Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 7, Number 1, pp. 48–61, Print ISSN 1934-2039, Online ISSN 1934-2047. q 2013 C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2013.759064.
In this paper, I hope to offer a modest contribution to shaping a psychological response to the ecological crisis and to consider what a Jungian approach can offer to such an extraordinarily significant issue. Little attention has been paid in developmental theory and psychological thought to the way we are affected and interpenetrated by the multiple and splendid nonhuman others in our world. Attending to this has the potential to enrich our perspectives on healing as well as on what constitutes psychological health (Spitzform 2000). It is, however, the ecological crisis, with so many ecosystems besieged and the alarming reality of mass species extinction that evokes this paper. Only gradually are we beginning to grasp the gravity of our situation and the complex ramifications of our culture’s dissociation from its relational existence in the matrix of life. Here, in this inquiry, I join a wave of other psychotherapists and ecopsychologists.1 Though the outcome of our time is uncertain, we have an opportunity for profound transformation, not only transformation of our actions and behaviors on our planet but also a “great turning” in our consciousness, individually and collectively (Macy 2009–2012).
An ecological sense of self may not frequently enter directly into our practice, but when it does, how a therapist takes up the inquiry and how she or he holds it in consciousness will significantly affect what unfolds within the dyad. When the issue of the environment comes up clinically, it can open our patients, as well as the therapeutic couple, to states of deep belonging and a quality of participatory consciousness with all that is. Alternately, it can be deeply disquieting, as it was when a patient, who had been speaking of his concerns about the environment, asked me directly, “Do you ever think about the world coming to an end?” Another patient, engaged in active imagination, was looking into the globe of the earth of the future, as if looking into a terrarium. For a moment, she saw green vines and life; then they vanished, then reappeared, then vanished. She spoke, with a sense of disquieting horror, of seeing that there was no life in the future.
I responded quite differently to each. To the first, I responded that actually, yes, I do think about it; because of the current rate of species extinction and climate change, it is something that I, along with others, think deeply about. I spoke a bit about how people such as Bill McKibben have led the way by gathering the science that assesses where we are and how changes in human behavior can greatly influence the trajectory of climate change. Additionally, elders, such as ecotheologian Thomas Berry and ecophilosopher Joanna Macy, articulate that it is a change in consciousness that is foundational for the kind of behavioral changes that could shift things toward a promise of continuance.2 Our dialogue continued as he opened up thoughts regarding his intent to focus his career in information technology toward applications that turn in the direction of life, such as education, rather than a use of technology that tends to dissociate from life. He claimed his soul’s need for meaningful life work that enhances the earth community.
The second person’s experience was accompanied by her adding that she felt young as she looked into this transparent earth. I echoed her words. The tears that streamed down her cheeks let us both know that this young self’s experience was currently alive within and needed our attention. The precarious balance of life on earth had entered our explorations in the past; in this moment, we held it silently alongside her tears. Later, we reflected on how our beleaguered earth can stir up inner wounded parts of ourselves that have previously experienced survival threat.
Both of these individuals have, like many of us and those we treat, suffered early trauma. Most of us have witnessed how care and attention to a traumatized self can be transformative, offering hopefulness where previously there was none. Additionally, this may be so of ourselves in relation to our earth.
The possibility that the earth may no longer be capable of supporting us in ways it seemingly always has is in itself shockingly hard to fathom, a thought that in itself threatens trauma and provokes anxiety. Because of our tendency to dominate (fight) or dissociate (flight) from inner
experience activated by the one who represents or is the perpetrator of traumatic harm, some of us may be inclined to dominate the earth whereas others may tend to disconnect in its very moment of needing us more not less. The healing paradigm of the therapeutic relationship in which the therapeutic couple stays with and navigates these dynamics, and in so doing both are changed, offers a path to navigate this territory. From within or beyond the therapeutic vessel, attending to these visible and not so visible traumatic dynamics, present in both our way of relating to earth as well as attending to the suffering earth itself, may aid in transforming a sense of our individual and collective future.
