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Sam Keen |
Sam Keen's Key Accomplishments Include . . .
Sam Keen is a noted American author, professor and philosopher who is best known for his exploration of questions regarding love, life, religion, thought-provoking slants on marriage and sexuality, persuasive arguments on the value of telling one's story in the search for meaning and being a man in contemporary society.
Sam Keen was, in his own words, "overeducated at Harvard and Princeton" and was a professor of philosophy and religion at "various legitimate institutions" and a contributing editor of Psychology Today for 20 years before becoming a free-lance thinker, lecturer, seminar leader and consultant. Sam Keen is the New York Times best-selling author of Fire in the Belly as well as a dozen other books, and a co-producer of an award winning PBS documentary, Faces of the Enemy. His work was the subject of a PBS special Bill Moyers--Your Mythic Journey with Sam Keen.
More About Sam Keen . . .
Sam Keen believes that our lives are shaped — and occasionally misshaped — by the stories we tell about ourselves. It's only by becoming intimately acquainted with these narratives — as they have been handed down from our families, our cultural backgrounds, our religious beliefs — that we can begin to live consciously and, as the Sufi poet Rumi said, "unfold our own myth." By understanding our lives as a kind of autobiography in the making, we're less likely to take refuge in other people's stories, in ready-made ideologies, and in unexamined systems of belief.
When not writing or traveling around the world lecturing and doing seminars on a wide range of topics, Sam Keen cuts wood, tends to his farm in the hills above Sonoma, takes long hikes and practices the flying trapeze. |
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| Suggested Keynote Programs |
- Self-Healing: Myth and the Body
The myths and value systems we unconsciously adopt from our families and from the economic, political and religious cultures into which we are born shape both our minds and our bodies. Our scripts, stories, life-styles predispose us to treat our bodies in certain ways and therefore to contract certain diseases. An urban, competitive way of life, for instance, leads predictably to a high incidence of heart attacks, cancer, respiratory infections and diabetes. By discovering the somatic aspects of our myths, they way they shape our bodies, form our character armor, structure our use of energy, dis-ease us, we can begin to recover the power to heal ourselves.
In this seminar you will explore:
Personal history. What disease scripts did you get from your family? What did you learn about the body, about sensuality and sexuality, from your parents? What meanings were assigned to special diseases?
Social and political myths. What religious, economic and cultural myths are informing your life and death styles? What price do you pay in health and happiness for living by the myth of competition, success, progress?
Somatic cryptology. How do you decipher the messages of your pain and disease? How do you listen to the voices of your illness?
The art and techniques of self-healing. How do you use creative imagination, memory, visualization, dreams, meditation, touch to change your disease scripts and enter into a more healing relationship with your self?
Healing and the body-politic. How much disease is a cry of loneliness and despair? What are the unheard voices that speak to us out of violence? How do we recover the communion that is necessary to health?
- Reviewing and Revisioning Your Life
Periodically, we all need to review and revision our lives. Every decade of our life-cycle brings new tasks, goals, pleasures and horizons. When the trauma of divorce, illness, tragedy or sudden good fortune strikes us, or when we gradually become dissatisfied, bored and depressed,it is time to take stock of our past and look for a new vision to guide us toward a more hopeful future.
In this seminar we will explore your present, past and future.
- Where are you in your life-cycle.
- Thus far what have you accomplished? Experienced?
- What's old? Stale, worn-out, boring?
- What new? Interesting, exciting,appealing?
- What decisions do you need to make?
- How are you haunted by your past?
- What destructive patterns to you repeat? Addictions?
- What wounds still fester?
- What infantile guilt and shame lingers?
- Whom have you not forgiven?
- What can't you "re-member"?
- What debts of gratitude have you not repaid?
- What past values and visions do you want to re-present?
- What future do you foresee for yourself?
- What do you fear?
- What hasn't happened yet?
- What promises and potentials are still unfulfilled?
- What are your dreams, values, visions?
To help in this review and revision assemble objects that might be useful to a biographer who was going to write the story of your life. Photos from different times. Diaries that show how you have changed over the years. Newspaper clippings about your accomplishments. Objects that were especially important to you. Songs that moved you. Bring a blank book and colored pencils.
- Corporate Cultures, Corporate Myths
Corporations, no less than tribes or nations, are shaped by myths,stories and rituals of which they are largely unconscious and which may be either creative or destructive. (Think of myth not as mistake or fabrication but as the unconscious information , the cultural software, the social DNA that provides the basic information that governs the growth and decay of a group of people.)
Cultural myths (eg. Communism is a "cancer" that must be cut out or contained. Capitalism is an exploitation of many by the few) often cause nations to adopt policies that are shortsighted or self-destructive. Likewise, unexamined corporate myths often result in the choice of inappropriate means for unclear goals, high levels of anxiety and stress, low levels of creativity and stagnation.
In this seminar we will examine the myth that informs your corporation--the stories, rituals, rites of passage, power objects and insignia of power that bind the group together.
- Some of the questions we will consider include the following:
- Where are you going? What are your goals? Visions? Values?
- Who defines happiness? The good life? The marks of status?
- What are you required to sacrifice for success?
- Who are the heros? Heroines? Villains?
- What is taboo?
- How do you deal with conflict?
- Who are your enemies and allies inside and outside the corporation?
- Why do men and women fall sick? Become stresses? Burn out?
- By what standards do you judge a corporation to be healthy?
- What kinds of power function within the corporation?
- When should a corporation change.? Merge? Die? How may it be reborn?
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| What People Are Saying |
"Human life is a journey whose end is not in sight. Searching, longing and questioning is in our DNA. Who we are and what we will become is determined by the questions that animate us, and by those we refuse to ask. Your questions are your quest. As you ask, so shall you be."
— Sam Keen |
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