Dr Ian Player with his wife, Ann, and Professor Kriben Pillay.Academic Presents Workshop on Mindfulness and Fear
UKZN’s Professor Kriben Pillay led a workshop on mindfulness and fear at the Phuzamoya Dream Centre based at the Karkloof home of world-renowned conservationist, Dr Ian Player.
Pillay, Dean of Teaching and Learning in the College of Law and Management Studies, facilitated the workshop as part of his on-going community engagement and research.
Player, who started the Centre in 2009, was introduced to dreams about 30 years ago by his friend, Sir Laurens van der Post in his book: C G Jung and the Story of our Time.
The purpose of the Dream Centre as it is currently structured is to provide a forum for interesting discussions about people’s internal lives - the wilderness within that Player refers to - with the belief that such informed debate is enriching.
Dream Centre Co-ordinator and Clinical Psychologist, Ms Sheila Berry, wrote the following in an email to Pillay after the workshop: ‘Your presentation is still very much alive in the minds of many of the people who attended the event. The afternoon session was certainly most entertaining and I really appreciated the humour and laughter you brought to the event. It is unusual for almost the whole audience to stay on after tea and never before have they stayed on till after 6pm, and would have been more than happy to continue for another 20 minutes had I not brought the session to an end.
‘May I ask what magic you cast over the audience that kept them spell-bound and clearly oblivious to the fact that night was falling, when these dream gatherings are billed as afternoon events? It must have been your interesting presentation of how we are almost genetically pre-disposed to being captive to our many assumptions that foster an acceptance of illusions.’
Pillay also introduced the audience to John Sherman’s Inward Looking which, linked to mindfulness, has shown to be for many a transformative act that dissolves the context of fear that plagues most human beings; a context that keeps alive ill will, greed and delusion.
- Kriben Pillay