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

There is an abundance of talk, research, and writing about resilience these days. Many of us are running as fast as we can, and yet we still feel our energies waning and that our resilience is evaporating in reaction to a relentlessly stressful world. All manner of fatigue and exhaustion abound: workplace burnout, relationship troubles, work fatigue, emotion fatigue, and so on. I’m quite sure you can personally relate to fatigue, burnout, and many other varieties of self-dis-integration. Read Field Note

Over the decades (five, to be precise) of seeing clients in private practice and, of course, many people in public settings, I can say that the difficulties of letting go confound most people, regularly, and rather frequently. The difficulties are particularly pronounced when my clients see for themselves that it makes no sense for them to hang onto a person, a relationship, or a situation that is damaging or futile, or both. What is going on? Let me get at this conundrum this way: First, allow me to try out some explanations as to how being human works. Read Field Note

My doctoral thesis supervisor, the late Professor Carl Leggo, was a poet and a writer whose works touched countless students in schools along with many students of life. I was particularly fond of his writing style, amongst very many others, that he often titled “ruminations. ” These are short fragments, often no more than a few sentences, or a paragraph that capture the vital meanings in everyday occurrences that Professor Leggo encountered. In this Field Notes edition, I wish to curate a couple of fragments of my own (although my fragments are more like short tracts) that I generated over the past summer. Read Field Note

I had a dream: I am in some kind of war zone. I see there are a number of compartments of some kind. One of the enemy soldiers approaches with his rifle and bayonet and tears open one of the compartments. He goes inside. Read Field Note

Hello Everyone, I hope you are having a peaceful, insightful, and enjoyable summer. I have added a new feature to the Field Notes. Audio of the Notes will now be available starting with the July 1 Note. Please test it out here. Read Field Note

As I suggested in the June Field Note, High Dreams are about creative imagination – and its cultivation and nurturance. They are also about an increasingly clear view of what your Dream is, where you are in relation to your Dream, what obstacles need to be addressed, learning how to address these, including finding the value in them, and how to step further into the overall process. Beyond High Dreams and most central to the process is development of your High Dreamer self. I suggest to you that as a true High Dreamer you are in a process of becoming increasingly honest with yourself and the world, along with becoming increasingly clear about who can hear what, what is beneficial, and what requires different timing and/or careful wording. Read Field Note

The focus in this Field Note is dreams of possibility, what Arnold Mindell the founder of Process Oriented Psychotherapy calls “high dreams” — dreams that express your most strongly held values and beliefs, and the essence of who you are. High dreams are not night dreams, although they are not unrelated. All dreams of any kinds are an outcome of many sources, such as personal history that includes, family of origin, culture, schooling, peers, religion, institutions, and so on. As such, they could be said to arise from both the individual and collective unconscious. Read Field Note

I imagine that at times it  has occurred to you how “machine-like” others, and yourself are? However you address and describe such experiences, these undesirable and predictably repetitive reactive patterns of behavior, thinking, feeling (or lack thereof), really your/our reactivity keep popping up, despite best resolve to change them and not to repeat them. It’s seems there is part of you and me that is like a machine with set programs that are not under our control to turn off or to change. I think the central question is what is it that you are really dealing with in yourself when you struggle to change your patterns of behaviour, thoughts, and feelings? Read Field Note

The word Holotropic is borrowed from the Czechoslovakian psychiatrist and one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, Stanislav Grof (stanislavgrof. com), who created it from ‘holos’(meaning, ‘whole’) and trapein (meaning, ‘turning or moving towards’).  Holo+tropic together means moving or turning towards wholeness. This term is related to his view of the value of non-ordinary, and what Heesoon and I have been calling, the ‘post-egoic’ states of consciousness. Read Field Note

As many of you know, ‘inner work’ is something I believe is central to personal growth and becoming an increasingly whole human being. It is the most important practice in life that I engage with persistently and consistently, and recommend to everyone with whom I work. Life hands us anything and everything, and inner work offers transformational potential; it provides the alchemical way to turn the inner lead into inner gold. For this Field Note I will share a recent personal experience and my related reflections along with some broader implications. Read Field Note