Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Life Enhancement via “Self Rev”
I have a friend in Oakland, California, named Sheila Rubin, who leads workshops on how to do “Self-Revelatory Theatre.” (This approach to my knowledge was first written about in the mid-1990s by another friend, Renee Emunah, and mentioned in her book, Acting for Real.) This is good stuff, but the appeal so far has been […]
Posted in Play and Spontaneity, Psychodrama, Psychology | No Comments
Metaphysical Explanations
(With a drawing at the end as an example.) I’ve begun a new art form that mixes drawing and prose. Through this synthesis I attempt to explicate my version of how the cosmos is in an ongoing creative process. It’s poetic, not to be taken literally. I seriously doubt that language as it operates today […]
Posted in Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts), Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing, World of Almost-Real | No Comments
Problems With Psychotherapy
Considering the challenges of counseling, let’s also consider the idea that there may be not just differences in the severity of illness, but rather different types of illnesses, as different as conditions caused by vitamin deficiencies and conditions caused by infectious agents (as I discuss on a webpage about the history of medicine.) So let’s […]
Posted in Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments
Contemplating Compassion
This morning I awoke with a couple of dream fragments that felt significant enough to get me to reflect on them. 1. I had to go uptown a mile or so and somehow annoyed my wife so that she was cross with me. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. 2. […]
Posted in Autobiographical | No Comments
Free Spirits Playing
Here’s what I mean: These are indeed free spirits—or that’s what we might call them. Or their technical species name is vibratium transcendentum. They are playing, frolicking, even, messing around. They vibrate! You can almost hear their giggles. This is going on in the cosmos. We can participate too, with a certain knack for second […]
Posted in Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts), Foolin Around, Zordak's Journal | No Comments
The Experience of Vitality
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the noted pioneer of contemporary views of mythology, wrote: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will […]
Posted in Psychological Literacy, Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
Applied Improvisation Berlin Conference
The Applied Improvisation Network is meeting in Berlin soon. The schedule of events suggests some of the meaty things they’re talking about. Note that the concepts of enactment, improvisation, and creative collaboration are being carried on with vigorously by thousands of professionals internationally. Most are theatre comedy improvisers seeking other sources of income and draw […]
Posted in Play and Spontaneity, Psychodrama | No Comments
A Fuzzy Tale
One of my favorite anecdotes is “A Fuzzy Tale,” written by Dr. Claude Steiner, an advocate for Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis (in the 1970s). Part of that theory overlaps with how I think about things and vivifies Berne’s theory of giving and getting “strokes.” This is a wonderful story, first written in the 1970s, about […]
Posted in Psychological Literacy, Social-Depth Psychology (Sociometry) | No Comments
My Way or Thy Way?
Reading a recently published autobiography by Paul Anka, “My Way” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), I was taken by his description of Frank Sinatra, for whom Anka wrote the hit song, “My Way” in 1969. Sinatra had his ups and downs and was both a bigger-than-life character who had indeed lived a life that’s […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Book Reviews | No Comments
What We Don’t Know
Truly, of all the happenings in the vastness of the cosmos, what we know is almost infinitesimally tiny. So as a friend asked herself, “How can I teach when I don’t know?” I responded, “I too know (on this scale) next to nothing. Courage! On another scale, most people don’t have the tools to see […]
Posted in Mind-Spectrums, Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments