Guided by aliveness

  This week I helped organize a national conference on sustainable development in teacher education (Universities Norway). Teacher educators shared experience and knowledge about how to integrate UNs sustainable development goals into teacher education. One important subject discussed was the need to use as a starting point the personal responsibility of the students and pupils to make changes towards sustainable development in their everyday life, but at the same time not forget the bigger global picture and the need for fundamental structural change. There was also a focus on children and young people as the guides towards a future for the rich and overspending countries where the good life is not connected to increasing wealth. In this perspective its interesting to see this new international initiative, called the inner developmental goals, which are connected to UNs sustainable development goals: https://youtu.be/xsB5ci-rgGg Inner Development Goals Important thinkers like ...

  I recently spent a day in Tivoli in Copenhagen with my family, and it was so much fun. An experience of joy and flow, the whole day was focused on play. Play is presence in the moment, and I noticed an intense quality of presence being there, even standing in line waiting for the next ride was somehow nourishing and magical.  W.B. Yeats said: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” I think this is what may happen through play - our senses grow sharper, and we notice that the cliff is actually a troll who became stone, and the tree is talking to us, and the frog is a prince waiting to be kissed. Our awareness expand and the ability to perceive becomes more inclusive. We leave our habitual patterns of perceiving reality and open up to new possibilities. I imagine the possibilities of transformation are endless when we set out on the journey of expanding our awareness and ability to notice more. When we change our perception we cha...

  Peter Kingsley is a professor in philosophy at Cambridge. His research interest is the presocratic thinkers, first and foremost Empedocles and Parmenides.  Something I love about Kingsley is that he is an acknowledged academic researcher from one of the highest ranked universities in the world, and at the same time he publishes books which are unacceptable in a scientific perspective. They probably have made him an outcast in the academic world. Kingsley is a mystic, and his perspectives are not rational, they represent a break with mainstream consensus culture, or what Kingsley calls ‘the myth of rationality’. His views may be seen as madness, but from Kingsley’s point of view, the mainstream normality is the madness.     His most important book in recent years is Catafalque.   Carl Jung and the end of humanity. It’s a dark book. Kingsley argues that western culture is dead, and because western culture is so dominant in the world, this means the end o...

  Mysterium Conjunctionis  is the last great work of Carl Jung, which he finished in his eightieth year. The book gives a final account of his research into alchemy, and is in many ways a summing up of his thought world. The subtitle shows the point of the book: An inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy. Examples of such opposites in the book are the king and the queen, Adam and Eve, the sun and the moon. Other universal opposites are thought and emotion, mind and body, culture and nature. The process of synthesis of the opposites in alchemy may be symbolically understood as the process of psychic integration, ie. connecting with the parts of the psyche which has been split apart because of social adjustment, trauma or other experiences. Integration includes according to Jung both the individual and collective unconscious, and implies connecting with our wholeness, becoming whole. To Jung, alchemy is a tradition which originated in Egypt, ...

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum  writes in her wonderful book   The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy  about  how to understand a central dilemma in the human condition: "the intermingling of what is ours and what belongs to the world, of ambition and vulnerability, of making and being made".  Her view on this dilemma is a critique of a traditional emphasis in ethics on human beings as rational, autonomous and free, and a pointing to the beauty and importance of other aspects of human life. We are more than rational agents, we are deeply dependent vulnerable embodied beings: “a lot about us is messy, needy, uncontrolled, rooted in the dirt and standing helplessly in the rain”. Human beings are nature, a part of nature and not something entirely different. This is constituent of our beauty: "Part of the peculiar beauty of human excellence is its vulnerability. (...) Human excellence is something whose very nature it is ...

This blog is about practices and perspectives that may expand awareness and increase ability to connect with, and be guided by, aliveness. My theoretical focus is ethics, philosophy, spirituality and depth psychology. I have a ph.d. in ethics ( Den gode profesjonelle : profesjonsetikk for advokater og barnevernsarbeidere (uio.no)  and my professional work is within higher education and research. I am interested in embodied practices which cultivate presence and mindfulness, like meditation and yoga, I am a certified facilitator of group-meditation ( Transformational Connection ) and certified Relateful Coach, working at  Connect. Grow. Thrive. (relateful.com) , and a student of energywork and Rosen Method Bodywork  Rosen Method School | Rosen Method: The Berkeley Center . In these practices we are guided by what brings more aliveness - by what gives more space for the authentic expression in the present moment. Aliveness in this context is understood as a break with habit...