The Sustainable Clinician — The Landscapes We Inhabit: Body, Psyche, and the Living World
In July 2027 I’ll be sailing through Alaska, co-facilitating a workshop for therapists
The experience will weave together the body and the psyche, and use Alaska itself as part of the teaching.
When Kris and I first spoke about the possibilities a study cruise to Alaska might offer, I tingled with excitement. Although I have not yet traveled to Alaska, it is a place that has long called to me through dreams, images, and story.
As an internationally certified sandplay therapist and teacher, I have traveled and taught in many places, and I have found that the places that affect me most deeply are often those with powerful geographic and archetypal landscapes. I am reminded of a transformational experience hiking in the Swiss Alps several years ago, when the outer landscape seemed to open a passage into the inner landscape of myself.
This training grows from that experience and from a question: What happens when we allow ourselves not simply to look at a landscape, but to enter into relationship with it?
Alaska offers an extraordinary place in which to explore the relationship between our outer and inner worlds. Glaciers, mountains, vast waters, wilderness, shorelines, silence, wildness, and enormous scale carry powerful archetypal imagery. Rather than experiencing these simply as things to see and photograph, we will allow the landscape to become an invitation into the psyche.
What does the frozen quality of a glacier evoke within the psyche and the body? What in us has become frozen, preserved, protected, or perhaps begun to thaw? Where does the wildness live within us? What happens at the shoreline — that liminal place where one world meets another? And what might these landscapes teach us about the conscious and unconscious, the known and unknown, and the therapeutic process itself?
Sandplay offers its own landscape. Within the containment of the tray, inner terrain becomes visible. Through sandplay case material and experiential work incorporating movement, sound, imagery, painting, reflection, and engagement with the Alaskan environment itself, participants will be invited to notice what the outer landscape evokes within their own inner world.
Kris Silvestry’s work will invite us into the body as landscape; my work will move us toward the psyche as landscape. Alaska becomes the living outer landscape holding both.