Posts tagged grad school

I am interested in radical change.  As individuals and as a species we need to understand Ecopsychology.  Everything is combined, everything is connected, how can it not be?  We are in a web, we are a web— our Earth. We are our Earth, we are a part of Her. I believe we can save/salvage our planet through science, but we can only save ourselves as a species through compassion.  I am interested in people, compassion, and relationships as part of the solution to our unhappiness, unhealthiness, and fear on this planet.  I am ready for change, and I am looking for preparation.

Recently, things feel like they have been picking up speed.  My knowledge base is expanding in many directions, and my past experiences are combining together to be useful in a way that I don’t quite understand yet.  Undergraduate Chemical Engineering studies in high math, physics, chemistry, and industrial practices required a new way of learning for me that opened up what I understand now to be neural pathways essential for learning how to learn.

I left chemical engineering because I wanted to be with people, and I wasn’t getting a broad enough range of knowledge. Psychology was my choice as a science and also a language, as a background, and something every human should know- an operations manual for the body, really or a chemistry/geography textbook.  I was curious though, in my undergraduate, about the seeming lack of spirit in psychology.  It’s so obvious, I think.  There is more going on than there is going on with the body, beautiful chemistry and all.

In 2005, I began working as an international humanitarian clown with Gesundheit! Institute (under the guidance of Patch Adams and Johnny Glick). This is where I first learned to explore deeply, with strangers, the levels of communication between people without language.  How to communicate my care, my love? Strange as it sounds, as clowns we provide support in many emotionally difficult settings.  Frequently I meet people in hospitals who, with a small caress or heartfelt smile, accept relief and fall into my arms. Practice with eyes and touch allow suddenly for strangers to share something else, something necessary—a desire to divulge the truth, the hardship, the heartache, the sadness in lonely human situations.

Several years ago, while in Iquitos, Peru with Gesundheit!, I had a visionary experience that was surprising and frightening, where I was afraid and in the void and was looked upon nonchalantly by a passing child.  Because of the presence of my mentor Johnny and his belief in my process, I learned to explore my strange state, and to accept this vision as a part of who I am.  Exploration of this vision brought my compassion and belief systems to a higher level.  It has helped me to understand my responsibility of being on the planet.

I do not know yet what routes I will pursue professionally.  I want to be able to ease transitions on personal and global levels.  I am interested in psychotherapy, I am interested in the ministry of love, I am interested in biomass char, but I am most interested in the combination of knowledge to save us as a species and a planet.  I communicate and use my knowledge to help people every day, and I will always continue to do so.

My goal in education is to continue to pursue the changing perceived edge of knowledge available to humans, and to keep pushing the edge of exploration.  In only fifty years we have jumped from black and white television to compiled images of the Hubble space telescope.  Can I imagine what will happen in the next fifty?

With this program, I hope to find mentorship.  I would like to have some really intelligent guidance and questioning.  I need the education for a high skill level in my future.  When I am done I hope to have learned the tools to assist my community of relationships locally and globally to understand the changes happening around them.  We are in a crisis here on Earth, as individuals seeking advancement in knowledge of communities and technology, as a species doing the same, and as a planet being mistreated and misused.  The question What are we doing here? exists in many realms.

Naropa is the most interesting/appealing school to me because I think that everyone there has a high quality of mind and is practicing mindfulness.  When I attended just a week of the SWP in 2006 (with Jack Collum), I was immediately immersed in a pool of creative thinking, staff and student alike.  My experience there was very freeing, and provided an opening for many, many conceptual seeds to be planted.  I loved being able to sit with and talk to great and beautiful minds like Anne Waldman, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka.  How thrilling to be engaged in information exchange with brilliant radicals!

I am also drawn to the holistic approach to learning that other schools do not offer.  I think that contemplation is a guiding hand to all learning.  There will always be questions, and thought on those questions, as long as there is time.  A contemplative education is a natural one.  And for experience, what are we humans, if not that?  To be human is to perceive experience. I feel like my intentions for study in Transpersonal Ecopsychology are aligned with the mission of Naropa as a center for experiential and contemplative learning.