Lil JaXe's story is an amazing example of how to heal the voice. To overcome his stuttering, this Canadian boy from Toronto found a new form in which his voice mattered. Years of speech therapy did not work. He is now a popular rap artist whose voice is heard and appreciated by thousands!

FINDING OUR VOICE

Beloveds: Finding our voice is an all-quadrant-all-lines experience because we work through our personal issues, our relationship with - and in - society, our unique cultural expression, and we make contact with our spiritual source. This psychological principle is embodied in the video clip of Bobby McFerrin doing his magic - see the video bar! In addition to the four quadrants of self psychology, social psychology, cultural psychology and transpersonal psychology, my model of integral psychology adds the central fountain of Salsabil (from the Gardens of Paradise), otherwise known in diverse traditions as Sophia, the Immaculate Mary, Quan Yin, the White Tara or what I call the Imaginal Eve. It is the embodied feminine principle that connects and flows through all the four quadrants with Wisdom, Grace and Compassion. Love, light and shadow, Jalaledin

INTEGRAL PSYCHOTHERAPY

This blog is a re-invention of the Quantum One Life Coaching blog, occasioned by my licensure as a psychotherapist in the state of California and the completion of my doctorate in Depth Psychology with an emphasis in Psychotherapy. I defended my doctoral dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute on August 13, 2012. Henceforth, as a licensed psychotherapist, I will not be using the language of Quantum life coaching per se, even though coaching is very much an aspect of Integral Psychotherapy.

Another look at the Law of Attraction

Beloveds:

Interesting video on the Law of Attraction:

http://www.habitofattraction.com/?ref=313

CRISIS AS INITIATION

As I am in the midst of making some major life decisions, I thought this excerpt from Joan Borysenko's book "Fire in the Soul" might inspire us all to look at our crises as initiations:

"What a difference it would make if a person in the throes of a life crisis were called, as in the Ndembu tongue, a mwadi - an initiate - and then skilfully led to a rebirth. Instead our psychological initiates are often labeled neurotic, psychotic, addictive or character-disordered, labels that create helplessness and low self-esteem. These labels reinforce the fearful story that we are damaged and less than whole, a belief that prevents accessing the First Stories of initiation that the universe provides to help us move out of liminality into rebirth.

Some of the power of twelve-step recovery programs comes from the context in which addiction is placed - the new stories that Bill W. created that echoed the truth of the First Stories. In anonymous programs, addictions are transitions between a life where the person was out of touch with a High Power and one in which the reality of that Power becomes not only the force for recovery but also a renewal of the meaning of life. Addiction as a mwadi experience, for those who are willing to see it in that light, creates a context of excitement, empowerment and even gratitude for the addiction as a conduit to a new, more self-aware and fulfilling role.

Psychological problems and addiction are not the only challenging life-events where context effects outcome. Psychiatrist Victor Frankl, in his moving book Man's Search for Meaning, talks about life in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust. In those most terrible of times some people succumbed to the inevitable epidemics that swept the camp, dying before the brutality of the Nazis and the fire o the ovens could consume them. Others, those who were able to find some meaning in their suffering, were more likely to hold onto life. Frankl himself survived four death camps before liberation, and it was in those camps that he conceived of logotherapy, a system of psychological growth and healing based on the apprehension of meaning.

Frankl and others like him created ritual out of horror, growth out of destruction, by choosing to believe that there was some transcendent meaning to their suffering. When we set our sights on a higher meaning, we automatically cast ourselves in the role of a dweller at the threshold, an initiate in a Great Story. We are not powerless, trapped or worthless. We are passing through the fire on the way to a purification of sufficient value that our suffering becomes worthwhile when weighed against it. Part of the value of suffering and dwelling at the threshold is that it initiates or intensifies the search for what is most sacred, for only in placing our minds on the promise of that sacredness can we emerge from the liminal period not only intact but healed.

The late American psychologist Abraham Maslow spoke of the deep need to find in our lives not only personal meaning, but transpersonal or spiritual meaning. A need is like a biological drive, an instinct. It's part of the genes, part of the racial memories that form the collective unconscious that all people share. When a biological drive is thwarted the organism suffers in some way. The particular kind of suffering that accompanies a thwarted drive for transpersonal meaning is a feeling of emptiness, of meaninglessness about life that can progress to depression if the need is not attended to." (1993, pp. 57-58)

~Excerpted from "Fire in the Soul - A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism" by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D

Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks, the renowned neurologist, was on NOVA's program "Musical Minds" today talking about the impact of music on the brain. He writes about some of his research in his book "Musicophilia":

"A Bolt from the Blue:
Sudden Musicophilia

Tony Cicoria was forty two, very fit and robust, a former college football player who had become a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York. He was at a lakeside pavilion for a family gathering one fall afternoon. It was pleasant and breezy, but he noticed a few storm clouds in the distance; it looked like rain.

He went to a pay phone outside the pavilion to make a quick call to his mother (this was in 1994, before the age of cell phones). He still remembers every single second of what happened next: "I was talking to my mother on the phone. There was a little bit of rain, thunder in the distance. My mother hung up. The phone was a foot away from where I was standing when I got struck. I remember a flash of light coming out of the phone. It hit me in the face. Next thing I remember, I was flying backwards."

