Contents:
I arrived at each workshop and started dreaming in the same way the women in this book dream. I needed help to disentangle the threads of my own personal history and interpretations. In that way the cultural barriers crumbled down.
Such constraints were perhaps made intolerable by the social mores of her culture so that Wolff's situation mirrored Antigone's choice of death in order to honor the kinship relationship as essential to the very meaning of Greek social ideals. Connections with physics, eco-feminism, and other evolving theories will be noted, yet the group conversation will keep returning to how Wolff's model can be applied in individuals' lives—without regard to your gender or previous knowledge of any type model. Both Jung and Wolff made major contributions to the broad field of theories about adult development. Revelations keep the embers burning for future generations. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. She Moves in Circles is the voice of women who have been gathered at a symphony.
During this process, Rachel included Mother Earth, the ecosystem. At moments her insistence bored or annoyed me. After reading the book, I discovered links that Rachel made clear during our gatherings. It is not only a matter of a change of contents but of a transformation of the way we produce, share and devise knowledge. To be able to think in a different way it is necessary to change our way of living.
To establish a different relationship with knowledge is not only a mere theoretical change, but a radical transformation of our ways of being that includes our own practices, our ties, our beliefs, our affections, our ways to relate to each other. If consciousness is an invitation to pursue an ethical analysis, such a pursuit requires a commitment to the rights of all life forms.
This commitment is central to how the School of Ecofeminist Spirituality and Ethics understood an issue of our day: We then experimented in experiencing the energy fields which everyone lives in-- the mother, the amazon, the heteara, the medium. Wondering how could I show here a tiny part of the mystery in which we all are and live, I made moebius bands which I will pass around for you to play with in your own hands.
Wolff's critical idea is that genuine maturity is in the complementary capacity to relate to the personal and to the impersonal, neither personalizing what is essentially impersonal nor objectifying what is personal. A self generated by experience of this flow is a self aware of disavowed and devious aspects of one's nature as well as one's strength and creativity. In this flow subject-object consciousness transforms into a subject-subject recognition of alterity. To let go of the illusion of having a complete knowledge is the key to be able to access the shaky, active and multidimensional landscapes of complexity.
But letting go of the privileges and certitudes which organize modern life it is not something that you can decide in your mind nor be able to do alone. It is as such because knowledge has always been something collective, historical and belonging to a place.
Knowledge has always been built up through practices, institutions, bonding and loving styles, technologies and languages which design an intricate networking. She Moves in Circles is the voice of women who have been gathered at a symphony. It is a book which carries a message traveling from centuries in the memory of our ancestors. Now the ancestors want to reveal the message to us so that we women enrich our knowledge and know that we exist as individuals in recorded history. The author presents us with a journey through myth, symbol, dreams, memories--a richness of contents, -the same contents we need to absorb and digest little by little so nothing goes to waste.
It is a book for women who are looking for their identity in this second decade of the twenty first century. These are considerations often transmitted in an environment of secrecy and concealment, an environment which has not recognized women's worth. This transmission is possibly done with the fear of losing the power of social traditions supported by men secure at the peak of the patriarchal pyramid. The book is organized in four parts, each rigorous in attaining content clarity. A searching woman aware of her own rich full experiences will find in this book a guide to her life.
Narrated perceptions trace the challenge to help us think in circles, to let go of the linear and logical way of thinking, to learn how to interact in a dynamic way. The writer pushes us to vibrate in between lines so that we become part of the flow allowing us to understand reality from different dimensions. Suddenly it is no longer the poet, nor the author, but ourselves going deeper and integrating us to the movements of the spiral, to the plot. She sweeps away the doubt of centuries of emptiness, opening us to the realization of a concealed truth.
This part of the book is populated by women who are therapists including the author. Each one has her own name and a descriptive word which eventually helps us find them inside the narration. The therapists remember their own experiences and make their own journeys visible. It seems that nothing is at random, they weave around interchangeable situations which show up in their personal lives along with everything they perceive when accompanying other women in therapy.
