Is it possible to experience psycho-spiritual wholeness while living in a socially divisive and environmentally fragmenting world?
This course envisages psycho-spiritual maturation as an ecology of soul. Dr. Costello portrays wholeness, not as a destination, but as a spiritual path that embraces the inextricable relationship between life and death principles and assents to Creation as mystery. She invites us to confront dominant cultural constructs that alienate us from the body and obstruct the psyche’s connection with the non-human world. In hope of redress, an alternative model of consciousness is proposed, one embracing a nature-based-symbolic attitude that reconnects us with our roots in nature, conjoining mind, soul, and cosmos.
Dr. Costello demonstrates how our environmental crisis and our collective fear of death stem from the same ideological root. She discusses our fear of change and our fear of loss – anxieties that stymie the spirit and inhibit growth. She explores how changes in our bodies and in our life-circumstances may be harnessed as a motive-force for reconnecting us to our roots in nature, opening us to mystery, and honing our intentions in regard to self, others, and our work in the world.
Approaches to healing our severed roots in nature, including methods for using mythic imagination, dreamwork, and a nature-based life review process are demonstrated. Special attention is given to the recurrence of cosmological and elemental themes in dreams of individuals undergoing life-transition.