Online Zoom Forum: A Dialogical Inquiry: Spirituality and Our Quiet Resolve -
Essencing and Presencing Our Professing.
Wednesday 15 January 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Description:
Format: There will be up to five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Dr Ian Wight:
Bio: Ian Wight, Senior Scholar, City Planning, Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba.
Now retired (but more ‘refiring') in his native land, Scotland, after a professional career in planning in Canada, first as a practitioner and then as an educator, Ian has had a long interest in place and placemaking, in related professional practice, and in the essencing of the professing associated with architecture and design.
His current focus is the project: The Essencing in Professing: Sourcing as Souling Meaningful Work. He brings an integral perspective to his work, including the integration of Self, Culture and Nature - in body, mind, soul and spirit.
Documentation of his refirement interests may be found on his ResearchGate site and in his LinkedIn articles. Of possible particular relevance to the present forum is ‘Being Professional Together - Collective Quiet Resolve: Integral Ethics as Ethos-Making’.
Speakers:
Dr Julio Bermudez:
Title: Toward a Spirituality-grounded Architectural (and other) Professing.
Description: True architectural professing demands holding a position, standing for something, and making a vow in the name of a deep-seated passion for architecture, our fellow beings, and the Earth. Professing wants belief and care. But that is not enough. Professing also requires the masterful ability to technically and competently respond to architectural challenges. Professing necessitates knowledge and skill. Professing is where belief and expertise come together in the here and now of present-day reality. Yet embodying such professing is easier said than done. For who doesn’t feel demoralized, disempowered, or skeptical when confronting today's reality? If, on the one hand, it is clear that our professing cannot be one of avoidance, appeasement, subversion, or adoption of some fashionable new idea; on the other hand, the answer doesn’t lie in adopting reactionary or pre-digested models either. Instead, the path forward ought to come from our ‘TRUE’ selves as individuals and society. For our ‘TRUE’ self does know what is right, true, just, and beautiful. Finding it ‘only’ requires us to dive deep within or, alternatively, authentically tune into our surrounding world. It demands us to transcend existing biases for the sake of the whole or, if we are believers, the holy. It asks us to take a SPIRITUAL TURN.
The result of a spirituality-grounded professing is a natural alignment with what we define as a “calling” or “vocation” and expresses itself as love/compassion, commitment, and vision that usually results in professional excellence. This is hardly surprising. It takes something extraordinary within to accomplish something extraordinary without. We know this to be true in our bones but, somehow, we need to keep reminding ourselves, don’t we? Now, if we sense this to be true, if we think, feel, or know that spirituality is at work in the best professional work, shouldn’t we reexamine our professional institutions’ existing negative attitudes towards it? How could anyone pretend to offer professional services or education without dealing with the most meaningful dimensions upon which professional practice finds its ethos?
Bio: President, The Architectural, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (https://acsforum.org)
Julio Bermudez is president of the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum, an 800+ members (from 65 countries) organization that he co-founded in 2007. He holds a Master of Architecture and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Bermudez’s interests focus on the relationship between architecture, culture, and spirituality through the lens of phenomenology and neuroscience. He has widely lectured, led symposia, taught, published, or appeared in the media covering these areas, including a beautiful episode in National Geographic’s The Story of God with Morgan Freeman in 2019. Current projects include three neuro-phenomenological studies of sacred vs. secular architecture (supported by $1.5 M in grants from the Templeton Religion Trust). He has published three books: "Transcending Architecture. Contemporary Views on Sacred Space” (CUA Press, 2015), "Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality" (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Thomas Barrie and Phillip Tabb), and “Spirituality in Architectural Education” (CUA Press, 2023).
Bermudez has been teaching architectural design, communication, and theory for 40 years. He directed the Sacred Space and Cultural Studies graduate concentration at The Catholic University of America School of Architecture and Planning from 2010 to 2023, where he developed the Walton Studio, a world-class design studio that involved recognized architects from around the globe. Before this work and at the University of Utah (1993-2010), Bermudez investigated (1) the interaction between design process and computers, and (2) the use of architectural thinking to design data environments. Results of this effort were the award-winning and influential analog-digital design method, a successful information visualization study across multiple domains (attracting over $5M in funding), and many lectures, workshops, patents, and publications in the U.S. and abroad. During this time, he co-created and co-led SiGraDi(Iberoamerican Society of Digital Graphics, 1997-2005) and an academic exchange program between Santa Fe-Argentina and Salt Lake City-Utah (1995-2010).
