Eco Psychotherapy Reclaiming our Indigenous Relationship with Nature - CPD Seminar Series Abstract

Eco Psychotherapy

Reclaiming our Indigenous Relationship with Nature

An introduction to the Systemic Integration of Nature into Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Practice

With Bayo Akomolafe, Nora Bateson, Michael Boyle, Karen Carberry, Tom Cheetham, Roger Duncan, David Key, Meredith Little, Graham Music, Robert Romanyshyn, Arne Rubinstein, Sue Stuart-Smith


These webinars have emerged out of the postponement of the 2021 diploma ‘Eco Psychotherapy and the Emerging Adolescent Mind’ to 2022 due to ongoing Covid restrictions.

It is impossible to ignore the impact of the environmental crisis we are currently facing.

It is now unequivocally clear the contemporary, industrial model for social development not only has had a fatal impact on many ecosystems of the earth but also a detrimental effect on human mental health and psychological well-being.

The global Coronavirus pandemic is the latest iteration in a series of emerging and unsettling ecological events that require a radical and deep adaption to a new relationship with nature. We are facing not only an ecological break down but also a breakdown in how to make sense of what we are facing, a process of narrative collapse.

This has coincided with a painful awakening to the legacy of the social and environmental destruction resulting from a colonial world view to nature and culture. There is now a growing respect for long subjugated indigenous cultural epistemologies and a recognition that these ways of knowing which have sustained human culture through ecological change for millennia, must hold vital wisdom about multi systemic ways of relating to nature and human mental health

‘Reclaiming our Indigenous Relationship with Nature’ is a webinar series about ways of reclaiming an indigenous relationship to nature and mental health. Not through cultural appropriation to support our failing western lifestyles, but by finding a personal deep intersubjective connection to the self-healing ecosystems of the earth; which is the birth right of all human cultures.

This a series of wide-ranging conversations on this theme by a group of inspirational speakers and practitioners. Each speaker holds a fragment of an emerging new and very ancient narrative of deep connection. These webinars are an invitation into a hermeneutic process of deep listening for a radically reimagined ecological approaches to therapy, for the task of the supporting future generations of children and adolescents to become generative, altruistic and ecologically integrated adults.


TIMES
Monday and Tuesday evenings at 19.00-20.30hrs BST

FEES
Per seminar
Each Seminar: £30
Each Seminar (Member): £24

Whole series of 12 seminars
All Seminars: £290
All Seminars (Member): £230

CPD
1.5 hours per evening/18 hours whole series
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

BOOK WHOLE SERIES OF 12 SEMINARS (for single seminars see below)

Purchase the remaining presentations and acquire recordings of the whole series. The assembled recordings can be viewed over the next few months as they are added, with the package being complete by 1 November 2021.

All Seminars: £290

All Seminars (Member): £230


1. What we know.  An introduction to the science of eco psychotherapy, nature and mental health

Sue Stuart-Smith portrait photo

Monday 12 April 2021
Sue Stuart-Smith

The Well Gardened Mind

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (BST) Wednesday 7 April.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Dr Graham Music

Tuesday 20 April 2021
Dr Graham Music

The Adolescent Brain, Nature and Nurture

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (BST) Thursday 15 April.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 


2. Reaching beyond a eurocentric epistemology to decolonise our perception of nature and mental health

bayo akomolafe

Tuesday 4 May 2021
Bayo Akomolafe

Let us make sanctuary: posthuman ecocriticism, ecopsychology, and the end of therapy

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Thursday  29 April.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Karen Carberry Portrait Photo

Monday 17 May 2021
Karen Carberry

Decolonizing mental health – foragers of the epistemology pathway

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 12 May.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 


3. Rattling the cage of the western mind, engaging with systemic complexity in nature and mental health

Nora Bateson Portrait Photo

Monday 7 June 2021
Nora Bateson

Intergenerational mutual learning

Warm Data: 

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. 

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 2 June.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Roger Duncan

Tuesday 22 June 2021
Roger Duncan

Nature in mind; reimagining our approach to nature and Mental health

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Thursday 17 June

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 


4. Working beyond the borders of the known; Nature, the imaginal and psychotherapy

Robert Romanyshyn Portrait Photo

Monday 5 July 2021
Robert Romanyshyn

Journeys in nature: stories of homecoming

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 30 June.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Tom Cheetham Profile Portrait

Tuesday 20 July 2021
Tom Cheetham

Psychocosmology and ecological imagination

I argue that we can move beyond the constraints of a reality shaped by the modern technologically sophisticated societies. One way to do this is to embed those forms of life in a broader vision of the creative imagination. We can learn to experience it as the living fabric of creation. There are many styles of this animist cosmology, ranging from the Dreamtime of indigenous peoples to Whitehead’s metaphysics of process to Deleuze’s world of flux and other contemporary experiments in reimagining what it means to be incarnate. I will present a version that is inspired by Henry Corbin, one of the great cross-cultural thinkers of the 20th century.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Thursday 15 July.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 


5. Culture and Nature; rites of passage and adolescent mental health

Arne Rubinstein Profile Portrait

Monday 6 September 2021
Dr Arne Rubinstein

Bringing rites of passage back into the mainstream

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 1 September.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Michael Boyle Profile Portrait

Monday 20 September 2021
Michael Boyle

Rites of passage – An antidote for toxic masculinity

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?

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 15 September.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 


6. What we can do. Learning to reconnect through nature-based practice within a western culture

Meredith Little Portrait Photo

Monday 11 October 2021
Meredith Little

Reviving Earth-based ritual to the land and to the people

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 6 October.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 


Monday 18 October 2021
David Key

Change through nature

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.

TIME:
UK British Summer Time: 19:00 – 20:30hrs
US Eastern Time: 14:00 – 15:30hrs
US Pacific Time: 11:00 – 12:30hrs

CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar

FEES:

Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 13 October.

Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).

Live Seminar: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)

 

Live Seminar (Member): £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)