Then - he seemed to hesitate before telling me this - "I was flying forwards. Bewildered, I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, 'Oh shit, I'm dead.' I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman - she had been standing waiting to use the phone right behind me - position herself over my body, give it CPR...I floated up the stairs - my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be okay. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light....an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. No emotion associated with these...pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the percveption of accelerating, being drawn up...there was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, 'This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had' - SLAM! I was back."

Dr. Cicoria knew he was back in his own body because he had pain - pain from the burns on his face and his left foot, where the electrical charge had entered and exited his body - and , he realized, "only bodies have pain." He wanted to go back, he wanted to tell the woman to stop giving him CPR, to let him go; but it was too late - he was firmly back among the living. After a minute or two, when he could speak, he said, "It's okay - I'm a doctor!" The woman (she turned out to be an intensive-care-unit nurse) replied," A few minutes ago, you weren't."

The police came and wanted to call and ambulance, but Cicoria refused, delirious. They took him home instead ("it seemed to take hours"), where he called his own doctor, a cardiologist. The cardiologist, when he saw him, thought Cicoria must have had a brief cardiac arrest, but could find nothing amiss with examination or EKG. "With these things, you're alive or dead," the cardiologist remarked. He did not feel that Dr. Cicoria would suffer any further consequences of this bizarre accident.

Cicoria also consulted a neurologist - he was feeling sluggish (most unusual for him) and having some difficulties with his memory. He found himself forgetting the names of people he knew well. He was examined neurologically, had an EEG and an MRI. Again, nothing seemed amiss.

A couple of weeks later, when his energy returned, Dr. Cicoria went back to work. There were still some lingering memory problems - he occasionally forgot the names of rare diseases or surgical procedures - but all his surgical skills were unimpaired. In another two weeks, his memory problems disappeared, and that, he thought, was the end of the matter.

What then happened still fills Cicoria with amazement, even now, a dozen years later. Life had returned to normal, seemingly, when "suddenly, over two or three days, there was this insatiable desire to listen to piano music." This was completely out of keeping with anything in the past. He had had a few piano lessons as a boy, he said, "but no real interest." He did not have a piano in his house. What music he did listen to tended to be rock music.

With this sudden onset of craving for piano music, he began to buy recordings and became especially enamored of a Vladimir Ashkenazy recording of Chopin favorites - The Military Polonaise, the Winter Wind Etude, the Black Key Etude, the A-flat Polonaise, the B-flat Minor Scherzo. "I loved them all," Cicoria said. "I had the desire to play them. I ordered all the sheet music. At this point, one of our babysitters asked if she could store her piano in our house - so now, just when I craved one, a piano arrived, a nice little upright. It suited me fine. I could hardly read the music, could barely play, but I started to teach myself." It had been more than thirty years since the few piano lessons of his boyhood, and his fingers seemed stiff and awkward.

And then, on the heels of this sudden desire for piano music, Cicoria started to hear music in his head. "The first time," he said, "it was in a dream. I was in a tux, onstage; I was playing something I had written. I woke up, startled, and the music was still in my head. I jumped out of bed, started trying to write down as much as I could remember. But I hardly knew how to notate what I heard." This was not too successful - he had never tried to write or notate music before. But whenever he sat down at the piano to work on the Chopin, his own music "would come and take me over. It had a very powerful presence."

I was not quite sure what to make of this peremptory music which would intrude almost irresistibly and overwhelm him. Was he having musical hallucinations? No, Dr. Cicoria said, they were not hallucinations - "inspiration" was a more apt word. The music was there, deep inside him - or somewhere - and all he had to do was let it come to him. "Its like a frequency, a radio band. If I open myself up, it comes. I want to say, 'It comes from heaven,' as Mozart said."

Now he had to wrestle not just with learning to play the Chopin, but to give form to the music continually running in his head, to try it on the piano, to get it on manuscript paper. "it was a terrible struggle," he said. "I would get up at four in the morning and play till I went to work, and when I got home from work I was at the piano all evening. My wife was not really pleased. I was possessed."

~ Excerpted from "Musicophilia - Tales of Music and the Brain" by Oliver Sacks.

Why should I listen to Simon Sinek?

Why you should listen to him: With an undergraduate degree in anthropology, most of Simon Sinek’s career has been spent in advertising. Although he began law school in London, he shortly left the program, moving to New York where he joined Euro RSCG, with a stint at Ogilvy & Mather, working on accounts for Oppenheimer Funds, MCI, NASDAQ and DISH Network. In 2002, he started his own company, Sinek Partners. His book, Start With Why, outlines the basis of his current work in leadership consulting.

Sinek also contributes to several efforts in the non-profit sphere: He works with Count Me In, an organization created to help one million women-run businesses reach a million dollars in revenue by 2012, and serves on the Board of Directors for Danspace Project, which advances art and dance. He writes and comments regularly for several major publications and teaches a graduate-level class in strategic communications at Columbia University.


"As an ethnographer, we are in search of why but we actually ask what."
Simon Sinek