Transformative Learning

Heart Sense Private Mentoring Sessions via Zoom – Dr Louise Livingstone – Running Throughout The Year
One-to-One Support/Mentoring/Readings. Private sessions with Louise Livingstone, PhD (MSc, BA, PGDipCEIG, VTCT, AAMET EFT, INLPTA). Reconnect with your heart and align to the inherent wisdom that lies within, learn to understand how your heart speaks to you and guides you through life, and gain confidence and trust in your heart for personal transformation; particularly important in these rapidly changing and challenging times. “Committing to journey back to our own heart is one of the most courageous and important steps that any of us can take in our world today” – Louise Livingstone.
Each session is one hour online via Zoom. All sessions are recorded. You will receive the audio recording via WeTransfer after the session has taken place.

iRewild in Motion – Reconnect to the Natural World – 6 week course starting 2nd February 2022 – 7pm-8pm (UK time) – via Zoom – £44 full course with certification
An exciting collaboration between the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred and iRewild. This course aims to support and improve your health and wellbeing in deep connection with nature, while at the same time increasing your love for learning about nature as you freely walk, explore, and reconnect with the natural world.

From Allegory to Anagoge: the question of symbolic perception in a literal world by Angela Voss
This paper discusses the relevance of the ‘four levels of interpretation’ of medieval theology – literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical – to the teaching of astrology at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. In an educational system increasingly bound to positivist assumptions a way is required to lead students to a deeper perception, and experience, of the symbolic.

Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred: Transformative Learning as a Bridge between Worlds by Angela Voss
Rice University religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal has defined the humanities as ‘consciousness studying consciousness in the reflecting mirror of culture’ (2014: 368), and indeed he sees the role of intellectuals as a ‘collective prophet’ (2017: 302) who can potentially see behind the veil of our separatist, egoistic illusions and wake up an awareness of our common humanity. This paper focusses on how Kripal’s vision informs the Masters programme in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred at Canterbury Christ Church University, for in our view, values of sustainability are intrinsically connected to understanding what it means to be a human being making meaning in the world. The MA subscribes to Kripal’s call for a broader perspective which goes beyond the ‘exterior’ world of empirical and historical information to reflect on the question of human cognition and experience—that is, on our own nature as interpreters of culture and creators of myth. The MA programme is situated within a transformative learning context, and here the programme director explains its rationale and ethos. Examples of pedagogical methods are described and student feedback included. With reference to key authors, the foundations of the programme in holistic and integrative models of knowing are discussed, together with the importance of calling on esoteric and wisdom traditions for hermeneutic frameworks. Such frameworks combine mythopoetic and spiritual insight with critical and reflexive understanding, and thus bridge the subject-object split of the Western Enlightenment which still dominates our intellectual discourse. Finally the programme is linked to sustainability values, and positioned in the context of a new vision of integrative learning for our times which fosters connections between humans, earth and cosmos.

Conversations with Gaia with Dr Louise Livingstone & Jay Livingstone via Zoom – 6 week course – Wednesdays 14th, 21st, 28th September, 5th, 12th, 19th October 2022 – 6.30pm-9pm UK Time– £85
This course is inspired by the theme of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wonderful book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) that encourages us, through indigenous teachings, to see the world as a gift. Innate within the energy of gift lies relationships, and the notion of reciprocity. In turn, at the heart of relationship and reciprocity lies openness, love, understanding, give and take, and, conversation.

Introduction to Goethean Enquiry – DOWNLOAD with Louise Livingstone – £15 for full recording and handouts
In this seminar we will learn more about Goethe and his imaginal method of enquiry, exploring why his method is so important for the world we are living in today.

How can Study unite the Symbolic and the Literal? – Simon Wilson
Today I’d like to talk about studying and what studying may bring about. To be more specific, I’d like to talk about a crucial meaning of the word study, a meaning which most of us are probably unfamiliar with and which indeed the whole Western world is unfamiliar with and has been for the past 300 years or so. It designates a whole understanding of what study involves and what study can bring about in students and it has fallen by the wayside, where it still lies forgotten, neglected and concealed under the detritus of 3 centuries. But if we clear away the undergrowth and remove the rubbish, we may find that it still shines as if new with a light that may illuminate the world and ourselves. It may even bring about a transformation in our knowledge, both of the world and of ourselves.

Meeting the World Through the Heart with Louise Livingstone – 25 July 2021 – 3pm-5pm (UK time) – via Zoom – £15
As Iain McGilchrist states in his book The Master and His Emissary, “The model we choose to understand something determines what we find….Our first leap determines where we land” (2012, p.97). Expanding our enquiry deeper into the imaginal realms, in this session we continue to take the imagination seriously and move into our heart space; known through various discourses as an organ of imaginal perception.

Summer School 2021
We are excited to announce that the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred is celebrating its first birthday! Over the past twelve months, via our online lectures, seminars and talks, we have had the pleasure of connecting with large numbers of you over Zoom; meeting old friends and making new ones. Each day (from Monday to Thursday), we will be releasing an online lecture for you to watch/listen to. On Friday 30th, we will be hosting an on-line, celebratory coffee morning via Zoom at 11am (BST), where Angela, Mary and Louise will be available for informal chat.

Calling and the Inner Imaginarium – Sharon Blackie talk with Q&A – £10 – DOWNLOAD
Sharon’s talk took place on 23rd February 2021. This package contains the full recording of both Sharon’s talk and the Q&A afterwards. In this talk, Sharon explores the idea that each soul has a unique way of being, a unique purpose, which is essential not only to its own growth, but to the world’s own becoming.

Transforming the heart: from biological pump to producer of knowledge, with Louise Livingstone – £5
20 minute downloadable lecture. This lecture presents the idea that the heart is far more important and complex than our dominant way of generating knowledge about the world makes possible

Research Lecture – The heart speaks: reimagining the heart for contemporary times, with Louise Livingstone £10
60 minute downloadable lecture. In this lecture, Louise introduces her PhD research that makes a case for heart knowing as a vitally important human capability which has, over the course of many hundreds of years, been divorced from, and rendered subservient to, knowledge about the world as generated through the brain.

Docere, Delectare, Movere, Soul-Learning, Reflexivity and the Third Classroom by Angela Voss
‘It is as if we can study everything about religion, except what makes it fiercely religious’ observes Rice University religious studies professor Jeffrey Kripal. Well, what does make religion fiercely religious? Should this highly-charged, sensual, devotional, or emotive impulse indeed find a place in academic studies?

A Methodology of the Imagination by Angela Voss
In his work on Sufi mystics, Henry Corbin uses the term mundus imaginalis to designate the psychic space in which the “super-sensible”reality of dreams, theophanies and spiritual beings are manifested, in a visionary sense, to the individual. T

Taking the lead from nature: why creativity matters in research – with Angela Voss – £5
This lecture was originally given at Christ Church Canterbury University in 2017 as the opening of a research day on creativity in research. In it Angela discusses combining the two ways of knowing – the objective and the intuitive

Moments of Awakening: Religious Myth and Reflexivity – Angela Voss
In this contribution to Daniela Boccassini’s wonderful journal, I talk about my ‘moments of awakening’ through music, and also the author Fred Gettings’ similar experiences in the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte in Florence.