The Healing Process

Hi everyone,

Today’s newsletter has:

1) Current opportunities for groups
2) An empowering idea - today the focus is on The Healing Process

1) Current Opportunities:
(sign up by emailing [email protected])

A) Sunday Evenings at High Park

Beginning mid-October, I will be holding a group at High Park with a nearby backup indoor location for inclement weather.

B) Virtual Group

There is enough interest to start a virtual group on Mondays from 1:00pm to 2:45pm.

C) Start your own Group

If you have 3 or more people who would be interested in organizing a group together, we can start your own group at a time and location that works for you.

I am in discussions with several other places, so more opportunities will be coming soon.

2) An Empowering Idea:

After outlining our collective mental health problem, I started to answer the following question:

If climate change is the result of a collective mental health problem, how do we heal?

I started by sharing the concept of emergence and today I outline the process needed to bring about this emergence.

The process of my psychiatree work is strongly influenced by Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects¹ . It requires 5 steps we need to take as individuals to lead to the emergence of collective mental health:

1) Appreciate Earth’s abundance to remind us that we depend on animals, plants and fungi for our survival. Nourishing gratitude enlivens our trust in the world and fosters our motivation to work in alignment with what the world needs.

2) Accept our role in Earth’s destruction and honour our resulting pain. Our culture has taught us to disconnect from unpleasant feelings however we need a willingness to listen deeply. When we tune in effectively to our painful emotions, they complete necessary feedback loops to guide us to action.

3) See the world from different perspectives regarding our own identity, community, power and sense of time. These perspectives open more possibilities for our individual and collective action.

4) Create ongoing, realistic, significant changes in our lives to address what our emotions tell us needs to change. Taking effective action within our own lives has ripple effects among those we connect with which shifts what collectively emerges.

5) Continue self reflection and re-assessment of our actions as previously effective actions may no longer be optimal or sufficient. This requires that we participate in this process on an ongoing basis.

This process heals the collective through healing individuals’ interactions with our own emotions, other people and the ecosystem within which we reside.

In my future posts I will help to clarify each step of this process from my perspective and how to deepen our connection with our emotions.

To receive future psychiatree posts on healing our mental health and the climate crisis together, please subscribe to: https://psychiatree.beehiiv.com/subscribe

I’d love to hear your reactions to this post. Please email me at [email protected].

Thanks for the care that you give,

Nate

1) Macy, Joanna and Chris Johnstone. 2022. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power. Novato: New World Library.