Level 3 Advanced Ecotherapy Training Learning Objectives

Level 3 Learning Objectives for Live Class

#1: Describe “Deep time” and understand how to apply it in therapeutic situations.
#2: Apply how developing a deep connection to the land, watershed, and creatures around you supports grounding, decreases isolation and uplifts mood and spirit.
#3: Explain how our climate crises, racial injustice and colonization are interconnected systems.
#4: Analyze how colonization is impacting ourselves as well as our relationships with different cultures, interaction with communities and politics, and our relationships with individuals.
#5: Demonstrate and build the capacity to feel, hold, express, and witness grief and joy and facilitate this in a therapeutic setting.
#6: Prepare how to be a “climate-informed” therapist or “climate-informed” in one’s profession.
#7: Use your own emotionally embodied process with relation to our climate crises to support others in their processing.
#8: Assess the particular roles you play in participating in community activism.
#9: Create an embodied, activist-inspired Ecotherapy project to present to the class. 

Learning Objectives for Media

#1: Discuss the concept of Landback and the need for reclamation: of indigenous rights, treaties, cultural and sacred practices as human rights issues with intergenerational trauma affects.
#2: Explain the 5 Gates of Grief from Francis Weller and explore one of these in a dyad.
#3: Discuss how grieving fully is therapeutic and repressing grief is psychologically harmful.
#4: Describe the three types of climate trauma: anticipatory, acute and pervasive.
#5: Explain how various populations (youth, vulnerable populations, those with previous trauma), are affected by our climate crises and why it is therapeutic to inquire explicitly about this.
#6: Discuss the various effects of a news anchor showing emotions about climate devastation on nation-wide television.
#7: Describe attitudes and techniques of honoring beauty, rooting in pleasure, and tending to our senses and sensuality to confront isolation, heal the mind-body split, and build capacity for long-term activism.

Learning Objectives for Immersion

#1: Use several ecotherapy techniques to explore one’s connection with awe and the sacred as a way to be grounded and build resiliency.
#2: Apply Deep Time practices to build one’s perspective, resiliency and belonging to the land.
#3: Utilize the concept of working with a nature ally to support a therapeutic issue.
#4: Explain how coming into relationship with the land and its original ancestors creates a reciprocal relationship.
#5: Develop ways to be allies with the revitalization efforts of the indigenous people of the land.
#6: Apply embodied activities to discover how colonial habits and patterns live in us, and begin to dismantle these.
#7: Utilize community grief techniques to embody, express, and witness levels and types of grief.
#8: Demonstrate a variety of ways to engage our senses to cultivate joy and deepen our intimacy with the world.
#9: Create an eco-art process to heal a damaged and desecrated part of the land as well as to heal ourselves.
#10: Apply Work That Reconnects concepts to process grief and other feelings around our climate and environmental catastrophes.
#11: Use therapeutic and climate-informed techniques to lead an individual therapy session.
#12: Apply nature-based, climate-informed techniques in groups to explore the trauma of perpetual stress in the body and build resiliency.
#13: Describe and cultivate where our unique gifts meet the needs of our client populations and communities.
#14: Demonstrate and embody the courage and capacity to name and address the current cultural and planetary emergencies.
#15: Design a self-care strategy to use in activism work and to share with your clients.
#16: Discuss ways to create new community containers to build cultures of care (such as ritual, stories, symbols, codes of behavior, institutions).
#17: Prepare a demonstration of your community offering or project as a hands-on activity.