8
Jun 12

 Table of Contents

Preface — A Life Shaped by Stories, Dreams and Visions 

• My Parents, Scheherazade, and Other Master Storytellers

• The Stories That Shape Our Lives

Introduction — Stories: The Disaster Relief Kit of Your Life 

• Difficulties in Life: A Calling to the Path of the Reluctant Metaphysician

• What is a Reluctant Metaphysician?

• Towards a Holistic Model of Human Spirituality

• The Tapestry of This Book

• The Structure of This Book

•  Mount Analogue

Chapters

1. Stories That Reveal and Heal: Stories and Practices That Change Our Lives

• Stories: The Spiritual Bones of Our Lives

• Putting Stories in your Disaster Relief Kit

  1. What to Do When the (Your) World Is Destroyed: The Story of Icanchu and Chuna
  2. Stories That Help Us Appreciate Our Uniqueness: Ugly Duckling
  3. The Coat of Many Colors We Each Wear: Joseph’s Story
  4. The Old Woman in the Cave: Frame Story of This Book

• Exercising Your Story Muscles

• Dreams

• Finding Your Sacred Note

• The Rabbi in the Woods

2. Our Bodies: Holders of the Keys to Self Knowledge 

• Fate: Hidden in Our Bodies

• My Childhood Energy Blocks

• Healing Practices and Healing Stores Are Borne from Our Bodily Diseases: A Metaphysical Perspective

3. Our Childhood Dreams: Keys to Our Karma and Dharma 

• Murdered by Nazis: A Lucid Repetitive Dream

• Keeping Mystery Alive as You Interpret Your Story

• Following the Hermeneutical Path of Interpretation

4. Two Rivers Become One: What is Your Power Spot in Nature Trying to Tell You? 

• Outward Introspection: Finding Our Deepest Selves in Nature

• My Life Path: Two Streams Joining

• Healing Traditions Based in Nature

• The Problem with Following Your Unique Vision

5. A Lawyer Abducted by Metaphysical Forces: The Wider Forces That Can Change Our Destinies 

• My College Years: Sprouting the Seeds of a Metaphysical Life

• Woodstock: Social Forces and Psychedelic Experiences

• Changing Occupational Paths Mid-Stream: My Father’s Disappointment

• A Lawyer, Captured by Astrological Forces?

• The Actualization of Fate? An Astrological Pathway Opens

• The Transformative Forces of the Cosmos

• Ananke—The Goddess of Necessity

6. The Land Where the Sun Rises in the West and Sets in the East 

• The New School for Social Research

• Healing Anxiety with the Secret of the Golden Flower: My First Teaching Job—Montclair State

• Revolution of Consciousness and the Psychedelic Revolution

• Dream of the Land Where the Sun Rises in the West

• Following the Hero’s Call to Move to the West

• Parcival’s Quest for the Holy Grail

• Dangers in Answering the Metaphysical Calling

7. Four Shaman: The Esalen Institute Calling 

• Telegraph Avenue and the Counter-Culture: Mythology Comes Alive on the Streets

• Esalen Institute: Center of the Human Growth and Potential Movement

• The Four Shaman Dream

8. What’s Your and My True Name? 

• My Doctoral Years: Saybrook Graduate School

• Financial Struggles during My Doctoral Years: Teaching at Laney College

• Opening the Door to the Metaphysical Inner World

• Pre-Modern Metaphysical Views of Our Life’s Purpose: Opening to the Genii within

• Exploring the Western and Eastern Initiatory Traditions

• My Flowering at Saybrook’s Doctoral Psychology Program

• My Forty-Night Vision Quest

• Shamanic Dismemberment and the Quest to Find Our Soul’s Purpose

• The Metaphysical Aliments of Our Times

• Mythogems of Our Life’s Purpose

• Carrying Forward the Vision: The Quest for Our “True Names”

• Is There Something to This Astrology Stuff, and Are the Words That Open the Door to Our Inner Genii’s Cave Astrological Symbols?

