What is physis?
Physis is the energy that keeps life living – in your body, in your mind, in your family, your community and your organisation, and in the totality of nature around us.
It is the biochemical energy that was set in motion when life on Earth emerged some 3.74 billion years ago, and has since then organised itself into amazingly complex, multi-layered and differentiated structures of energy pathways that form the web of life on this gorgeous, green planet.
The concept of physis was first imported into modern psychological parlance by Eric Berne who used it to refer to the healthy psychological energy driving therapeutic healing. He also applied it more broadly to denote the energy behind human growth and development, learning and adaptation, healing and regeneration. He indicated that physis was the concept which tied in TA with biology in general and evolution in particular. Based on all of this, one might think that physis was the central organising concept of Transactional Analysis, but in actual fact we meet with an enigmatic use of the term – it crops up at a mere handful of loci and is never discussed at length or elaborated systematically.
This is what physis theory undertakes to do for reasons connected largely with the spirit of the age we live in.
Who is physis theory for?
Physis is a prime quality training programme for advanced professionals. It helps to have some grounding in Transactional Analysis, but essentially it is an independent course of study open to anyone with experience in organisational work or the helping professions and an interest in any of the following fields:
- business organisations
- communities
- international relations
- education
- the marketplace
- the families and schools raising the next generation of citizens for this planet
- non-governmental settings
- HR
- your own personal and professional unfolding.
It draws on a large body of multidisciplinary knowledge – which has been pooled and systematised for you and brought to bear directly on your daily professional concerns: so all you need to do is sit and listen in wonderment.
It requires no prior training in any of the disciplines mentioned – all it takes is your own rich prior professional and personal experience and an open and inquisitive mind.
How does it help to serve our clients?
Our job as leaders, decision-makers, helpers and educators is to accompany and advise people along their way in uncertain and even bewildering times. We need to be competent, sure-footed and able to extend realistic hope, viable perspectives and responsible guidance. This needs to be based on a profound understanding of our current predicament and be translated to easy-to-grasp, intuitive guidelines, tools and techniques.
Physis theory brings the vast complexity of life down to the operative level of our daily practice and puts it into your hand in a neatly packaged, ready-to-use professional toolkit. It enables professionals to provide employer and employee with solutions which align the health criteria of the individual, the organisation, the family, the community/nation and the global community.
It provides a coherent framework for making sense of any case, placing the case on the universal map of the overall web of physis and helping you generate valid problem-solving answers on the local level which consciously integrate the local with its broader systemic context, working toward a sustainable global reality.
It provides vocabulary for understanding and securing the health and sustainability criteria of individuals, families, organisations, local/national communities and the global community.
Each of the 7 dynamics acts as a bridge connecting the deepest biological regularities of life on this planet with the mundane realities of our lives as individuals or social units.
Jointly, they produce a potent and useable framework for sense-making, relief and regeneration which has been refined through the wear-and-tear of a busy consultancy practice over the past twenty years, and which clients have readily embraced as intuitive catalysts to generate their own healthy answers to the challenges of their personal and professional life-course on its numerous planes.
In physis theory trainings you learn to steer by the guiding principles of global sustainability, whilst mobilising the full local understanding of your partner’s unique reality, teaching them to generate their own healthy answers, using their own resources and feeding into a sustainable global reality.
