Philip Shepherd has a passion for adventure and exploration that has guided him for most of his life. At 18 it took him from his native Canada to cycle alone around the world through Europe, the Middle East, Iran, India and Japan. But that trip, adventurous as it was, merely expressed a commitment to a more crucial adventure – coming to understand the subtle and often hidden aspects of our culture that affect us all, compromising our sense of self, our connection with the living world, our freedom of expression, and our creative engagement with the present.
As a young teenager, Philip could feel that influence pulling at him like an undertow to conform to given limits of thinking, understanding, values and body awareness, and felt he could resist its pull only if he understood it. That prompted him to study classical Noh Theater in Japan, design and build several houses, co-found an arts magazine, “Onion”, co-found an interdisciplinary theater company, write two internationally produced plays and a CBC documentary, teach workshops on embodied thinking and spontaneous creativity, and earn a reputation as a corporate coach. In 2001 Philip began to write “New Self, New World”, and over the next nine years worked on it continuously to pull all the strands of his understanding together, and challenge the 10,000-year-old story of our culture, which tells us what it means to be human.
Philip speaks with Joanna about: recognizing the wholeness of the world; liberating oneself from fractured paradigms; embodied present; Orpheus journey; the orphan parts of ourselves; the depth and mystery of relationship; the sense of play; Noh theater and the sacred wholeness; being danced by the world.
”I Can’t Sit Still”, original music by Evarusnik
http://www.evarusnik.com/Home.html
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I loved this podcast so much. So much of what Philip talks about resonates with me. Just this morning I lay in bed after a restless night. I’ve been crying for the past few days without understanding exactly what it is that I am upset about. I went down into my body to see what I could see. And there was this crazy wild-haired kid, flinging himself around. I have been doing Peter Gerlach’s inner-family work lately, and so once I saw this wild kid flinging himself around I brought alongside me some of the other parts of myself to introduce to this “prodigal son”. One of those parts I call Source, and is represented by a vast sky. And Source lowered himself down onto this kid like a blanket, and soothed him. It reminded me of the weighted blankets and vests I’ve seen that (counterintuitively) help calm the bodies people with muscle problems, and people with autism.
So I guess that’s why I started to cry a little when Philip began talking about Orpheus and Eurydice :)
I really enjoy your podcasts, Joanna. Thanks.
Wow ,I do applaud you for your works and I love your topics section . Thank You and hope to see more of your trees from the seeds you sprouted .