Julien is national coordinator for the study of Grief and Trauma at the biggest private Counselling and Psychotherapy Institute in Australia (ACAP) and is interested in deep ecological and ecological-grief perspectives and their contribution to Mental Health in Australia.
Of this conversation Julien wrote for his students:
Grief Ritual and Deep Ecology with John Seed
"To hear within ourselves the sound of the earth crying"
In this episode I meet with Deep Ecologist John Seed. Together we explore the relationship between collective sorrows, trauma and ecological anxiety; and the need to generate new and innovative community therapies, yet therapies that call back to our ancestral roots. We look at the Deep Ecological response, developed by John Seed and Joanna Macey, that weds together Group Work, Ecological Connection and Grief Ritual.
We discuss what occurs for participants who collectively make contact with grief, rage and terror the culturally repressed, forbidden feelings that we are not invited to share in polite company today. These workshops demonstrate the therapeutic potency of engaging in group processes that combine both gratitude for inhabiting, and honouring our pain for, the world, and in this process seeing with new eyes.
In this yarn we discuss the evolutionary pressures that operate not just on individuals but upon groups, for millions of years, in generating a ‘socially-extended and ecologically embedded’ sense of self. What does it mean, then, that our cultural approach to mental health, to grief, is so atomized? There is an evident call, John Seed suggests, to both honor our relations in the more-than-human world and recognize our greater ecological identity. A question for you to take forward is: what role can psychotherapy, group-therapy, eco-therapy, play in producing this shift?
