If you want to know more about enactive thinking and risk, you can register for the free online workshops run on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time with Prof. Rob Long, register here: admin@spor.com.au

The group has already started pre-reading work but you can register and catch up.

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I saw a fascinating post the other day about ‘mind safety’ complete with the icon of a brain image attached.

It is this kind of use of the word ‘mind’ as metaphor and image of the brain that makes people think that safety work is ‘brain work’. It is NOT!

The development of such a myth is how images (semeiotics) and metaphors are used to create meaning (semiosis).

In SPoR, we use the word ‘mind’ in two ways. One accepts that the brain has a part in decision-making and we call this mind, with a lower-case ‘m’. Then we refer to Mind with an upper case ‘M’ to denote the embodied person as an enactive being.

If you search for ‘mind safety’, what comes up is images of brains and ‘brain work. This is misleading. Mindfulness is NOT about brainfulness. Being mindful is not about how the brain works. Being ‘safety minded’ is NOT about how the brain directs decisions indeed, in enactive cognition we know that the brain is NOT a directing organ but a coordinating organ. 95% of all human decision making does NOT involve the brain. Similarly, learning is not about ‘brain work’ as we see professed in HOP. These kinds of myths distract people from the real way people move in the world.

If one ditches a Westernised understanding of mind to an Eastern understanding of Mind, your whole view of the world changes. Prof. Karl E. Weick pioneered this thinking in risk thirty years ago (https://safetyrisk.net/eastern-mindfulness-weick-and-transdisciplinarity/).

A good place to start research is here:

In SPoR, we integrate Western and Eastern understandings of Mindfulness in our approach to risk (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262336620_Art_of_Mindfulness_Integrating_Eastern_and_Western_Approaches). This is where an understanding of Enactivism is critical.

It is in the Eastern understanding of Mindfulness that we get a better connection to what psychosocial risk means (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306170334_Eastern_and_Western_Approaches_to_Mindfulness_Similarities_Differences_and_Clinical_Implications).

This neat little chart helps explain the difference between views:

In Enactivism, there is no thought of separating the brain from the work of the body. It’s not ‘either or’ but ‘both and’.

If you want to know more about enactive thinking and risk, you can register for the free online workshops run on 8, 15, 22, 29 September 9am Canberra time with Prof. Rob Long, register here: admin@spor.com.au