Reflective Practice During a Time of Change

Reflexive Practice, Research Diaries and Witchcraft

I feel at the moment I want to begin every post with: in the current situation, or during this challenging time … whilst I do not want to amplify the platitudes, the pandemic has amplified fractures, and needs. More than ever do I find solace in reflective writing, in pausing, letting my mind wander on walks or during lunch breaks in the garden. There is so much input at the moment, and not much processing.

Normally, I would go for walking meetings with colleagues and friends, or for sanity coffees. In both situations the spaces we are in, permit our minds to meander and physically as well as metaphorically walk through spaces. I would be able to share thoughts, or get input all the while moving. The field of embodied cognition explores these interrelationships between body, movement, and cognition.

However, not only our own movement but, like in the case of sanity coffees, movement around us, seems to have an impact. We would be in a space of noise and movement, encapsulated in ‘sitting at our table bubble’ and again, whilst we are fixed, everything around us is moving, and maybe thus the dynamics of conversations are fluid. From sharing latest news, to project ideas, back to gossip, looping around to ‘take away tasks’ and back to real life. But maybe this is just habitual, a cultural script; for that’s what one does when being in the space ‘Café’.

Somehow, the fixed space of virtual meetings, seems to put stop rules on thinking. As if everything is limited to 17″ or whatever your screen-size. I miss the movement, the interrelation between physical movement and thought. Screen meetings work well for operations, for organising and task focused conversations. They are more difficult for deep conversations however, as if my possibility thinking is becoming limited, and the multidimensionality of micro-bodylanguage, and non-verbal cues are getting lost. Not to mention hugs. Everything is flat. Social interaction has become two-dimensional. Maybe the accumulation of these elements contributes to the feeling of dissociation, because a big part of living and working is happening in two dimensional space.

So this thinking about thinking and reflexive practice made me revisit something I wrote in my PhD dissertation, which by now, after all this time, and in conjunction with the research diaries, feels more like an accumulation of thoughts I meant to follow up on, than a finished piece of work. Over the last half a year or so I did have some headspace to go back to ideas, and concepts I meant to explore, and found that often the things I am drawn to now have their roots in work and studies done many years ago. And like a puzzle things are coming together.

So here were my first thoughts on thinking about thinking (Sheridan, 2011), and this is where the witches come in. As Tiffany Achings, a witch in training, was encountering the mixed messages of the different levels of thought: