Bridges to Wholeness: Body, Psyche, Earth

Course Description

This course envisages psycho-spiritual maturation as an ecology of soul. Dr. Costello portrays wholeness, not as a destination, but as a spiritual path that embraces the inextricable relationship between life and death principles and assents to Creation as mystery. She invites us to confront dominant cultural constructs that alienate us from the body and obstruct the psyche’s connection with the non-human world. In hope of redress, an alternative model of consciousness is proposed, one embracing a nature-based-symbolic attitude that reconnects us with our roots in nature, conjoining mind, soul, and cosmos.

Dr. Costello demonstrates how our environmental crisis and our collective fear of death stem from the same ideological root. She discusses our fear of change and our fear of loss – anxieties that stymie the spirit and inhibit growth. She explores how changes in our bodies and in our life-circumstances may be harnessed as a motive-force for reconnecting us to our roots in nature, opening us to mystery, and honing our intentions in regard to self, others, and our work in the world. 

Approaches to healing our severed roots in nature, including methods for using mythic imagination, dreamwork, and a nature-based life review process are demonstrated. Special attention is given to the recurrence of cosmological and elemental themes in dreams of individuals undergoing life-transition.

This course is ideal if

• Find correspondences between outer world struggles and your inner life.
• Acquire tools for locating unconscious patterns of perception that frustrate your sense of connection and belonging.
• Formulate a coherent life-narrative, one that makes sense of seemingly senseless internal and external events that shape experience.
• Deepen your awareness of the web of life as reflected in your own life experience.

Course Overview

Class 1. Heritage
We discuss the cultural back-stories that cast light on Western attitudes toward the body and toward earth’s natural processes. You will discover how to locate the unconscious presence of mythic modes thinking, as well as the ongoing influence of foundational mythic themes that have shaped the Western psyche.  

Class 2. Dream, Myth & Transformation
Learn how you can access the restorative and enriching experience of mythic imagination through dreamwork, conversational approaches to myth, and by cultivating those states of mind that return us to an experience of an original wholeness.

Class 3. Psyche’s Natural Order
Confront fears of change and of death by tracking regenerative cycles in your own life-course during this self-paced life-review process.

Class 4. Holistic Vision
How much-needed healing of the body-psyche may be supported by envisioning the path to wholeness as an ecological process, one that fosters the healing of our broken kinship with the land. Learn how to cultivate alternative ways of perceiving self, other, and the created world.

By the end of this course you will

• Identify culturally acquired mythic themes that form the backdrop to the way we experience the natural world.
• Understand the historical processes that shaped Western European and American ways of perceiving and knowing.
• Describe mythic and philosophic assumptions underlying collectively shared attitudes toward aging and death.
• Identify “differentiated thinking”, “mythic thinking” and “unitive thinking” as three distinctive ways to use the mind.
• Practice “polyvalent awareness” as a discipline used to mend dissociation of mind from body and environment.