Mangsukas Indigenous Knowledge Heritage in Yamphu Community: An Estranged Transformative Learning Space

Based on a critical ethnographic research tradition, this paper explores how Mangsuk as an indigenous institution represents a space for cultural-self and relational knowing in the Yamphu indigenous community of Ambote village of Ilam district of eastern Nepal. The paper explores the beliefs, worldviews, and practices of Mangsuk that pass on to adults and children in the community. The paper argues that Mangsuk, as a cultural institution, shapes the emotions, sense of self, particular beliefs, and behaviors among the community people. It further highlights the Mundhum (an oral tradition) associated with the Mangsuk ritual to transfer Yamphu indigenous knowledge, communal values, beliefs, emotionality, spirituality, and worldviews among the kins in the community. Furthermore, the paper portrays how modern education has been side-lining the indigenous ways of transformative learning (cultural self-knowing and relational knowing), resulting in the relegation of indigenous knowledge heritage.

La insoportable soledad de ser un "no ser". Ser un "Don nadie"

This presentation is about the pain and suffering felt by people who, right from early childhood, have been disconnected from their emotions. Lack of affection and insecure attachment bonds are breeding grounds, “kitchens”, where false identities, role reversal or identities of feeling insignificant to their caregivers are cooked; this is what they refer to as being "nobody". Two clinical cases are used to illustrate this way of being in the world. "They might say good or bad things about me, but at least they talk about me", says Antonio, the 41-year-old patient we'll be discussing in this presentation. It is within the patient-therapist bond where patients find an opportunity to learn a new way of interacting and relating to others. Modifying their implicit relational knowing, they have a second chance to build a secure attachment with their therapist. We are emotional beings, regulating emotions through our relations; thus, our principal focus is relationships/interactions. "You're my only support,” says the patient to the therapist, “I can be me, Antonio, with you; but outside I'm Anthony, the dealer and addict". It's from here on that he can forgo feeling "nobody" and gain access to his singularity: simply be himself. This can come about because he has felt listened to and seen by his therapist. Feeling felt helps to build his identity.

On improvisation as dreaming and the therapist’s authentic use of self in music therapy

This article discusses the Music Therapist’s authentic use of self in improvisation-based music therapy to involve the therapist’s ability to ‘dream in music’. The topic is explored with reference to the work of psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden and illustrated with clinical examples from work with an adolescent with autism. The author describes the music-based dreaming through which it was possible to establish a musical connection with the client for the first time that enabled the client’s music and process to evolve as it had not previously. The thinking presented has links with Winnicott’s ideas about play, creativity and psychotherapy; with Stern’s ideas about implicit relational knowing, intersubjectivity and affect attunement; and with theorising about transference and counter-transference in music therapy. The article develops a theory of dreaming in music that highlights the importance of the therapist’s ability to work with the creativity of the unconscious, trusting the music that emerges from within.

Spiritual Exchange: A Methodology for a Living Inquiry With All Our Relations

Brought to life by an exchange with a crocus, we respond to our challenges with methodologies that privilege cognitive ways of theorizing and sharing together. As a Michif (Metis) woman and a woman of White settler descent, we engage in a layered dialogue across cultural understandings—what we call a spiritual exchange—guided by ethical relationality and the teachings of Spirit Gifting. The spiritual exchange offers a process to make meaning of experiences and to collaborate in ways that help us generate and live out ethical relationships. We question: How can we proceed in ways that might rehumanize the research process and honor the living earth? How might research look and feel if stories of respect, love, reciprocity, and responsibility were at the center? In this article, we offer an inquiry process that honors the act of study from an Indigenous sensibility, the multiplicity of kinetic and relational knowing, and the reanimation of the more-than-human.

The Centrality of Reflexivity Through Narrative Beginnings: Towards Living Reconciliation

Autobiographical narrative inquiry is an approach with a specific set of methodological commitments that guide research practice, yet its place and position within the work on reflexive practice are lost or misrepresented. Reflexivity in the form of autobiographical narrative inquiries comes out of the relational ontological commitments of narrative inquiry. By inquiring into Michael’s (the first author) experience as a researcher–practitioner, the purpose of this article is to show how reflexivity, in the form of narrative beginnings, is situated in the ongoing stream of experience. It provides narrative inquirers with avenues to make clear their research justifications/puzzles, become wakeful and open in their inquiries, and support shifts in relational knowing and being. By looking back and noticing the ways stories work on us, rather than us on them, this research explores the reverberations of past experiences and the ripples that carry forward into our future inquiries.