Welcome to the Ecopsychology Project. I’m Jon-Erik Jardine, and this is my podcast. The Ecopsychology Project is just that: it’s a project. It’s not a product to be consumed, but an on-going process. It is not a place to reach out and find solutions to the worlds problems, it’s more instead an orientation towards what we already know, and what we may have forgotten, and listening to what emerges in this space of remembering.
The Ecopsychology Project is part of what I hope to be a larger dialogue that reaches across the minds of many listeners who inhabit all walks of life on this globe. I hope to find other people who are thinking in similar, and divergent ways about the human identity oriented towards nature.
Here we will discuss all things concerned with human well-being but always grounded in the married relationship with the other-than-human world. We too are nature, but what does this really mean? How do we unpack the meaning of what it means to be human, and is there truly anything to be found there? These are questions I have explored through my own life, determined to describe the implicit world of the experiential cycle in motion, that we are our felt experiencing.
So why Ecopsychology? Well, Ecopsychology as a discipline has not formerly established itself amongst academic elites, but it is gaining the attention of many, and I think now is the time to bring it to the forefront of public discourse. At its essence, it is philosophical, an attempt to understand the depth of phenomenology, the study of experience itself.
If there is one thing we can be certain about human causality, it is that we have excelled at speeding things up. Here, I am attempting to slow things down, just enough that we can slip back into the realm that we inhabit continuously from birth to death: our bodies.
Ecopsychology primarily deals in the realm of the osmotic membrane; the place of contact between the inner and the outer; The cycle in which exchange takes place. Where our bodies make contact with the world. It is the realm of experience in which we relax our boundaries just enough to let something new in. Final contact. Where our feelings, our bodily-felt ground of experience is satisfied. Where we surrender into an orgasm, give in to grief, gain a new skill, learn something, receive a message, or flow into an expressive movement. It’s the place in our experience where we sink into the sounds of the river rushing below during a rest in the warm sun.
