Psychological Services
Exciting new series on Psychology starting on March 21st, 2026. More information coming soon about how to register (in the meantime, questions are welcomed)!
For inquiries, questions, and/or to register, please be in touch with elizabeth.lyell@feminenza.org. Or you can use the following Zeffy link to sign on…
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/inside-to-outside-new-entries-into-psychology
If you wish to register for this exciting new series, offering new insights, understandings, and tools for psychological renewal, please use the following link (note: early bird discount (20% off) is now available until September 17th)…
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/inside-to-outside-new-light-on-psychology
We live in an ocean of Psychology. Every move we make creates ‘psychologies’…that is, psychological sequences formed via the way and style of our at-the-point responses to life, at all levels of our being. We cannot not create these (i.e., we have to respond as we make acquaintance with life), and they (our responses to life overall) serve as the foundation for our next encounter with life. Another way of saying this – we grow our intelligence as we live, day by day, minute by minute, and we meet the future with whatever intelligence (and/or bias) we’ve gathered to date…
The question is, do we know, track and regularly update our ‘psychologies’? or do our past reactions and responses to life, whether ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘indifferent’, direct our future feelings, thoughts, and actions (thereby diverting ‘possible future’ into status quo)?
If you are wondering about your own psychologies, where they came/come from and what you can do about it, if you are wondering about Psychology in general, check out this new series offering New Light on all of the above…!
Check out Feminenza’s international work at www.feminenza.org.
First steps into creating new ground…
What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to grow into being human? Isn’t our human-ness all there to begin with? In a word, no.
Being on a journey of exploration regarding what it means to be human is part of what it means to be human! to be always searching for ways to live that are more true to who and what a human actually is and can be. The human form and faculties are truly amazing, the potential of which is beyond full comprehension. The question for me as an individual human is, what do I apply this form and these faculties to? Further questions follow, e.g., what are my pursuits in life, and are they intentional, i.e., consciously chosen? are my intentions kind, generous, decent…? do I realize and accept the fact that there is a natural learning curve as I live? and do I stop to consider – a curve towards what? To open up such matters, it is essential to look more closely at psychology, asking what is it and how does it work? And further to ask, are my psychologies automatic or chosen, do I know, and what difference does it make?
More to come…! And comments are welcomed.
Exploring Psychology in new ways involves looking with new eyes at what it means to be alive…
What often comes with the word “psychology” is a sense of challenge or difficulty, often pain, struggle, and fears that something is wrong. The more effective (and interesting) route is to grow our curiosity about how psychology works in us and around us. What story does it tell about how we’ve been affected by our experiences in life so far? What new stories (psychologies) might we want to create into the future that could help us move closer to who we are and want to be? As we meet life, are we mostly coming from the automatic inner printings? or are we forming ourselves anew each day, based in the knowledge that we actually can do so, and developing the passion to act accordingly.
If you are interested in learning more, check out this new series starting March 22, 2025, Inside to Outside: A New Look at Psychology [aka New Eyes on…] – exploring psychology in terms of 3 areas of daily application [see details on flyer below]. To add, early bird registration is available until March 12th!
In case you haven’t thought about it, lately or ever, what we mean by the term “psychology” is a mystery! It’s a handle we humans use without thinking much about what it actually is, in and of itself.
We may know we all are affected by psychology, but what it is and how it operates in us is another thing entirely. We form psychologies, throughout our lives. It’s going on all the time. And for each one of us, the psychologies we create are then under our surveillance and care. To add, while they are not our fault, they are our responsibility. In order to survive in life, we automatically form psychologies. Some are helpful (supporting us in life) and others harmful (blocking our path in some way). The question is, which is which, and how do we look at all of this with new eyes?
It starts with natural curiosity to do with who and what we are, beginning with the fact that we live in a body, on a planet! This means that everything we perceive comes through a sensing apparatus that is built into the earth-suit we are born with or into. And all the psychologies we form as we move through life are created by virtue of what we come in contact with and the way it is processed via the systems of us.
Pretty wild to consider what we would actually see if we had a different kind of body with different sensing equipment, yes? And what then would be the nature of our psychologies?
What does the word “psychology” conjure up for you? What feelings and/or thoughts stir? For many people, what comes up is a sense of challenge or difficulty, often pain, struggle, and fears that something is wrong. Given that our culture generally approaches psychology from the point of view of pathology, trepidation of one kind or another makes sense. But what if we came at things differently? What if we simply got curious about what psychology actually is, what it actually refers to, along with interest in how it works? After all, the root meaning of the word is ‘story or account of the psyche’. What if, by virtue of knowing more, we then found ourselves better able to direct our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and to better understand why we have created the psychologies we have (in an effort to survive)? What then? What would it be like to find ourselves in the driver’s seat of the car, or chariot, that we are?!
If you are interested in learning more, check out this new series starting in February 2025 – Inside to Outside: A New Look at Psychology – offering an intriguing way of seeing psychology as a vast ocean that we/humans dive into at the moment of birth and swim around in all the years of our life, from birth to death!
If you wish to find out more about Feminenza’s work in general, please check the resources link above. And if you have any questions about this series, please be in touch!
The Greek root meaning of the word “educate” is ‘to lead out’. Socrates (via Plato) spoke about learning coming from within, from the soul, saying that an educator’s job was to help a person find the learning already there inside, and to help the person bring it out into the world. In this same vein, Socrates saw himself as “midwife” to the truth. He believed that truth is born from genuine inquiries, questions, and open-ended curiosity about life.