What might emerge if we listened to our own inner experiences and, for those of us who are analysts, our patients’ experiences in relationship to the natural world, including environmental degradation? Would we want to? If we facilitate a deeper exploration, do we believe it will draw us away from our dedication to intrapsychic and interpersonal material? Do we hear our own or our patients’ feelings about the earth as resistance or displacement? Could these feelings instead be expressions of our deeply rooted relatedness to earth? If truly heard, might insight arise about what is a desire to restore what is wounded and live with dignity in relation to the land (Watkins 2009)?
I have come to believe that, at this time in history, it is important to hear patient material on two tracks: one that regards the intrapsychic world; the other might be thought of as receiving what is being communicated as representing that person’s particular way of listening to the earth’s dream and, as is appropriate to the clinical situation, to respond to both. Working in this way, I resonate with those depth- and ecopsychologists, such as Mary Watkins, James Hillman, and Mary-Jane Rust, who have seen ecology and culture in psyche and psyche in ecology and culture and endeavor to revision the seductive polarization between internal and external.
Beyond Undoing
Why then have to be human?
Oh, not because happiness exists
nor even out of curiosity,
but because being here means so much, because everything here, vanishing too quickly seems to need us, and strangely
keeps calling to us.
To have been here once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth,
this is beyond undoing.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
The Earth Is Calling
Three years ago, I backpacked with my family and a close friend to the Wallowa Mountains in northeast Oregon. We hiked in through mountain meadows blanketed with lupine. In this kind of territory, I find myself feeling small relative to the great boulders strewn down the slope of mountain. We wound along a trail that hugged tightly to the slope on one side, with the land dropping precipitously thousands of feet on the other. So as to not focus too much on that drop, I allowed my eyes to be drawn to the horizon,
which was lined with the purple-blue of ridge upon ridge of distant mountains.
Seven miles in, we started to glimpse the turquoise blue of a small crater lake that was our designated base camp. Geothermal activity still warms the lake just enough that in our first swim we could linger in the snowmelt water and renew ourselves from the long hike and from the previous year of urban life.
Two days later my son, who was then fifteen, and his two older cousins headed off for a three-
day quest. My husband, our close friend, and I stayed at base camp, each doing a daylong solo, and we later came together, continuing to hold sacred space for the young men’s journey. Our intention in holding sacred space for the initiates was inspired by an experience my husband and I had had with the Cree and Carrier people of northern Canada during a ritual we participated in just prior to the conception of our son. In that ceremony, about eighteen of us, of varying ages and life circumstances, camped solo along a wide riverbed, fasting for five days without food or water. We were guided to stay awake during the nights. The medicine men periodically visited individuals during the days. The community contributed to those on solo by staying throughout that period in the adjacent community house and participating in a sweat lodge each evening at dusk. They welcomed us with a feast to mark the culmination of the ceremony.
During my solo time in the Wallowas, I was perched on a ledge overlooking the steep river valley the three young men hiked down, and I could see the peak beyond that they planned to ascend. As the sun crossed the sky, nearby White Mountain and Red Mountain seemed to adorn themselves in lavender and rose-colored skirts, emanating enormous presence and beauty, but the trees that lined the river valley kept stealing my heart. I could see they were distressed and dying. On our hike in, we had encountered a young scientist who was taking samples and observing the trees. She explained to us that pine beetles, which usually die off during the cold of winter, were infesting the trees because of the rise of winter temperatures.
As I looked across the valley from my rocky perch, I felt my heart ache for the trees, for their loss and for mine. I knew how much I need them. Their very existence and the vast wildness in which they dwell is food for my soul. I need their nourishment. I can hardly imagine bearing a life in which they and their community are diminished.
On the sixth day, we climbed the slope just below the tree line to sit in fields of Indian paintbrush, heart-shaped arnica, mountain lilies, shooting stars, and alpine orchids, awaiting the three young men’s return. Toward mid-afternoon, the oldest one arrived, and later the two younger ones straggled in, hot, exhausted, and proud. The ninety-five degree record high temperatures contributed to the challenge of their final trek up the river. The tales of their excursion were vivid. Each had found a special spot—a rock face, peak, or lake—that had been numinous for him. The trials they encountered were unique to each.
