Life works in mysterious ways and I have learnt to trust moments of synchronicity and to trust my body’s intuitive Yes and No.
I was really taken aback when in mid-July my body spoke very loudly, that a change was needed! I put in little changes, and still my body demanded change. I put in more changes, and still my body spoke loudly and so in mid-Sept I began extended leave from seeing counselling clients in my private practice to explore my next direction….
(Side note: I’m still seeing supervisees for clinical supervision, this is a YES for my body).
Grief stirs the heart. It is indeed the song of a soul alive. … The work of grieving for the world translates into a fierce and undying devotion to the world.” …find our courage to protect what is being threatened….We must participate in the repair of the world.”
Francis Weller The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals for Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. P46.
I have been aware that the impact of climate crisis and global crisis is harder to ignore and is having more and more impact on my own and on my clients’wellbeing. I think it was becoming more urgent for me to address collective issues and the need for social change rather than just focussing on personal issues. I realised in Gabor Mate’s words that myself and my clients ‘are having a normal response to an abnormal situation‘, and that seeing people in the therapy room, focusing on helping them to feel better without bringing in the external context no longer sat well with me.
In this time of personal transition and change, while feeling the weight of the grief of the world, my daughter recommended I read the book I Eat The Stars: how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world by Sarah Wilson. I was resistant at first…..my ‘business as usual’ parts didn’t want to read more ‘doom and gloom’ and activate my climate distress parts- but listening to the first chapters of this audiobook I was reminded of a podcast I’d listened to with Steffi Bednarek talking about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and climate change which led me to the book Steffi edited Climate, Psychology and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety that was sitting on my bookshelf, not yet read! This led me to an amazing array of podcasts by Steffi Bednarek and Sarah Wilson and to find the course Systems Way-finding facilitated by the Centre of Climate Psychology. Thank you Universe! (links to these resources below). It has been a most amazing rabbit hole to go down while on extended leave…
This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.
– Joanna Macy
And so here I am feeling energised and excited to explore how all the maps and tools that I have personally used or guided clients / groups to use for navigating internal / personal change/transitions that might be useful for navigating the complexity of the external / collective change that is needed in these times of climate crisis and global crisis.
How do we navigate this complexity without going into control or collapse parts
David Kitchings Systems Way-Finding Masterclass
I’ve been personally pondering for awhile now how do we build more resilient communities to navigate these times, how do we identify what is needed, how do we be what we need, and how do we be our longing to find our true belonging as Toko-Pa Turner says in her book Belonging.
I’m longing to be in nested communities of people who are finding ways to navigate external, collective change, who are getting curious about what it is to be human in these times and finding ways to focus in on what is good, true and beautiful while sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what the future holds, sitting with groundlessness and expanding the range of creative responses available.
Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness.”
Pema Chodron in Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change
Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies. Joanna Macy
As Joanna Macy says in the Work that Reconnects and Active Hope Spiral / Deep Ecology – we need to not get lost in our ‘business as usual’ parts or ‘doom and gloom’ parts and instead embrace that this time is one of the Great Turning (sometimes known as the great transition or great simplification).
Joanna Macy highlights that if we are to navigate this transition then we will need to do 3 things:
- Protect what is here on Earth that we can still protect (forests, waterways, other living beings etc)
- Create new regenerative ways of living here on this planet in reciprocal relationship with a larger living ecosystem
- Shift our consciousness, perceptions and values to move into right relationship with Earth and the more than human world
While it is difficult to embrace grief and be moved by it’s muscular demands, without it we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breadth of love, the surprise of joy, we could not celebrate the sheer beautiy of the world. Grief fosters each of these capabilities, deepening them by bringing gravity to the moment.
Francis Weller The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals for Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. P9.
I’ve been curious for a long time now about the healing power of nature-based, creative, embodied, IFS-Informed practices individually and in circles/groups for personal internal healing for myself and for others.