I had the good fortune, many years ago, to be involved with an educational program for young people, Philosophy for Children, through which we helped K-12 children and young people reason about their ideas, thoughts, and beliefs, encouraging both critical and creative thinking skills. The teacher’s role was to facilitate the discussion, opening up questions, asking for reasons, sometimes noting inconsistencies and/or contradictions. It was not to fill young minds with that teacher’s favorite thoughts or answers to the questions being pursued. As result, I got to hear all kinds of ideas being tried out by young minds (which might otherwise not have seen the light of day). Lucky me!
I remember a time of working with a 5th grade class (in a Seattle public school). One day, we were talking about the difference between the mind and the brain. Some thought they were the same. Others thought it wasn’t so simple. After talking about it for awhile, with students offering different views on the subject, one 10 year old boy suddenly said, ‘I’ve got it! it’s like a fish tank!’ ‘Oh reeeally,’ I said, ‘can you tell us more?’ ‘Yes,’ he said with happy confidence, ‘the tank is the brain, the water is the mind, and the fish are the thoughts!’ Okaayy, wow, bingo! We all thought that was pretty cool, and I’ve never forgotten it. To add, another little boy (new to the US, having grown up in India) then quickly countered with, ‘no, no, no, the mind is bigger than the brain…the brain and everything else is inside the mind!’ I never forgot that either.
So what has this got to do with Psychology? Everything!
It seems to me that therapists, counselors, coach-practitioners (like myself) should be trying mostly to help draw things out of/from their client’s deepest core resources, not put things in. Granted this may take some work of clearing away what is clouding the issue and/or no longer useful. However, the basic point is, each of us is unique and while we all need support, help, and at times removal of accumulated debris, no one knows us better than we know ourselves! It’s just that most of us have never been encouraged to tune into this self-knowing potential. From day one, we are filled up by everything and everyone else, so much so that we often lose track of how to start again to locate what is inside us, our most intimate and enduring depths, faithfully waiting. I guarantee, we knew something about this as children, we just didn’t always know we knew!
So, here’s to the containment of tanks, the flow of water, and the variety of fish within all of us (and all within Brahman containing the all and everything of everything that ever was)!
Why do we repeat certain psychological themes as we live…patterns, habits, repetitive ‘memes’, sequences, ways of doing things that come to be our ‘reality’, helping us to feel comforted and/or stabilized? In general, we tend to attract to ourselves more of our “favorite” thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’. We spend much of our time circling around these “favorites” in mostly unconscious ways. The question is what attracts such themes to us (even in those situations where we are trying to change)?
Carl G Jung wrote volumes on these “strange attractors” (a term from quantum physics), referring to them as “archetypes”. From Latin archetypum and Greek arkhetypon, the word means pattern, model, type, mark, and has been used to refer to the ‘first form or original pattern from which copies are made’ – if Plato comes to mind here, you’re on the right track! While that may give us some location in an abstract way about the nature of patterns recurring generally, it doesn’t explain why or how individuals are compelled, sometimes haunted, by specific archetypes.
Before we go there, it’s important to point out that part of Jung’s rupture with Freud was around exactly this, i.e., how to look at what stirs and drives us. For Jung, it had to do not just with sex and death (Freud’s two favorite movers of instinct, emotion, thought, and behavior) but instead, more expansively, with the many different and varied forces moving in the unconscious, both the personal and the “collective” unconscious. As far as the latter goes, Jung believed this larger, more universal cauldron contains memories and ideas inherited from the past, as well as those collectively fermenting in the present. It also, for Jung, holds future possibilities, whether or not picked up on by the human race.
But back to the original question – why do certain specific themes or “strange attractors” live in or nearby to specific individuals, going around and around and around? I’m asking this question with a counsellor’s eye, keeping in mind its range – that is, from unhappy habits (read: addictions) all the way to future visions (read: inspirations). Regarding the former, we might ask, what is to be done about them, how can we break free, and/or how can we make use of them to our advantage rather than just being held hostage to them? Regarding the latter, the questions are more like, what is it, where did it come from, and how can I bring it into fruition, make it real?
In each case, dealing with either ‘the low’ or ‘the high’, there is a strange attractor involved, some kind of seed crystal around which matter/energy gathers, pulling to it more and more material. Unless we understand the way of this – how collections begin, move, grow, influence. sometimes possess us – we will not understand human psychology (or anything else).
[Please see next blog/post for more about this!]
What is it? What IS self-esteem? It is spoken of as sometimes present, sometimes lacking in a person’s basic make-up…but what exactly is it, and why is it so important?
Many people speak of it as a psychological characteristic, one that can be grown and developed, and also one that may shrink under distressing conditions. Often we’re taught to gauge our level of self-esteem in connection with how we believe others see us, treat us, respond to us. However, this is back-to-front, starting at the wrong end. Self-esteem is an internal quality, self-built (or not), and is KEY to determining the degree and extent to which we can be open and available to life. Feeling good about oneself is part of self-esteem. At deeper levels, it is about self-trust. When we feel confident that we can count on ourselves to ‘do right’ by self, others, and life itself, our self-esteem grows.
In this sense, self-esteem is first and foremost a spiritual property. What do I mean by this? I mean that it has to do with depth, and fundamentals. Every time we tell ourselves that it is a good idea to do such-and-such and we follow through, what results is a growth of our self-esteem…the good feeling which now lives between us and us. Likewise, every time, we don’t follow through, every time we blow off the good idea, vision, inspiration, we lose some of our self-esteem. No one else may know about this, but we will. We will feel it somewhere inside and here’s a secret and mystery – all our cells will, too!
And wait, there’s more! As a person builds (or breaks down) self-esteem, they promote an inner environment in which ‘good’ things (e.g., qualities, essences, valuable characteristics and attitudes) can live (or not). In this way, self-esteem is fundamental to a person’s wellbeing and her possibility for growth. It serves as “good soil” to all else a person might want to be and accomplish. This is why is it so important to continuously keep track of, take care of, provide safety and nurturance for, one’s self-esteem.