Spiritual Ecology and Psychotherapy
Updated: Aug 20
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, and here I am thinking particularly of psychotherapists and artists, the question can evoke something ancestral: a realignment of the senses with a more natural way of being in the world. We are accustomed to listening deeply to silence, symbol and the ways psyche speaks through image and metaphor, so what happens when we turn the same attention towards the more-than-human world?
This is a question I keep close to both my therapeutic work and my art, where landscape is often approached through relation and reverence rather than as scenery alone.
I am also interested in experiences that resist being divided too neatly into opposites. Beauty and grief, for example, are often treated as though one must cancel out the other, whereas I increasingly experience them as intertwined. This is something I have written about elsewhere in relation to Martín Prechtel’s The Smell of Rain on Dust, where grief and praise belong together within a wider attitude of reverence towards life. The natural world can evoke wonder and sorrow at once, and perhaps each can deepen our capacity for the other.
Why spiritual ecology and psychotherapy belong together
Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, edited by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, gathers writers and practitioners who approach ecological crisis as inseparable from a crisis in our relationship with the sacred.
Its central proposition is unsettling in its simplicity: when the Earth is understood primarily as material resource, something vital is lost in our relationship with the world and within ourselves.
Rivers, forests and other forms of life cease to be encountered as presences with their own intrinsic value and become increasingly available for use. This separation is cultural and economic, but it is also spiritual and psychological.
Psychotherapy is already concerned with the effects of disconnection and with what happens when important parts of experience are pushed beyond awareness. Spiritual ecology extends that question outward. What happens when a culture collectively loses its capacity to experience itself as belonging within a living world?
The ecological crisis can then be understood partly as a crisis of relationship. James Hillman repeatedly argued that psyche is not merely something contained inside us; we are also within psyche. From that perspective, damage to the world cannot be entirely separated from psychological life.
The term ecopsychology is useful up to a point, but I also find it limiting. It can imply that ecology is something psychology now needs to incorporate, as though the two were previously separate domains. Hillman’s deeper criticism was that much modern psychology had already lost contact with psyche itself, reducing psychological life to the interior concerns of the individual. From that perspective, the task is not simply to add the natural world back into psychology, but to recover a sense of psyche broad enough to include the world in which we already participate.
Soil, soul, and society
In his essay Soil, Soul, Society, Satish Kumar describes three fundamental dimensions of relationship: our connection with the Earth, our inner life and our participation in community.
For Kumar, spirituality is embedded in ordinary life, in how we eat, walk, grow food and relate to one another and the Earth. Ecology and spirituality therefore become inseparable aspects of how we inhabit the world.
The image of roots intertwining offers an obvious resonance with relational psychotherapy. Human lives do not develop in isolation, and psychological experience is always embedded within relationships and environments that precede and exceed the individual.
This is one place where psychotherapy and ecology genuinely meet, because both challenge the fantasy of complete separateness.
Inner ecology
Joanna Macy’s essay The Greening of the Self has particular resonance for those concerned with inner transformation. She explores the possibility that our sense of self can widen beyond an isolated ego and recover an experienced participation in the living Earth.
Her idea of the ecological self suggests that concern for the natural world need not arise only from moral obligation. It can emerge from recognising that what happens to the Earth is not wholly separate from what happens to us.
There is an interesting connection here with Jungian ideas of individuation, provided we do not reduce ecological awareness to another stage of personal development. The boundaries of the self become more porous, and psychological maturation may include a growing awareness of the wider field in which a life is embedded.
Bill Plotkin’s contribution, Soulcraft and the Eco-Soul, approaches this from another direction, placing the soul’s development in direct relationship with the natural world. Nature becomes an active participant in the process rather than scenery surrounding an otherwise human story.
His work brings to mind familiar archetypal motifs of descent and transformation, but places them within an ecological context in which the Earth itself participates.
For psychotherapy, this opens useful questions. What happens when we attend not only to family histories and interpersonal relationships, but also to someone’s relationship with seasons, locality, weather or other forms of life? For those of us who work through image and symbol, such material may already be present in dreams, memories and spontaneous imagery.
The artist’s gaze
Again and again, contributors to Spiritual Ecology return to the cultivation of what aughan-Lee calls a sacred gaze. This resonates strongly with artistic practice.
Wendell Berry’s writing on wildness considers attention itself as a form of reverence. The industrial mindset tends towards utility, whereas artistic perception can remain with particularity and presence.
