For the
Monday group and an invitation to colleagues.
5.00-7.00
1WN 3.8, Monday 7th
November 2005.
(Urgent
information for John if you are coming on Monday evening and want to
participate in the engagement with astrological symbolism. Please send to John
at astrojohn7@yahoo.co.uk your Birthdate, birthplace and birth time (if known). If the latter
is known only approximately, that will be fine. (John – mine are 29/08/44, Newton,
Hyde in Cheshire at 7.00 p.m.). See John's note below.
Viv – looking forward to continuing to explore our educational
responses to bullying. Margarida – I imagine Monday's session will engage
with your ideas on proprioception – the video of the session could be
useful so if anyone wants to be present without participating they could video!
Jean
writes from New Zealand on the 31 October:
"Keeping you up to date, the
trip is going very well. Workshops in Otago and Christchurch were well
received. Today I am at Victoria in Wellington, doing workshops today and
tomorrow. I fly to Auckland tomorrow evening, doing workshops Thursday and
Friday at UNITEC. People are very receptive to the ideas, and eager to have a
go. The experience at Christchurch was overwhelming - 35 HE staff, all intent
on studying their own practice, and already laying plans about how they can
develop their own inter-university network to support and critique their own
work. You would have simply loved it. There is major interest here in the
ideas, so I am having a good time. I'm also doing a lot of sightseeing into the
bargain. I went on an island cruise on Sunday and then yesterday travelled by
ferry from South Island to North Island, which was a simply lovely journey.
It's all rather breakneck speed, so I feel a bit breathless, but am surviving
well and managing to stay on top of it all. Lots of new ideas for writing as
well, so that can't be bad. As I look out the window I see Wellington bathed in
sunshine. It's a very short winter for me!"
Moira is
likely to be staying on in Guyuan until July 2005.
Alan's
summary of his ideas on The
Inclusional Nature of Neighbourhood is at http://www.bath.ac.uk/~bssadmr/inclusionality/naturalsolution.html
Alon's
Abstract for his doctoral thesis on How Do I Consistently and Methodically
Lead A More Meaningful, Productive and Gratifying Existence In and With the
World for Myself?
A
Heuristic Approach to Constructing My Ontological Living Theory is at http://www.bath.ac.uk/~pspas/phdabs.htm
Marie has
produced an account (http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/mariejackbanes4nov.htm) of the first year's activities of the Bath and North
East Somerset Action Research and Inclusion Group with the concluding questions:
How can documentation be developed that supports and
energises rather than hinders and enervates and takes the work into the public
domain? Could we play with different technology? Would this be a way of
desensitising and learning the skill necessary at the same time?
How can the influence of this group be understood and the
strands of understanding plaited in with the other work – to transform the
individual, the group and beyond? How do we know that what we are doing is of
value and has a life beyond us?
See also Marie's poster for the Heads and Hearts in Learning
– Making the Link workshop on the 19th June 2006 at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/19thJune06.pdf
Here is
John's suggestion for this Monday evening's conversation.
We can
explore, through experiential role play, some of the relational
dynamics in the group particular to this evening, by engaging
with some of the simpler and more easily calculable astrological
signatures pertaining to each of you, as members of the group,
according to your birth time. (e.g. natal position of Sun, Moon, Mercury,
Venus, Mars in the zodiac). For this purpose, I will require birth
data. Birthdate, birthplace and birth time (if known). If the latter is known only approximately, that
will be fine - the more accurate the better. If it's not known at all,
that 's fine too - I can work with just the date. Ideally, I would like
to have this information prior to Monday evening - it can be sent to me by
email. If this isn't possible for whatever reason, it can be
given on the evening of the class and I can still work with it.
My invitation,
for the duration of this exercise, is for each of you in the group to
engage directly with the 'roles', assigned symbolically by the
astrological signatures of your own astrological
birth chart, as if they were indeed roles that you play in life,
through your relational interactions with others. At the end of the
exercise we can formally 'de-role' and come back together as a
group and open up to feedback and reflect upon our individual
experiences. It is my intention, through this piece of work,
to monitor and authentically describe responses and reactions (my own and
others) to working in this way using this symbolism. I am
keen to explore the extent to which the attribution of
a role (incorporating particular character attributes and qualities) might
be experienced as more impositional or invitational. E.g. Did you
find that it restricted or encouraged self-expression, freedom of
enquiry, personal insight, intuition etc? I invite you to
suspend judgment on this until we reach the feedback part of the
evening.
My own
experience with astrology is that its symbolism serves to orientate my embodied
participation in life and offers guidance as to
how I am being in the world, how I see and how I am seen, how I
relate to my environment, how I aspire, the challenges I may
encounter in my life, and the way in which I perpetuate my own life
story. The symbolism often seems to be showing me my
'default' way of being in the world. In being able to acknowledge inherent patterns,
I can create for myself a freedom to explore possibilities
beyond that defaulted sense of self. I relate to the symbolism of
astrology, not because it is necessarily 'true' in any 'objective' sense
(is anything ever?), but because its symbols speak to me in a way that adds tremendous
value and meaning to my life. My experience is that the symbolism opens
up my intuitive sense, making me more responsive to others and better able
to be responsible for my own thoughts, feelings and actions. I often
describe astrology as being my 'stake in the ground'. It seems
to give me a place to stand in the world, a sense of ontological
anchorage, a place from which to explore and a place to return to; a map
of possibilities and (often self-wrought) impositions.
I make
no claim that astrology is true, and have no wish to impose its symbolic
language on anyone. It is explicitly not my intention to attempt to prove
the validity or otherwise of astrology from this exercise, and I am certainly
not asking you to 'believe' in it (whatever that might mean)! The
ambition to prove astrology true or false is, to my mind, always
a futile one. As in life, there are far too many variables to even
attempt such empirical certainty. That said, however, this way of engaging
with the world speaks to me as if the symbols themselves possessed a
validity. I recognise from my own experience and that of others I
have worked with, that an embodied engagement with astrology can be
of great value as a tool for ethical and philosophical
self-enquiry. It is with this possibility in mind that I offer
up this invitation to you.
It
should be an enormous amount of fun too!
(John
– sorry not to have put The Embodied Mind in the post – will bring
it along without fail on Monday)
Any news to
share of your activities do e-mail it in.
Love Jack.