My Key Inquiry Questions:
- How can nature-based creative embodied Internal Family Systems (IFS) support us as humans to understand our own parts and the external society’s parts that are responding/reacting to this climate crisis? (e.g. burn out, control, denial, ambivalence, disavowal parts and eco-grief, eco-despair, eco-anxiety parts)
- How can nature-based creative embodied Internal Family Systems (IFS) support us to cultivate and increase our capacity for our authentic Self-Energy qualities (such as curiosity, creativity, courage, compassion) personally and collectively in this time of change and crisis?
- How can understanding Earth’s natural cycles of change and other teachings in creative and embodied ways support us in personal and collective times of uncertainty and change?
- How do we embrace and learn new earth-based creative embodied ways of knowing in times of crisis when intellectually thinking our way through this crisis isn’t effective and we need new expansive, creative ways of being and doing?
- How do we heal the separation we experience with our own body, with our communities and with Earth so that we may feel a deep sense of belonging to our own body, to the community and to Earth’s body?
- How can Earth as teacher, teach us about paradox and navigating the complexity of life (e.g. tender and fierce, being and doing, rest and move)
An Invitation:
The Great Round of Mandala is a tool / Map exploring 12 archetypal stages of change that has held me through many personal life transitions since 2017 and has been something I have facilitated in circles since 2017. It has been amazing witnessing people’s insights and awareness as they apply this tool to the life changes and transitions they are going through. I’m curious whether this tool / map can also support people through the external collective changes we are needing to navigate in this time of crisis, uncertainty and complexity.
If you would like to join me in the Great Round of Mandala please see invitation here.
More on nature-based, creative, embodied IFS-Informed practices
Wandering in nature is perhaps the most essential soulcraft practice for contemporary westerners who have wandered so far from nature. The earth speaks to us in a manner and a muscle with which nothing in town compares. What nature has to say is the necessary complement to what we hear all day long from news and social chatter. To save our souls we need nature’s news.
SOULCRAFT: CROSSING INTO THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE AND PSYCHE BY BILL PLOTKIN
It is time to take another look at ourselves – to re-enliven our sense of what it is to be human, to breathe new life into ancient intuitions of who we are, and to learn again to celebrate, as we once did, our instinctive affinity with the Earth community in which we are rooted.”
Bill Plotkin Wild Mind
Earth-based / Nature Based strategies
We can’t think our way out of a problem using the same thinking that created the problem (Einstein) and we need Earth as Teacher more than ever in this Western Industrial Growth society to teach us a new story of living in reciprocity, in right relationship with Earth (Robyn Wall Kimmerer). This is something that indigneous cultures across the world know and are still practicing and something my Scottish ancestors once knew, how to live in sacred relationship with the Earth and all her beings (Philip John Newell Sacred Earth Sacred Soul).
Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life
on whose behalf we can act.
We belong to this world.
The web of life is calling us forth at this time.Joanna Macy
We now have scientific evidence on the healing power of nature and yet Western Industrial growth society has largely reinforced a separation from nature. In the Eco Soul Therapy that I have been doing with clients we do deep listening to Earth and her living beings and use the power of active imagination to access the wisdom of nature (using active imagination techniques from SoulCraft and Deep Ecology).
The Wanderer discovers her unique path by perceiving the world with imagination and feeling. She senses what is possible as well as actual. She sees into people and places and possibilities and she cultivates a relationship with the invisible realms as much as the visible. She is in conversation with the mysteries of the world, on the lookout for signs and omens. She attends to the edges, those places where one thing merges with another, where consciousness shifts and opens, where the world becomes something different from what it initially appeared to be… Of the four windows of knowing (thinking, feeling, imagining and sensing) imagination is the Wanderer’s most potent tool, her way of seeing into the dark, of illuminating the shadows, of digging deeper into soul... The Wanderer cultivates this ability to see into the dark. She learns to access and retrieve the images waiting for her in her soul, the images she was born to make manifest in the world, that identify her gift to the world.”
