News & Topics
The 8th Memorial Meeting of the Japan Association of Somatics & Somatic Psychology was held.
On October 9-10, 2021, The 8th Memorial Meeting of the Japan Association of Somatics & Somatic Psychology was held at Toyama Campus, Waseda Universtiy. Hiromitsu Miyata was the Congress Chair for this meeting.
The meeting was totally face-to-face, despite the COVID-19 pandemic that has forced us to hold most meetings online. Since we started to prepare for the meeting around the beginning of 2020, we again and again feared that the meeting could not be held as it was scheduled and planned. Fortunately, the state of emergency was lifted before the meeting, and a permission was obtained from the university as well, which meant that we could hold the meeting as we had planned it at the start. The meeting went very successfully with more than one hundred participants, including those from other universities/organizations, as well as students from Waseda and other universities.
The theme for the meeting was: "Soma and Psyche" That Go Beyond and Connect. Researchers including psychologists, Buddhologists, philosophers, mathematical scientists, psychiatrists, etc., held lectures and separate meetings, and practitioners and instructors of osteopathy, martial arts, speed-reading, mindfulness, laughter yoga, biodanza, etc. held workshops that actually involved these practices. In addition, the renowned poets Yuzuru Katagiri and Shuntaro Tanikawa held an online dialogue session on "poem and body," which was both quite enjoyable and impressive. I was pleased to hear a participant saying that the meeting was so pleasant that she lost a chance to go home till the end of the day.
I am looking forward to the future in which we can further develop and expand novel intellectual horizons based on the standpoint we have had at this meeting.
Related website of the Japan Association of Somatics & Somatic Psychology:
