The Khora Institute

A Therapoetic Way of Caring

Todd DuBose, Ph.D. , Director

The Khora Institute

A Therapoetic Way of Caring

Todd DuBose, Ph.D. , Director

Welcome...What we are about: Heeding Lived Meaning

Welcome to The Khora Institute. My name is Todd DuBose and I am its director. The word, “khora”, originally meant the place outside the city where outcasts resided. It later came to mean that place of sanctuary where you can come as you are, in your own way, and be heard and held respectfully in an engaged understanding of your lived meaning, regardless of your situation, circumstance, or context. I call this process "therapoetics".

The experience of therapeutics is beautifully written by Dostoyevsky,, in his book, White Nights: "“To speak to someone who truly listens, who understands your heart without judgment—there is no greater gift. And for the first time, I feel as though I am not alone. Meeting you has been like hearing a song I’ve always known but never dared to sing. You have brought me back to life, if only for a moment, and that is enough.”

Therapoetics explores the hermeneutical-phenomenological practice of heeding lived meaning. Heeding is more than just hearing or listening; it is discerning and taking in what matters to those seeking our care regarding their lived situations. Sometimes what is meaningful is explicitly said or shown, sometimes it is pre-reflective, sometimes it is inconspicuous. Heeding is neither correcting what is deficient, nor translating symptoms into conclusive interpretations. Instead, the therapoet resides in a clearing, or space, where what shows itself can do so as it is, in its own way, without explanation, justification or expectation. I companion with you as we follow phenomena of concern wherever they take us.

The Khora Institute, therefore, offers therapoetic care, consultation, and education to individuals, couples, families, groups, and institutions across the life span and across disciplines and professions. Whether you are seeking therapoetic care that does not pathologize or medicalize your suffering and joy, or whether you are looking to review organizational practices of care in order to tease out implicit biases and missed intangibles so as to deepen and broaden your quality of care, or whether you are seeking further education in a hermeneutical-phenomenological as a therapoetic health care worker, attorney or judge, corporate executive, first responder, educator, parent, coach, or human being, we can offer you something meaningful and transformative.

About The Khora Institute's Services

Education

Therapoetic Care

Consultation

We offer seminars, workshops, and ongoing individual and group supervision in a hermeneutical-phenomenological approach to lived meaning . We show how this appproach to care differes from the more familiar and dominant deficit-corrective and engineering models of care, Pesonas from all discinplens and prodfesisons are welcome.

Consultation

Therapoetic Care

Consultation

This institute offers critique of current practices of care across disciplines and professions in order to expand or enhance practices already in place so as to include heeding lived meaning to enhance its quality of care, as an alternative to deficit-corrective practices. We explore the hermeneutical phenomenology way of caring in concre

We look at the power of reframing from a stance of incessant reinterpretability, how to appreciate undecidable transimmanence, or being able to go in any and all directions, with each one disclosing significance, and how to indirectly attune to the inconspicuous, and the implicitly lived values operative in any practice of care. We will learn to see meaning in any and every moment, including moments of meaninglessness and despair. The distinctive aspect of this kind of quality or enhancement of care sort of consultation is the uniqueness of learning the hermeneutical-phenomenological way of caring, to learn how to heed lived meaning in any and every situation.

The process of discerning implicit values and assumptions, lived meanings and other inconspicuous intangibles will lead to concrete possibilities amidst limitations and existential givens regarding one’s pathway. Decisions are such that whatever one chooses, something will be gained and lost, and we have to choose. We can only choose one thing at a time, and although we can redecide, we cannot undecide. We can, nevertheless, decide again. Mostly, we will see how we are always and already deciding each moment. We will accompany you through this process of courage, loss and celebration. The pathways are yours, but you won’t have to walk them alone.

Here are some examples of practices of care that could benefit from attending to inconspicuous lived meanings in everyday encountered events:

Any patient care protocol or procedure in hospitals, doctor’s offices, or any kind of service that offers therapeutic care of any sort.

· Communication among professional and patients from intake through follow up

· Learning how to attend to others in other than deficit-corrective, engineering ways

· Heeding the lived meaning embedded in any procedure or treatment plan

Educational programs and institutions regarding policies of departments in the care of its students.

· Addressing intangibles left out when teaching skills and behaviors and competencies

· Clarifying the difference between training as indoctrination and education as a “drawing out” in a hermeneutical-phenomenological way

· Discerning implicit valuations in rank ordered hierarchies of scales of success and failure and exploring alternatives toward relative equity and equalization

Rehab centers, nursing homes, assisted living centers regarding care of able-challenged persons and the aging, elderly population.