SOULCRAFT: CROSSING INTO THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE AND PSYCHE BY BILL PLOTKIN
Active Imagination
Active imagination is a Jungian depth psychology practice that is also practiced in animist cultures or philosophies across the world (including my Celtic ancestors) where you dialogue with a dream symbol or something in nature and invite in the archetypal qualities or teachings of that object or symbol. Bill Plotkin from Soulcraft writes about this as does Sharon Blackie and Toko-Pa Turner. The Council of All Beings practice in Deep Ecology / The Work that Reconnects utilises the power of active imagination to shift our perspective, to see the world with new eyes, to discover our Ecological Self and our interconnections, interbeing with all other living beings.
In the shamanic traditions, the apprentice learns his craft by using the refined powers of his imagination to become the various animals and qualities of nature, by merging with the earth archetypes and re-membering’ as he remembers he has always been nature. … By becoming earth, through her forms and forces, we regain our souls.’
SOULCRAFT: CROSSING INTO THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE AND PSYCHE BY BILL PLOTKIN
Creative Embodied Strategies
What I love about using Active Imagination is not only can we access this in nature, dreamwork or in a visualisation but we can move our body or intuitively draw or create what it is that we are seeing and experiencing to deepen the experience and the inner knowing. Active Imagination is a way of accessing our expansive right brain (an image speaks 1,000 words0 and bypassing our left brain parts that can be very linear and logical. I have experienced myself and in sessions with clients the transformation that can occur quickly when we move out of left brain talk therapy and into using creative embodied strategies such as metaphor, image or symbol with nature symbols or visualisation or story or dreamwork. Art Therapy, The Artists Way, Art Journalling are all based on this premise and have been incredibly healing in my own life.
Many of us wish we were more creative. Many of us sense we are more creative, but unable to effectively tap that creativity. Our dreams elude us. Our lives feel somehow flat. Often we have great ideas, wonderful dreams, but are unable to actualise them for ourselves…..We hunger for what might be called creative living- an expanded sense of creativity in our (work) lives, in sharing with (family) and friends.”
Julia Cameron in The Artist Way
As we open ourselves to that element of wildness, we discover a quality of our own soul that longs to be embodied in the world, sung to the world, danced, cried and celebrated.
SOULCRAFT: CROSSING INTO THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE AND PSYCHE BY BILL PLOTKIN
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Internal family systems (IFS) uses active imagination for us to visualise or sense our internal parts and to heal or work with these parts. This is similar to buddhist meditation where we can invite in parts of ourselves, get to know them, and as we do this we notice there is an observer Self. Most religions or spiritual philosophies across the world have a name for this observer Self. In Buddhism it is Buddha nature or in IFS it is Self-Energy, in other traditions it might be Soul, Essence or Spirit.
IFS seems to be very easily understood by those of us who have grown up in the Western Industrial growth culture, this language of parts and the idea that underneath our parts is the observer Self – or wise authentic Self – the aspect of us that is present, playful, holds perspective, is curious, courageous, compassionate, caring, connected, has clarity and is creative. More on IFS here
The more Self-led that you become, the less afraid you are to act in a way that’s going to actually bring more harmony.”
Dr Richard Schwartz
Your soul is your true home. In the moment you finally arrive in this psycho-ecological niche, you feel fully available and present to the world, unlost. This particular place is profoundly familiar to you, more so than any geographical location or any mere dwelling has ever been or could be. You know immediately that this is the source, the marrow, of your true belonging. This is the identity no one could ever take from you. … Acting from this place aligns you with your surest personal powers (your soul powers), your powers of nurturing, transforming, creating; your powers of presence and wonder.
Bill Plotkin Soulcraft
In Circle / In Community
We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief and healing that keep us connected with the sacred.”
Francis Weller The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals for Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. P54.
Something a little magical happens when we gather in a circle, the collective energy often deepens the insights and we learn from others or deepen our understanding of the cycles of change / being/ belonging. Many of us are feeling a loss of community and we are craving a safe and sacred space to share our deepest thoughts / emotions about what is unfolding in the world.
