On Being a Practitioner #1
Liberating Self form Structured Limitations
In the weekly reflection, I mentioned working on a model called “The Practitioner.” The idea is around some questions:
How can a change-maker develop?
How can one person constantly experience, learn, and recreate in life despite the limitations?
How can one person be the root for change? How can they develop eyes to spot change and development opportunities?
Other questions come to my mind. For example:
Can one person change something? (I’ll write about this topic later. The answer can be yes and no. It depends on our point of view. There can be two: sociological(Relational) and person-centered)
What is the impact of context on a person or group of people involved in the change process?
How my definition of being a practitioner is different from other approaches and mindsets?
I try to answer these questions as we walk together on this journey. Now let’s take a look at some basic definitions, and I give you an example of a person I call a pure practitioner.
What does “Practitioner” Mean?
Let’s take a look at the root of the phrase practitioner:
At the heart of being a practitioner is practicing. Practicing was and is a pure humanistic approach to learn and explore the world around. When we talk about practicing, it means interacting and being in relation to the world around us. In this kind of relationship is that we can make sense of things. The concept of being a practitioner can give the person a different world view from the social norms that encourage them to be the perfect version of themselves. As a practitioner, the person can experience current narratives living in and create new narratives, and the narratives are the soul of change.
If I were to tell you where my greatest feeling, my universal feeling,
the bliss of my earthly existence has been,
I would have to confess: It has always, here and there,
been in this kind of in-seeing,
in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments
of this divine seeing into the heart of things.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, 1987)1
Liberating from Structural Limitations
We are living in societies. We as humans created social institutions to interact with constant situations. For example, schools are institutions we have made to unify education and keep its continuity.
A social institution is an interrelated system of social roles and social norms, organized around the satisfaction of an important social need or social function.
Social Institutions are organized patterns of beliefs and behaviour that are centered on basic social needs.2
As we look back to the history of human living, we identify that we could live as social creatures by creating social institutions. We have to remember that social living was a way of survival for us. Our ancestors from thousand years ago realized that we are dependent on each other, and we need to define norms and behaviors to keep life going on. Because of this need, social institutions are resistant to change because they have been created to represent and keep social norms.
When we look at social norms, we realize that expectations are set for different roles we have. For example, being a father, mother, engineer, film director, and so on are affected by norms. All these norms become an acceptable narrative for society members. Like what I mentioned in the article about the meaning of hope, living in norms gives us obvious definitions of phenomena. These axiomatic narratives create structured limitations and encourage us to accept narratives and not ask questions.
A practitioner asks generative questions, observes phenomena, and makes sense from interacting with phenomena. In such being, the practitioner can understand current narratives and reproduce new narratives, which is a means of liberating from structured limitations.
Abbas Kiarostami as an Example of Being a Practitioner
Abbas Kiarostami (1940 - 2016) was an accredited Iranian filmmaker. He was awarded Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the Movie Taste of Cherry (1997).3 Watch the movie free on Youtube. (With English Caption)
Although we know Kiarostami as a director, at the same time, he was a painter, a poet, a photographer, a carpenter, and a sculptor. Social norms created by social institutions define that a film director should be a film director. When you question the norms, you may experience liberation and permit yourself to experience various things in life. These experiments are the source of creativity and new narratives.
Kiarostami, for me, is a sample of being a practitioner because he occupied himself with different practices. For example, in comparison with a poet, it can be hard to call him a poet with the definition of norms, but he dares to write things as a poem, and it’s a form of practicing and discovering the world. His movies are his narrative of life which is the result of all his daily living experience.
Watch this short interview with Kiarostami. These 8 minutes help you a bit to understand his worldview:
Where are we going?
With this writing, I’m trying to discuss how we can permit ourselves to have the profound experience of different aspects of life? This series will continue, and I invite you to discuss and give your opinions.
Some questions:
What does it mean to be a practitioner for you? What do you think about this concept?
Who’s a sample of a practitioner for you?
Phenomenology of Practice. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228480543_Phenomenology_of_Practice