9. Living a Metaphysical Life 

• The Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Holy Name’s Influence on My Life

• My Name: Connected to Michael Maier, the Alchemist

• The Metaphysics behind Our Life Choices

• Carrying Forth the Vision: Teaching at JFK University—While Sleeping in the Woods

10. Meetings with Remarkable People and Traditions 

• Seeing Yourself in All Beings, and All Beings in Yourself

• Manly Hall and the Founding of JFK University’s Transpersonal Psychology Program

• Dane Rudhyar

• Eugene Gendlin

• James Hillman and the Archetypal Psychology Tradition

• Ken Wilbur

• Larry Dossey

• Kozoko Onodera

• Ram Dass

• Fong Ha and My Other Tai Chi and Qigong Masters

• Jewish Renewal

• Conclusion: How Should We Approach Meeting a Remarkable Person

11. Practices to Guide Our Lives 

• Introduction

• The Secret of the Golden Flower

• The River of Life

• Experiential Dimensions of the Golden Flower Practice: How Taoist Saliva Swallowing Saved My Life in the Desert in Israel

• Standing Meditation Qigong

• Tai Chi Chuan

• Outward Introspection

• Developing Our Own Metaphysical Practice System in Everyday Life

• The Hawaiian Flute Master

• Practicing the Opposite of Your Favorite Metaphysical Practice

12. Dancing with Deer, Not Dancing with Wolves 

• Keeping Your Life’s Vision Alive by Rituals of Returning to the Source

• Dancing with Deer

• Animism and the Animal Forms of Qigong

13. What is the Origin of Tai Chi? A Transmission from Bear Creek Mountain 

• Meditating on the Essence of Things in Nature

• The “True Origin” (in the Mythic Sense) of Tai Chi

• Tai Chi: A Postmodern Metaphysical View—Continued

• Using the Imaginal in Your Tai Chi Practice

14. The Greek Mystery Cave: The (Real?) Uterus of the Great Mother 

• The Cave of the Oracle of Delphi

• Plato’s Story of the Cave: The World behind the World

• Second Visit to the Cave

• Initiation into Psycho-Archeological Realities: The Dragon and the Earth Mother

• The Initiatory Dimensions of the Journey into the Cave at Delphi

• Psycho-Historical Dimensions

• Cave Creation Myths: Weaving Tales to Create New Ways of Being

• A Ritual for Opening: The Imaginal Caves in Our Lives

15. The Story-Telling Psychotherapist 

• Introduction

• Stories I Tell My Patients: The Monkey and the Banana, Odysseus and the Sirens, Buddha and Sickness Demon, the Jewish Farmer, Perseus and Medusa

• Healing with the Elements: Transpersonal Hypnosis for a Writer’s Block

• The Mythic Journey Process: Transforming Your Demons

  1. Case Illustration: A Critical Perfectionist’s Mythic Journey Process
  2. Case Illustration: The Passive-Aggressive Ostrich—Healing Trauma and Withdrawal
  3. Case Illustration: The Desperately Grasping Parrot—Healing Abandonment and Neediness

• Not Just Stories Change Our Lives: Songs, Postures and Movements

16. Joining Two Streams: Ancient Sacred Wisdom Traditions and Modern Psychotherapy 

• The Seeds of Creating a Bodymind Healing Psychotherapy

• Weaving Together Qigong, Somatic Approaches to Psychotherapy, Ancient Sacred Wisdom Traditions, Energy Psychology, and Qigong

