TERRAPSYCHOLOGY
Terrapsychology is a growing field of imaginative studies, ideas, and practices for reenchanting our relations with the world, and with ourselves.
Here you will learn to explore the deep dynamics of where you are and how to speak Earth.
EVERYTHING CONVERSES.
Terrapsychology is a growing field of studies, ideas, and practices for reimagining and restorying how deeply and intimately our psychological life is involved with our surroundings, whether human or other than human.
More informally, we tend how the world gets into the heart and how the heart reflects the world. TP explores how terrain, place, element, and natural process show up in human psychology, endeavor, and story, including myth and folklore.
Terrapsychology explores how terrain, place, element, and natural process show up in human psychology, endeavor, and story, including myth and folklore.
We are restorying and thereby reenchanting our relations with the world, and therefore with each other and with ourselves. TP is a deep psychology not only of humans, but of everything we interact with.
What we do and who we are links to where we are, and when. What emerges when we listen, imagine, and feel into rich intersections of psyche, story, symbol, body, mood, and place? When we put the presence of world at the center of psychology?
Terrapsychological Inquiry
Restorying Our Relationship with Nature, Place, and Planet
In his recently published book, Terrapsychological Inquiry: Restorying, Our Relationship with Nature, Place, and Planet, Dr. Chalquist introduces the qualitative research methodology, Terrapsychological Inquiry. Terrapsychological Inquiry is a form of seeking inquiry that takes seriously our intense inner responses to the state of the natural world.
Terrapsychology is a theory and practice approach that 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 experimentation by graduate students, instructors, workshop leaders and presenters, and other embodied creatives to offer a truly Earth-honoring mode of story-based qualitative inquiry, one that changes all involved from passive spectators of the doings of the world into active, sensitive participants. Learn how to use this methodology of reenchantment in a variety of settings inside and outside academia, and by doing so reenter an animate world.
Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book is an introduction to a new research methodology and will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental psychology, ecotherapy, and environment and sustainability studies more generally.
“The Environment” is You!
Terrapsychology began as an inquiry into our deep and usually unconscious relations to the places where we come from, work in, or call home. These relations operate not so much causally as symbolically: full streams and abundant feelings, clear roads and congruent conversations. Part of our psyche is outside of us, as the alchemists of old used to say about the soul. It’s in tune with what’s going on.
When we know how connected we are to our surroundings, we care about them more. Also, the world stops being a desert of dead objects and instead changes into a theater of reenchantment.
We are addressed by places and things, by insects and animals, by weather and water, by the living world itself. How will we choose to respond?
New Stories for Coming Home
to Our Homeworld
A prime task of terrapsychology is to tell stories about our intimate involvement with the multileveled presence of our living Earth, including that of specific places, creatures, and materials. What links us to places and animals, breezes and floods, towns and homes and strangely willful everyday objects travels along bridges of symbol, metaphor, image, and and dream
Reenchantment and inspiration
We can’t reenchant and heal the world without a reenchanting and healing worldview and thoughtful actions to inspire change.
Deep dwelling and conscious location
Where we are and come from profoundly influences who we are and how we live. How much do you know about your surroundings?
Restorative ideas and practices
Terrapsychological work in the world strengthens social justice through restorative conversations and skills.
Terrapsychological inquiry for research
Terrapsychological Inquiry offers qualitative tools for Earth-honoring forms of inquiry inside and outside higher ed.
When psychology needs therapy
Mainstream psychology has succumbed to planet-wrecking commercial, political, and military agendas. Is it curable?
Terrapsychology Definition:
We explore how the patterns, shapes, features, and motifs at play in the world sculpt our ideas, habits, relationships, culture, and sense of self: freeway congestion in congested conversations, lake toxins in our darker moods, salt-choked fields and bitter relations, healing landscapes and regenerating hearts. We work with the stories inside us and the larger stories we are inside of.
Although terrapsychology aspires to be a truly planetary psychology, for now it is a psychology of reenchantment for living in an animate world.
As such, terrapsychology explores how terrain, place, element, and natural process show up in human psychology, endeavor, and story, including myth and folklore. It begins with the premise that we are not really separate from the sites where we live and work. Understanding what we do and who we are requires understanding where we are, and when. What emerges when we listen, imagine, and feel into rich intersections of psyche, story, symbol, body, mood, and place? When we put the presence of world at the center of psychology?
Terra means “earth” or “ground” and was known in antiquity as a goddess. In our work we take “terra” to mean emplaced, located, grounded: in other words, here, whether local, regional, or farther out. Immanent rather than transcendent or otherworldly.
Terrapsychology is the discipline name for the experiential approach called earthdreaming: a body of imaginative Earth-honoring practices for enriching our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world.
