As humans, we are both domesticated and wild
Psychotherapy as we know it has become very good at the domesticated: boundaries, objectivity, assessment, control, talking, thinking. All useful tools for therapists and ones which we are taught on training courses and can read about in countless books.
What about the wild parts of ourselves?
What about our passion and spontaneity, our impulses and our instincts, the knowing that transcends the intellect and the rational? What about all the things we don’t know how to express with words? Where is the place for our wildness in the therapy room? How do clients know that they can bring all of who they are to sessions, without leaving their undomesticated selves out?
Domesticated Humans
Domestication is an attempt to make what is unpredictable predictable, what is uncontrolled controlled, what is threatening non-threatening, what is bewildering (notice the root word wild) intelligible. To conceptualise, analyse and explain is to domesticate the messy, endlessly varied details of existence into clean, rational precepts, to impose order on ourselves and the world. There is of course a place for domestication. We live in a largely domesticated world. Ecotherapy at Homa offers us a place for our wildness, reconnecting us with our undomesticated, messy nature.
Carl Jung said that...
"The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche [of man]". A rewilding of the psyche is perhaps part of what we need in these times. That can be done in the therapy room, with talking and embodied therapies. And, through the portal of Ecotherapy, we invite our psyches to run wild and free in the woods, in a world in which we have simply forgotten that we too belong.
HOMA takes therapy outside the therapy room to meet all these parts of ourselves.
As we discover who we are becoming as therapists we have the opportunity to embrace all of who we are as human beings; the domesticated and the wild. Being with the other than human and more than human honours and reconnects us with the parts of us that we may have forgotten or denied.
"We do not live on the earth, we came from it, like a wave. There is a legacy deep in our tissues, when we were wildlife, when we were elemental. Every culture came from the same place. Every spiritual tradition came from the same place. It came from Nature. And so we go back to the place it all came from and we listen, and ask, and connect. Nature is the wisdom we are seeking". Emma Rich
Into Nature
As we create a practice among the trees and the plants, the earth and the sky, the wind and the rain, the sun and the clouds, the animals, the insects and the birds we remember parts of ourselves that so often become marginalised in our daily lives. Out in the world beyond the therapy room, we can reconnect with our wildness, with spirit, with mystery, with dreams, with all of who we are.
Ecotherapy Modules
There are three two-day Ecotherapy modules in Year 2 and one further two-day module in Year 3.
The Homa Ecotherapy work is led by Emma Rich and co-lead by Sophie Boss.