Spiritual Ecology and Psychotherapy: Listening to the Earth
- aphillipsarts
- Jun 13
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 28
What does it mean to listen to the Earth? Not as a metaphor, but as an act of reverent attention.
For those whose work engages with psyche and image (particularly psychotherapists and artists in this instance) the question can evoke something ancestral, a realignment of the senses with our most natural way of being in the world. We are accustomed to listening deeply: to silences, the symbolic, to psyche speaking through image and metaphor. So what happens when we turn this same ear, this same gaze, toward the more-than-human world?
This is a question I keep close to my work, both in the therapy space with patients, and in my artwork. Very often we have a tendency to neatly divide things into extremes, and then say that only one can be true. This can be considered a defensive move to protect us from the reality that how we feel about a situation is much more complex, and that conflicting feelings and outlooks coexist. I try to hold together the notions of 'beauty' and 'grief' that often seem to become polarized, emphasising that they belong together. In the images below there is hopefully the suggestion that these respective qualities are not mutually exclusive, and even require the presence of the other.
Why Spiritual Ecology and Psychotherapy Belong Together
The premise of the book is elegantly simple and yet profoundly unsettling: the ecological crisis is a reflection of a spiritual crisis. We have desacralized the world.
We no longer see rivers, forests, oceans, or winds as alive, ensouled, or holy. And in doing so, we have lost something vital in ourselves.
As someone working at the intersection of spiritual ecology and psychotherapy, I find this book speaks directly to the hidden wounds of disconnection, both inner and outer.
This is not a romantic nostalgia for a pre-industrial Eden. Rather, it’s a recognition that we’ve built entire systems of thought and economics upon a myth of separation; human from nature, mind from body, spirit from matter. And when the world is no longer seen as alive, it becomes disposable.
As psychotherapists, we understand the perils of disconnection, losing sight of aspects of ourselves, fragmentation of our sense of wholeness and being held together. The ecological equivalent of a split-off psyche is visible all around us: species extinction, climate breakdown, extractive economies. These are not just political problems. They are symptoms of a deep dislocation from the sacred.
What this book offers is both a mirror to, and medicine for that rupture. It asks us to bring the same quality of inner attention we give to the human soul to the Earth itself. Just as we listen to trauma, fragmentation, or exile in the psyche, we can learn to listen to the grief and degradation of the Earth as expressions of a shared field. As archetypal psychologist James Hillman might point out, psyche is not merely our internal experience, we are within psyche.
Soil, Soul, Society: Satish Kumar’s Living Triad
In his essay “Soil, Soul, Society,” Satish Kumar names three core relationships:
To the soil (our connection to nature)
To the soul (our inner life and purpose)
To society (our place in community)
For Kumar, spirituality is not confined to meditation cushions or retreat centres. It is embedded in how we walk, eat, grow food, and relate to one another and the Earth.
Ecology and spirituality are not separate domains. They are braided together, like roots beneath the forest floor.
This image of roots intertwining offers a appropriate metaphor for relational psychotherapy. Our relationships, both conscious and unconscious, mirror the ecological principle of interdependence. Kumar’s vision echoes systemic and transpersonal approaches in therapy, where individual wellbeing cannot be divorced from the broader web of life.
Inner Ecology: Joanna Macy and Bill Plotkin
Joanna Macy’s contribution, “The Greening of the Self,” has particular resonance for those of us who work with inner transformation. She explores how expanding our sense of self to include the Earth is not only possible, but necessary.
This is not about sentimentality or projection. It is about remembering ourselves as part of a living whole.
As therapists, we guide people in recovering lost parts of the psyche. Macy invites us to do the same collectively, moving beyond an egoic, consumer identity into what she calls the ecological self.
In this way, ecological awareness becomes a form of individuation. It’s not merely a political stance, but a psychological maturation: the recognition that the boundaries of the self are porous, participatory, and embedded in a wider field of being.
Likewise, Bill Plotkin’s “Soulcraft and the Eco-Soul” speaks to the soul’s journey in direct relationship with the natural world. For Plotkin, true maturity requires a descent into soul, described as a deep surrendering of the surface self.
He invites us to engage nature not just as scenery, but as initiation.
