of the contributors, Sobonfu Somé elsewhere argues, one parent is not enough, one parent can't handle all those demands); the film invites us to accept the scientific evidence for intelligence and sentience in the foetus and newborn child and to have this re-shape the birth process; parents-to-be are invited to diligently attend to any unfinished business they might be carrying around with them that might prove to be an unwelcome gift for their child.

My oldest son Elmer, wrote, directed, produced and edited 'Invitation to Intimacy'. It's an eloquent, richly touching recipe for recuperating how we do pregnancy, birth and child-care. It will set a standard for some time on how to speak about why birth matters.

Another day
Other items to come in Satyagraha include: how to start a Steiner school, and a piece about the Independent Practitioner's Network [IPN], ten years old this November. IPN has developed an entirely new form of accountability for psychopractioners based on peer assessment and non hierarchical organization.

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posted at: 06:46 | permanent link to this entry