Craig Chalquist

Terrapsychological Inquiry is a path of storied, imaginative research that takes seriously our intense inner responses to the state of the natural world. This place-rooted approach studies, from the standpoint of lived experience, how the world gets into the heart. Oceans and skies, trees and hills, rivers and soils, and even built things like houses, cities, ports, and planes: How do they show up for us inwardly? How do our moods, feelings, and dreams reflect what happens in the world? Terrapsychological Inquiry evolved over a decade of exploration by graduate students, instructors, ceremonialists, workshop leaders and presenters, and other practitioners of embodied creativity to offer an Earth-honoring mode of storied qualitative inquiry, one that transforms all involved from passive spectators of the doings of the world into active, sensitive participants. Learn how to use this methodology of earthly reenchantment in a variety of settings inside and outside academia and by doing so reenter an animate world. This new edition has been revised throughout and offers fresh insights into how Terrapsychological Inquiry, a field with roots in depth psychology, ecopsychology, and Hermetic philosophy, can also be used as an ecospiritual path. Thoroughly updated with a new chapter and added discussion questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, this introduction to an evolving research methodology will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental psychology, ecotherapy, and environment and sustainability studies more generally.

Terrapsychological Inquiry is a path of storied, imaginative research that takes seriously our intense inner responses to the state of the natural world. This place-rooted approach studies, from the standpoint of lived experience, how the world gets into the heart. Oceans and skies, trees and hills, rivers and soils, and even built things like houses, cities, ports, and planes: How do they show up for us inwardly? How do our moods, feelings, and dreams reflect what happens in the world? Terrapsychological Inquiry evolved over a decade of exploration by graduate students, instructors, ceremonialists, workshop leaders and presenters, and other practitioners of embodied creativity to offer an Earth-honoring mode of storied qualitative inquiry, one that transforms all involved from passive spectators of the doings of the world into active, sensitive participants. Learn how to use this methodology of earthly reenchantment in a variety of settings inside and outside academia and by doing so reenter an animate world. This new edition has been revised throughout and offers fresh insights into how Terrapsychological Inquiry, a field with roots in depth psychology, ecopsychology, and Hermetic philosophy, can also be used as an ecospiritual path. Thoroughly updated with a new chapter and added discussion questions and exercises at the end of each chapter, this introduction to an evolving research methodology will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental psychology, ecotherapy, and environment and sustainability studies more generally.

The earth-human relationship is the most pressing and encompassing issue of our times. Visionary perspectives on the earth-human relationship are assembled in Earth Dreaming. A transpersonal approach highlights the possibilities of awakening to a new global consciousness. A mythic perspective tells, in the brevity of words and potency of images, the billion-years evolutionary journey of our planet. A depth psychological perspective perceives ecological complexes-points of deep environmental wounding that resonate into the human psyche. Still, our everyday existence provides openings to participatory kinship with the planet. The portal provided by our natural attachment to pets can extend to other non-human attachments. The vegetative world provides a portal to the evolutionary wisdom of interdependence and co-creation. The sensate capacities of our bodies offer a portal into an earth-embracing consciousness. In the portal provided by nighttime dreaming, three types of earth dreams appear: those restoring psychic kinship between human and earth, those asking us to witness earth's destruction, and those pointing towards earth healing. Dreams, expressions of pure nature, offer inspiration during this dark, chaotic phase of decay in Western civilization.

The world is indeed enchanted--but you wouldn't know that from the unimaginative ways we learn to think about it The magic becomes visible in myth: myth not as outworn science or cold ideology, but as the language of past and present humanity. Myth reveals through story and ritual the perennial presences that haunt us until we learn how to listen for them and respond creatively to their summons. Offering an applied practical course on world mythology, Myths Among Us retells more than 100 traditional tales to examine how the plots, images, and motifs of myth dwell among us today: in our dreams, conflicts, families, relationships; in film, politics, industry, and finance; and in current events whose innermost workings the lens of myth allows us to discover. "What I thoroughly enjoyed about the savvy Myths Among Us is that the first two chapters offer enough material for reflection on myth and mythic consciousness to comprise an entire course. The second treat is how Chalquist stirs in stories from around the globe to illustrate the pleasure of myth; now readers have a rich nourishing series of meals for the soul to snack on for years." - Dennis Patrick Slattery, author of Riting Myth, Mythic Writing

In The Tears of Llorona: A Californian Odyssey of Myth, Place, and Homecoming (World Soul Books, 2009), California native Craig Chalquist collected stories, facts, and reflections gathered during his deep exploration of the spirit, soul, and voice of place from San Diego to Sonoma along the old Mission Trail running up and down coastal California. Ventral Depth, the second volume of the Animate California Series, examines recurring mythic and alchemical images brewing in the Golden State's Great Central Valley. From the standpoint of terrapsychology, the transdisciplinary study of the lively and interactive presence of the outer world in the depths of the human psyche, landscapes harbor rich recurrences of story and folklore, image and dream that connect us to the places we call home. At over four hundred miles in length and seventy five at its maximum width, the Central Valley provides the world with fruit, vegetables, beef, clothing, petroleum, machinery, and hydroelectric energy. Its cultural and religious diversity is unmatched. When witnessed with a terrapsychological eye, it also reveals itself as a vast, sealed-in repository of tales and events, histories and psychologies, geographies and mythologies that weave together inner and outer soulscapes in patterns discernible to a sensitized ecological imagination.