The Importance of Context
This is not just a story about me, it’s a story about…
This is a story about human potential movement and feminism.
It’s a story about how the human potential movement and feminism stimulated and nurtured my development over time. The story is about openness and awareness in a framework for a different kind of human connection for someone like me.
I know we were not the first wave of transformation, but we were the wave that I experienced and can report on. I will leave it to historians far more knowledgeable and interested to report on the huge shifts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
I know that I was raised to be, and expected to be, a constrained young woman of the 60s, and follow the “go back home and be happy women” post-World War II model described by Betty Frieden in the Feminine Mystique. Jonathan fully expected to be a psychologist, making a modest living, working for an agency and supporting a family. It certainly didn’t turn out that way.
He started it. He was exposed to a weekend of Transactional Analysis and was cured of the procrastination about his dissertation with a single sentence intervention. He got hooked on Transactional Analysis, a new and effective method, growing in California. It was one branch of the budding human potential movement that included Fritz Perls teaching Gestalt therapy, Virginia Satir developing family systems, George Leonard teaching aikido, Yogananda teaching yoga, the Humanistic Psychology Association, holistic health, Radical Psychotherapy, and feminism.
On the East Coast Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine, Jean Houston and Robert Masters experimentation with LSD, the Voices Journal, and throughout the country the anti-Vietnam War movement. At the same time the riots at the Democratic convention in 1968, civil rights movement, and who knows what else, were adding to the mix. It was an incredibly rich time of possibilities.
I guess this is the story of how one person dipped her toe into the ocean and was quickly and willingly swept into the depths and emerged as someone who could still masquerade as a cultural normal but lived her own life in a different dimension.
And like so many others, I made it a part of my life to invite, entice and teach others so that they could join the party. I was hoping they would remove their blinders and escape the cultural trance as I had done. My metaphor was becoming an un-boxed person as was suggested in the voices article, The Unboxed People. We found each other and changed some parts of the world probably igniting the renaissance we live with today.
Readers would be interested to learn an insiders account of the situation because…
So much of our current world has been transformed by the Internet that the history has been forgotten. For 50 years women became complacent about our hard-won rights to manage our own bodies and allowed the current extreme conservative movement to attempt to constrain us again.
Loneliness and isolation are pervasive while movements like marijuana legalization and interest in psychedelics for healing emerge trying to counter these reactions. Coaching has emerged to fill a gap and is rediscovering some of the principles. Coaches love the option to help and connect.
Yet the skills I joyfully acquired in the fabulous mentors I learned from our almost unknown. While new technology like energy therapies including Logosynthesis is developing and is so much more effective, fewer people seem to have the courage to grab the lifelines that are offered.
This is a story of how I grabbed the lifelines and shared them with others. It’s not new and I’m not alone. The fact that I happen to be in the right place and the right time to have these fabulous experiences may give you the courage to say yes to the opportunities that surround you, my readers, now.
I am writing this both for you and for me. I am learning as I write. For me, learning and teaching go hand in hand. One of my hands is in the past and the other goes to the future. I said yes again and again, and I don’t regret it for a moment. My father once told me he regretted only the things he had not done. I have said yes to so many things. When people ask what I planned I can’t answer. Mostly, I simply responded to opportunities.
Bob and Mary Goulding modeled the shift of combining personal and professional lives and not just going to a job. Jon, “It just seemed like thing to do at the time” for us to it too.