"Soul Work" At The Institute of Imaginal Studies

The Institute of Imaginal Studies, Graduate School and Research Center, offers through its Masters and Doctoral degree programs in Imaginal Psychology, as well as public programs and events, a context for the mysteries of the soul to unfold.

The Institutes' programs emphasize the role of transformative learning in catalyzing the emergence of key human capacities. The capacities of self awareness, collaboration, responsibility, and empathy are given special emphasis in the Institute's graduate programs. The Institute seeks to educate psychologically aware leaders with the knowledge, skills, and capacities essential to empower individuals, organizations, and communities. The curriculum in the Institute's graduate programs embodies this intention.

The Institute's curriculum in Imaginal Psychology offers a distinct orientation to the discipline of psychology. This orientation reclaims soul as psychology's primary concern. The soul expresses itself in images. Care of the soul asks that we pay close attention to the images we inhabit. This orientation to psychology has its roots in the transformative practices that are at the core of many spiritual traditions and the creative arts. The Imaginal Psychology curriculum in all programs draws on spiritual traditions, somatic practices, creative arts, mythology, indigenous wisdom, deep ecology, and social critique.

When collaborative learning is practiced in a supportive community, we are able to inhabit vulnerability and mystery. Through the recognition of each other's unique potentials and limitations, we deepen the process of soul-making and care of the soul. This approach builds relationships of reciprocity and mutuality; it is especially suited to the transformative dimension of adult learning.

The Institute seeks to support the adult learner through offering public programs in addition to its graduate degree programs. These programs, formatted as seminars, experiential workshops, and professional programs are taught by Institute faculty and guest presenters. Like the curriculum in our graduate programs, the public programs draw on: spiritual traditions, somatic practices, creative arts, mythology, indigenous wisdom, deep ecology, and social critique.

This Fall and Winter the Institute of Imaginal Studies is bringing to Northern California profound teachers who will speak about contemporary culture in terms of mythology, deep ecology, indigenous wisdom, and social critique. These teachers include: Aftab Omer (Oct), David Abram (Nov), Michael Meade (Dec), Robert Bly (Jan), and Robert Sardello (April).

Aftab Omer is President and core faculty at the Institute of Imaginal Studies. Aftab's research has focused on the emergence of human capacities within transformative learning communities and his work has included assisting organizations in tapping the creative potentials of conflict, diversity, and complexity. In his workshop Omer will explore how the experience of shame plays a critical role in developing a discerning conscience and an autonomous individuality while at the same time sustaining integrity and dignity. Omer asserts that our ability to imagine how we are affecting the other—our moral imagination—is profoundly linked to the depth and breadth of our engagement with shame.

David Abram, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. He was named by Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world. His work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, poetics, and wonder inform our relationship with the animate earth. In his programs at IIS, The Wild Horizons of Ecological Psychology; Shadowed Wonder: Wild Language and the Ecology of Perception; and Becoming Animal: Shapeshifting and the Ecology of Magic.

Abram asserts that many persons seem to have lost their ability to actually see nature with any clarity, or to hear as meaningful anything other than a human voice. This blindness and deafness have lodged themselves in ways of speaking that continually deny the expressive vitality of other animals, of oak trees and rushing rivers, and indeed of the living land itself. Weaving storytelling and poetics with insights from diverse indigenous, place-based cultures, Abram will lead participants through an exploration on the ecological dimensions of language as well as the earthly role of the magician—the medicine person or shapeshifter in indigenous cultures.

Michael Meade is an author and masterful storyteller with a genius for metaphorical thinking and gleaning ideas from years of working with indigenous cultures, youth, and communities at-risk. His language rings with echoes of truth and "sings with an incantational voice that takes you right to the edge of elemental knowledge." In his programs at IIS, The Poetics of Peace; The World Behind the World: Myth and Imagination in Troubled Times; and The Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul, Meade will draw on his book The Water of Life to address initiation and the roots of conflict.

Robert Bly is among the most influential poets in North America. Author of many books of poetry and social critique including The Light Around the Body, which won the National Book Award, as well as Iron John: A Book About Men and The Sibling Society. In his workshop at IIS, The Poetic Imagination: How Poetry and Stories Can Heal the Soul, Bly will explore how good poetry and great stories dip down into the sorrow areas of the soul. Bly asserts that the listener of these great works often finds his or her most puzzling failure or limitation evoked in the opening words. They are then offered, through images and metaphor, some way through this limitation. They are even offered a way to rejoice in their failure, just as great stories and great psychotherapy sometimes do. Throughout this workshop, Robert Bly will tell two or three classic stories, as well as read some poems by Rilke, Yeats, and others.

Robert Sardello is the co-founder of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, and has been a practicing psychotherapist for over 20 years. He is the author of Facing the World with Soul, Love and the World, Freeing the Soul from Fear and the recently released Silence. In his workshop at IIS, Body Awareness: From Body-Soul to Soul-Body, Sardello will explore the terrain of the human body, of our body, and its in-depth unity with the soul-body of the world and of the cosmos. Among the primary qualities, he will focus on the in-breath and out-breath of awareness, with particular emphasis on entering the center of the Silence of the body, and our link to the soul-body of the world. In his workshop Soul Work with Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money, Sardello will assist participants in unfolding healthy money-consciousness. Engaging stories of the sacred origins of money and considering how humanity has diverted from the sacred aspects of exchange, Sardello will lead an exploration of how to work with inner practices to become conscious of the currents of money in our lives and how money works to deepen inner wealth and connections of sacred service in the world.