Bermudez has received several national and international recognitions, including the 1998 AIA Education Honors Award, the 2004-05 ACSA Creative Achievement Award, the 2005 Arturo Montagu Creative Career Prize (bestowed by Latin American SiGraDi), the 2006 ACADIA Award for Teaching Excellence, the 2010 Sasada Award for significant record in scholarship and service (conferred by CAADRIA, Asia), and the 2021 ACSA Distinguished Professor Award.
For more on the speaker and his work, visit: https://www.juliobermudez.com http://www.sacred-space.net/transcending_architecture/ https://architectureandspirituality.com https://www.building-spiritual-understanding.net https://www.facebook.com/JulioBermudezOfficial https://www.linkedin.com/in/julio-bermudez-5771545/ https://acsforum.org/about-us/#board
https://cua.academia.edu/JulioBermudez
Dr Pádraic Hurley:
Title: What’s happening? The Rhythm of Time, Being and Becoming.
Description: It may be interesting to contemplate and metabolise that a more expansive experience of 'time and space' is one of the markers of ‘professional development’.
Given the pervasiveness of ‘time management’ and ‘work-life balance’ speak, a revaluation of time is timely. This especially in a betwixt and seemingly bewitching time, a time between worlds, when people commonly express a sense of time poverty and or display a sense of temporal illiteracy.
Somewhat ironically within this context, an acute question arises. Are we attuned to the urgency of the moment? And can opening up to an integral vision, which includes the three eyes of flesh, mind and spirit add requisite dimensionality, adjusting and attuning our timing, intimately related as this is to our being and becoming and integrated in our professing?
Bio: Dr Pádraic Hurley lectures in Contemplative Psychology in SETU on the MA in Applied Spirituality (MAAS) and on a BA in Employee Support and Well Being, working with police officers, prisons officers and defence force professionals.
His research interests focus on the inner developmental aspects of our global meta-crises and the meta-opportunity this presents.
Alastair Wyllie:
Title: Who am I? How am I? How do I show up? And is that congruent with what I say and do?
Description: My talk will be an existence-essence-experience process of inquiry, since it is only as I give it that I will find out what it will be.
I intend to introduce myself personally and professionally, and say something about what matters to me in how I am and what I do.
I will also look through the other end of the telescope at my professing and how it is contained by my profession.
And in conclusion, I will consider the spiritual dimension to the work that is transformational.
Bio: Alastair Wyllie, DProf, MBA, BA Hons, EIA SP, ESIA.
Alastair is a People and Organisational Developer who lives in Fife. He has 30 years’ international experience of facilitating leadership and organisation development through executive and team coaching, action inquiry, whole systems collaborative learning, and organisational supervision. As Adjunct Faculty in two international business schools, he works with chief officers, senior managers and officials in private, public and not-for-profit organisations. He also teaches, supervises and examines on Masters and Doctoral programmes.
Alastair has an eclectic background as a professional actor, corporate communications advisor, EU city planning network and project manager, and trainee psychotherapist. Throughout, his career has been sustained by a passionate interest in how people make sense of their experience of forming and being formed by the families, cities, organisations and cultures of which they are a part.
Dr Marilyn Hamilton:
Title: Prof-essencing Dancing Soul Connections for Integral Cities.
