Field Notes
by Dr. Avraham Cohen, PhD, RCC-ACS, CCC

The beauty of childhood dreams is their potentially malleable and predictive quality about what is to come in your life and the opportunities to work with this process of discovery and its unfolding. This work can subtly shape and fine tune your self and the path of your life. Here, we are not talking about taking you out of the path you are on already but illuminating the path you are on and, at times, highlighting certain important features of the path so that you can make the best of the possibility’s life is offering you for your self and others. Read Field Note

In this Field Note, I will share my own early childhood dreams and the work I have done as an example of this work. My aim in this sharing is to offer my self-study to illustrate ways of working with dreams. My hope is that what I offer will be of benefit and help to you in working with your own childhood dreams. For sure, I am also benefitting from writing about my dreams in this Note as I get to re-examine my early dreams and see, from ever changing angles of viewing, the emerging and merging layers, and folds and what is newly revealed about myself and life. Read Field Note

The language of ‘regulated’ and ‘dysregulated’ seems to be part of common language these days. And there is an implicit approval for being regulated, and disapproval for being dysregulated. Understandable! Who wants to be dysregulated, let alone be in the company of anyone experiencing dysregulation? Yet, something troubles me here with this regulation/dysregulation way of speaking and describing. Also, consider the incarcerating potential of such powerful labels. Read Field Note

According to Jeremy Rifkin, economic and social theorist, writer, and public speaker, a new civilization is emerging: The Empathic Civilization (this is the book title of one of his 21 bestselling books). It may be so, and I hope so. But looking all around me, I don’t see any strong evidence that we as members of the current civilization are doing very well, in terms of practising empathy. Read Field Note

Dr. Arnold Mindell (aamindell.net), whose work I have referenced previously in my Field Notes, suggested that World War III was already in process: “The war between the sexes!” While Mindell had in mind two sexes, Male and Female, I will, in keeping with today’s cultural context, extend the plurality to more than the two binary categories: to all gender categories. (However, in this Field Note, I won’t address couples’ relationship that goes beyond two-person couples.) Read Field Note

Many of you may see or hear this title and wonder, “Huh? Why would I want to magnify the problem? Don’t I want to get rid of it? Surely, it makes no sense to want to make the problem bigger than what it already is.” Indeed, I cannot emphasize the prevalence of ideas of what might be called common psychology, or common consciousness, strongly enough. Within this consciousness the automatic reaction is to want to destroy the problems we encounter, and as quickly as possible. Read Field Note

As many of you already know the topic of inner work is one of my most central interests as a therapist, educator, and human being, and this practice is of course not entirely new or novel. However, our culture, being overwhelmingly outward-focused, relentlessly enables such impression that it is new!. We just have to look around to see all the ways people are offering outward-focused solutions to any and all problems we humans encounter. Read Field Note

This Field Note is a co-authored dialogue in which Heesoon and I engage in an exploration-and-discovery conversation about relationship. More than being “about” our relationship, this dialogue bears fruit from and for our relationship. I certainly made some discoveries as we proceeded with this process. We offer you this open conversation not so much as a window into us rather as a possible window into yourself and your own close relationships. Read Field Note

In this Field Note, I will focus on how we feel energetically within as we go about our days in the world, and how we feel in terms of connection to the primal source of this energy, if indeed there is such. If this latter is not available you can use your wild imagination to conjure it up. Read Field Note

This is a ‘Bonus’ Field Note. I had intended to take a break until October. What follows is an academic journal article publication, for which my colleague and friend, Dr. Thomas Falkenberg (University of Manitoba), and I were interviewed by Dr. Heesoon Bai. The Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education is a new journal in the field, and our article is about inner work: a perennial topic for me, as you, my readers, would know. Read Field Note