Sunday, August 29, 2010

#144 Embodied Mythology Series 13: The Holy Grail with Paul Rebillot,part 1

We are continuing our conversations with our teacher and friend Paul Rebillot on the topic of the Healing Theatre – the combination of acting and drama, mythology, gestalt therapy, and rituals. For more information about Paul and his work, please visit his website – Direct Impact Creativity.

In this episode, Paul tells the essential parts of the myth of the Holy Grail.

The topics covered in this talk are:

  • The Holy Grail – Parsival and his Mother
  • King Arthur
  • The Grail Castle
  • The Great Knight
  • Healing of the Wound
  • The Sacred Feminine

Sunday, August 22, 2010

#143 Embodied Mythology Series 12: Rituals of Transformation with PaulRebillot, part 2

We are continuing our conversations with our teacher and friend Paul Rebillot on the topic of the Healing Theatre – the combination of acting and drama, mythology, gestalt therapy, and rituals. For more information about Paul and his work, please visit his website – Direct Impact Creativity.

In this episode, Paul explains the structure and design of Rites of Passage, or the Rituals of Transformation.

The topics covered in this talk are:

  • How do you know it’s time for the rite of passage
    • Putting “blood” (life) back into the ritual
  • Lack of rituals in the modern society
    • There are no rituals for crossing age thresholds – people want to stay young and don’t appreciate their own age
  • Making rites of passages in everyday life

Sunday, August 15, 2010

#142 Embodied Mythology Series 11: Rituals of Transformation with PaulRebillot, part 1

We are continuing our conversations with our teacher and friend Paul Rebillot on the topic of the Healing Theatre – the combination of acting and drama, mythology, gestalt therapy, and rituals. For more information about Paul and his work, please visit his website – Direct Impact Creativity.

In this episode, Paul explains the structure and design of Rites of Passage, or the Rituals of Transformation.

The topics covered in this talk are:

  • Rites of Passage – Example
    • Ways of leaving the “nest”
    • Suffering is being stuck at a passage
  • Structure for creating rites of passages
    • Ritual is dying to the old and being born into the new
  • Boy becoming a man – one of the aboriginal rituals
    • How did you find out that there is no Santa Clause?
  • Various rites of passages
  • How do we construct these rituals?
    • Saying good-bye to the past
    • Symbolic act of ending the past
    • Going into the no-man’s-land
    • Crossing into the other side, being who they are. Trying something new behavior in the new place.
    • Group gesture to complete the ritual

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Greal link if Mythology fascinates you - Meet the Gods

Welcome to Godchecker – your Guide to the Gods

We have more Gods than you can shake a stick at. Godchecker’s Mythology Encyclopedia currently features over 2,850 deities.

Browse the pantheons of the world, explore ancient myths, and discover Gods of everything from Fertility to Fluff with the fully searchable Holy Database Of All Known Gods.

www.godchecker.com
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Friday, August 6, 2010

Culture Wires The Brain

More evidence of the BioPsychoSocial model for development is what needs to be studied.
Patterns exists and influence at the level of self, Self, Culture/Enviornment, and the relationship between the indiviual and the environment. We are working on a series right now exploring the meta-programs-patterns that govern our experience of the world.
Any suggestions, thoughts ideas (above and beyond the normal so called NLP Meta Programs) are welcome

Culture wires the brain: A cognitive neuroscience perspective

There is evidence that the collectivist nature of East Asian cultures versus individualistic Western cultures affects both brain and behavior. East Asians tend to process information in a global manner whereas Westerners tend to focus on individual objects. There are differences between East Asians and Westerners with respect to attention, categorization, and reasoning. For example, in one study, after viewing pictures of fish swimming, Japanese volunteers were more likely to remember contextual details of the image than were American volunteers. Experiments tracking participants’ eye movements revealed that Westerners spend more time looking at focal objects while Chinese volunteers look more at the background. In addition, our culture may play a role in the way we process facial information. Research has indicated that when viewing faces, East Asians focus on the central region of faces while Westerners look more broadly, focusing on both the eyes and mouth.

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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Lost in Translation

An interesting article on something most of us intuitively know and many of the NLPers and linguists have for long shown, along with the work of Ed Hall!

Fasinating read coming to the MSM (mainstream media)

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

Does Language Influence Culture? – WSJ.com

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take “Humpty Dumpty sat on a…” Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say “sat” rather than “sit.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) change the verb to mark tense.
Related Video

* Yes We Can Learn English

* Learning a Language Online

* Keeping Cajun Alive

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you’d use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you’d use a different form.

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Sunday, August 1, 2010

#141 Embodied Mythology Series 10: Personal Myths with Paul Rebillot,part 2

We are continuing our conversations with our teacher and friend Paul Rebillot on the topic of the Healing Theatre – the combination of acting and drama, mythology, gestalt therapy, and rituals. For more information about Paul and his work, please visit his website – Direct Impact Creativity.

In this episode, Paul is describing his approach to designing new structures from Personal Myths.

The topics covered in this talk are:

  • Identifying with every character in your myth
  • Variety of Shadows
  • Moving between roles
  • A story from Hero’s Journey workshop
    • Example – Baba Yaga story
  • Feedback about the structure
  • Common patterns in the structures