For me, awe, wonder and beauty are essential aspects of human experience, although psychotherapy can sometimes seem hesitant around such language, perhaps because of a fear of sentimentality or a tendency to privilege suffering as psychologically more serious. Yet experiences of beauty can nourish us profoundly and deserve to be approached with equal depth.
When describing his concept of 'the shadow', Jung takes care to explain that it consists of "gold", as well as more seemingly undesirable or darker elements. For if the likes of awe, wonder and beauty are what is deemed unnaceptable within a family, culture (including environmetal activism), or society, then they will become the unlived material of the shadow. Mythologist, storyteller, and wilderness-vigil guide Martin Shaw is doing important work in the restoration of relationship between true romanticism and activism.
Pir Zia Inayat Khan, writing from a Sufi perspective, describes the heart as a meeting place between spirit and matter. His contribution suggests that ecological crisis is also a crisis of feeling, because what we cannot allow ourselves to experience fully is difficult to enter into relationship with.
For artists, this opens a path in which making can become devotional. An artwork may participate in witnessing, prayer, ceremony or magic, depending upon the life and practice from which it emerges.
This is close to how I understand my own relationship with landscape. Reverence is less a subject to depict than a way of entering into relation with the living world. An artwork may emerge from that encounter and acquire a presence that exceeds the intention with which it began.
To see the world as sacred is also to resist reducing it to commodity. Artistic attention can help restore sensitivity to qualities that disappear when everything is approached primarily through usefulness.
I am increasingly wary of the language of re-enchantment here. It can suggest that the world has somehow lost its vitality and requires us to restore it. My sense is almost the reverse. The vitality was never absent. What may be absent is our capacity to perceive, receive and respond to it. That requires less grandiosity than humility, and less projection than reverence.
The question may not be how to re-enchant the world, but how to recover our capacity to meet a world that was never disenchanted.
The cry of the Earth and the psyche
One of the qualities I value most in this book is its willingness to remain with grief.
If we participate in a living and interconnected field, then some of what we experience inwardly may also belong to the wider world around us. Ecological grief is one expression of this, although it may not always arrive in therapy under that name.
Sometimes it appears more indirectly: sadness at vanished habitats, anxiety about what is changing, or a difficult-to-name sense that something precious is being lost.
Psychotherapy has long recognised grief as something that requires room rather than immediate correction. Ecological grief deserves the same seriousness because it can reveal that our capacity for attachment extends beyond the human.
There is another danger here which I think receives less attention. Many people who feel deeply for the Earth, and are acutely aware of its damage, can nevertheless lose a sense of reverence for what remains. The world begins to appear primarily through its wounds. In human terms, it would be rather like seeing someone who has suffered trauma as nothing more than the wounded person. Something essential disappears when injury becomes the whole identity.
This is one reason Prechtel’s insistence upon grief and praise belonging together has stayed with me. Grief without praise can become strangely barren, while praise without grief risks sentimentality. Reverence allows us to mourn what has been damaged while continuing to perceive beauty, vitality and worth in what remains. I increasingly think this is part of the medicine rather than an avoidance of ecological reality.
I was reminded of this recently by a discussion in which someone argued passionately that much modern agriculture, including intensive crop farming, was ecologically destructive, yet concluded that because such land was already “industrialised” it hardly mattered if it were subsequently built upon. The concern for ecological damage was genuine, but the conclusion struck me as revealing something of the very rupture being opposed.
A cultivated field does not need to be pristine wilderness to possess beauty, ecological value or a claim upon our reverence. Once we can see only damage, it becomes surprisingly easy to justify further destruction. Care can become narrowed by the very wound it is responding to.
Vaughan-Lee writes:
We are being asked to reconnect with the world around us in a way that our ancestors understood instinctively.
The language of reconnection is important, although perhaps connection itself has never entirely disappeared. As Jung’s image of the rhizome suggests, we may remain embedded in relationships that our dominant ways of living have made difficult to perceive.
Grief can become one way of discovering that those relationships are still alive, but in Prechtel’s terms praise belongs beside it. To grieve the Earth while remaining capable of wonder may be one way of refusing both denial and despair.
A different kind of listening
What stayed with me after reading Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth was less a particular argument than the quality of attention running through the book. Its contributors repeatedly return to what it might mean to live within a sacred world rather than behaving as if the world were sacred, a subtle distinction that changes everything.
For therapists and artists, the book offers less a collection of techniques than a change in orientation. It asks what becomes possible when our attention extends beyond the bounded individual and recognises psyche, creativity and spiritual life as already embedded within a larger ecology.
The Earth is neither backdrop nor merely symbol. Our lives arise within it, depend upon it and remain in relationship with it. Perhaps listening begins there.
