Hello!

Welcome to The Embryological Foundations of Personality and Character. This is a 4-part course offered on Mondays, July 19, 26, August 2 and 9, 2021 at noon Eastern time. We would like to invite you into an inquiry and exploration of a central human question: 

How exactly do we form ourselves to meet the challenges and opportunities life presents us in skillful and satisfying ways?

What we are calling “forming ourselves” begins with conception and gestation as an involuntary, pre-programmed organizing and ordering process. This fundamental construction of the body will then incorporate family and social input, the various experiences life brings us, and our voluntary choices, decisions and actions into a functional – or dysfunctional – form. Thus our form incorporates our genetics and epigenetics, family and cultural forms, and personal history and personal choice.

Our inquiry method begins by appreciating that the body itself is an action pattern, a behavior, which generates feeling, sensation, emotion, and cognition as feedback to enable ever more effective strategies for survival and growth. This fundamental action starts with pulsation, builds to instinctual and reflex body responses, to reach its fulfillment in voluntary and nuanced motor activity.

From this basic principle, we learn how to direct and manage the body’s arousal and excitation into activities that express our shared humanity – from nurturing self and others, to establishing satisfying work and relationships, to build effective problem-solving skills, and to creating personal and individualized behaviors that express and match our own constitutional type.

We will engage this formative conversation from a number of perspectives, including the Formative Psychology of Stanley Keleman, the Polarity Therapy of Dr. Randolph Stone, the Craniosacral Biodynamics of Franklyn Sills, the Pre- and Perinatal work of Ray Castellino, and other somatic and energetic orientations.

See you soon!

Kate and Jim