Description: More than an ecovillage … we are a thriving, regenerative spiritual community, hospitable to the soul of Planet, Place, People, Person. That is the statement that has emerged from a community-wide year-long search for Purpose, Aims, Vision and a Local Place Plan for Park Ecovillage Findhorn, Scotland. This EICSP exploration will share my rediscovery of the Map 5 of Spirituality embedded in the Integral City framework. I will share a new appreciation of how Map 5 captures the co-creation of our incarnation as Beauty Truth and Goodness and opens us to reconnecting with the Soul of Gaia. As Spirit we incarnate from Source/Love through the Involutionary path of our energetic existence. As we incarnate we reveal the Beauty, Truth and Goodness through which we impact Grace, Place and Space. As incarnate beings we develop our soul journey back through the Evolutionary Path to return to Source. This In-Spiration and En-Soulment are complementary energies that flow through us and around us like a Torus. It seems (with renewed inspiration from Iain McGilchirst, Alastair McIntosh and Nish Dubashia) that I have rediscovered how we are creating Indra’s dancing web – revealing a multi-dimensional Field of Ensoulment Energy filaments. That will be the essence of what I profess for the New Year.
Bio: Dr Marilyn Hamilton is Co-Founder of Living Cities.Earth and Founder of Integral City Meshworks. She is the author of the Integral City Book Series and Tales of the CROFT Regenerators Novella series. She is co-designer of the course Cities Rising for Regenerative World & curator of Urban Hub 20, City Change in a VUCA World (English and Spanish).
Marilyn serves cities and ecoregions as Gaia’s Reflective Organs. Inspired by the Gaia Code of Care for Self, Others, Place and Planet, Marilyn designs, delivers and supervises “pracademic” courses. These build capacity for the wellbeing of 4 archetypal Voices of the City: Citizens, City Managers, Business/Innovators, 3rd Sector/Civil Society.
An international keynote speaker, and faculty of Ubiquity University and Royal Roads University, plus several other Universities, Marilyn is or was CEO, COO, CFO and CIO in the private & Not-for-Profit sectors. She is an Evolutionary Leader, a researcher and a member of the Integral Europe Academic Consortium and Global Accreditation Council and is a Findhorn Fellow. She has served as Fellow for Urban Arena Europe and Ambassador for World Unity Week.
Currently Marilyn is really passionate co-creating initiatives with the international consortium Living Cities.Earth aiming to ignite aliveness in 10,000 Cities for Love and Peace.
Marilyn lives in Findhorn Ecovillage Scotland (where she returned to the land of her ancestors from British Columbia, Canada in 2018). www.integralcity.com livingcities.earth
Forum Overview:
An opportunity to reflect on ‘being professional together’, as authentic self-identifying professionals, with an emphasis on the ‘being' - on really deeply being, and on the related ‘togethering’ - the ‘we’ as much as the ‘I’. With a curiosity around not simply ‘the what’ or ‘the how’ - but with the why in our how in relation to the what that is, literally, of the essence... in what/how/why we profess..
Conceived as an adventurous exploration of the interface between the spiritual and the professional, as experienced by exquisitely discerning professionals in their everyday practice. Informed by a particular interest in the essencing and presencing of their professing - well beyond standard professionalism and professionalization - from the depths of their Self, Soul and Spirit. Expressing perhaps what might be regarded as their ‘quiet resolve’ - manifested in elements of a personal praxis, beyond mere practice, and an interpersonal co-created ethos, beyond mere codified ethics.
The hopeful intention is to very much privilege the professing - its related personal sense-making and collective meaning-making - with an emphasis on the public inside-out professing, individually and collectively, of operative secular ‘articles of faith’, actively honouring the etymological roots (pro- and fess-). The related essencing, or prof-essencing, is envisaged as an embodying and enacting of an associated resolute presencing, combating problematic absencing, in pursuit of a potential ever-more-whole-making.
The forum is envisaged as a dialogical inquiry valuing a mix of reflective and generative dialogue, with the conversation spanning a sequenced concern with divergence, emergence and convergence.
Each presenter will be invited to first contribute to what is hoped will be a diverse range of perspectives, welcoming divergence and differentiation. Having actively listened to the opening offerings, each presenter will then have an opportunity to creatively articulate what new perspectives might be emerging for themselves (exploring what’s emerging reflectively). Again, after more active listening, each presenter will have an opportunity to seed some deliberative convergence, around potential co-created, co-generated new insights and new meaning, towards some helpful integration.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
Cost: By Donation:
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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