My Ecosystems

Animas Valley Institute - Bill Plotkin

This work brought my work out of the two dimensional and polarized view of illness versus health, as if each of these was a static state on either end of a spectrum…and into other more nuanced, spiraling dimensions of growth and maturation. A life well-lived, it could be said, is one in which we don’t just grow old, but we also grow wise. We develop relationally: in relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to the infinite intelligence of this living world. This work offers rich and comprehensive maps of life stages and passages, and the wild human psyche through healing into wholing and service. It offers deep structure, ecological-based truth through relational and cultural maturation. It gives meat and bones and teeth to becoming fully human and living from Soul. https://animas.org

“But once we get started in our wholing, we can begin Self-healing; and Self-healing accelerates our capacity for wholing. Wholing and healing reinforce each other. .. Psychological wholeness also necessitates a mature and reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world of which we are members. ..Our private psyches are meant to be public resources. The personal contributes to the cultural, and vice versa. The personal also contributes to the ecological, and vice versa: as healthy humans, we enhance our more-than-human environment, and we have no life at all, of course, without a thriving environment.” ~ Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche_

Response-based Practice

Being introduced to response-based-practice was like someone switching the power back on all over the world for me. It gave everything I knew at a deep feeling level about power and justice, a voice and lit it up. Up until that point I had been studying and learning about the responses of tissues, fluids, chemicals, systems and structure in the body to energetic patterns of the body (meridians, chakras, and localized consciousness). But response-based-practice contextualized the connections between the physical body and the energy body within the frameworks of power dynamics, systemic injustice and ways that language directs power.. and how systemic violence affects not only relational health, but actually energetic, mental and physical health too. And vice versa. It offers a way to deconstruct human behaviour in response to the more invisible aspects of power and make it visible. This work transformed my practice as well as my personal health and life too. https://www.responsebasedpractice.com/

Social Constructionism

I began a Masters in Relational Leadership in 2015 because I wanted to explore the ways power (and inadvertently, injustice) is organized institutionally from, among other approaches, a Social Constructionist lens and within an academic environment. The program wasn’t for me in the end, but I got a lot from the dive into this perspective and approach to understanding different ways to experience a “reality”. And it continues to help me unpack the ways meaning is constructed relationally and work with clients as they navigate shifts in perspective, and become more skilled at generative meaning-making in their own lives. https://www.taosinstitute.net

Non-Violent Communication - Marshall Rosenberg

While I immediately felt drawn to this body of work and it’s ability to uncover and work generatively with the relationships between needs, feelings, and behaviour, I found that the basic methodology inadvertently obscures power dynamics in relationships. And in situations where I found myself on the disempowered end of systemic “tragic expressions of unmet needs” (which is a way Marshall Rosenberg describes violence), I initially found it further disempowering; not it’s intended purpose. However, over time I was able to distinguish between needs and feelings not being expressed, and where they are not being heard. This distinction was essential to shifting imbalances of power in my own life and finding the places where this work is incredibly powerful and healing. I find it has correlations with the 3 lower centres of the vedic energy body (root chakra = needs, sacred chakra = feelings, solar plexus chakra = behaviour), giving voice and language and therefore power to personal, systemic, and cultural patterns of relating. https://www.cnvc.org/

The Nervous System - Polyvagal Theory and other ways of understanding Connection: Attachment, Trauma & Addiction

We humans just have so much to learn and understand about human behavour.

The work of Stephen Porges and Polyvagal Theory brings much depth and humanity to this exploration. https://www.stephenporges.com/ And in addition, the work of Peter Levine and Somatic Experiencing https://www.somaticexperiencing.com/home, and Bessel Van der Kolk. https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/

Dr. Gabor Maté understands trauma as "not what happened to us, but what happens inside us as result of what happened to us" and makes explicit links between trauma, physical and mental health and addictions, grounded in vast amounts of science that the Western medical systems are still mostly ignorant of. This work continues to inform my own re-education around health care versus normalized dysfunction. https://drgabormate.com/

Attachment Theory

Everything you Think you Know about Addiction is Wrong (“Rat Park”)~ Johann Hari

Polarity, Erotic Intelligence, Sexuality & Spirituality

David Deida’s work fleshed out my understanding of polarity, not only within an individual body (Chinese Medicine works with the opposite poles of yin and yang), but between people. It transformed my understanding of energy medicine and relational health as embodied between people. It seems to quickly get sucked into a quagmires as it relates to gender, identity, and orientation, but at a very meta-level, it provided me some useful embodied understanding of the tantra of listening and responding in relationship. https://deida.info/

Esther Perel has deepened and affirmed this exploration for me: If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air. - From ‘Mating In Captivity’ https://www.estherperel.com/

Analytical, Transpersonal & Depth Psychology, Mythopoetic Storytelling & Birth and Death processes

These healers, thinkers, creators, bards, writing collections, blogs, and podcasts are weaving the seemingly disparate threads of myth and the soul of the earth into the fabric of human consciousness, and enriching mine in infinite ways.

