Our Advanced group November weekend was rich and vibrant! We began our weekend with question of inquiry,
‘What is our own personal and direct experience of being-well?
‘What does TA offer us to understand and support the inborn striving for vitality, life and health in ourselves and those we work with?’
On the Saturday we focused our attention on the human-to-human encounter and experience of being-well (in body, mind, soul and spirit).
‘whereas spirit refers to that aspect of us that connects to something outside of us, soul refers to the animate life within us, the seat of our senses, desires, affections and appetites’
(Tudor, 2019)
We headed into the busyness of the centre of Sefton Park to be amongst lots of people to reflect upon and then share/discuss what the 4 cornerstones of TA theory and practice (ego states, transactions, script and games) offer our inquiry into being-well.
What came alive in our discussion was how ego-states, transactions, script and games offers us many ways of understanding and supporting health not just treating illness and pathology. We explored how TA has shifted its focus away from the questions, ‘What is wrong? How do we fix it?’ to invite us to ask how we can make meaning of our experiences (past and present) and imaginatively co-create different realities, meanings, narratives and relational possibilities which enhance our life experiences.
‘The notion of fluidity in growth (and personality) and a movement from fixity (and rigidity) to one of fluidity, at which point a person becomes a unity of flow, of motion…he has become an integrated process of changingness’
On the Sunday we expanded our exploration to include the more-than-human and natural world. We travelled out to some ancient woodland in South Liverpool – Childwall Woods. As you can see from the photos the woods was a magical place for our learning!
Our question of inquiry was:
What happens to the 4 cornerstones of TA (ego states, transactions, script and games) in relation to being-well and health when we include the more-than-human and natural world?
What new possibilities arise and open up from the more-than-human?
What came alive amongst us was all that the more-than-human offers ego states, script, transactions and games to understand and support the inborn striving for vitality, life and health in body, mind, soul and spirit.
‘…… our sense of I is far more porous to the world than our existing theory would indicate, and so I think that the ecological development of ego state theory calls for what I am naming an outrapsychic theory (Marshall, 2021).
This is a theory that allows for a sense of ‘I-ness’ that is also located beyond the skin of a person; a watery realm where inside and outside are at times less clearly defined. It incorporates the world of what I’m calling the ecological implicit.
This is our nonconscious way of embedding in the world through the sensory’
(Marshall, 2021).