Strengths of Humanity

People who are naturally strong in "strengths of humanity" are those who care for their relationships. You probably know people like this: folk who always send a thank you card, who call occasionally "just to check up", and who are kind and pleasant to be around. For these individuals, caring relationships are important, and their strengths play to developing and maintaining friendships, marriages, and workplace collegiality. In return we often feel a sense of loyalty to and appreciation for these types of people. We admire their empathy, sensitivity, and compassion. They are the people we commonly turn to when we have problems. It may have occurred to you that that many of the people we think of as paragons of these virtues are women. There is a stereotype that women are, on average, more focused on relationships and more kind and considerate than man. This might be true - on average. However, if I think of my professional past, present, I just can not totally confirm this in our community. Despite that the ladies who involved with conductive education are immaculately giving their caring love to children, clients, they can be real disastrous to each other. Why is that? I do not know any good reason, but maybe some good answers can be collected.

Developing Empathy- Buber again - Person centered relationships - Empathy

Basic empathy enables the conductor to relate to the participant more completely, viewing the person as a whole. This more complete way of relating to the participant can be referred to as the I-Thou position (Buber, 1958). The incomplete experience of the self and other is known as the I-It attitude. As Brient and Freshwater (1998) comment: " The I-It attitude is one in which the other person is never viewed as a whole being. It can never be the basis for a holistic relationship". The I-It positio0n is one that has been found to exist widely within nursing. Menzies-Lyth (1970), in her research into social systems, found that nurses view patients as objects as a way of coping with the intense anxiety that such intimate relationships give rise to. The I-Thou approach to relationship is based on equality, with one individual in their totality relating to the other in their totality. Much of what takes place in CE can be related to the person centered approach: I-Thou. Person Centered relationships usually referred to as Rogerian counselling after its founder Carl Rogers, the person centered approach sits very much in the humanistic tradition. Rogers, influential as both as a psychologist and a counsellor, became convinced during his career that human beings are esentially positive, forward looking and realistic by nature, which he referred to as the actualising tendency. Rogers believed this was the motivating force driving all human beings to achive wholeness.

Empathy is a term that is employed variously in counselling, psichotherapy, nursing and across the helping professions. It is used to describe a particular characteristic that helpers should possess in relation to their clients. Here I am relating it to the skills of the conductor, who need to create a safe and enabling relationship to maximise the potential of the participants. In broad terms empathy is a state of being between two people, where one is entering the world of the other whiole maintaining an awareness oh his or her own world. It is the ability to see the world from the point of view of on other individual or group of individuals, through their frame of reference, which in turn describes the ability of the conductor to enter into the true feelings of the other person or group of people.

It is not an attempt to be that person, and try to envisage how it might feelto be them. It is the 'as if' quality that makes empathy different from sympathy. Sympathy, whilst concerned with feelings of pity, compassion and tenderness for the other person, involves collusion, whereas empathy requires much more effort, concentration and discipline. Empathy is expressed or communicated through a number 9of key skills, including active listening to both the words and feelings that are being conveyed by the participant.

Holistic Learning

Engage the mind - Touch the heart- Feed the soul Publicity notice, Edinburgh International Festival 2005

The term 'holistic learning' signifies an approach to learning which is predominantly 'whole person', i.e. it seeks to engage fully all aspects of the learner - mind, body and spirit. (See also Whole Brain.) The underlying holistic principle is that a complex organism functions most effectively when all its component parts are themselves functioning and co-operating effectively. And this idea relates very closely to the concept of synergy, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. In terms of mainstream education a 'whole person' approach to learning is much more likely to be observed within the sensory-rich nursery or primary school activity room than in the intellect-dominated university lecture theatre.

John Heron's Model of Holistic Learning

John Heron, Founder of the Human Potential Research Project. A powerful pyramid model presents learning as an interaction between four distinct modes of psychological being: feeling, imaginal, thinking and practical. These are normally represented in the form of a pyramid with feeling at the base and practical at the top. And so what is especially unusual about the model is that feeling is presented as our fundamental mode, rather than thinking. This contrasts sharply with much of mainstream traditional education, where cognitive thinking and the pursuit of intellectual competence have the pre-eminent role. The significance of this alternative orientation is that the crucial requirement for each learner is to establish a relationship with their total learning situation which is intimate, resonant and positive (i.e. in the feeling mode). Only when this is firmly in place is it considered that the learner will be free to tap fully into the other three modes of the learning model, viz. imaginal, thinking and practical.

Source

http://www.jwelford.demon.co.uk/brainwaremap/holist.html