In 2020 I am offering a series of 'incubation spaces' that explore our personal and professional responses to the climate emergency. These gatherings are an invitation to bring our fallible selves back into relationship with each other and the world. Together we experiment how to weave ourselves back into a soulful connection with life, how to re-ignite our love affair with the more than human world and how to allow our hearts to break open to the world.
Incubation space for mental health professionals
As mental health professionals we can’t ignore that we are in unprecedented times and that there is an urgent need for a professional and clinical engagement with the psychological dimensions of the climate crisis.
How can we invite the state of the world into the therapeutic conversation?
How do we work with eco-anxiety (our own and our client's)?
How do we approach the anaesthesia and amnesia that form a state of malignant normality in our culture?
How do we grieve something we may not even realise we have lost?
These questions present our profession with unprecedented challenges that don’t have linear answers. It is time we made space to discuss them. If we keep colluding with business-as-usual in a time of a climate emergency, we may well have a mental health crisis at global scale on our hands, with both therapists and clients utterly unprepared to bear the consequences.
In order to be in a position to support others, therapists and mental health professionals will have to face their own personal responses to the losses we are facing. I am putting out a call to come together in humility in a time of crisis, inviting us to step out of our professional comfort zones and our need to know where the journey is going.
This weekend provides a space to attend to our personal disavowal, deflection, numbness, fear, anger, grief, hope and hopelessness. From a professional perspective, we widen the lens beyond the habitual anthropocentric and individualistic viewpoint. We explore the conditions that may be needed to develop a psychology of the environment, explore practices which move us beyond the story of a separate self, and practices that transcend a sense of separation from the world.
Informed by Gestalt Therapy, climate psychology, soul centric perspectives, nature connection and deep ritual, these gatherings will include:
creative writing in order to loosen the ground
invitations for the body to be part of the picture
nature connection that invites us to listen to what may lie outside of our awareness
grief tending that invites us into resonance with the soul of the world
small group work that invites us to learn from each other in inter-connected and inter-disciplinary ways
poetic imagination that courts the wild soul and opens a wider perspective
If you are interested, please contact me for more details. steffibednarek@gmail.com
Cost: £225 for 2 days (CPD Certificates Provided) Students: £185
London 28th&29th March 2020
East Sussex September 2020
Steffi Bednarek: I am a Gestalt Psychotherapist with a specialist focus and training in somatic trauma therapy. I am steeped in the newly emerging field of climate psychology and am an active member of the Climate Psychology Alliance. I have published on the issue of mental health and climate change in several different countries and have worked with the BBC on a documentary on eco-anxiety.
In my work I draw on the soul centric approach of Francis Weller, who has mentored me for years. My training in community grief tending, my work with Clarissa Pinkola Estes on how to tap into our original voice and my involvement with the 8 shields approach to nature connection form the ground that my practice emerges from. The Gestalt concepts of field theory, phenomenology and relationality are deeply embedded in all I do and Thich-Nhat Hanh's ideas of inter-being guide me in these difficult times.