ConnectIONS Live!
In times of intense stress, a miraculous transformation sometimes occurs: the death of an old identity and the birth of a new, spiritually awakened self. For 15 years, transpersonal psychologist Steve Taylor has been researching cases of spontaneous spiritual awakening triggered by intense psychological turmoil. In this webinar, he will share his findings.
Extraordinary Awakenings – When Trauma Leads to Spiritual Transformation
Friday, October 1, 2021
11:00am – 12:15pm Pacific
In this webinar, Steve will share examples of extraordinary awakenings from his research and explain why intense suffering can lead to spiritual growth. He will also offer insights from his research, along with actionable principles that we can apply to our own spiritual development. At the end of the webinar, Steve will lead a meditation and exercise to provide a hands-on experience of how we can harness the transformational power of crises and turmoil in our lives.
SPEAKER
Steve Taylor, PhD, is the author of Extraordinary Awakenings and many other bestselling books. He is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and the chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. Steve’s articles and essays have been published in over 100 academic journals, magazines, and newspapers and he blogs for Scientific American and Psychology Today. Eckhart Tolle has described his work as “an important contribution to the shift in consciousness which is happening on our planet at present.” Steve lives in Manchester, England, with his wife and three young children. Visit him online at StevenMTaylor.com.
Alan Briskin, PhD, is a pioneer in the field of organizational learning and leadership development. He has been working with executives, managers, and teams for over 35 years as a coach and consultant, specializing in systems change and collective wisdom. Alan’s work is distinguished by his attention to the conditions that allow for change and innovation. He estimates spending over 10,000 hours in conversations, 1-1 and in small teams, with managers and executives addressing change processes and their role in it. He has held retainer relationships with multiple organizations for consecutive periods of 10 years or longer, including Lucasfilm, Goi Peace Foundation, Sutter Health, and Kaiser Permanente. Co-founder of the Collective Wisdom Initiative, he has written or co-authored five books, including the award winning The Power of Collective Wisdom, Daily Miracles, and The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace.
Author Robert Waggoner is the past President of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD). For the past ten years, he has been the co-editor of the online magazine, 
Amikaeyla Gaston uplifts audiences and inspires positive action through her engaging performances and passionate speaking engagements. She shares her story of how while surviving a hate crime – a near-fatal hit and run automobile accident just before entering medical school — she found the most powerful form of healing — musical expression. Suffering from 3rd degree burns and through a year-long stay in numerous hospitals, the one thing that alleviated her pain was music. Ami then transformed the pain of this extreme experience into ICAHSI, the 
Valentine Giraud is a facilitator in the context of innovation and creative leadership. Born and raised in Brazil, Valentine has build her career globally — she’s lived in The Netherlands, France, India, and Canada and is fluent in five languages. Throughout the years she has specialized in designing and facilitating group processes using Design Thinking, Participatory Dialogue and personal leadership development frameworks. She holds a BA in International Relations and is an alumni in the 
Jewel Love is a licensed psychotherapist and the CEO of 
Sarah Peck has offered spiritual service, launching and leading spirit, mind, and body programs at Teachers College, Columbia University for the last 10 years. She is the former director of the Spirituality Mind Body (SMBI) Master’s Degree Program, October 2013-17, and was Co-Founder and Co-President of the Mindfulness and Education Working Group, September 2010-14. She taught six graduate courses, including Pilgrimage to Mata Amritanandamayi Devi in Kerala, India and Pro-Seminars in Leadership Development on Self-Awareness Training for 400 students within the Summer Principals Academy. She successfully defended her dissertation, a qualitative case study examining the role of mental imagery for 30 spiritual healers trained by Ron Young, who saw clients with serious illness each week for nine months. She examined the comparability across different constructions, experiences, and expressions of mental imagery, finding distinct and overlapping themes and sub-themes among healers within each case, and between the healers and their clients.
Arnaud Delorme, PhD, is a CNRS principal investigator in Toulouse, France, a member faculty at the University of California, San Diego, and a Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. In 2000, Dr. Delorme completed his PhD thesis on visual categorization in humans, monkeys, and machines. Dr. Delorme then moved to the Salk Institute for a postdoc in Terry Sejnowski and Francis Crick’s laboratory where he focused on statistical analysis of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals recorded during various cognitive tasks. He developed the free EEGLAB software for advanced analysis of EEG signals in collaboration with Scott Makeig, software which is now amongst the most used in EEG research worldwide. He was awarded a Brettencourt-Schueller young investigator award and a 10-year anniversary ANT young investigator award for his contributions to the field of EEG research.
Jonathan Schooler, PhD, joined the faculty at University of California, Santa Barbara as a Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences in 2007. Dr. Schooler pursues research on consciousness, memory, the relationship between language and thought, creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making. He is particularly interested in exploring phenomena that intersect between the empirical and the philosophical such as how fluctuations in people’s awareness of their experience mediate mind-wandering and how exposing individuals to philosophical positions alters their behavior. He is an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, as well as a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental and Social Psychology. His work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Unilever Corporation, the Center for Consciousness Studies, the Office of Educational Research, the Bower Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the John Templeton Foundation, the Imagination Institute, and the Fetzer Franklin Fund. Dr. Schooler is the author or co-author of more than two hundred papers published in scientific journals or edited volumes and was the editor (with J.C. Cohen) of Scientific Approaches to Consciousness (1997 Lawrence Erlbaum).
Dean Radin, MS, PhD, is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Before joining the research staff at IONS in 2001, he held appointments at AT&T Bell Labs, Princeton University, University of Edinburgh, and SRI International. Dr. Radin is author or coauthor of hundreds of technical articles, some 125 peer-reviewed journal articles, four dozen book chapters, and four best-selling, popular books. He has given over 600 invited presentations and interviews for government, military, business, scientific, and other groups around the world.
Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on ‘Scientific American,’ the ‘Institute of Art and Ideas,’ the ‘Blog of the American Philosophical Association’ and ‘Big Think,’ among others.
