Ecopsychology: Finding Home Inside through the Outside
“The world is perceiving itself through us”
David Abrams
The Spell of the Sensuous
In contemporary society, Americans often find ourselves in a world where we can feel wholly separate from our surroundings and the place we live. Everyday many pass other humans, barely making eye contact. Instead of meeting the rich gaze of one another and letting ourselves be seen, we often choose instead to stay within our individual thought bubbles of where we are going, what we need to do, and how behind we are with our list of tasks. If we cannot even value making eye contact with strangers in human form, it seems logical that non-human entities in our surroundings would get even less attention and respect. This separation from each other and all that is around us, would naturally lead to a society that objectifies, disregards and uses its natural and man-made world as it sees fit without question, pause, or remorse.
We often chose to live in a dead world of disconnection, isolating ourselves from others humans, as well as the more-than human world all around us. We prioritize land possession, acquisition of resources, going to war and spending our time watching it all on television. But are we at peace? Are we content on a deep soul level? Are we in love with our life and the world around us? Do we feel connected and that our lives are deeply meaningful? We were raised to live this world-view, and everyone we grew up with unconsciously supported the perspective that our surroundings were objects, without energy. We were taught that they were a backdrop for the more important things of our personal life, such as our career, making a living, and supporting our nuclear family. A result of this separation and disassociation from our surroundings, and even our own bodies, has created a world where the environment we live in is toxic to many species and ourselves.
This environmental crisis is mainly due to how we perceive the world and the actions that this perception produces. When we feel connected and perceive the livingness and worth of something, we are more likely to honor and respect it’s right and or own right to exist. Where we feel connected, and in relationship, we cannot disassociate and hurt the other. What we consciously relate to and love, we naturally respect and care for. In our modern society of fast whirring highways, digital communication, disembodied stressful work, and financial priorities overriding our sense of community and home, how can we tap our source of connection to our self and the world?
This paper will inquire into how to access this connection we have to the more-than-human world. I define “connection” as a physical link, association, relationship, joining, bond, logical sequence in thought or expression, coherence, and the like. This paper will explore connection and how to create a stronger bond between the human and the non-human. It will explore how to perceive a world that is alive, and worthy of something to connect to through intersubjective and I-Thou relationships with the other. To cultivate connection and communication we need to open to our bodily senses, practice our innate simultaneous perception, synaesthesia, and activate our imagination, image, the altering of consensus time and space, and allow the livingness of the more-than-human world to touch us deeply.
The essence of Ecopsychology is a movement that aims for cultural transformation of our relationship with our environment. My capstone will seek to fill our current cultural need for reconnection with our environment and the deeper Self. The capstone will demonstrate how ecopsychology can provide essential transformational experiences in a variety of situations that connect humans with their sentient environment, themselves, and each other. The capstone will be a digital web portfolio that ecopsychological practitioners, curious organizations and the wider community can reference for education, networking and application of ecopsychological theory. The capstone emphasizes group, individual, and culturally transformative work that integrates expressive arts, process work, coaching, and ecotherapy processes. It translates the theories of ecopsychology into highly applicable techniques and experiential education that reconnects humans to their animate environment. For accessibility, the capstone integrates writing with multimedia components within a website to effectively interface with contemporary society. I hope the capstone will serve to inspire and demonstrate how easily ecopsychological principles can be applied to educational and professional settings in today’s society. I hope it will reconnect people to their environment, their community, and themselves.