Eco-Psychotherapy
Person + Planet: basic choices for meaningful healing
Humans seek meaningfulness, satisfaction and quelling of anxiety through two basic, psycho-culturally rooted, choices. The most prevalent is consuming from outside, as if attempting to fill up an emptiness or lack. The cumulative behavioral effects of this are generating eco-systemic degeneration everywhere on planet Earth. emphasizing that humans are, collectively and personally, participants in (or members of) planet Earth’s ecosystem, the contextualising orientation seeks to discern a meaningful sense of contribution or role within it, and seems to generate longer term, personally systemic meaningfulness and satisfaction than consuming orientation which requires addictive replenishment. Contextualising is also more sustaining eco-systemically. Both orientations and their implications have long been presaged in the deeper understandings of transpersonal-religious traditions.
Thank you, Paul, for such a deeply emotional presentation that truly touched me. The film clip has burned a powerful and important impression on my mind’s eye–I won’t forget the images, and the tone shift when they were presented. Then tenor of your presentation strikes me as just what is needed to reconnect humans and nature. There is so much coming at us from minds, great minds no less, and yet when I hear you speak from your heart as you have, I feel something shift inside of me, and I want to share the video, talk to others, and show them how much this affected me–it’s emotional. So thank you for reminding me (because in psychology, it is very easy to get stuck in one’s head) where the heart of the matter also lies. I “felt” something during your presentation, and that I won’t forget long after the module is complete–thank you. (Martin Prechtel, you might know, has written in depth about the Mayan view of “filling the hole in our hearts” with addiction, consuming, and so forth.)