(This article introduces a series of essays for the coming months from people who are deeply attuned to a psychological & social transformation of the ways that we regard obiosphere.)
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“THE DESTINY OF HUMANS," wrote Thomas Berry, “cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.”

There is a slow but momentous shift happening in the Western psyche. A civilization that has long imagined itself separate from the Earth, ruling over a world of dead matter, is beginning to awaken to a long-forgotten truth: we are not apart from nature, but of it. This shift is not merely an intellectual revelation; it is a deep ontological correction, an unfolding recognition of the ensouled world that Indigenous traditions have never forgotten. In the face of climate catastrophe, biodiversity collapse, and a crisis of meaning, we stand on the precipice of a radical reintegration—a return of Gaia's prodigal son.

This is the context in which Gaia Psychology: A Positive Psychology Reset for an Ecological Future (2024) was formulated. As ecopsychological thinkers like Andy Fisher have long argued, the climate crisis is a psychospiritual crisis that reveals the fracture between humanity and our home. This metacrisis is the product of a severance between mind and matter, a metaphysical estrangement that has led us to objectify, exploit, and desecrate the very ground of our being. To heal this grievous fracture, we need more than policy shifts and technological fixes—we need a dramatic shift in collective consciousness, one that calls forth a new psychology that can re-enchant the world.

The Limits of Western Psychology

Modern psychology, born of the Cartesian dualism that split mind from matter, has largely confined itself to the isolated individual, or ego, treating the psyche as an internal phenomenon, sealed off from the world. Even the rise of depth psychology—Jungian, Hillmanian, archetypal—while restoring soul to the conversation, often fails to fully extend that soul to the world itself. Gaia Psychology is a corrective for this anthropocentric bias. It posits that the human psyche is not confined to the skull, nor even to the human, but is a property of Gaia's Psychosphere and the cosmos itself. 

Here, the insights of panpsychism become crucial. Long dismissed as mystical or unscientific, panpsychism—the idea that consciousness is fundamental to reality—has been experiencing a quiet renaissance. Philosophers like David Chalmers, Philip Goff, and Thomas Nagel have pointed to the "hard problem of consciousness," highlighting that materialism has failed to explain subjective experience.If consciousness is not an emergent property of complex matter, but rather an intrinsic feature of the universe, then the world is not dead mechanism, but ensouled process. Gaia, then, is not a passive stage for human drama, but a sentient, intelligent presence in her own right. By adding a "Psychosphere" to the other Gaian "organs" posited by earth systems science, systems thinker and psychosynthesis therapist Mark Skelding ostensibly grants her the agency lacking only in our limited imagination.

As someone who has worked with Mark for several years now, I have come to think of the Psychosphere as the field of subjectivity that permeates the natural world. And we are integral parts of that world.

Trauma, Dissociation, and the Living Earth

If the Earth is alive, if Gaia is aware, then we must confront an unsettling possibility: the climate crisis is not just a geophysical phenomenon, but a psychophysical one as well. The taxonomy of climate trauma suggests that we are collectively dissociated from the pain of the planet. Just as an individual subjected to unbearable trauma might split off awareness to survive, so too has modern humanity numbed itself to the suffering of the Earth. The fires, the floods, the vanishing species—these are not merely ecological events but symptoms of a profound psychic wounding.

What if, as Skelding suggests, instead of treating nature as an external backdrop, we recognized these upheavals as Gaia’s somatic distress signals? What if we considered that Earth itself is exhibiting trauma symptoms—fever (global warming), fragmentation (biodiversity loss), and immune dysfunction (ecosystem collapse)? Dr. Craig Chalquist maintains that the world is speaking to us through its very disruptions, that our task is not only to “fix” but to listen. From his perspective, stories are just as important, if not more important, than political narratives and scientific reports. His colleague, Dr. Sean Kelly, professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, goes even further, asserting that we are experiencing a mass scale initiation that could usher in a new epoch: the Gaianthropocene if we respond according to our better nature.

Toward a Gaian Psychology

To reclaim our relationship with the animate Earth, psychology must expand beyond its human-centered focus. A Gaian psychology would be one that acknowledges the reciprocal nature of psyche and world. It would recognize that healing human trauma is inseparable from healing ecological trauma and that therapy is not just about individual well-being but planetary regeneration.

A crucial aspect of this transformation is the need for positive psychology, which shifts the focus from pathology and dysfunction to resilience, well-being, and flourishing. While mainstream psychology has historically been preoccupied with diagnosing mental illness, positive psychology invites us to explore what makes life meaningful, joyful, and connected. In the context of Gaia Psychology, this means fostering an ecological consciousness that nurtures not only healing but also deep appreciation, gratitude, and reverence for the living world. It is not enough to address trauma; we must also cultivate a vision of psychological and ecological thriving, where humans and nature co-evolve in harmony. For this reason, Gaia Psychology posits that individual self-regulation is an expression of Gaia's homeostasis, closing the feedback loop that Skelding posits has been interrupted by climate trauma. In my own experience, approaching self-regulation praxis in this way can lead to direct, practical insights into ecological regeneration, which I share as a case study towards the end of the paper. 

This shift is not merely theoretical; it is backed by a  growing interdisciplinary consensus on the need for systemic transformation. The 2024 IPBES Report on Transformative Change underscores the necessity of deep cultural, economic, and psychological shifts in order to halt biodiversity loss and climate breakdown. It argues that the sustainability crisis cannot be solved within the same frameworks that created it—requiring instead a profound reorientation in how we think, relate, and imagine our place in the world. Gaia Psychology, by recognizing the Earth as a living, intelligent system that co-evolves with human consciousness, offers precisely this kind of shift in perspective.

This is not, however, a call to abandon traditional psychology. Indeed, the American Psychology Association has responded positively to the new taxonomy of climate trauma that I first proposed. Rather, as represented by the Climate Psychology Alliances of UK and North America, what is needed is to radically deepen the practice of psychology—to extend its reach beyond the consulting room and into the forests, the rivers, the mycelial networks of the Earth, and into the public squares and town halls where climate trauma often plays out. Climate Psychology Alliances have been very active in this regard, training therapists to facilitate "climate cafes." Gaia Psychology is a call to cultivate practices of deep listening: ecological pilgrimage; dreamwork with place; ritual engagements that reconnect the psyche to the living world; and to build bridges between settler and Indigenous communities, breaking down the barriers erected by colonialism.

Building on Joanna Macy's "Work that Reconnects," it is an invitation to recognize that, just as we grieve the losses of our planet, Gaia too grieves for us. When we tap into that heartfelt energy, when we resolve our own climate trauma, we become activated cells in Gaia's auto-immune system.

The Return of the World Soul

If we accept that consciousness is woven into the very fabric of existence, then we are no longer passive observers of a dying world—we become, instead, participants in a great act of remembrance. Indigenous wisdom traditions have always known this, carrying the knowledge that the Earth is our relative - a "we-source," not our resource, as Chief Arvol Lookinghorse teaches. In listening to these voices, we may yet find our way back to a world suffused with meaning. As Brian Swimme says, “Earth was once molten rock, and now it makes spaceships.”