Abstract

This Project Demonstrating Excellence , or dissertation, explores the restorative qualities of poetry and personal stories in relation to understanding and integrating the dynamics of spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency. The project embraces a transpersonal approach to mental illness, envisions a nonlinear paradigm for healing, and provides numerous examples from Jungian, Tantric Buddhist, and related literature. The archetypes mentioned in the PDE's title, the dakini and guru are from Vajrayana Buddhism. In this study, the relationships between Vajrayana teacher-student and analyst-analysand are explored and compared. This dissertation consists of two parts: A contextual essay and a chapbook of my poetry. A heuristic study serves as the background for the contextual essay. My autobiographical narrative and the autobiographical narratives of the co-researchers regarding spiritual emergence, which appear in the PDE, support the contextual essay. These narratives are based on heuristic research, a qualitative research method developed by Clark Moustakas . The contextual essay and chapbook are intended for the general reader, medical patients and their families, health care providers, therapists, and others in the healing professions along with students and instructors of transpersonal psychology and the humanities. The contextual essay locates the work for the scholarly audience, positioning it within the fields of humanities, comparative religious studies, women's studies, comparative mythologies, transpersonal psychology, psychiatry, and medical humanities and provides a critical summary of related research. Collectively, the poems, autobiographical narratives, and analyses encourage a participatory role in spiritual emergence. The work could prove to be especially therapeutic for practitioners in the mental health profession and laypersons who use poetry and bibliotherapy as guides to personal growth. In addition, persons interested in pastoral care might find this PDE useful. However it can also empower anyone seeking alignment with the Self by integrating the dynamics of spiritual emergence