Later, on my own, I reflected on that last leg of their walk. I wondered if the suffering trees through which the trail passed had made the hike harder. The boys only spoke of that stretch of forest being dismal. It had subtly darkened their otherwise empowered, proud mood. I reflected on how the trials of growing up are challenging enough and how much more difficult a tough uphill can be without a sense of awe inspired by nature’s beauty. I felt a gnawing unease as I wondered what world these young men were being initiated into.
The next day we hiked out. As we were driving down the road, we spotted flames and smoke
in the region near where we had been hiking. Summer fires in the mountains are common. With climate change, they seem to be becoming much more common. Two summers before, as we drove home from the Trinity Alps in northern California, the forest service reported that there were over 1700 wild fires burning simultaneously in California alone, the most on record.
Back home by the bay, it was easy for the trouble to seem distant. Yet.
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren ask me in dreams what did you do while the planet was plundered? what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you knew
(from “Hieroglyphic Stairway” by Drew Dellinger)
What Is Needed of Us?
Like many of us, I drive to my office in a hybrid car to do my analytic work; I grow vegetables, hike, recycle, and sign petitions. Yet the reality of ice caps melting, entire forests dying, and unknown species going extinct can seem distant. As I drive to work, the radio announces that walls of water have wiped away entire Filipino communities in what has been called a reverse tsunami, the wave initiated on shore rather than off, as torrential rains caused by climate change fell upon a denuded forest and its watershed, creating unimaginable rolling walls of silt, mud, and logs that rolled furiously onto people below. I remember the distressed watershed in the Wallowas. Who lived at the base of that river, I wonder?
Yet, all this can seem distant. I can keep it at a distance. Wall it off. I’m relatively comfortable; actually, I am very comfortable. I am good at denial and justification. My culture has developed this level of comfort and care and disconnect. We’ve been doing it for a long time.
So that we have shelter from the storm, really comfortable shelter, we have developed ways to protect ourselves from the terrifying aspects of nature. But they keep creeping, shaking, or washing in. It is as if we have created an archetypal self-care system with a positive and negative pole (Kalshed 1996; Foster 2011). On the positive pole, for the most part, I am sheltered from the terror and potential of being destroyed; I am provided and cared for. On the negative pole, I become unconsciously walled off from that which is the actual source of those provisions. Without respect for the terrifying aspect, I am in far less contact with the awe inspiring and numinous, the sacred dimension of nature. An overall dulling of the immediacy, even the reality of nature ensues.
In preparation for rising ocean levels that will accompany climate change around the San Francisco Bay, lowlands and salt flats are being restored to wetlands. On the south end of the bay, wetland ecosystems are slowly recovering. Because they accommodate the influx of tidal waters, they offer a natural buffer for urban life that is close to the bay. Though they are not very accessible to humans because of long stretches of mud flats, birds, grasses, and animals love them.
On the other side of the bay near the Marina District, Fort Mason, and the Embarcadero, engineers are designing systems of levies and sea walls. One plan is to construct a great sea wall along the shore to keep rising waters out of those neighborhoods. The addition of a sea wall, though necessary for the safety of hundreds of people as well as for the extensive and beautiful property there, will certainly change the feel of the bay front. And the inner way we have walled ourselves off from nature will be literally concretized. With all such walls, whether inner or outer, it will take constant energy to keep up the solidity and defense. Water and the depths have a way of working us.
Body, Earth, and Self
Winnicott articulated the process in which people inhabit their bodies and thus live in congruence with felt experience, as psyche indwelling soma (1960). If, at an early and sensitive stage, the individual is engulfed by unbearable affects, a split develops between mind and body. The unbearable is held in the body, split or walled off from consciousness. As this defense system becomes part of psychic structure, such a person is prone to a kind of abstracted life, dissociated from directly felt bodily experience, which is also the locus of felt emotion, primal agonies, and one’s fundamental felt sense of pleasure. A life abstracted feels intrinsically off.