While the psychological underpinnings of the energy work I was trained in was Jungian-based, I became a lot more versed in Jungian psychology by going through a year-long Analytical process personally, and grew more curious about this work during this time.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is a Swiss psychiatrist who developed Analytical Psychology. This approach focuses on the psyche, human development, personality formation, and individuation. Individuation is a process of bringing our unconscious potential into a concrete living reality. This process helps to secure a bridge between an individual and the unconscious as well as the individual and his/her wider community. By incorporating both an inner and outer exploration, one discovers a more potent sense of meaning and purpose in life. The C.J. Jung Center

James Hillman, Marion Woodman, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Robert Bly

Charles Eisenstein, Dr. Martin Shaw, The Dark Mountain Project:

Spiritual Midwifery - Ina May Gaskin

Death Doula and Ritual Healing - Sarah Kerr

Dream Work, EcoPsychology, The Work that Reconnects, Permaculture, Ancestral Medicine

Oh dreamwork….there is more richness here than I could possibly elucidate in 10 large novels… So I will just begin with these two names. But let me also just say this.. to dream is to be and become more human.

Jeremy Taylor https://jeremytaylor.com/

Toko-pa Turner https://toko-pa.com/

EcoPsychology - The International Community for Ecopsychology, What is Eco-Psychology? What is Eco-Psychotherapy? “I hope this helps to make it clear that eco-psychotherapy is not simply about the healing power of nature. Instead it is a new form or psychotherapy that invites the natural world into the therapeutic relationship, or alternatively, places the therapeutic relationship in the context of the natural world. It is at the intersection of the therapeutic relationship and the human-nature relationship that all sorts of interesting and profound things start to happen. This is the terrain of eco-psychotherapy.” ~Sean O’Carroll.

The work that Reconnects - Joanna Macy https://www.joannamacy.net/main

Permaculture: This work offers a cohesive structure to the whole-systems approaches to inter and intra species relating that have always resonated for me. This is culture-building at it’s finest. I am able to apply these design principles to my work at all levels: with clients, with my clinic, with my business, my home, my garden, my finances and with my life in general. I can keep coming back to these principles to see where any of these systems (or any others) are less efficient, then shift my thinking and refocus. Permaculture Design Principles

Ancestral Medicine & Animism - Daniel Foor - I was aware of communicating and connecting with my ancestors and with the more-than-human-world before I was introduced to Daniel Foor’s work, but his body of work, approach, and systems developed to deepen these connections were incredibly affirming and insightful. https://ancestralmedicine.org/

Mind & Body Medicine

Candace Pert and Bruce Lipton - Molecules of Emotion & Biology of Belief: These two scientists, researchers, and authors seem to have been capable of moving between academic and popular culture. Popularized by more recent movements in westernized culture making connections between beliefs, thoughts, and emotions on the hormonal, chemical and genetic levels of physiological organization and health, their work has affirmed my own direct experience of mind/body connections, and the experiences of hundreds of clients I have worked with over the years. Their work helps to make sense of how a stronger and whole-er sense of self-esteem can actually translate into improved physical health that can be read by blood and other medical tests.

http://candacepert.com/

https://www.brucelipton.com/

Reiki and The BodyTalk System: These energy-based modalities offer the primary framework of my practice as energy-based. They provide me and my clients a way to make meaning of the body’s responses and invite a physical felt sense and experience of change and growth over time.

Astrology, Physics, Metaphysics, the Occult, and Dimensions of consciousness

The bodies of work from these folk helped me make links between Depth and Transpersonal Psychology with Mathematics, Physics, Geology and the technologies of the Ancients, including Astrology, Stone Circles, and working with telluric lines (ley lines).

Alchemy of Nine Dimensions - Barbara Hand Clow

Physics of the Soul - Amit Goswami

The Resonance Science Foundation - Nassim Haramein