During this week we seek to foster a community of inquiry and dialogue where the rigorous demands of clinical practice and the openness of spiritual inquiry can enrich each other. Newcomers are welcome even as the course continues conversations begun over past summers for those who choose to return. We inhabit the territory between the wisdom of spiritual traditions, east and west, and the insights and practices of contemporary psychoanalysis. We will spend some time daily during the course doing actual meditative practice.
Clinicians have a great deal to teach and learn from one another.
We are committed to a course that is encouraging, intellectually stimulating and clinically useful. Our goal is to widen the conversation between spirituality and psychotherapy, not to advance any particular approach. The seminar has remained fresh and fruitful by bringing to the conversation each year the novel intellectual, moral and spiritual issues that arise for us in our professional practice and spiritual lives, while each year also re-engaging the recurrent questions at the interface of spiritual traditions and psychological theories and practices. The contemporary need for clinicians to think clearly about the relationship of belief to human experience is helpfully illuminated by returning to the first and most creative psychologist to take up the problem, William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. This morning also includes getting to know our colleagues and the questions and concerns that they bring to the seminar.