Just as our psyches indwell our body, we potentially indwell the earth. Yet, culturally, we have developed a split between ourselves and the earth. Understandably we have attempted to avoid terror and harm from natural forces. Humans as a species are young relative to earth, and perhaps we are, thus, parallel to Winnicott’s infant, prone to developmental injury, vulnerable to overwhelming affects leading to fissures in our experience. Defensively attempting to override, rather than work with, our inner terror and complex array of feelings, such as shock, profound disappointment, betrayal, and abandonment related to the natural world, has resulted in our having split ourselves off from our inner experience, and in so doing, we have profoundly distanced ourselves from a conscious sense of the actual daily reality of that world. Dissociating from highly activated, bodily sensed feeling states associated with natural forces disconnects us from the earth itself, because it is through our bodies that we sense our connection to earth. Daniel Stern underlines the unique modes of perception of the core or physical sense of self: “A crucial term here is a ‘sense of’ as distinct from ‘concept of or knowledge of or awareness of’ a self or other [the earth]. The emphasis is on the palpable experiential realities of substance, action, sensation, affect, and integration” (Stern 1985, 71). Having abstracted ourselves from our bigger body, the earth, we are unsituated and no longer have a felt sense of primal indwelling.
Yet we are made of the same DNA as all living things. Even the algae are our cousins (Swimme and Tucker 2011).3 We are part of the world, made from the carbon and stuff of the stars. The alchemists knew this and spoke of the Anima Mundi. Indigenous peoples are clear about this, acknowledging the earth and sky community as related kin.
Yet because of the carnage wrought from industrialization, bringing with it climate change, many of our cousins are dying. We will never see them again. Our children will not know of their fur or leaf.
Caught in a negative feedback loop, our emotional attitudes and the long, deep shadows of dualistic modes of philosophical thought and monotheistic religious beliefs fortify themselves moment to moment in our language. Nature is something “out there.” Ultimately we disconnect not only from being part of the earth community and the universe but also from our own nature.
Just as actually experiencing and relating to the bodily felt emotion of one’s own psychic depths creates an inner home, a relationship to one’s inner environment, allowing one to inhabit his or her body, so too a felt relation to the land in-souls it. For me, the scent of granite and pine accompanies my feelings of pride as I see my son grow into his manhood. This pride is accompanied by my grief and apprehension about him entering a world where beetles, unchecked by seasonal cold, infest pines that, in turn, will change entire watersheds. It gives me a felt experience of the fact of beetle-infested pines, rampant across the western states. I share the despair that many others feel, such as that expressed poignantly by a forest ranger from Utah who said, “It’s really something to see; you would be very surprised. It’s hard to describe until you see it—it’s just dead trees as far as the eye can see” (McKibben 2010).
Perhaps the earth needs us to belong to it and it to us. When abstracted from us, we are most likely to abstract “resources” from it without regard. Perhaps it is more than an “environment” and there is more going on than an environmental crisis “out there.” Something is going on “in here,” in us that is in crisis as well. The word ecology is derived from the Greek, oikos, meaning house. This crisis is about our sense of home, how we sense ourselves at home within and with the world.
What Jung intuited nearly a century ago has never been more relevant: that Western culture would become lost if we were not able to sustain a connection to nature and learn from the wisdom of the indigenous people whose stories are deeply woven with the land. Jung wrote about our psyches’ attempts to regulate that loss through inner symbolic relationship (1964). That compensation, as internally enriching as it is, has not been adequate to balance this massive disconnection. And if a symbolic relationship with the natural elements keeps us self-enclosed in our inner world, it can be dangerously seductive, contributing to a state in which we are highly sensitive yet encapsulated, unrelated to the actual land. For example, we fall into a distorted projection when we associate vicious violence to the image of a wolf appearing in dream or fairy tale yet fail to consider the actual behavior of wolves who, in fact, never engage in random, senseless violence (see Steven Galipeau’s article in this issue). At this point in time, associations such as these that linger in the collective psyche unchecked can serve to endanger the actual wolf by perpetrating an unjust notion of wolf behavior, thus indirectly supporting their destruction. Alternately, if an element from nature has a symbolic significance to an individual’s inner life but the individual remains related to the symbol only in inner life, unable to bridge to the actual thing-in-itself, to outer nature, there is a loss. Without bridging to the outer world of nature and relating to each other, some of the creative potential of the imaginal is kept from manifesting and we remain disconnected, the indwelling possibility is thwarted, as is the reshaping of a collective vision, which Thomas Berry refers to as the historical mission of our time (Berry 1999; Plotkin quoted in Laszlo and Combs 2011). Yet, symbolic experience can and does keep calling us, ignites our deep longing for mysterious and direct participation with the numinous powers ever present in soil, sand, and stars, at times informing not only the individuation process but also an individual and collective way to relate to the land. The imaginal realm can serve to bridge us to a kind of “radical immanence,” such as the phenomenologist David Abram evokes when he animates our sensual knowing with the breathing earth (2010).
