Ecopsychology and Our Personal Economy

We are in a time of crisis in which connection to self, other, earth, and numinous has been severed for many and severely disconnected for most. Our industrious and material culture developed over the last few centuries has driven us to consume in such a way that we are left unfulfilled and ever-searching for more, resulting in high rates of crime, violence, and addiction. The dominant patriarchal paradigm has constructed certain worldviews, institutions, behaviors, and attitudes that leave us confined, filled with angst for what our soul’s full expression could look and feel like. The old way of doing things, the business-as-usual mode, ultimately informs our relationship with the economy. Our use of money, in turn, determines how we protect or harm our environment. The current earth crisis is intricately tied to how we operate within our economy. Utilizing an approach to personal economics that is based on sacredness can generate a more life-sustaining way of engaging with our money.

My purpose here is to explore, in brief, ecopsychology as a means for integrating a sacred and sustainable personal economics into our lives and work. The foundation of ecopsychology offers us varied and dynamic ways to approach healing that can be used for re-imagining our relationship not only to the earth but also to our lives and the fundamental structures that foster aliveness, connection, and human flourishing. Reorganizing our economic functions to preserve the earth is not merely environmentalism; it becomes self-preservation and survival. It gives us the possibility of future generations being able to walk the earth and evolve their own consciousness.

My observation is that disconnection of self to earth and self to money run parallel to each other, stemming from the same inherent separation within our psyches. The relationships we hold to money, earth, and spirit may come from the same intrinsic place within each of us, veiled by this false sense of a self based on materialism and victimhood. This reconnection is the foundation that can inform how we define our relationship to self, other, earth, and the numinous. I am encouraging a restructuring of our personal economies so we can engage with the world in a more sacred and sustainable way, one that is life-affirming and can reach beyond simply halting the rapid planetary degradation we are experiencing and can embrace healing and transformation of our soul and psyche wounds around both money and earth.

We are on the brink of an ever-changed planet. It is imperative that we heal our relationships to earth, our economy, and our ideas about money itself. It is often easy to change our minds about our relationship to resources with clear evidence of the crisis, but often our emotional and psychological bodies must be renewed simultaneously. The new way of doing business ultimately requires a dramatic shift from what Liu and Hanauer (2012) call the ‘machinebrain’ to the ‘gardenbrain.’ The machinebrain has us operating at optimal speed for an economy that runs on efficiency and rationality, while the gardenbrain recognizes the reality of organicity, that the economy is actually “complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic.” An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden. It can be fruitful if well-tended, but will be overrun by noxious weeds if not tended. We could tend to weeds that pop up here and there, but if we shift the soil in which we plant and use a natural system of partnering plants that fosters growth in each other, our garden could be weed-free and ever more plentiful. The garden brain must be assumed in our minds and hearts, in our thoughts and actions.

How we think and feel makes the foundation for how we act. An ecopsychological approach to healing the deep wounds we carry between us and Mother Earth, money, relationships to others, and our higher power can allow for the development of an interdependent, sustainable personal economy. Online, virtual, remote, hybrid, and earth-based income-generation models significantly reduce crude earth impact and can be especially life-sustaining models. Money, by its very nature, is not of the earth like products, food, or our bodies; it does not exist in a finite world. It is oriented similarly to spiritual inclinations, as something we believe in and adjust our attitudes and behaviors for, but that does not exist in the manifest world. It is the driving force for the working world, pushing us to submit ourselves to the productivity schema that materialism is derived from. In the words of Charles Eisenstein (2011), “Today we live in a world that has been shorn of its sacredness, so that very few things indeed give us a feeling of living in a sacred world.” To create a personal economics that is both honoring of earth and self, our attention must shift not only to tending the garden of our personal economy but recognizing its sacred interconnectedness.