Meta Labs
The Advanced Labs or Meta Labs are a set of programs designed to explore the philosophical bases of process work. These labs go beyond the exploration of dynamics and consequences, to explore the context and nature of human existence. Participation in at least two such Labs is essential for individuals to satisfactorily complete the Fellowship program. These Labs are held separately from the Summer Institution.
The Bindu Lab series is founded on the principle that each moment holds the entire universe of experience. This series of labs is geared to exploring the processes (as opposed to the content) of our experience. It is distinct from other lab work as in being free of concerns of becoming such as causes and effects, benefits and disadvantages, success and failure etc. It is designed to create a space for exploring and nourishing the linkages between mind, body and spirit.
The Learning Theatre (September)
The exploration in LT is the dynamics between the ‘actor’ the ‘mirror’ and the ‘witness’ as they play-out in ones ‘inner canvas’. Ones own inner drama, the propensity to favor certain personas and listen to certain voices and use ones inner structures in certain ways becomes blatantly visible, not through words, but through the body, and the body never lies! LT focuses on the body as the concrete expression of ones identity, it helps one explore the inner space where our many selves enact an inner drama, the drama that is the ground for ones outer expression and relatedness.
The Gender and Identity Lab is a weeklong residential lab offered by
Sumedhas, on how the idea of gender is configured consciously and unconsciously in our psyche and hence its implications on identity formation and role taking processes.
The lab is an experiential workshop, based on principles of process work and uses the ‘here and now’ reality to
examine intra-personal and inter-personal dynamics between men, women and transgendered persons to explore and discover one’s gender identities, conflicts and struggles therein.
This discovery, recognition and cognitive and emotional acceptance of oneself and the influence and impacts of culture therein leaves one to re-examine experiences and meanings held with those meanings, and further define choices and actions for oneself, enabling people to explore newer ways of being.
While frames of analysis are drawn from an eclectic body of work on psychology, sociology and philosophy, the lab is not an academic or theoretical study on gender.
Symbols, metaphors, similes and the like are intertwined and interwoven with the voices of human processes. Be they processes originating in roles, in one’s concept of one’s self, in the body, or from one’s spiritual or cosmic identity, or the identity of human collectives – symbols readily provide a way of articulating that which is unarticulated and making the invisible visible. As Carl Jung, the acknowledged architect of Analytical Psychology, puts it “an examination of Man and his Symbols is in effect an examination of man’s relation to his own unconscious”.