Rachel is also a pioneer when listening to the voices of the women of this second decade of this century. Within our diverse cultural contexts, she has been able to read the social codices and perceive our urgency to find answers which can help us identify with our real femaleness and our being as democratic citizens. By deepening into the insights that psychology offers us, we can reach a deeper knowledge of our interior life and its potential. We recognize a wider world of wisdom, one where personal truth allows for a better life and health for women.
By learning to dream we open our perception, we reconnect with the reality around us where we find sounds, colors, aromas and flavors, where there is a palpable reality, where our personal dream becomes a communal dream when we share it and when we listen without judgments.
Dreams show us possibilities we are unaware of. We are invited to dive into the dream world, to get in contact with elements that may seem surreal but which our memory keeps there for a reason, experiences which we need to re-think to get the bigger puzzle, the pieces that we need in our conscious lives to enrich our imagination and creativity, letting go of fixed ways to see and organize ourselves.
This section of the book helps us to appropriate the power of our dreams and our intuition which enrich our feminine wisdom. Here there is a tribute to women embodying mercy in the world, helping the disenfranchised, the dying, trying to resolve social chaos and to reduce the destruction of our planet. It recreates and multiplies possibilities for relationship among women, having the circular as our main focus when we think, dance, and interchange, and when looking at Mother Earth and her cycles for inspiration.
This book becomes something unfinished in the hands of the reader. One needs to come back to it to read between the lines. One is searching for a hidden treasure. If I could use a metaphor to refer to this text, I would say it is like an overflowing glass, one recycling itself in a transformative way for whoever drinks from it. It challenges just one way of looking at life and seduces us to advance in our growth without resisting the changes.
We are invited to enter into a permanent evolution of our consciousness, the perception we have of ourselves, the cosmos, and our own image of a circular relationships moving around in depth and vastness, so that each time we become more aware of the great circle. This book is not one more among many.
It is a text that opens the door for an interdisciplinary interchange. Revelations keep the embers burning for future generations. We are not islands. The whole universe interacts in a synchronized way and we are part of it. The proposal is to heal relationships, our fragmented relationship with both nature and humans. We are called to bring to life our dreams so that new social and cultural forms may emerge.
Such forms integrate respect, diversity, new discoveries about the sacred, ways to know our dreams as parts of ourselves, parts we need to pay attention to every day. The deep pleasure one finds by reading this book takes us to our origins, so that we can reimagine who we are and where we come from; it gives us new ways of looking at ourselves. It allows us to feel that we are not alone but that we are a circle.
Then, Life transformed Us. And, in Rachel's words: Again, a philosopher responds and in the words of Denise: Part 2 This part of the book is populated by women who are therapists including the author. Part 3 By deepening into the insights that psychology offers us, we can reach a deeper knowledge of our interior life and its potential. Part 4 Running Back in All Things Here there is a tribute to women embodying mercy in the world, helping the disenfranchised, the dying, trying to resolve social chaos and to reduce the destruction of our planet.
But there are differences between Jung's and Wolff's models. Jung distinguishes ways of perceiving and judging, Wolff distinguishes ways of relating. In Wolff's Relational Model some types focus on the individual or the group, some focus on the personal or the impersonal. It's an added aspect that differentiates how we can recognize different types.
Fitzgerald and Wolff had similar experiences as psychotherapists. Each found that their clients came to them primarily with concerns that could be called relational. They also found that Jung's model did not adequately account for this aspect of clients' lives. Wolff placed the relational aspect at the center of her typology.
Our speaker has taken Wolff's model one step further. Fitzgerald suggests the possibility that the relational archetype containing all relational forms is itself evoking and changing. This food for thought, and interactive discussion, about Wolff's feminine perspectives is served up and facilitated by Rachel Fitzgerald. As a participant, you will choose a "blind" or random image when you enter the workshop. During the session, you will have the opportunity to consider how the image relates to you.