Eco Psychotherapy II

The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nurture and reward. From the science of the brain’s own ‘gardener cells’, to the beauty of flowers and the grounding effects of working with nature’s rhythms of growth, decay and regeneration, Stuart-Smith provides a new perspective on the power of gardening. Using case studies of people struggling with stress, depression, trauma and addiction, as well as her own grandfather’s return from World War I, she explores the many ways in which gardening can help transform people’s lives.

Presenting recent research into why people feel more fully alive and energised in the natural world, why gardeners report feeling calmer and more vigorous and why spending time in nature awakens the connection-seeking aspects of our human nature, Stuart-Smith argues that our increasingly urbanised and technology-dependent lifestyles make it more important than ever to rediscover a closer relationship with the earth.

Deploying a mix of anecdote, insight and science Sue Stuart-Smith shows that our understanding of nature and its restorative powers is just beginning to flower.

This talk will look at adolescent brain development, and how contemporary life and pressures, such as technology, social media and new forms of peer pressure, might tilt long evolved potentials along new and possibly worrying trajectories. We will see how our evolved capacities, honed over millennia in our hunter gatherer pasts where humans were immersed in nature, have been hijacked by contemporary consumerist industrial societies, deeply affecting our minds, bodies, brains and nervous systems.

The talk, using slides and videos, will think about what can redress this, in particular the forms of relationships, with parents, important adults and nature, which can rebalance and recalibrate the adolescent nervous system, leading to them living a better life and creating a more hopeful future.

The Anthropocene is a cautionary Icarusian tale of soaring too close to the sun and reaping the planetary consequences of our hubris. Much has been written about the deleterious effects of mass industrialization and how unsustainable it is to think of “humans” as independent of their environments. Unbothered human continuity is now impossible: we have been exposed, and we must now contend with a world that exceeds us.

In this talk, Bayo Akomolafe suggests that the very ontology of therapy and its subject has been irreparably altered as well. What does healing look like in a time when the human is called to question, when the self is diffracted and diasporic (unavailable for the couch), and when we now see ourselves as composite and contingent becoming in an open-ended world of mattering? Akomolafe suggests: let us make sanctuary. This talk is about what that might look like.

Struck by a new reality, people around the world took to the streets, parks, and green spaces to stand with black people, and people of colour following the public murder of George Floyd. This teaching will explore how we can use a renewed vision of every-day knowledge, both in our minds and our senses, in order to dismantle former beliefs, which hinder the expression of truth in our models of practice.

The warm data processes, now active in 40 countries, are allowing for a context of mutual learning and shifting in sense making at the level of abductive process. In warm data the new perception of interdependency comes in through multi perspective tonalities and indirectly, unpredictably attaches to memory, language and unformed thought/impression.

That is where the change is.

Change in perception in turn changes all action that follows. The differences that make differences, the contrasts between types of music, ideas of love, the way food tastes, the textures of the flooring, the volume of the baby cries, the nuance of the language used, the insinuations of the rhythm in the diction, what are the aesthetics, the tone, the textures in the transcontextual relationships?

For me this is the question right now that holds the most moist and fertile soil. It’s hidden, but it’s there. While analysis of what is already happening is limited to the explicit perception and description. What assumptions have stewed together to produce the responses that are now emerging? The question is not what is said or unsaid, the question is– what is it possible to say? This rubbing together of noticings is made in the submergent zone all day, every day. In every conversation with family these limits and reasonings are made, ideas of what is sexy, what is authority, what is health, what is old, or natural or what is it to be human… what has submerged to give life to those ideas?

In this session we will explore Warm Data, and a brief discussion of the theory underpinning it.

This talk is an invitation to radically reimagine the western epistemology of how we think about the relationship between humans and nature. I argue that the roots of our current ecological and social crisis are a result of the split between how the western mind thinks and how nature actually works, and we are now experiencing the unfolding of this disastrous epistemological error.

Based on the work of both Gregory Bateson and Henry Corbin we will explore how an understanding of the ‘imaginal world’ within Systemic Psychotherapy and Ecopsychology could provide a language that is deeply understood by both nature and mind. It argues the case that to truly understand nature and mental health we need to relearn an ‘imaginal language’ and in doing so reclaim our lost collective indigenous heritage.

The bond between body and nature lies at the core of feeling at home. In touch with the natural world, sensing its presence through all our senses, educates the imagination into learning how to care and to love.

Are we truly at home in the digital world?

Through the telling of stories this webinar explores a hunger to experience again how we once were startled by the beauty of the world.

Wandering in wonder can be therapeutic, making us more aware of a sense of sorrow at what has been lost, a step toward homecoming.

I will argue for the relevance and importance of Henry Corbin’s seemingly medieval theology. If you adopt a sufficiently broad view of his eclectic, collage-like and radical post-Islamic Christianity, you can’t help but recognize that it is animist to the core. He grounds his cosmology in Zoroastrian angelology and carries it onward through human history on the wings of the Angels-out-ahead, whose function is to keep the cosmos in motion, and lead all beings onward in creative movement. They are the personifications of the creative imagination, which, as Emerson said, always flows and never freezes.

For tens of thousands of years Rites of Passage have been used to find a healthy way to support the key transition moments in people’s lives. They are regenerative and support a thriving social structure. The loss of formal and appropriately facilitated Rites of Passage have had serious consequences for both individuals and communities. We see it so clearly when the young try to create their own and the disastrous outcomes that can occur.

In this presentation I will clearly outline the elements contained in all Rites of Passage and demonstrate how we can be bringing them back in a healthy way into the mainstream through families, schools, communities and in workplaces.

The most dangerous creatures on earth have proven to be human males. Our indigenous ancestors right across the world viewed the male, if left to his own devices, as an unsafe and potentially destructive element in community. They set up Rites of Passage rituals to mark the transition from boyhood to responsible manhood because they understood that the masculine predisposition for aggression together with a propensity to create “pecking orders” was likely to be the source of power – driven behaviour not conducive to the interests of the tribe as a whole.

Perhaps, if there is ever to be a healthy transition from a culture that has been long since been dominated by patriarchy to one that reflects a balance and integration of both feminine and masculine values, it will depend on the release of the masculine psyche from its adolescent-bound state, through the practice of healthy and psycho-spiritually informed rites of passage?

This will be an introduction of the work done by The School of Lost Borders to bring meaningful wilderness rites of passage ceremonies and earth-based wisdom to the modern Western World. Steven Foster and Meredith Little began the reintroduction of rites of passage for youth in the early 1970’s. They founded The School of Lost Borders as a training facility as their passion became to support meaningful rituals back into the neighbourhoods’ and cultures and land around the world. Meredith has continued to work internationally since Steven’s death in 2003.

Outdoor experiences remind us that we are part of nature. This can encourage us to live more sustainably, while transforming our mental health and wellbeing.

But not all experiences of nature are transformational. This talk explores how to design and facilitate them so that they are.

Drawing from over 25 years of professional practice and research, Dave reveals how experiences of nature impact our psychology, changing the ways we think, feel and behave. He shows how they can be harnessed through design and facilitation to deliver truly transformative outdoor programmes.