ABOUT JARISCOPE
Welcome to JARISCOPE!
The Jariscope Mission: Our mission is to give caring people hands-on practical tools, processes, and community support for turning the alienating, inauthentic, and dehumanizing influences of postmodern life into the very energy and essence of change. The program provides secular, inclusive, reliable, and repeatable activities that we can all do to get more deeply in touch with our bodies and psyches, to reintegrate our fragmented lives, and to enliven our relationships, work, and everything we do with sparks of creativity and originality.
JARISCOPE is an organization creating a growing community and providing online and onsite courses and educational materials for caregivers, people in the helping professions (mental health professionals, parents, teachers, ministers, authors and artists) the tools to quickly and reliably recharge themselves holistically and relieve their stress.
Our work combines and synthesizes the many benefits of yoga and dance movement, creative expression, and meditation techniques. This synthesis provides a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. We’re here to save you time and give you more for your money.
The first courses were given at Rishi Valley School, a private boarding school in rural South India, between Bangalore and Madras, in 1994. The program was developed in the following years in California and has now been taught nationally in the U.S. as well as in Canada, Norway and Ecuador.
With Jariscope, you can expect deeper, more lasting results in coping with the physical, psychological, and emotional demands of work and life, and to make a habit of healthful and pleasurable means of holistic self-care.
Jariscope develops your capacity for facing change, processing your emotions, gracefully managing difficult people and situations, and being true to your values.
Just join our subscription list on the main page of this blog site and we will keep you informed as we roll out our product offerings in 2008. Be part of our growing community of caring people who know how to stay in balance anytime, anywhere.
Feel free to email: jc@jariscope.com If you would prefer to call: 203-848-8093
BASICS OF THE JARISCOPE PHILOSOPHY
· We can change our bodies, thought patterns, beliefs, and behaviors.
· We are whole systems, integrated into the fabric of life everywhere.
· Everyone is completely unique, unrepeatable, and of infinite value.
· It is our job to bring about the conditions for breakthroughs of creative insight and understanding.
· If we open ourselves to the greater mystery, we allow ourselves to be gifted.
· When you are in balance, you can better trust your instincts and intuitions.
· All of the Earth’s peoples can meet in sensing the wonders of life.
· Only an integrated approach to learning and growth can effectively develop the wisdom, holistic health, and peace in individuals and groups so necessary now.
An interview with Jari Chevalier and the Ojai Valley News
OVN: Regarding your teaching, how did you get started with this unusual approach?
JC: Throughout my formal fine arts education in poetry, which included two degree programs, a number of writers conferences, several privately held workshops, and two tutorials with masterful poets, I was quite conscious of aspects of the education that were extremely lacking, in my view of things.
Even though I was successful in those programs—I had excellent grades; my teachers believed in me; I received awards and recognition—there were qualities of the struggle to grow as an artist that I felt were not being addressed at all in these educational settings. And I was really baffled at times wondering how these aspects could be completely passed over and ignored. I especially felt compassion for those who were not writing good work, who were not doing so well, and who wanted so much to be better—their process and struggle was not being addressed.
I was thinking, when I get a chance, later, to be a teacher there are things I would like to do very differently and to speak about differently in my classes. It’s everything—how we work with the very motives, the deeply inward need behind a creative work, in other words, I was questioning: is there a way for us to, if not speak of that, nurture it without ever putting it into words. I would like to be, as a teacher, aware of, and with a tenderness for the very core from which a creative work is moving out, that desire in an individual to express something that’s intimate and real for them. Can we be better at this, can we set up the conditions that will ease that process for the person who is just learning how to be brave and authentic? And, might everyone be treated like a budding creative artist who is consistently learning to better tap into their innermost reality, their truest inner life experience, and express it?
OVN: That’s what JARISCOPE’s about, I guess.
JC: Well, that’s a part of it. It’s about setting up the ideal conditions for artists and psychologists (or really anyone interested in exploring creativity), even extremely successful artists wishing to enter really new territory, to experiment, to work in a new form or to work on something they find very difficult to put out there, where there’s this sense of something that needs to be expressed, but there are inhibitions and they can’t quite get at it; with JARISCOPE they can get at it.
So, JARISCOPE is where we set up the ideal conditions, first in the classes, but it’s really to be used in an ongoing way, for oneself, so that your creativity is best supported all of the time.
OVN: What kind of conditions are you referring to?
JC: We work together from a non-critical, open-minded perspective. We’re creating raw material, brand new creative material in the course, so we’re not there to analyze and judge: that wouldn’t be fair or constructive, because the person has not had a chance to even take a second look at it themselves. Instead, we respond from a very body-centered awareness to let that person know where in this raw material we are experiencing the most interest, the most heat, so to speak, where they’ve got the stuff with the energy that moves us.
OVN: That sounds terrific! I think some workshops can be very intimidating for people.
JC: This is different. We don’t know what’s going to come out, whether its going to be in the form of poetry or music or choreography or something visual or a whole new vision of a product, a process, one’s life or of the future. We are all working with the same prompts, in real time, together, with the dual purpose of self-development and profoundly resonant communication with others. It’s a powerful experience that changes lives.