Jung invites us to connect to what he called the “objective psyche,” that current of intrapsychic life that runs through us but seems not to belong to us, that is certainly not under the control of the ego. It is that inner current that thrusts the individual toward wholeness, offering the spontaneous arisings of impulse and imagination that manifest in dreams, movement, visions, and in creative activities such as active imagination and sandplay. When we turn our attention to this “objective psyche” within our breathing body, we feel nature pulsing through us. Indeed, we feel how we are nature. This is the wild animal we track, engage with, and relate to in analysis.
In his earliest reflections, Jung asked himself, what is my story, what is the myth I live by? (1965). Now nearly a century later what might happen if we revisit that inquiry?
The Ecological Self
Thomas Berry, a theologian dedicated to earth-human relations, suggests that, unlike any moment in previous history, a possibility exists to create a story that integrates all of the world’s spiritual wisdoms with contemporary science. He poses that industrialization and our consumer society are no less than “the supreme pathology of all history,” and thus, there is urgent need for revelatory experience “wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process. This awakening is our human participation in the dream of the Earth . . . ” (Berry 1999, 165). He suggests that this participatory process is carried deep within us, wherein “the Earth functions beyond our capacity for active thought. We can only be sensitized to what is being revealed to us. We probably have not had such participation in the dream of the Earth since earlier shamanic times, but therein lies our hope for the future for ourselves and for the entire Earth community” (165).
How are we to awaken to and participate in the dream of the earth if we disconnect from nature? How do we access revelatory experiences that are linked to the depths of the dream of the earth?
For such a dream to emerge, there must be one who listens. If analysts and analysands, therapists and clients, are the ones who participate in the stories that arise from these innermost realms, do we tune our listening to hear? For the most part, I have been trained to keep my ear tuned to the inner world and the world of human relationships. Perhaps in this time of crisis there is an opportunity to develop a listening perspective that has a newfound curiosity about both the individual’s inner life and the interweaving of the individual-in-relation with the more-than- human community, a listening for an ecological self. This is the term for self first coined by Arne Naess, the grandfather of the Deep Ecology Movement (Naess 1987). It is a sense of self that is related not only to humans but also to our home, the living earth, and the nonhuman others that co-inhabit this home. Ecology pertains to an organism’s interdependencies with its habitat. It is fundamentally a relational perspective. Immersed in our cultural attitude, most contemporary
developmental theorists perceive development of the individual as primarily dependent upon and interactive with human caretakers, giving little attention to our most basic reliance on the rest of the natural world. Our embeddedness in the natural world, however, may contribute to our development as significantly as our human caretakers. Consider, for example, how our sense of emergence, continuity of being, agency, and subjectivity are reflected to us in every unfolding day. We, infants and adults alike, are met by the exquisite attunement of unfolding poppies, sweet spring rain, cracking thunder, death and life entwined in manzanita’s blood red arms and praying leaf-hands. Even our verbal selves are influenced by this outer realm. Can you imagine words spoken in an utterly soundless surround? Birds and wind speak, and our voices, though in another language, arise in this vast complexity of relating. Since the earliest of times, our stories have been consistently woven with and by the human and nonhuman others of this breathing world. A handful of thinkers are beginning to explore more thoroughly what Searles seeded when he considered the rich significance of developmental interaction between the individual and the nonhuman environment (Searles 1960). These new theorists, including Gene Myers (1998), Marianne Spitzform (2000), and Inger Birkeland and Astri Aasen (2012), place fresh emphasis on developmental interactions with the earth and its other-than-human inhabitants. Gene Myers provocatively poses this question: “Can a child provided with a human social environment but deprived of more-than-human others, develop his or her full humanity?” (quoted in Spitzform 2000, 268). There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that a deficit in early exposure to the outer world of nature has profound implications, not only for an individual’s health but also for the health of the earth itself. Commenting on the small-scale psychoanalytic field investigation that she conducted, Susan Bodnar states: “ . . . that early interactions with the physical landscape forms the kind of relationship people have to their ecosystem and who they become. The more consumerist practices shape those interactions, the more those interactions will shape human contact with the planet” (Bodnar 2012, 30–31).
