The current study investigated the effects of an 8-week mindfulness-based substance use intervention on self-reported impulsiveness, perceived drug risk, and healthy self-regulation in a sample of 60 incarcerated youth. Forty-eight participants completed questionnaires pre and post intervention. Additionally, 16 participants from two of the final 8-week cohorts were interviewed in focus groups...
The greatest contemporary challenge in the arena of cognitive neuroscience concerns the relation between consciousness and the brain. Over recent years the focus of work in this area has switched from the analysis of diverse spatial regions of the brain to that of the timing of neural events. It appears that two conditions are necessary in order for neural events to become correlated with...
This study investigated the experiences gained from a 20-minute shamanic-like drumming session. Twenty-two persons participated and made written descriptions afterwards about their experiences. A phenomenological analysis was applied which generated 31 categories, that were organized into six themes: 1) The undertaking of the drumming journey, 2) Perceptual phenomena: visual, auditory and...
This article presents a model of lifespan development based upon the tantric chakra system. It begins with a survey of the evolution of transpersonal psychology and its alignment with eastern philosophies as previously espoused by William James, Carl Jung and others. The chakras are defined in relation to their potential influence on psychological functioning with a focus on development beyond...
The Wheel of the Year is a name used to describe the cyclical progression of the seasons through time and most often described as part of Pagan, Goddess, and women’s spirituality and/or Wiccan magical traditions. This article introduces the author’s conceptual model of the Wheel of the Year as an earth-based psychology for women, one that is inherently feminist and also based in transpersonal...
This paper presents a preliminary description of A Transpersonal Feminist Approach to Family Systems (ATFAFS) as taught at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP) between 1995 and 2002.In this approach, students studied the principles of Murray Bowen's family systems theory with attention to feminist revisions of the theory while simultaneously investigating their own multigenerational...
This chapter focuses on exploring various models of spiritual development. It first addresses philosophical dilemmas underpinning the concept of spiritual development by questioning whether these can be addressed without metaphysical assumptions embedded in religious worldviews and thus understood in any consensual way across different historical and cultural contexts. Traditional models of...
Cosmological hybridization, a process in which spiritual paradises are bound together, is highly active in American religious culture. Beginning with an early Christianized version of the Buddha, this religious Creolization gathered speed after WWII and peaked during the Vietnam War, leading to a complex spiritual revolution in which transcendence became an all important orientation. This...
The aim of this paper is to tease out from the New Age religion and religious transpersonal psychology a more relational spirituality. Humanistic and transpersonal psychologies were important forces in the emergence of the social phenomenon of the New Age. New Age transpersonalism leans toward a restrictive non-relational spirituality because of its historical affirmation of individualism and...
Although transpersonal psychologies of self realization emphasize individual development, earlier shamanic traditions also showed a central societal aspect and group based consciousness. Indeed, many have understood the transpersonal movement as developing towards an abstract globalized neo-shamanism. That altered states of consciousness, whether as integrative realizations of the numinous or...
In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the...
This paper gives continuity to the criticism, undertaken in two papers previously published in this journal, of transpersonal systems that fail to discriminate between nirvanic, samsaric, and neithernirvanic- nor-samsaric transpersonal states, and which present the absolute sanity of Awakening as a dualistic, conceptually-tainted condition. It also gives continuity to the denunciation of the...
A four-factor model of spiritual intelligence is first proposed. Supportive evidence is reviewed for the capacities of critical existential thinking, personal meaning production, transcendental awareness, and conscious state expansion. Based on this model, a 24-item self-report measure was developed and modified across two consecutive studies (N = 619 and N = 304, respectively). The final...
Though the relation of spirituality to self has long been recognized in established spiritual and religious systems, serious scientific interest in spirituality and its relation to identity has only started to grow in the past 20 years. This paper overviews the literature on spirituality and identity. Particular attention is given to describing and critiquing conventional and transpersonal...
This interview with Antonio A. Arantes, Brazilian anthropology professor and recognized specialist on the topics of intellectual property and traditional knowledge, addresses the 2008 request by Brazilian ayahuasca groups to be recognized as part of the immaterial cultural heritage of Brazil. In the first portion of the interview, Arantes reflects on the challenges of the new conceptions of the...
Recollections of humanistic and transpersonal psychology’s origin’s morph into the pros and cons of humanistic/transpersonal oriented schools developing APA accredited clinical programs. This discussion dovetails with the question will ATP ever become an APA division, raising an interesting alternative for those of us considering a career in counseling: becoming a spiritual coach. Enter the...
Recollections of humanistic and transpersonal psychology's origin's morph into the pros and cons of humanistic/transpersonal oriented schools developing APA accredited clinical programs.This discussion dovetails with the question will ATP ever become an APA division, raising an interesting alternative for those of us considering a career in counseling: becoming a spiritual coach.Enter the issue...
This paper explores the experience of a silent meditation retreat from the perspective of a novice practitioner.The 7-day Scientist Meditation Retreat was held at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.It was intended to provide meditation researchers an intensive silent retreat experience.The author shares his reflections throughout the retreat and concludes with some of the...
The International Transpersonal Association (ITA) was formed in 1978 for the purposes\nof promoting education and research in transpersonal subjects, as well as sponsoring\nglobal conferences for the international transpersonal community. The association was\nsubsequently dissolved in 2004, but is now in the process of being reactivated and revitalized.\nAs background for this development, this...
This essay discusses the meaning of embodied spirituality—based on the integration of all\nhuman attributes, including the body and sexuality—and contrasts it with the disembodied\nspirituality—based on dissociation and/or sublimation—prevailing in human religious\nhistory. It then describes what it means to approach the body as a living partner with which\nto co-create one’s spiritual life,...
The International Transpersonal Association (ITA) was formed in 1978 for the purposes of promoting education and research in transpersonal subjects, as well as sponsoring global conferences for the international transpersonal community.The association was subsequently dissolved in 2004, but is now in the process of being reactivated and revitalized.As background for this development, this paper...
Attempts to elucidate the kinds of "thing" or "things" to which the term shamanic journeying image is referentially linked must grapple with two related questions: what is the fundamental nature of shamanic journeying images, and how might the origin of a shamanic journeying image be found? The first question is ontological, concerned with the nature and essence of shamanic journeying images....
Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic commonly used by US physicians, has recently been shown to be a powerful anti-depressant and is also capable of eliciting transpersonal experiences that can be transformative. Although currently approved in the US only for use as an anesthetic, physicians there can legally prescribe it off-label to treat various psychological/ psychiatric problems and it has...
Block (2002) has argued that the multiplicity of meanings ascribed to consciousness is due\nto the erroneous treatment of very different concepts as a single concept. Block distinguished\nfour notions of consciousness intended to encapsulate the various meanings attributed to\nthe term: phenomenal, access, self, and monitoring consciousness. We argue that what is\ncommon to all of these...