Classification: Transpersonal Psychology

The wonder of it all,things happening and pieces falling into place as we "seek and ye shall find". Validation during each step makes this whole thing so gosh darn rewarding that I want to celebrate everything and everyone.

Last night while researching some prospective publishers, I came across a word that I had to look up. Believe me, and I am ashamed to say there are many. But this one caught my attention and I just had to know it's meaning on the spot.

Here is what I found:
Transpersonal psychology is a school of psychology that studies the transpersonal, self-transcendent or spiritual aspects of the human experience.
A short definition from the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology suggests that transpersonal psychology "is concerned with the study of humanity’s highest potential, and with the recognition, understanding, and realization of unitive, spiritual, and transcendent states of consciousness" (Lajoie and Shapiro, 1992:91). Issues considered in transpersonal psychology include spiritual self-development, peak experiences, mystical experiences, systemic trance and other occult experiences of living.
Transpersonal psychology developed from earlier schools of psychology including psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanistic psychology. Transpersonal psychology attempts to describe and integrate the experience of mysticism within modern psychological theory. Types of mystical experience examined vary greatly but include religious conversion, altered states of consciousness, trance and other spiritual practices. Although Carl Jung and others explored aspects of the spiritual and transpersonal in their work, Miller (1998: 541-542) notes that Western psychology has had a tendency to ignore the spiritual dimension of the human psyche.

I am on cloud nine.

Love and light,

Wendy