Confer - continuing professional development, seminars and conferences for psychotherapists, counsellors and psychologists
Landscapes of the mind
LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND CONFERENCE
Does our mental health depend on our relationship with the natural world?
Conference
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FULL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
FRIDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 2009
Chairperson David Peters
Registration from 18.30
19.30 The planetary crisis and the arising of the ecological self
Joanna Macy
To be conscious in our time involves an almost unbearable awareness of irretrievable losses and accelerating dangers to all life. The feelings aroused are too often reduced to some personal pathology, and people are robbed of ways to see them as wholesome and to channel them into appropriate action. The healing professions have a powerful role to play in countering this reductionism and legitimating people's natural responses to loss and danger. Most successful are moves to enable people to expand their capacity to identify with collective interest. Joanna's work over three decades has been informed by systems theory and Buddhist teachings as a lifelong commitment to social activism.

21.00 Drinks reception
22.30 End of day
 
SATURDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2009
Chairperson David Peters
09.00 Social Dreaming Matrix
Laurie Slade
By sharing dreams and associations, making connections where possible, we can identify emerging themes of the conference and explore our engagement with them.

10.30 The living mountain: attachment to landscape and its importance in regulating emotions
Martin Jordan
This paper will explore how our attachment to nature is formed in our early love relationships. I will draw upon ideas from relational theory and research in developmental psychology to explore the role of nature in affect regulation and development, discussing how 'splits' have formed between self and nature as a protection against vulnerability. I will argue that at the heart of our current ecological crisis, are fundamental problems of dependency and vulnerability. I will conclude by exploring the role of psychotherapy in developing an ecological self.

11.45 Coffee
12.15 Nature as subject: exploring anthropocentrism
Mary-Jayne Rust
We've had a hundred years of exploring the psychodynamics of human relationships - but what of our relationships with the non-human world? The "natural world" has become a bunch of objects to be used; wild nature is often feared as dark and dangerous, or conversely idealised as all-beautiful. Facing our projections is every bit as (if not more) difficult as the challenge of working through sexism and racism. But this psychological work is essential if we are to relate with the earth as a community of subjects on whom we depend for our physical and mental health. How might these issues enter into our work as therapists?

13.30 Lunch break
14.30 Small group workshops (choose one of 8)
Indoor Workshops
1. A Taste of the Work that Reconnects
Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
The Work That Reconnects is a pioneering form of group work that began in the 1970s. It demonstrates our interconnectedness in the web of life and our authority to take action on its behalf. It has helped many thousands around the globe find insight, solidarity, and courage to act when addressing their concerns about our world situation. Drawing on systems theory, spiritual teachings, and deep ecology, this afternoon workshop introduces this approach.

2. Ecopsychological Listening
Mary-Jayne Rust
It is well known in the therapy world that how we listen, what we hear and how we respond may be limited by our own experience as therapists. For example, how might we respond to stories of ecological destruction? What do we know of the importance of attachment and bonding with the non-human world? Through a mix of experiential exercises and discussion we will explore how we listen and respond to ecopsychological material in the therapy room, and its importance to our emotional well-being.

3. Towers and Landscapes
Sandra White
Carl Jung described his experience of himself when living in his tower at Bollingen: "At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons." Through story, enactment and artwork, we will examine how we separate ourselves from and connect with our experience of being an integral part of Earth's landscape.

4. Environmental Constellations - an experiential workshop
Zita Cox
Eco-psychology offers the perspective that humankind suffers the distress of the other-than-human world we so rigorously exclude - as well as our own pain at being separated from the natural world. This Constellations workshop aims to reconnect us beneficially to the other-than-human world in a different, dynamic and unpredictable way: to rely less on the rational mind and connect through our body, intuition, empathy and unconscious.

5. Wild Mind
Nick Totton
Wild mind listens to the intelligence of all our embodied experience. It emerges from accepting identification with the body as an aspect or part of the whole system. Like an ecosystem, like our physiological functions, wild mind happens of its own accord, as the sum product of local reality: we do not have to bring purpose or intention to bear on the situation, as if from the outside - it arises as a spontaneous expression of the situational gestalt. In this workshop we will think about, talk about and experiment with the qualities of wild mind and its potential role in our individual and collective life.

