In this article I bring a transpersonal perinatal anthropological perspective to the study of three fathers' near-death-like experiences. I com pare Kenneth Ring's descriptions of prototypical near-death experiences (NDEs) with the "spiritual emergencies" of these three New Zealand men during their partners' pregnancies. Their experiences show significant similarities to the classic NDE pattern...

The events of the last decades have impacted our lives and our health significantly. We expected that the technology boom will improve our lives. While this may be true in a specific context, generally speaking our societies are suffering from moral decays, terrorism fears, wars, financial crisis and unpredictable acts of nature that are increasing in frequency and in intensity. The complex nat...

In this lecture, the new insights and strategies that transpersonal psychology offers will be discussed in relation to the global crisis. Western academic psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy are ethnocentric; they tend to see their point of view as being superior to the perspectives of all the other cultural groups. They are also pragmacentric in that they take into considerations only ex...

This article introduces a new qualitative spiritual assessment instrument. It reviews existing qualitative assessment tools and presents a new multidimensional spiritual assessment framework. The instrument consists of two components: a spiritual history in which consumers relate their spiritual life story in a manner analogous to a family history and an interpretive framework to assist practit...

This article addressed the following questions: How are spirituality, spiritual need, and spiritual care in aged care defined? What constitutes spiritual care for older people in aged care? From an organisational perspective, what are barriers and enablers to providing spiritual care? Spirituality and spiritual care were defined in a variety of ways in the literature. The literature endorsed nu...

Actions and processes leading into, or out of, crises depend on humans’ decisions, including the ones taken in the name of organizations. Prerequisites for prevention of repetition of crises, as well as for their abolition, include requisitely holistic individuals. Hence the humans/organizations should look at humans as multilayered entities. In synergy, not only as a sum, we define humans as: ...

Patient and family requests for hastened death, upsetting as they are to the treating team, are usually a way for patients and their families to express their need for an increase in the intensity of communication, improved symptom control, or acknowledgment of an existential or spiritual crisis. Rarely do they represent the need for patients to control the time, place, and manner of their deat...

certainly be quite peripheral. Rather, my central concerns will be how to face my death, how to bring my life to a close, and how best to help my family go on without me. A ventilator will not help me do these things-not unless all I need is a little more time to get the job done. Unfortunately, however, bioethics has succumbed to the agendas of physicians. Physicians face ethical concerns abou...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To understand how hospital inpatients express their spirituality and to investigate the impact of hospice environment on this expression. RESEARCH APPROACH Qualitative. SETTING Two metropolitan hospice centers in southern Australia. PARTICIPANTS 12 inpatients (7 males, 5 females) who were residents for at least four days. METHODOLOGIC APPROACH Influenced by Heidegger'...

PURPOSE Spirituality encompasses a wide range of meanings between holistic wellbeing and mysticism. We explored advanced cancer patients' spiritual experiences of transcendence. METHODS A total of 251 patients with advanced cancer were included and observed (participant observation) over 12 months by a psycho-oncologist/music-therapist. She recorded and documented patients' spontaneously expr...