· Intangibles about time, space, aging, identity in confronting uninvited limitations

· Understanding others with different logics or grammar in their expressions of lived meaning, such as with dementia

· Addressing perpetual loss and loneliness missed even by planning activities and scheduling programs

First responders and Military Personnel Care and Training

· Addressing moral injury from ethical dilemmas such that whatever one does is considered both ethical and unethical at the same time

· Lived values that contribute to compassion fatigue and continual confrontation with existential givens (e.g., death, unpredictability, horror)

· Exploring how burnout may be driven by ignoring one’s finitude, while not becoming numb and hardened in embracing it

Court systems regarding procedures and protocols of representing

· Caring for clients in such activities as preparation for court, after sentencing care, discerning and placement of the varieties of truths and realities, and the hermeneutics of evidence.

· Caring for clients or wards of the courts that feel misunderstood or falsely seen by the algorithm of “if this, then that” processes of crime and punishment

· Working to contextualize de-contextualized “evidence” that impacts others’ lives, sometimes permanently

Any organization regarding the care of its staff and employees and their level of satisfaction.

· The loss of significance and purpose in staff burnout

· Unspoken and unheeded encounters with existential givens of limits and possibilities

· Addressing feeling like utilities and mere functions for larger systems that seem unchangeable

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Therapoetic Care

Most people understand psychotherapy as a deficit correction process modeled after medical intervention and engineering practices. But therapeia means "heeding lived meaning”, which is what the institute means by therapoetic care. We offer a hermeneutical-phenomenological way of caring that focuses on being with, letting be, without why. We serve individuals, couples, families, groups, and organizations. Any way of being in the world is accepted as it is, in its own way, without being pathologized or being prescribed about how to live one's life. Instead, twe clear a space for showings of meaning and heed callings of where one’s suffering is leading us, no matter where it leads. We we explore and unfold this truth becoming itself, we will move more and more into the concretes of possibilities and limitations in each context and circumstance. We will walk with you through those experiences.

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About Todd DuBose, Director

Professional and Education Training, International Engagement, and Specializations

Todd DuBose an award winning, internationally renowned Distinguished Full Professor at The Chicago School , as well as an Adjunct Professor at Saybrook University, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the Circulo de Estudios en Psicoterapia Existential, in Mexico City, Mexico, and the International Institute of Existential-Humanistic Psychology in Beijing, China. He is also in private practice, is a former chaplain, and has over 35 years of experience in therapeutic care, supervision, teaching, consulting, advising and scholarship. He holds degrees in philosophy (B.A., Georgia State University), religion (M.Div., Union Theological Seminary) and clinical psychology (Ph.D. Duquesne University).

He integrates contemporary continental and comparative philosophy of religion and human science psychology (post-humanistic existentialism, radical hermeneutics, and therapeutic phenomenology) in caring for experiences of the impossible (no way out), and boundary or limit situations (the unwanted, unchangeable, irreversible, incurable, unrelenting, unmitigated, invisible, immeasurable, intangible, ungraspable), or extreme experiences such as psychosis, nihilism, suicidal and homicidal ideation, existential crises of meaning, paranormal or anomalous experiences. He sees his task as a "Seelsorge," or carer of soul (lived meaning), attending to "the happening in the happening" (Caputo), one who "keeps watch over absent meaning" (Blanchot) and/or as a guardian and shepherd of the clearing (Heidegger) for the irreducible, the unconditional , the excessive and the inconspicuous, and the coming of the Other. He critiques such ideologies embedded in standards of care, particularly restrictive definitions of identity, suffering, therapeutics, "the good life", meaning, evidence, empiricism, science, method, outcomes, truth and reality.

His interprofessional and interdisciplinary experience is as extensive as his international experience. He has published in various interdisciplinary projects and journals.

He has presented in such diverse places as Prague, London, Oxford, Paris, Toronto, Budapest, Brussels, Athens, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Johannesburg, Vienna, and Jerusalem.

His research attends to those persons, experiences, situations, and events that are "left out" (e.g., subjugated knowledges and persons that are overlooked, ignored, rejected, pathologized, stigmatized, alienated, unforgiven, uncelebrated, and forgotten), intentionally or unwittingly, when standardized ideologies and practices of care are established, He is committed to the models of the organic intellectual, public scholar and engaged practitioner.

Advocacy and Community Involvement

He is very active in organizations that advocate for those persons oppressed by medicalized psychiatry and psychology (e.g., participant and on the board with the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry), and with addressing food insecurity and community violence among at-risk youth on Chicago's south and west sides (e.g., advisor to a farm to table culinary alternative therapeutic program called The Evolved Network).

