Tangible Minds™

The Tangible Minds Self Inquiry Practice, and all other information contained on this website, are the work of myself, Joseph Shirley. Please consider my primary credentials to lie in life experience and my independent research and development. I have successfully identified the mechanism of my disruptive mood, thought, and behavior patterns, and corrected those patterns permanently. Plus, I have successfully assisted hundreds of other people to apply the methods I developed to overcome a wide range of life challenges.

My education

My early education was in the life sciences, in preparation for medical school, at the University of Pennsylvania from 1977 through 1982. Bipolar disorder prevented me from completing my degree. I continued my education after ridding myself of the bipolar disorder in 1995. Further formal education includes several years at Antioch University Seattle, completing my BA with an emphasis in consciousness studies, and graduating with my MA in Whole Systems Design with an emphasis on transformative facilitation. In between my two degrees at Antioch, I attended the California Institute of Integral Studies as a student in the PhD program for Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness.

My informal education includes many months of intensive training as a Practitioner and Master Practitioner of NeuroLinguistic Programming, including training by Steve and Connirae Andreas of NLP Comprehensive, as well as Robert Dilts and Richard Bandler. I was also trained in motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral techniques in my three years on the job at Free & Clear, a Seattle company providing behavior change coaching nationally to people quitting tobacco. And I have read extensively about therapy and neuroscience.

Tangible Minds is neither psychotherapy nor psychiatry

None of my education is formally recognized by any body governing psychotherapy, and I possess no official credentials in the field of therapy or medicine. Therefore, this site is intended solely for informational purposes and is not a substitute for routine or urgent medical or psychological evaluation, treatment or consultation. Individuals who believe they have medical or psychological problems as defined by the bodies governing practices in these fields are requested to seek advice from their own physician or mental health professional. The information on this website should not be construed as medical or psychological opinions aimed at establishing a diagnosis or course of treatment. Individuals who are being treated should not construe information here as replacing or superseding recommendations of their own clinician.

Tangible Minds creates a new paradigm that does not fit into current clinical structures

There is no diagnosis in Tangible Minds. There is no concept of disease. Tangible Minds considers that all people are operating more or less in the flow of life, or wholeness. All people have access to greater flow, and all people have some measure of interruption of that flow. Tangible Minds is a practice to increase awareness and control of a person's participation in the flow of life.

Tangible Minds also proposes a new model of the human mind that differs from current models in the fields of medicine or psychotherapy. It focuses on feeling as the foundation of consciousness and proposes a distinct architecture of the feeling mind that fully shapes all conscious experience, including thought, motivation, perception, and behavior.

These two defining traits place Tangible Minds clearly outside the boundary of conventional thinking about "mental health" and even "personal development." Individuals have the option to treat this as either a limitation or an opportunity. I welcome those who see it as an opportunity, and who are willing to accept responsibility for making a free and informed choice to engage with this work.

I make my offering here. It is up to you what you want to do with this information, and it is your responsibility to manage your use of it to serve your highest good, which only you can know.