And so everybody, no matter how accomplished or famous in their field, is considered an amateur in the group, an amateur of this particular process. Because “ama” means “love”. We do this for the love of it, for the love of growth and new frontiers, and the trust that good things spring from this open and loving place in ourselves. Participants are encouraged to go completely out of their concentration or specialization.
A sculptor writes a personal essay; a mystery writer does a drawing. Anything goes. And, as facilitator, I don’t need to be an expert in every one of these forms; it’s not about that. I am a sensitive and tasteful person who’s going to give you an honest response and moderate the room as others give their response as well. I want the members of the group to receive the work freshly, to rely on their own true visceral responses in the moment, in all innocence.
OVN: So you’re looking to create a safe place?
JC: People in the group are asked to pledge confidentiality and nonplagarism, so there’s the safety of being able to be really out there, possibly saying and doing things that you wouldn’t want talked about, and the participants can also be as startlingly brilliant and original as can be, and nobody’s going to run away with their ideas. The group witnessing the entire process together, to some degree, ensures that.
I think a lot of teachers in universities do not want to offer, in any ostensible way, this kind of environment, because it supposedly invites the workshop to become a group therapy session.
Now, I’m not a trained therapist and these teachers in universities are not trained therapists, and so we really don’t want to invite that. And you know, John, when human beings are in a creative atmosphere in which they are expressing their deepest concerns symbolically, they really can’t help being in the territory of potentially healing themselves and each other. I do have a structure that allows for that. Everyone understands that this is not therapy. And, having said that, I will add that it can certainly be therapeutic for some people.
I actually think that we go to the greatest works in poetry, theater, film—you name it—because they offer us insight and a way to feel our way around in the great questions, the depths of life with each other, and they give us the means to not feel so alone and alienated, to remember that other people, that all of humanity is up against some of the same difficult things and this helps us to feel that it’s good to be alive, even when it’s hard.
And, this is lovely; it’s beautiful work; and it’s great to be a part of it. Everybody in the group feels uplifted and warmed to be in an atmosphere where all of this is happening, where there’s no hiding or shame in our common humanity.
OVN: Something that most people never get exposed to.
JC: There are very few contexts that I know of. The JARISCOPE sessions can go all kinds of ways. There may be people in the group who are going in a healing direction with it and there may be others who are in there to create a useful product, for business. Which is nice! It’s extraordinary! In an open field like this, a wide variety of things happen and there’s a great deal of cross-pollination and inspiration, which strengthens the vital human bonds among all concerned. It’s just a whole lot more like life, in all its richest moments, than many educational experiences.
I started teaching the course in India at a boarding school called Rishi Valley School in the winter of 1993. I took my son, who was then fourteen, on a trip. I did a trade with this school, which was just about the best deal I had ever come upon. It was one of the most providential things in my life and the beginning of quite a wonderful string of events. So, at Rishi Valley we got our own cottage and three meals a day and afternoon tea and my son, David, was able to attend any of the classes in the 9th grade. And he took on a full program there for three months. In exchange, I was to teach creativity in any way that I saw fit, to all the various age groups and levels.
I concentrated with the upperclassmen and I had several groups. And I tell you, these kids—in the upper eschelons of society in India—they spoke the king’s English with a beautiful British accent a rich and extensive vocabulary. Brilliant, bright-eyed kids who’d never taken a drug in their lives, who were into studying and who adored their teachers—this is the environment in which I started teaching JARISCOPE.
I remember walking with a student by the lovely man-made lake, which was part of a large ecological reforestation project the school had taken on, talking about her short story. We created a reading series through which the students got to read their writings to the school. And then the teachers started getting interested in what I was doing through these wonderful pieces by their students. I gave two weekend intensives there for the teachers, so they could investigate it. And I went in and worked with some of the younger kids, the 7- and 8-year-olds. There was a school magazine that published a lot of the work—they really did everything they could with this: it was such an honorable way to begin.
And the truth was, it came out of a wholehearted desire to do something wonderful for them. I had no books with me. I basically had to create something on the spot and just start teaching, based on my memory of highlights from the past, and what had worked best for me, and to invent processes that would help people to succeed creatively, exercises that would engage the totality of their personhood in the process of creation. A lot of the things I did with those kids are still being done in the JARISCOPE sessions now. I am quite sure that it’s because I was able to be in such a nurturing, accepting environment that my own creativity as a teacher flourished. I was given perfectly fertile ground to get started with this.
I have observed that this work is very integrative. In other words it addresses people’s psychological, spiritual, motivational, and creative needs. I wish to bring this program wherever it’s needed. I attended a conference called Spirituality & Healing in Medicine headed up by Harvard researcher and cardiologist Herbert Benson. He wrote The Relaxation Response and is famous for the research he has done with yogis, Tibetan lamas, and others who are able to change their physiological responses through meditation. He was fascinated with how these yogis can be buried alive and live with very little oxygen, for instance, or they can consciously regulate their metabolic rate. Certain Tibetan practices have the adept generate so much heat in their bodies, just sitting there, that they can melt snow—they have contests to show how much snow they can melt in a ring around their bodies! And they also become adepts at drying icy wet sheets thrown around their naked shoulders and backs. You see the steam rising from the sheets as they sit there in a cold room. It is fascinating, the power of the mind to regulate the body. Benson is an MD and he’s very interested in how this translates to healing. The conference featured some information about the placebo effect and the power of prayer, compassion at the bedside of terminally ill patients and other things.