More personal information

He is originally from Atlanta, GA, has lived in eight states, is divorced, has two adult children, and resides in Chicago's near southside. His avocation is in the culinary arts, particular exploring country-comfort-food "lit up". He was born in the sun sign of Virgo, Cancer rising, and with an Aquarius moon, and is an Enneagram 2: The Giver. He also has a great love of animals, enjoys classic rock and smooth jazz, soul inspiring film and theater, strength spots and football, was a dancer for two weeks in NYC, including one memorable night at the famed Studio 54, before it burned down (and, no, these two events are not connected), has experienced full body apparitions in paranormal encounters, has trained a bit as a clown, scratched a lion on his back, volunteered to be Aerosmith's chaplain, and, yet, is mostly and simply a human being.

Selective Recent Events, Publications and Presentations

Upcoming Events

Ongoing virtual supervision group at Therapy Harley Street in London on Therapeutics

Dialogue with Ernesto Spinelli with Therapy Harley Street in London on "Difference" in the series, Who is sane?

World Existential Summit #4 Presentation on Therapoetics

Ongoing seminars with the International Institute for Existential-Humanistic Psychology in Dali and Beijing China

Classes taught at The Chicago School coming up, Spring 2025: History and Systems, Basic Intervention : Humanistic-Existential ; Intermediate practicum Seminar; Advanced Practicum Seminar

Psychology and Spirituality

Upcoming classes this summer at the California Institute for Integral Studies:

Psychopathology; Ethics

Ongoing discussions and presentations in the Daseinsanalytic Roundtable Discussions sponsored by the American Daseinsanalytic Institute and The European Center for Heidegger Studies

Recent Presentations

DuBose, T. (2024). Into the paths where no one wants to go: Therapeutics in the Pit--The impossible, the taboo, and the extreme. Centre for Existential Practice Sydney Australia

DuBose, T. (2024). Dining with the Devil: Therapoetic Dwelling with the Unacceptable, Unforgiven, Denounced, Rebuked, and Banished. 21st Anniversary of CirEx, Conference: ON Evil, Mexico City, Mexico

DuBose, T. (2024). Attending to what cannot be counted: From scientific researcher to phenomenological poet World Congress of Qualitative Research. Virtual. Johannesburg, South Africa.

DuBose, T. (2023). Learning to listen again: Heeding the In/apparent as engaged mys-understanding radical hermeneuts. Society for Existential Analysis, London, England. (Virtual).

DuBose, T. (2023). Being With, Letting Be, Without Why: The journey of the phenomenological therapoet-as-mystic in contemporary practices of care. 4 Day Workshop. Centre for Existential Practice. Melbourne Australia (Virtual).

DuBose, T. (2023) Main Speaker. Guarding Intangibles, Being Lichtung : Or Why “Existential Intervention” is an Oxymoron. The 3rd World Congress on Existential Therapy, Athens, Greece – (Recorded).

Recent Publications

DuBose, T. (2024, In Press). Authenticity and Genuineness in The Encyclopedia of Humanistic and

Existential Therapies. APA.

DuBose, T. (2024). Súmptōma: From discrimination through destruction to transfiguration. In A. Cantú, E.

Maisel, & C. Ruby (Eds.),Theoretical Alternatives to the Psychiatric Model of Mental Disorder Labeling: Contemporary Frameworks, Taxonomies, and Models (pp. 236–251). Ethics International Press.

Groth, M. , DuBose, T. (2020). Dialogues on the soul of existential therapy. Daws, L., Ed. London:

Society for Existential Analysis.

DuBose, T. (In Press). Authenticity and Genuineness in The Encyclopedia of Humanistic and Existential

Therapies. APA.

Awards, Honors and Leadership Roles

President, APA Division 32: Society for Humanistic Psychology, 2021-2021

Two Time Winner of the Distinguished Award for International Research and Scholarship, The Chicago School of Profesional Psychology, 2022-2023; 2016-2017

Recipient of the Ted Rubenstein Inspired Teaching Award – The Chicago School of Professional Psychology – 2018

Recipient of the American Psychological Association Division 32: Society for Humanistic Psychology

Carmi Harari Early Career Award for Inquiry and Application, 2013

Recipient of the Excellence in Classroom Teaching Award - The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, 2008

Fees for Services

Education

Individual Supervision $100hour

Group Supervision $50/hour and a half

Workshops and Classes - TBD

Consultation

Consultation and Speaking Engagements

$200/hour

Therapoetic Services

Individual , couple and family care; $200/hour

Group $50/hour

I am paneled with various insurance companies: BCBS PPO, Aetna, Cigna/Evernorth, United Student Health Resources and will consider sliding scale and pro bono services if necessary.

I am also a member of PSYPACT Interjurisdictional Telepsychology Servcies and can do teletherapy in any state certified by this collaboration.