ecopsychology (31)

Read Part One of this Report here

9142463276?profile=originalDr. Vandana Shiva, author and activist, has courageously spent the last decade working on soil solutions to climate change, steadfast in her belief that if governments can’t make the shift, people can.

In her recent talk at Pacifica’s “Climates of Change and a Therapy of Ideas” conference, she focused on the dangers of genetically modified crops and the big business that seeks to capitalize on it. Monopoly rights on seeds and plants are increasingly being imposed

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As an activist working with NGOs to stop shark finning in Central America years ago, Dr. Lori Pye was once a target of a malicious act intended to intimidate her.

9142457279?profile=originalThe experience plunged her into a sort of psychological crisis. Finding herself face to face with a stark and undeniable image of ecological devastation, she had an epiphany: our own psychological destruction is being expressed in destruction of the ecological world.

The experience profoundly renewed Dr. Pye’s focus on ecopsychology. At

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WATCH the INTERVIEW HERE (approx. 22 mins) or... 

LISTEN/Download the AUDIO HERE

DOWNLOAD a PDF of the written TRANSCRIPT

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9142457688?profile=originalDr. Jeffrey T. Kiehl has been a climate scientist for almost 40 years—but he has a unique take on the challenges we face on the climate front, because he is also a Jungian Analyst, focused on the study of the unconscious.

In this interview for Depth Insights™, Dr. Kiehl speaks with Bonnie Bright about his up

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9142456091?profile=originalIn 1990, the renowned depth psychologist and author Thomas Moore published a book entitled Dark Eros: The imagination of sadism. In this book, Moore offers a series of extraordinary insights into the deeper aspects of sadism that regard our darker nature as a reflection of the soul. It is this relationship between sadism and nature that I’d like to ponder here.

Moore proposes that there is a difficult necessity we encounter in our own impulses to be agents of cruelty, corruption, domination, and

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When the Ebola virus broke out in Guinea, West Africa, with Patient Zero, a 4-year-old boy who came down with the disease, Peace Corps volunteer Hilary Braseth was forced to return to the U.S. after three years of service.Once she landed in the very fast-paced, high-tech San Francisco Bay Area, though, it was a rough transition. She didn’t believe she could find a place in U.S. society that would allow her the space or the breathing room to integrate the “very real changes that occurred in the P
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The idea of limitless growth is the most destructive myth of our times, began Dr. Vandana Shiva, in her inspiring plenary talk at “Climates of Change and a Therapy of Ideas,” Pacifica’s recent 40th anniversary conference held on the Ladera campus in Santa Barbara, CA.

Vandana Shiva, who trained as a physicist at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, is Founder and Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology and for Navdanya, the movement for seed saving and ecolo

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Organization

Do We Need More Psychology?

Dennis L. Merritt, Ph.D.

In the famous 1957 BBC interview, C.G. Jung proclaimed, “We need more psychology, the human psyche must be studied! Humans are the source of all coming evil.”

Psychology is positioned to usher in a holistic approach to the study of the human psyche, our relationship to the environment, and a truly interdisciplinary educational system. As Jung pointed out, all we know and experience comes out of the psyche and all our systems, including science, have an archetypal base. The

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In the heart of the jungle in Columbia, the U’wa people live a simple existence mostly beyond the reaches of modern society, having had little contact at all with the outside world until a few decades ago. Their indigenous relationship to the earth sustains them in a collective role as caretakers of the earth and an equal facet of nature. Thus, when the prospect of international firms making plans to drill into their ancestral lands for oil in the late 1990s arose, they perceived the concept to

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Education Institution

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Announcing “Earth, Climate, Dreams”—the BOOK! 13 in-depth conversations with Depth Psychologists on how we address these critical topics in the Age of the Anthropocene.

Contributors include Jungian analyst Jerome Bernstein; climate scientist and Jungian, Jeffrey Kiehl; Jungian scholar, Susan Rowland; Depth educator/author Robert Romanyshyn; Depth educator Veronica Goodchild; plus other scholars, educators, or Jungian analysts including Steve Aizenstat, Sally Gillespie, Susannah Benson, Nancy F

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Education Institution

We are pleased to announce that the new issue of Depth Insights™ Journal, the official peer-reviewed publication for Depth Psychology Alliance is out!

