Abstract

Personal Spiritual Inquiry (PSI) in a post-traumatic existence creates a dialectical complexity between the past and the present—living in the moment while reliving the past. The ability to fully recover past trauma is paradoxically entwined with the inability to gain access to all of the experience. In order to access fragments of trauma memory, a process of PSI creates contact with these memories and is translated through the means of video production. In this project, the PSI framework is organized by paradigms of meditation that deeply reflects on post-traumatic experience with illness, Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), and the process of video documentation. In the seminal text, “The Poetics of Space,” Gaston Bachelard claimed the house to be a great force that amalgamates the unique dreams, memories and thoughts of humans. Through the lens of Bachelard’s thinking, this project’s PSI with illness experience became represented by the image of the house as a signifier of decay, and the house as a signifier of a cocoon. The material derived from this research is an experimental documentary entitled, The Structure of Illness Space. Personal Spiritual Inquiry is a unique process of spiritual practice that functions as a conduit for spiritual growth, artistic expression, and transformative healing.