‘Moving Into Meaning’, by Al Pesso, is now available for download as a free PDF e-book
Together with his wife, Diane Boyden-Pesso, Albert Pesso was the co-founder of PBSP (Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor), a widely respected interactive technique that helps clients create new memories to compensate for emotional deficits in the past.
He was called one of the three living masters of body-based psychotherapy and was chosen in 2012 to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award by the U.S. Association for Body Psychotherapy. Diane Boyden Pesso died on March 4, 2016. Al died soon thereafter on May 19, 2016.
‘Moving Into Meaning’ is Al Pesso’s chapter for ‘What Sustains Me’. It is a collaborative book. Each chapter is written by a different author, stands on its own, and is released independently. When all chapters are ready, the book will be published as a regular book as well as an e-book.
The central question in this project is:
What sustains you?
More specifically: What gives you a sense of peace, meaning and purpose in everyday life? What keeps you going when times are tough? What gives you the strength to face moments of crisis or despair?
The book’s topic could be described as an ‘existential quest’ or a ‘spiritual quest’. We are consciously avoiding these phrases because they can be misleading. For instance, ‘spiritual quest’ often conveys the sense of a search for outside resources, beyond the realm of the physical world. Such a definition would exclude experiences that involve inner resources.
Our focus is on describing what we experience, as opposed to the philosophical or religious terms under which these experiences are usually framed. We are not describing a specific path, a ‘right way’ to do things, or a ‘correct’ narrative of how it all works out. To the contrary, we are coming at it from different approaches and belief systems, including agnostic and atheist perspectives.
A key characteristic of this project is that each author is writing in a personal and experiential manner. The key word here is ‘experience’. We hope that, by talking in terms of experiences rather than beliefs, we can find a bridge whereby people who come from different traditions or beliefs can be nourished by each other’s experiences.
What Sustains Me is a project of LifeSherpa, a nonprofit social enterprise that fosters everyday mindfulness as creative interaction with life. You can follow the progress of this project, and our other projects, at http://LifeSherpa.com
Moving Into Meaning, by Al Pesso, can be downloaded