• Joining Ten Streams to Create Bodymind Healing Psychotherapy

• Creating a New Origin Myth for Psychology

• Using the Astrological Mandala as a Psychotherapeutic Meta-system

• Joining the Streams of Energy and Psychology

• Joining the Streams of Qigong and Psychotherapy

• What Psychotherapy and Qigong Give Each Other

• Joining Ten Streams to Make a Bodymind Healing Qigong

• Revisioning Metaphysics

17. The Path of the Reluctant Metaphysical Healer: Tapping on the Self-healing Secrets of the Gods  

• The Path of the Reluctant Metaphysical Healer

• Creating a Healing Metaphysics: Journey to the Temple of Aesclepius

• Joining the Two Streams: In My Private Practice as a Psychologist and at an Integrative Medical Clinic

  1. Joining Two Streams: Qigong and Psychotherapy
  2. A Turning Point Patient: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

• Integrative Healthcare

• An Integral Approach to Hypertension

18. Changing Your Life Stance: Trance-forming Your life’s Story 

• Seeing the Sacred in the Gestures of Everyday Life

• What Creates Change in Psychotherapy?

• Shape-shifting in the Shamanic Cave of Creation

• The Case of the Repulsing Monkey

• A Dream of the Energy-Stream, Vacuum Cleaner in Reverse: Empowerment in Relationship to My Inner Foe

• Psychotherapy as Changing Your Life Stance

19. Weakling Scholar Learns the Secrets of Internal Arts’ Empty Force 

• My Experience: Bullies, Qi, and the No-Sword School

• Crane Splitting Hands: Weakling Scholar Uses Empty Force to Protect Himself

20. Four Crows Joining: The Reluctant Metaphysics of My Father’s Death

• Metaphysical Rituals for Death and Dying

• Four Crows Joining

• Synchronicity and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos

• A Metaphysical Plane Ride

• A Mourning Ritual: Rising in a Plane with the Full Moon

21. War on Healers, the American Culture and the Environment 

• The Dark Side of Storytelling: A Spider’s Web That Can Capture Your Soul

• Uranus: God of the Imagination Lives in Modern Advertising

  1. Fundamentalist’s Stories and the Myopia of the Cyclops
  2. The Fair and Balanced Storyteller versus Taking a Stance
  3. Texas Book Controversy and Modern Psychological Education

• The Wider Frame Stories—Cultural, Economic, Potitical, Environmental

  1. Culture Wars
  2. War on Our Economy
  3. War on Healers: War on Psychotherapists
  4. War on Plant Medicines
  5. War on the Environment

• The Predatory Birds that Control Our Lives

• War against Students

• The Solution: Listening to Stories with Our Hearts

22. Pelican Sinks Its Qi: A Calling from Nature to Us Humans 

• A Message from the Wildlife at Esalen Institute

• The Solution Lies in Consciousness and the Awareness of Story

• Pelican Practices and Cross-Cultural Stories: A Saving Grace for Our World

• The Avatar Movie, Anima Mundi, and Hope for Our World

23. To My Children’s, Children’s Children 

• Reflections on My Generation’s Contribution to Experiential Metaphysics

  1. Meditative Disciplines
  2. Metaphysical Ecology and the Wider Whole of Which We Are a Part

• Turning Our Metaphysical Eyes Heavenward: The Astrological Metaphors Hidden in Current Planetary Changes

• Turning our Metaphysical Eyes Earthward: Cooperating with Nature

• Energetic Healing

• The Reluctant Metaphysician Transformed: The Grateful Metaphysician

• The Last Hippie Standing: Standing Mediation and Finding Your Life’s Stance

Appendix I: List of Selected Stories

• Author’s Personal Stories

• Mythic Tales, Quotes, and Cross-Cultural Teaching Stories

• Patient Illustrations

Appendix II: List of Practices

Appendix III: What Psychotherapy and Qigong Give to Each Other

Appendix IV: Bodymind Healing Psychotherapy’s Contributions to the Field of Bodymind Healing

A. Contributions to Psychotherapy and Behavioral Healthcare

B. Contributions to Energy Psychology

Appendix V: Author’s Background, Training, and Contributions to Tai Chi and Qigong

Appendix VI: Quotes about Death