The Ki by Leonora Anne Weston is how people respond with their life force energy on the ground. It’s how they respond to threats, opportunities, authority figures, sexuality and power.
The word “Ki” 𒆠 is an ancient Sumerian word meaning “ground” or “Earth”; and used in terms of battle ground, meeting ground and threshing ground.
Its near homophone (a word that sounds the same but has different meaning) is Chinese 氣 - “Qi” or “Ch’i” meaning “vital energy force”. The borrowing of the word is rendered in Japanese as “Ki” and in Vietnamese as “Khi”.
In choosing this word - the Ki - Leonora chooses to honour the multiculturalism of her studies and students, East and West, and capturing the sense of people’s expressions to power being their energy force power response on the ground.
Her work with its “X” axis of Pro-Social to Adversarial, and “Y” axis High Dominance to Low Dominance - identifies and locates responses to power, and reveals that clusters of traits were sitting on Responses to 5Fs - Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn, Flop, but with additional “missing” responses found within her data sets.
These include a response which correlates with the 1920 work of World War I physician Dr W.H.R Rivers - of what he described as “manipulative activity”, and in Leonora’s work is identified for its physical embodiment “twist away” (or Detorquere in Latin; PIE root *terkw- meaning “to twist, bend, distort”). Other responses located in her data resemble religious responses, and may provide a new conception on the near-ubiquity of acts such as making offerings, purification rituals, adoration / worship, following tenets, and honouring in festivities - as responses to power.
The Ki has been positively received by psychologists as Leonora has been invited to keynote at conferences around the world. Her research data is presently being cross-compared as a testable model and explanatory framework to Personality Trait expression in dynamic responses to power, threat and opportunity. It is also functioning well with linguistics models based on word frequency and PIE roots of words that fit with Leonora’s theoretical framework and explanatory reasoning.
ABOUT LEONORA ANNE WESTON
Leonora Anne Weston is an International expert and teacher in Power Dynamics Studies.
Weston has a Masters degree from UCL in Comparative Art and Archaeology, and further post-graduate study in Middle Eastern archaeology. She has studied broadly across disciplines including Design Theory, Art History, Architecture, Film Theory, Law, Classics, Evolution of Human Cognition, won the Legal History writing prize, and is regarded as a polymath by colleagues.
Weston has appeared as a Dominance Studies expert on Sky TV, has been International keynote speaker at the Society of Aesthetics Postgraduate Conference at Kent University, CARAS conference in Los Angeles and as a private speaker at the Freud Museum London. She researched and wrote the first book in the world on The History & Arts of the Dominatrix, under pseudonym, with original research from the British Museum, British Library Rare Books and underground sources.
Within ancient world studies, she has focused in particular on the use of power and rise of “lugal” (big man) in Mesopotamian state-building and Empire formation. More recently she has examined, the stunning monumental finds and symbolism of Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, and what they tell us about the casting up of impressive figures (and transducers) of force power, arousal and fear.
The Ki ® Power Dynamics- 42 Responses to Poweris the culmination of 15 years of her life’s work and original research data, and she has a book in progress.
Currently Weston is based in Melbourne Australia where she she teaches. She is mother of one young daughter, and travels annually on archaeology site trips and to keynote at conferences around the world.