Humanity faces a time of uncertainty, not knowing what creative new ways of viewing the world are going to support us in the times ahead. We need to create community spaces and rituals for people to process their emotions as they observe and react to the climate crisis around them (Weller, 2015). Macy (2008) writes that the deadening / numbing of our responses is the greatest danger and if we as humans can acknowledge our despair and eco-grief then we find solidarity with our neighbours and the more than human beings in the world around us. When we do this “we find true community. And in community, we learn to trust our inner responses to our world—and find our power.” (Macy 2008).
We need to build grassroots resilient communities to reduce loneliness (Leblang & Wesselbaum, 2026) and increase the felt-sense of community and a sense of belonging to support eachother and respond as communities to what is ahead of us in the coming years.Small groups are effective in creating the kinds of decolonialised, relational and nature-based cultural shifts necessary (McMaster, 2016). Nature-based, creative, embodied IFS-Informed groups are just one of many ways to build community and strengthen community resilience and adaptability.
Grief work is Soul Work
Grief work is soul work and when we can grieve well we can access and remember our soul and remember our scared connection to all that is (John Philip Newell, Scared Earth, Sacred Soul, read more here). In our industrialised culture we have forgotten and we are now remembering ways to honour and provide a safe container for this essential grief and soul work through ritual with Deep Ecology, The Work That Reconnects, SoulCraft by Bill Plotkin and Francis Wellers book the Wild Edge of Sorrow. When we honour our grief, express and release it safely, we open our hearts and rediscover Active Hope.
The sacred ground of grief …shakes us and breaks us open to depths of the soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemy, transmutes suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by the experience of sorrow. …We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings.”
Francis Weller The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals for Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. P8.
While it is difficult to embrace grief and be moved by it’s muscular demands, without it we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breadth of love, the surprise of joy, we could not celebrate the sheer beautiy of the world. Grief fosters each of these capabilities, deepening them by bringing gravity to the moment.
Francis Weller The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals for Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. P9.
Resources:
- I Eat The Stars: how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world by Sarah Wilson
- Climate, Psychology and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety editted by Steffi Bednarek
- Systems Way-Finding: IFS for Social Transformation
- Belonging by Toko-Pa Turner
- Joanna Macy’s books including Active Hope with Chris Johnstone
- Pema Chodron in Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change
- Philip John Newell Sacred Earth Sacred Soul
- Bill Plotkin Soulcraft, Nature and the human soul, Wild Mind books
- An Economy of Right Relationship Discussion with Robyn Wall Kimmerer and Kate Raworth
- Your Anxiety is Normal: A New Psychology for a World in Crisis with Richard Schwartz and Steffi Bednarek
- Steffi Bednarek talking about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and climate change
- Griefs we’re denied: Nature, Climate, Land Loss with Steffi Bednarek
- Francis Weller: Grief will wake us up so how do we do good grief again Wild podcast with Sarah Wilson
- Iain McGilchrist Our wrethcedness is a left-brain issue Wild podcast with Sarah Wilson
More About Sara:
I am a Clinical Counsellor and Clinical Supervisor registered with ACA and PACFA, an Internal Family Systems (IFS)-Informed therapist who works with clients aged 12 to 80+ with nature-based, creative, embodied practices and I am a Deep Ecology Facilitator based in nipaluna/Hobart.
My existing creative practice is art journalling my dreams, personal growth, insights and wellbeing (since 2015) and regularly completing the Great Round of Mandala (Fincher 2010) (since 2017) as a creative practice to understand personal cycles of life transitions and change (such as menopause, empty nest etc) as well as understanding nature’s cycles / seasons of change. Watercolour, pastels and ceramics are also a part of my current creative practice.
For more information on the Great Round of Mandala, the Great Round of Mandala groups I have facilitated and some of the mandalas I have created please see here.
For more information on Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy and the type of nature-based creative embodied IFS I provide please see here: https://saraphillipscounselling.com.au/internalfamilysystems/