I am really interested in this and I’ve observed in myself and others that engaging in creative activity sets up a healing process that is not only psychological, but extends to physiology. And it can regulate people’s energy in a new way.
The work of James Pennebaker has documented scientifically the power of writing about traumatic events. Even just keeping a daily journal, which is a tool for self-reflection and for articulating what’s going on with oneself—these activities have significantly reduced the severity of chronic diseases, such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis—these are serious diseases! Highly significant results!
Who knows what else we can do by putting our pen and our pain on paper? The kind of writing and creating we do with JARISCOPE can be instrumental in self-care programs where people are making lifestyle changes and trying to deal with heart problems or any number of conditions.
OVN: In reading your poems I noticed that they expose your feelings and are quite personal: would that be required for this therapeutic effect that you’re talking about, to really get a person to put into words what’s deep inside of them?
JC: Not everybody wants to do that and it just doesn’t feel natural for everybody to do that. But there are those for whom that is an extremely liberating process: to be able to give voice to that which is deep inside.
OVN: Well, I assume that’s how it is for you, since you authored those poems.
JC: I simply must do it. And I don’t know why. Again, it’s another one of the mysteries. If I don’t give voice to what is very deep inside of me—the only way I can describe it is that I feel that I am betraying myself, like I’m not doing what I’m here to do, that I am wasting my life. So I’m compelled to, as artistically and aesthetically as possible, to give voice to what is very real for me. I have observed that not everyone is like this! In fact I’ve noticed in my classes and in my personal relationships, too, that—much to my dismay at times—many people just really don’t want to go very deep, or can’t. As a teacher, it is not my goal to pry people open. But, I do notice that a lot of people, given the right environment and the permission to be more truthful, actually like taking that road, even if it’s a little unfamiliar and they don’t feel particularly compelled to do it. If they have an opportunity, and there is the nurturing environment, and there is the freedom, and they see somebody else doing it, then people generally will go deeper. And once they experience the relief it can bring, a lot of times they don’t want to stop.
On the other side, many of us have had some very painful things happen to us. And so I never push anybody, because I feel that the defenses someone has first arose organically to protect them, psychologically, from those horrible things happening to them. If the time is ever right to look at those things, the impulse and opening will rise organically too, and the person will feel it is safe and natural to go into it. I simply set up the conditions so that if someone is ready to look and to express, they can do so. In my mind, the opposite of depression is expression and I see that a lot of people are depressed, chronically depressed. They are not living with the joy and vibrancy of life. And in many cases, they don’t even know it, don’t expect to be joyful, and wouldn’t know what to do with vibrant joy. They’d be a stranger to themselves if they were, suddenly, joyful. As a young person I was depressed. Looking back I can see how anxious, self-conscious, confused and depressed I really was. I didn’t really know I was depressed at the time, but I’ve gotten more and more joyful.
OVN: Because you’ve been expressing.
JC: I’ve been expressing; I’ve been getting it out; I’ve been dealing with it. And I also credit meditation and movement as being big contributors to it and that’s why I have brought these into the program from the beginning. The expression is not the whole of it at all. I think the physical activity—the movement series that we do is meant to be a concentrated way to energize and relax your body, before you get to work. I recommend that people run, swim, walk, not just rely on the movement series I do at the beginning of class. This warm-up is meant, as I said, to be a concentrate, so that when you’re really short on time, you can get yourself activated and balanced in 10-15 minutes. But if I could do a whole hour workout with yoga; if I had people for a whole week and we were doing a great, long camp or something—which I hope to do!—well, the same goes for meditation in my workshops. We only sit in silence for six minutes. It’s there to help establish the habit of letting things fall back into silence, clearing the mind, relaxing, coming back to the body, centering yourself, noticing your breath—and to associate it with the creative process. I tell everybody in the classes that this is just a tiny taste. What you really want is 20 minutes minimum meditation practice per day, walking or sitting practice.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I feel I can make certain generalizations that I would never have said in the first years. But I feel I can safely say, because there have been enough people coming through my program who have gone through a major shift, that this program is a means, a tool for self-revelation and transformation, change.
OVN: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
JC: Well, we talked a lot about the healing applications, and I just want to add that I don’t personally see a separation between the growth of a person and the growth of an artist. In other words, when a person gets into the state where everything lines up and something that is beautiful and true is expressed, something that can touch and move other people, that is also the state in which that person is healed, which is to be made more whole. That’s the state in which he is relieved, where his burden is lifted. That’s how it works for an artist, and that’s how it works for anyone. The beautiful and true piece of it, the power of the work’s ability to touch and move others is just stronger and more refined in the artist through his talent. Something much larger has moved through him. And it can happen for anyone who can make himself available for it. That’s the healing; the learning, the self-knowing, the power, and the art—the spiritual experience and the aesthetic experience happening all at once.
