Indwelling:

Our Human Participation in the Dream of the Earth

A workshop emphasizing the role of transformation in consciousness as an essential factor in addressing the environmental crisis.

With Barbara Holifield, MFT & Carol MCrae, PhD

Saturday, February 22, 2014, 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM

At The Institute

What Jung intuited nearly a century ago has never been more relevant: 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. We have developed a split between ourselves and the earth. 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.

Emphasizing the wild nature of psyche, embodiment and the analytic process as way of learning to engage this wildness, we will explore these ideas through entering processes of active imagination, including drumming and being with the experienced body through Authentic Movement both indoors and outside at the nearby park.

With such urgent questions regarding the environment before us today such as:

Just what do we do as concerned citizens? As therapists and healers how do we address these concerns and the anxieties they stir in ourselves and those with whom we work? What are our individual stories and what might be a more conscious collective guiding myth?

We will allow what emerges to build on Thomas Berry’s idea that hope for our future lies in our human participation in the dream of the earth.

Through our inquiry, we join a great wave of others: psychotherapists, eco-psychologists, land stewards, farmers, scientists, artists, healers and people across the globe who, though knowing the outcome of our time is uncertain, see that 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.

BARBARA HOLIFIELD, MFT, is a Jungian analyst practicing in San Francisco and Mill Valley. Immersion into wilderness is an intrinsic element in her life and the profundity of these experiences deeply influences her analytic practice and thinking. She is an adjunct professor at The California Institute of Integral Studies, and teaches Authentic Movement in the United States and abroad. She writes and present on the topic of the psyche within the matrix of the natural world.

CAROL MCRAE, PHD, is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in San Francisco and Marin for 38 years, and has taught at the Jung Institute for many years. She is particularly interested in the practice of active imagination, enriched by its linkages with shamanism. Her concern about our Western culture’s dissociation from nature, endangering our survival on Earth, has led her to look for ways of reawakening to our deep connection with nature.