From the Editor, Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.:

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When the world seems to be falling apart all around us, depth psychology provides perspectives and tools that can help us make some sense of things, even in some small way. Through the study of the unconscious, we can often get a glimpse of patterns at work, or underlying aspects that help us gain a new und
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Ecotherapy: Nature Reconnection as a Powerful, Transformational Healing Practice: A Short Interview with Linda Buzzell

by Bonnie Bright

 

9142457476?profile=originalIf the name, Linda Buzzell, sounds familiar to you, it’s no surprise—particularly if you are moved as I am by the growing ecological crisis that is unfolding around us. Linda Buzzell, MA, LMFT, PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) has been a psychotherapist for more than 30 years and has specialized in ecopsychology and ecotherapy since 2000. She co-edited the 2

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9142457074?profile=originalIn a short presentation as a panelist for “Earth, Climate, Dreams,” an online event hosted by Depth Psychology Alliance that took place in April 2016, Linda Buzzell, MA, MFT, shared some insights into the power of “daytime dreams” and working to develop eco-resilience in the face of challenging times. I found Linda's insights into eco-resilience quite powerful, prompting me to summarize them here in order to share them with you.

Linda begins by mentioning the work of Dr. Steven Aizenstat and psyc

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If the “outside,” as we in modern western cultures generally consider the physical world, is manifesting rather worrisome phenomena in the form of conflict, destruction of nature and home places, and racial and income inequality, we can draw a connection from what is occurring in the physical world to what must be occurring on an inner level, and therefore witness symptoms in the psychological realm as well.

The physical symptoms that are manifesting lie within a larger set of underlying issues,

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Hearing Voices
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Our students travel to classes from many different places, studying on campus three days a month. For information on our curriculum, scholarships, and admissions, please see our Admissions Booklet
Thank you, Mary Watkins

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9142445697?profile=originalAmerican psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton identifies our very human tendency to ignore difficult realities and overwrite them with thoughts and beliefs that are more palatable as "psychic numbing." This allows our ego to distract itself enough that it doesn’t have to engage with inner and outer voices and images and movements that go beyond the mainstream consciousness (in Shulman-Lorenz & Watkins, Toward Psychologies of Liberation).

When we witness instances of ecocide (ecological suicide) in the w

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                      Our Modern Cultural Mindset and the Forward Thinking of Carl Jung

One of my favorite quotes is this from Carl Jung, which addresses the reality of nature and our loss of contact with it. It also identifies a deep and burgeoning issue for humankind:
“Man feels isolated in the cosmos. He is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him. Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightnin
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9142445472?profile=originalSome would argue our contemporary consumer-based, productivity-oriented culture contributes to a collective loss of memory—done of being connected to something larger than our everyday selves. As a society, we have become dislocated in time and disconnected from place, leaving us rootless, transient, and opting for sensationalism instead of spirituality; superficiality instead of soul.

So much of this malady is due to our disconnect from nature, our bodies, and earth itself. We are no longer grou

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In a recent blogpost, I wrote some introductory thoughts about what I’m calling “Culture Collapse Disorder,” an eco-psycho-pathological disorder in which human-made stressors stemming from culture and development (and their correlating underlying connected psychological issues) are causing a drastic systemic imbalance, manifest by a critical rise in adverse conditions for earth and its inhabitants.

In short, the way of life most of us are living in modern consumer culture is simply not sustainabl

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9142444458?profile=original“Spirit is the inside of things and matter is their visible outer aspect” (Jung, in Sabini, 2005, p. 2).

“I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths of and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism….Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the

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Earth’s inhabitants are in peril largely of our own making. We are, consciously or unconsciously, systematically destroying the our homeplaces, habitats, ecosystems, and above all, the only home we collectively know: Earth. Reports are emerging daily about the implications of human impact on our environment, presenting dire warnings about pollution, urban development, greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, natural disasters, and displacement.

The tally of global losses grows daily as we perpet

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