From the perspective of depth psychology, it is as if an essential aspect of our ego-self has been dormant, like a plant that has not emerged for decades. The deep and expansive roots lay underground, long known in the collective psyche. At this time of crisis, it seems as if there is a bursting forth of thoughts and feelings that have been held below, like seeds only activated by fire. Fueled by the times, emergent archetypal energies are infusing farmers, land stewards, scientists, city builders, governance, teachers, artists, and healers of all kinds with a numinous sense of congruence with earth’s processes, activating capacities that reunite long forgotten knowledge with our current time, bringing forward gifts that are needed for the healing of our world (Hawken 2007).
Responding to patients with an ecological self in mind may be essential not only in facilitating a sense of self-coherence to a fragmented ego, by aiding it to sense the sure hold and profound grace of gravity, but also in linking the individual to a larger sense of dwelling on earth, serving in a way similar to mythological links that facilitate a universal sense of belonging.
As examples, I want to offer experiences expressed by a few women who were participants in a collective that I facilitated in which the experienced body and movement were the medium for active imagination (an approach known as Moving in Depth or Authentic Movement), in which we explored the theme of body, earth, and Self. Those who chose to be participant witnesses formed a circle. For a half hour period, those within the circle closed their eyes and inwardly listened to a
body-based sense to either move or be present in stillness, entering into an intersubjective matrix of embodied waking dreamtime. The dreaming that unfolded within them, between them and between them and the earth, further took shape as they brought words to their experience. I invite you to experience their words, as if hearing from a group constructing a sandtray, giving voice to the sandtray figures. Imagine a large circular sandtray, or, more precisely, a circular sandpainting on the earth, in which the individuals are in a healing ceremony. The circle represents the earth itself. This session occurred during a prolonged period of above normal temperatures and a startling absence of rain this winter in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was one of the witnesses, and this is a weaving of both what I saw unfold in the circle and heard as the women gathered and spoke.
I heard one woman voice her experience of being a tree and feeling grounded, not so able to move; she thus spoke from an inner experience of deep tree-like stillness:
I see a lake where I grew up. I feel sadness—I feel the coming loss of my mother’s life and the life of the lake. I see cars and fracking, she weeps and chants, ending, fracking, death, space, openness, nothingness.
I heard another woman who entered the circle swirling; now as we sat and talked, she voiced her anger:
A mountain in the fog of what-the-fuckedness! The foundation is breaking.
I heard her fury, disorientation. I remember seeing her swirling body, stirring arms and hands, as
she spoke:
A mountain in the fog of what-the fuckedness, my new name.
I heard another woman speak of when she had been on the ground, legs tucked under, arms
extended. She said of that moment:
I feel myself in the soil, and of its dark unknowing . . . I am waiting, waiting for a long while . . . I experience an occurrence in my body of wiggling spine, like life moving from within the dark unknowing of a still bulb in winter soil looking for light.
Here are the final words spoken by a woman who had been in the circle and had remained there by herself for some time, after the others had returned to the outer circle.
What do I do?
The lone woman spoke of her inner experience after having sat still in silent inquiry for a long while:
What is the right way for me?
Another participant then quietly slid into the circle and lay beside her.
I sense, someone is beside me. I need this. I need to feel someone is beside me in order to find my way.
