Abstracts of 2002 Award Winners' Papers:

Coming Home to Nature Through the Body:
An Intuitive Inquiry Into Experiences of Grief, Weeping and Other Deep Emotions in Response to Nature

Jay P. Dufrechou
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology

For many people in the industrialized West, nature is increasingly a concept or image, rarely experienced directly and deeply through sensations and emotions. Using intuitive inquiry, a form of psychological hermeneutics, this dissertation researched the experience of some people coming into deep connection with nature: grief, weeping, and/ or other deep emotions. Stories written by 30 women and 11 men were gathered into thematic categories including ecological grief, healing, longing for harmony, experience of spirit, and return to experience of self as nature. The primary understanding offered by the researcher was that such experiences represent moments in a process of psycho- spiritual transformation capable of healing the splits between body and mind, and between humanity and nature, prevalent in contemporary industrialized society.