healers – Sacred River Healing

An Open Invitation to Holistic Healers and Spiritual Guides
Sunday, October 8th
2-5 PM
Location: Stony Point Center
(Great meal available at 6 if you’d like to stay for dinner – $15)

For those who have been immersed in holistic, integral or spiritual approaches to personal healing, growth and transformation, the political sphere of activity has often seemed a very dark and hopeless arena of collective human dysfunction. There is, for many in these fields, (yoga and meditation teachers, holistic bodyworkers and psychotherapists, teachers of Tai Chi, Qi Gong, shamanic practitioners, spiritual coaches and guides, and others) a distaste for “politics.” Folks in these fields tend to see that their work with individuals or small groups, with people who choose to make changes in their lives, actually brings about results. Further, it is sometimes said, that the best way to change the world is one person at a time opening to the wholeness of who they are as compassionate, loving beings. Our connection with all beings means that the changes in one will ripple out and effect others. Personally, I am a great believer in this principle.

Yet, the events of the past several decades, and especailly this past year, have brought home the awareness that: yes, any individual changing is connected to everyone, but we are all connected in a burning house. What’s more, the fire in the house has grown exponentially as the forces of domination and control have consolidated their hold over the political apparatus. This apparatus makes the policies that allow, even promote, greed to be the primary motivator for economic and, in fact, all social activity. Their policy-making is responsible for the collective failure to address rampant poverty, war, and the impending, catastrophic effects of climate change. These policies come out of politics, and they are ignored at all our peril.

So, how does one bring the sensitivity, awareness and skills of the work being done in holistic healing and personal growth to the issues that confront us as a community, nation and world? What does that look like? How can people with such an orientation join together and also join with those activists working on and through the political system? It is these questions that I’d like to see us come together to address. I’d like to join with others to build a bridge that connects the consciousness and sensitivities of healing practitioners with political activists. Would you like to be part of that?

I am open to any suggestions, ideas and forms of collaboration. I’m not looking to lead or start a new movement, but join with folks locally along lines that others have pioneered in other places. How about we start with a gathering? I’m suggesting this date and hope it works for enough folks to get the ball rolling. If you are interested at all, please respond to this message, even if you cannot come at that time.

Peace and blessings,

Alan Levin

alevin@SacredRiverHealing.org

Bridging the psyche and the world

A workshop for therapists and healers

Ecopsychology integrates ecology with psychology, so that the human mind and body are viewed in their relationship to nature and the whole web of life. This emerging field of study offers a philosophical ground for a deeper understanding of the human problems that are related to in psychotherapy and all healing work. It likewise offers practical approaches for healing and transformation. Through the lens of ecopsychology, we can look at the causes and treatment of some of the major difficulties faced in therapy such as depression, alienation, addiction, lack of intimacy and existential anxiety.

This workshop will be an exploration of some of the core ideas that have been articulated by theorists and practitioners of ecopsychology. It will include experiential practices that derive from this perspective, and offer direction for future study and experience.

Included will be discussion and exploration of:

* ecopsychology, biophilia and Gaia
* indigenous and shamanic practices of healing
* experiences of relating with nature as healer and therapist
* the role of rites of passage and other nature-based rituals in marking life transitions
* redefining sanity in the context of a culture that is destroying its own life support system
* the human body and mind as part of the web of life

Free lecture:
Friday evening (or Sat.) New Age Center, Nyack

Day long experiential workshop in nature setting:
Sat: 10 – 4 (or Sun) Point of Infinity

Workshop leader: Alan Levin, M.A., L.M.F.T., has studied and taught deep meditation practices and shamanic exploration for the past 35 years. He is a licensed psychotherapist in California, where he also led wilderness quests with an ecopsychological perspective. He founded Holos Institute in 1990, in which he trained and supervised intern therapists integrating spirituality and ecopsychology in their work toward licensure as psychotherapists. He has just moved to Nyack and is beginning a practice of working with individuals and groups with what he calls, “therapy for the mind, heart and soul living in a body.”

Additional reflections on ecopsychology:

“Ecopsychologists are drawing upon the ecological sciences to reexamine the human psyche as an integral part of the web of nature.”
-Lester Brown
President, WorldWatch Inst.
co-author, State of the World

“…an individual’s harmony with his or her ‘own deep self’ requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.”
-James Hillman
Jungian analyst, author

“Once upon a time all psychology was ‘ecopsychology’. No special word was needed. The oldest healers in the world, the people our society once called ‘witch doctors’, knew no other way to heal than to work within the context of environmental reciprocity.”
-Theodore Roszak
author, The Voice of the Earth