As their witness, I heard their voices weave together, and I acknowledged their personal journeys, simultaneously voicing my recognition that they had spoken to the archetypal themes and affects unfolding in this moment on the earth and to the earth: death, anger, fear, the quickening of life, rebirth, our need to be met by each other so we can bear our pain and navigate uncertainty. By my
offering this witnessing, their most intimate truths were recognized as being rooted in our collective ecological truth. Following this, we all expressed feeling closer to ourselves, to each other, and to the earth. Quoting Jung, “In the deepest sense, all of us do not dream out of ourselves but out of that which exists between myself and the other” (Lammers 2011, 63).
The Inner Pulsings of Self: Dreams, Imagination, Wildness
I have found Mary Watkin’s sensitive thinking illuminates this kind of collective work when she says:
Released from subjectivism, we discover that the imaginal registers and amplifies the calls of the world, awakening us through image and perception to what suffers and to what is beautiful. With exacting specificity, free-arising images convey the way the soul perceives the daily realities we live amidst. Through its stark renderings, the imaginal cuts through our denial, dissolving our distance from grief and loss. (2005, 17)
Dwelling with earth, with the natural world, requires the same careful attention needed to dwell within. One of the woman elders of the Carrier people, with whom I participated in ceremony, told me that to learn from a tree or any natural element takes work. To learn from nature requires that we turn toward it, patiently witness and accompany it, just as one learns to dedicate oneself to attending carefully to one’s inner world, such as when one is called to stay with an enigmatic symbol arising from a dream, over a long period of time in order to feel into its meaning. Our actions then can arise from this carefully tended ground of relationship.
Green Gulch is a nearby watershed that flows through the Marin headlands into the Pacific Ocean. In a yurt nestled there, a circle unfolded during a five-day Authentic Movement retreat in which the theme was bringing the sacred as experienced in the body to text. A participant was the witness. It was a warm spring day, and the song of birds and the running creek filled the gulch and wafted into the yurt. The witness saw two women enter into dream time and explore, with their eyes closed, the physical threshold while focusing on their sensorial, affective, and imaginal experience. The witness wrote and spoke these words:
I sense the invitation to revisit anew
boundaries that have been confused in me with walls. A new era is opening.
Within our bodies and psyches are natural processes just like other living organisms and ecosystems. Within the matrix of the living world we are like semipermeable membrane capable of being exquisitely aware of our insides and outsides. With our consciousness, embodying the cosmic-like dynamic of contraction and expansion, we are the ones capable of expanding our knowledge of and felt empathy to every organism in the universe and the universe itself as well as the ones able to contract inwardly, constructing inner barriers of near impenetrable density.
The earth is in a state of transition that has not been seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs, with hundreds of species becoming extinct each day. The depth of emotion in this paper is rooted in my grappling with this enormity. Cosmologist Brian Swimme and Professor Mary Evelyn Tucker at Yale’s forum on religion and the environment, describe the radical way we affect the planet:
We live on a different planet now, where not biology but symbolic consciousness is the determining factor for evolution . . . That is, the survival of species and of entire ecosystems now depends primarily on human activities. We are faced with a challenge no previous humans even contemplated: how are we to make decisions that will benefit an entire planet for the next several millennia? (2011, 101)
How each of us in the therapeutic community will orient to our situation will reflect the diversity inherent in the individuation process itself. As we carefully witness the enormity of the crisis and the gap in the world’s response to it, we are apt to discover and help each other discover how to accompany and hear more fully from others along their way. If we avoid or dampen our response or those of our patients, we risk contributing to a collective deadening. Just as in intrapsychic work, dreams and active imagination offer fresh opportunities to bring about the dissolution of the inner barriers we have created. One does not have to be a scientist or an activist, nor does one have to spend days in the wilderness. But in the days to come, we may have to learn to be with unfamiliar discomforts, such as prolonged bouts of drought, rain, or famine, and we will have to adapt our lifestyles. We will have to reckon with and help our patients bear grief and despair about those species we will never see again and possibly the loss of loved ones who die as a result of extreme climate change. Hopefully, as we allow penetration of the grief we feel for the destruction and loss of life about us, our emotion will break through inner protective walls, vivifying our bond with the earth community. When we listen for the Self, we can listen for awareness of that bond. Our listening perspective, attuned to the depths of the unconscious, may hear ego in service of Self as well as Self in service of the Soul of the World. Attuning in this way, we are not only available to make appropriate links when they arise in the psychotherapeutic dialogue, but we also apprehend that a great shift in consciousness is at hand and come to know, perhaps, in a way never before fully realized, the Self as not reified and individualistic but alive, interactive, embedded in the natural world of which we are all a part.
