To the right is Jordyn Foster, she hopes to be a psychologist. She talks about wanting to help people through this profession. Below is a article from a pretty cool magazine on psychology and a sense of the sacred.
Jordyn also has very nice toe nails.
Two thoughts I’d like to share from the Sun Magazine. First, I will paste the beginning paragraph – it speaks for itself…
Christian conservatives’ support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is well publicized, but there is also a long tradition in the U.S. of Christians using nonviolent direct action to oppose militarism.
I must raise my hand, confess, and continue to shake the anger I and many other Christian-type minded folk had when the Christian faith/language was abused by the conservative political right wing, pushing us, with drum cadence ringing in our ears, onward to war… Articles like these help me to release a little of that anger and know that we can take back the message of justice, freedom, and redemption that Jesus embraced.
“Everyone presumes pacifism means passivity, that the only response to violence is to either retaliate or do nothing. . . . Nonviolence is not just a tactic or a strategy; it’s a way of life that requires us to love our enemies. It demands creativity, initiative, and engagement with the culture. There’s nothing passive about it.”
More here>>>>>> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/402/what_jesus_would_do
Second thought from the Sun:::::: This may be a bit long, but it touches on many themes that roam around our contemporay situations. How to allow god/sacred/spirit exist in the modern scientific/psychology/secu
lar world. How do we honor the truth of both of these categories? It also brings up Native practices and spiritualities and how our contemporary society is alienated from each other and the earth that is our home. Our Christian tradition has often been an ingredient in this alienation rather than a prophetic voice. We must be the later, reading the scriptures as redemptive – redeeming this earth that we are interconnected with.
This article helps.
It is called, “The Good Red Road. Leslie Gray on Rediscovering America’s Oldest Psychology.” By, Barbara Platek. I will quote from the middle of the interview.
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/400/the_good_red_road
Platek: is the interviewer. Grey: is being interviewed
Platek: How much more effective do youthink psychotherapy might be if it acknowledged the human need for the sacred?
Grey: The word psychotherapy is from the Greek, meaning “soul healing.” Certainly western psyschology has lost touch with this original meaning, much to its detriment. For me, incorporating the sacred into my work is a question of responding to what clients are asking for, rather than dismissing their concerns. But it isn’t necessary to include the sacred or the transpersonal in every psychotherapy session. If someone comes to therapy to overcome a fear of flying for example, there are some cognitive-behavioral approaches that work wonders. The important thing is for therapists to listen and to assess the client’s needs.
I read a wonderful vignette in an ecopychology newsletter: A patient comes to a therapist and says that she has been having nightmares about the rivers being polluted and the air being fouled. The therapist interprets the dream as being about the patient’s fear of aspects of her inner life. But our environment really is being polluted and destroyed, and many people are concerned or even frightened about it. Psychotherapy needs to genuinely respect the socioevnironmental context in addition to the intrapsychic experience. There is a famous story about psychologist Freida Fromm-Reichmann: She had a patient whom she successfully treated, but a few weeks later that person was taken to Auschwitz. The question is: Would it have been better to focus the work on getting the patient to safety?
We therapists need to understand when a client has needs that may not fit with our clinical orientation – whether it’s a need for the sacred, or for contact with the environment, or whatever – and we cshould give a referral if appropriate.
Platek: you suggest that many of our problems result from profound feelings of alienation: we have forgotten where we came from.
Gray: Yes, we have become so alienated that we are destroying our own life-support systems. You can’t name another animal that does that. Nonhuman animals know that if they eat a certain insect for food, then they shouldn’t destroy the flower that feeds that insect. The shamanic paradigm is one of interconnectedness. The Chukchi people in Russia say, “Everything that is, is alive.” In contrast, we have created artificial environments that enable us to forget that we ingabit a living planet. If we ask chldren where chicken comes from, many of them will answer, “The supermarket.” We have forgotten that we are a part of the earth. As a result, we don’t take care of the planet or feel that it is here to take care of us.
I was part of an ecopsychology symposium in 1993 in whch we met a famous gardener who grew food as organically as possible and who drew upon indigenous methods to tend the soil. This man was deeply connected to the earth. I asked him: “If you could tell people one thing that might improve their relationship with the earth, what would it be?” He told me that twenty-five years ago he would have urged people to move back to the land and plant a big garden, but now he would simply say, “Just grow something edible, even in a pot on your windowsill. Grow something, and see how the earth nurtures you.”
We need a psychology that behaves as if the earth matters, and as if nature and the environment are crucial components of health. Recent research shows that someone in a hospital room with a view of trees will recover more quickly than someone who has no such view.
Shamanism is the native psycholohy of this North American continetn. Western psychology is a transplat from Europe and has never been integrated with this land and its traditions. If we could include Native American psychology in Euro-American psychology, i think we could have a holistic system. The method of healing that originated here addressed the whole person and acknowledges the interconnectedness of all life. Interest in nondualistic Asian philosophies is probably an attempt to address this lack of unity in the West. Native American societies have a lived sense of the unity of all living things, as expressed in the Native American phrase “all my relations,” which has been called a prayer and a cosmology in one breath. If we could incorporate that into conventional American psychology, we might create a genuinely “ecotherapeutic’ model that would view human beings as part of a natural world.
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In January of this year I went to Nicaragua with a small ELCA delegation “to gain an in-depth understanding of how the issues of extreme poverty, hunger and climate change are interrelated”. Actually, that’s quite a lot to accomplish in the ten days that we were there. However, it is readily apparent that climatic changes are having major impacts in Nicaragua. Hurricanes are more frequent and more severe. Seasonal rainfall patterns have been altered, directly affecting growing seasons and flooding and indirectly affecting incidents of disease and clean water supplies. The poor are disproportionably affected because they have less capability to adapt to the changes.
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