This calls to mind archetypal motifs familiar in both Jungian and mythopoetic therapy: the underworld journey, the encounter with the shadow, the death of the old identity. In Plotkin’s framing, the Earth is not just a container for this process, it is an active participant. Soul work and nature connection become inseparable.
For psychotherapists, this invites a deepening of practice. How might we consider not only our clients’ relationships to family and self, but to the seasons, to land, to weather, to nonhuman kin? And for those of us trained in the visual and symbolic, this opens a vast terrain of new material, from dreams of animal visitations to grief for the vanishing wild.
The Artist’s Gaze: Seeing the World as Sacred
Time and again, contributors ask us to cultivate what Vaughan-Lee calls a sacred gaze.
This resonates with the artist’s path.
Wendell Berry’s essay “Preserving Wildness” explores how attention itself is an act of reverence. The industrial mindset reduces everything to utility. The poetic or artistic mind, by contrast, sees in symbols, patterns, and presence.
To perceive the wild, he argues, is to engage it with awe, not control. For me, awe, wonder, beauty, are essential aspects of human experience, but psychotherapy often seems very hesitant to go near these words, perhaps sometimes overemphasising 'shadow', or approaching them reductively, rather than recognising the the essential nourishment these elements bring to our lives, and cultivating our senses to better perceive, embody, and express them.
Pir Zia Inayat Khan takes this further in “The Ecological Heart.” Drawing from the Sufi tradition, he describes the heart as the meeting place of spirit and matter. The ecological crisis, he suggests, is not just scientific or social, it’s a crisis of the heart.
To heal this, we must feel the Earth’s suffering, not abstractly, but with our whole being.
For artists, this opens up a profound path. Art becomes not decoration, but devotion. An act of witnessing and prayer, ceremony, or magic.
To see the world as sacred is to resist commodification. It is to attend to nuance, mystery, and presence. And in doing so, we become attuned to a deeper aesthetic, one that reflects the textures and rhythms of the more-than-human world.
This changes how we make, and perhaps why we make. An artwork becomes not a statement, but a form of relationship, and participates more as a being, rather than a static surface. This sensibility is not limited to those who identify as “nature artists”, it is available to anyone willing to slow down enough to see and feel their way beyond the currently dominant paradigm of scientific materialism.
The Cry of the Earth, the Cry of the Psyche
What is most striking about this book is its willingness to approach and be with grief.
It does not rush to solutions. It does not sanitise or soften the truth. If we are part of a living and interconnected field of being, then it follows that part of what we feel within our individual selves could also be considered an expression of the wider world of Nature. And if that is suffering, we may experience that within ourselves, much like we can pick up on the emotions of those people we are close to.
As therapists, we know the importance of grief in healing. Collective ecological grief, however, often goes unspoken, rarely entering the therapy room by name, but it is there. Quietly, insistently, beneath the surface.
This is not pathology. It is a sign that we still care. That we are still connected.
Grieving the Earth is not only a political or environmental act, it is also a deeply psychological one. It softens the defences of dissociation. It invites a reawakening of empathy, humility, and kinship. In many ways, grief is the bridge back to love.
Vaughan-Lee writes:
“We are being asked to reconnect with the world around us in a way that our ancestors understood instinctively.”
This is not about nostalgia. It is about recovering right relationship, not as dominators or saviours of nature, but as kin.
Conclusion: A Different Kind of Listening
Reading Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth feels like stepping into a sanctuary.
Not a place of escape, but of deep truth and tenderness. Each essay is a meditation, a mirror. Together, they form a collective soulscape, a map for remembering what it means to live within a sacred world, rather than as if it were sacred. A subtle, yet profound difference.
For therapists and artists, this book offers not techniques but a shift in perspective. It invites us to see our work as part of a larger ecology. To ask:
How might the work of soul serve the work of soil?
What images does the Earth want to show us?
What dreams does it long for us to dream?
The Earth is not a backdrop, or a symbol, and it is not “out there.”
It is alive and communication. And perhaps what it needs most is not always action, but deep, reverent listening.
Andrew Phillips is a Visual Artist, Art Psychotherapist, Creative Mentor / Life Coach, in south Wales.
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