In the opening poem, Rilke voices, “This fleeting world keeps calling us, apparently needs us.” In response to earth’s call, inner walls are softening, and, though their stories are not prevalent in mainstream media or mainstream psychological discourse and theory, individuals and organizations are rising up across the globe who are dedicated to discovering an eloquent relatedness that responsibly collaborates with the earth, alive to a deeply immanent sense of the sacred.4 It is a fertile moment in which we are called to value and risk sharing imaginative ways of interacting with the land. A view long held by indigenous cultures and now corroborated by contemporary scientists perceives the earth as a living organism and thus as self-organizing (Swimme and Tucker 2011). Jung perceived a self- organizing principle in the psyche, referring to it as the Self. Listening, we may hear the dreams that arise between us and the dream of the earth. Here, as Mary Watkins voices:
. . . the imaginal runs past the given, beyond conceptions of the self, and representations of what is. It ventures into a more culturally forbidden space which expresses what is most deeply desired by the soul. Hillman … describes the heart as the locus of desire, prayer, and the imaginal, as well as sensation and perception. The intense longing of the heart births images like seeds, hoping to inseminate different ways of being in the world. (2005, 17)
Rilke’s words reverberate: The earth “keeps calling us, apparently needs us.”
ENDNOTES
- AfewothersincludeMaryWatkins,aprofessoratPacificaGraduateSchool,whocoordinatesstudentsin a depth psychology–inspired theoretical and practical approach to ecological fieldwork. Her writings reflect her commitment to this integration. Mary-Jane Rust and Nick Totten have edited a book titled Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis (2012). Their work was inspired in part by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner (1995) who, in the United States, founded the field of ecopsychology. This group has published several books. Jerome Bernstein, a Jungian analyst, authored Living in the Borderland: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Challenge of Healing Trauma (2005), in which he weaves together his insight of working clinically with those who acutely feel along with the suffering earth, and how his time with the Navajo people has shaped his thinking about psychology and nature. See also Joseph Dodds (2011), Marianne Spitzform (2000), Bill Plotkin (2008), Robin van Lo€ben Sels (2011), and Sharon Heath (2012).
- In addition to his extensive journalism on climate change, Bill McKibben has spearheaded a global action network focused on abating climate change, called 350.org. In his film A Call to Life, David Ulansey has gathered scientists studying species extinction who indicate that human behavior will have a dramatic effect on the current rate of species extinction, which, in turn, will determine the dynamic balance of interacting ecosystems and thus the quality of life that may be sustained as the planet goes through this massive transition. See Call of Life, http://calloflife.org/, and Species Alliance http://www.speciesalli ance.org/links.php. Joanna Macy is an ecophilosopher, scholar of Buddhism, and general systems theory. She is a leading political activist who inspires and aids great numbers of individuals to speak up and engage consciously in protecting our earth. See Joanna Macy at Joanna Macy and Her Work, www. joannamacy.net. Thomas Berry was an ecotheologian and an ordained Catholic priest who lived monastically. He was also a cultural historian with far-reaching knowledge of religious and spiritual practices of the West, Asia, and indigenous peoples. During the last thirty years of his life, he directed his attention to becoming a historian for the earth, seeing himself as a geologian. His aim was to evoke a comprehensive ethic for all of life and a renewed awareness of our role in guiding the evolutionary process at this crucial point of history.
- Swimme and Tucker (2011) offer a description of the formation of the universe, the way in which humans are forged from the elements of the stars, and the evolution of life from bacteria and algae to human.
- Paul Hawken has chronicled an inspiring account of this upwelling in his book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World (2007).
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