Outdoor Workshops
6. Staying in touch with our ecological self – sensation, emotional intelligence and resilience
Viola Sampson
In a culture where individualism and desensitisation is fostered, how do we connect with the collective and how do we make sense of ourselves? This workshop will explore ways to tap into a deeper intelligence and nurture our relationship with the wider system. It will also offer space to share strategies and skills for emotional resilience.

7. Taking Therapy Outside - deconstructing and reconstructing the frame in psychotherapy
Martin Jordan
The main focus of the workshop will be on exploring issues involved in taking counselling and psychotherapy outdoors. The presenter will use case study and supervision material to explore some of the main issues involved in taking therapy outdoors. Issues such as confidentiality, timing, weather, containment and relationship with nature will be explored. Time will be given for small group discussion and focussed activity exploring how participants see issues involved in practising counselling and psychotherapy outdoors.

8. Will informed awareness save us from climate change?
Graham Game
Conventional wisdom has often dictated that when a problem or issue occurs, we throw information at people and raise their awareness, they act accordingly and the problem is solved. While that strategy may be relevant for some issues, the BIG Issue - climate change - demands a far more sophisticated approach. Graham Game will explore where we have gone wrong with our approach to tackling climate change, and how we can use Ecopsychology and Ecotherapy to empower people to change their attitudes and behaviour and live more sustainably.

16.30 Tea and time to explore the Eden Project
17.00 Activities
  • Wild foods: gathering and cooking (An Eden Project Workshop)
  • Open fire: time to chill and chat (An Eden Project Workshop)
  • Wild walk - Led by Graham Game (off site)

18.30 Satish Kumar
An exploration of the way our emotional, spiritual, psychological health depends on our relationship with nature

19.30 Barbeque and party
23.00 End of evening
SUNDAY 27 SEPTEMBER 2009
Chairperson Nick Totton
09.00 Social Dreaming Matrix
Laurie Slade
By sharing dreams and associations, making connections where possible, we can identify emerging themes of the conference and explore our engagement with them.

10.00 Yearning for Our Niche: the role of meaningfulness in the ecosystem
Paul Maiteny
As human beings, we mostly use our capacities to invent ever more ingenious, sophisticated and subtle ways to satisfy desires through what can be called a 'consuming orientation'. We know that consuming can never ultimately satisfy, but we continue it anyway, drawn by our 'pre-human' instinct, as if there is no other route to satisfaction. Paradoxically, our eco-systemic mess is rooted, at least in part, in an instinct for survival that has become dysfunctional. Our survival depends on shifting this orientation but why is this so difficult, even when we are aware of the problem? This presentation will explore how we can live as part of a bigger context, in which meaningfulness comes from seeking, and perhaps finding, one's niche in the ecosystem?

11.00 Coffee
11.30 What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves
Isabel Clarke
The ecological crisis is a crisis of relationship. Our abusive relationship with the earth, threatening the future of our species, also distorts us, causing pain, which we dull by addictions that fuel reckless consumption. Accepting and understanding that we are caught between self consciousness and embededness in relationship opens our capacity to expand in love, not cut off in addiction.

12.45 Lunch break
13.45 Active hope in personal and planetary healing
Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
As we enter a new era of economic uncertainty and environmental concern, polls show that most people consider the condition of our world to be getting worse. Against this background of anxiety, depression has become the modern epidemic. Yet as well as bringing nightmares and despair, could our current crisis also call forth positive qualities and new strengths? In rising to the challenges of our times, could we discover a positive experience of mental health that includes deepened purpose and greater aliveness? In this afternoon session, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone present insights, stories and strategies from their new book Active Hope, (due to be published in 2010). By exploring what help us find the courage and inspiration to address concerns about the world, they describe how crisis can become a turning point in both personal and planetary healing.

14.45 Practices to support the ecological self
Joanna Macy
Joanna will draw from her international work with people of all ages, backgrounds, and political persuasions to free their perceptions of current ecological and social conditions and to release their energies to take constructive action.

16.15 End of conference
SPEAKERS' BIOGRAPHIES
PROGRAMME BROCHURE
Our brochure contains information about the full Landscapes of the Mind event.. NB this file is large and may take time to download.
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landscapes_prog.pdf
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landscapes-bookingform.pdf
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