Moving beyond captivity.
Identifying Our Captivity
The first step toward living lives of holistic wellness as mutually enhancing members of the earth community is coming back to our senses. There is a form of low-grade collective developmental trauma that pervades our age. This same form of low-grade collective developmental trauma effects nonhuman animals held in physical captivity. By engaging our senses and coming back to our bodies as we experience the animate earth we can begin to identify the contours of our own enculturated captivity and move toward true psychological health.
About Vaughan
Vaughan Wilkins is a ecopsychologist studying the impacts of the loss of ecological participation. A skilled and inventive educator with a strong background in facilitation, Vaughan has spent the last decade developing programming and curriculum designed to address and undo the impacts of enculturated captivity. A supporter of regenerative approaches to education, business, psychology, and environmental participation, Vaughan is a sought-after speaker on the future of human participation in systems design.
Vaughan currently offers talks, workshops and interactive programming for those looking to engage with the world in a way that brings them back to their senses.
Vaughan Wilkins holds a PhD in east-west psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and a holds a Masters degree in the psychology of animal behavior from Hunter College.
Coming to Our Senses
The Journey of Coming Home to Our Body’s Inheritance
The personal is the planetary, and there is a path forward that leads to mutual healing for both self and system. Place-based sensory healing methods incorporate applied ecopsychology, modern trauma theory and are informed by trans-species psychology’s research with nonhuman animals. These methods not only address the symptoms brought on by the collective, developmental, intergenerational trauma of enculturated captivity, but also their root cause. By coming home to our sensing bodies we can identify the invisible bars that hold a life captive and move beyond them
It’s the journey home. One where we must come to our senses.
Through this work I see a world more integrated and connected. Where the deep ties between psychological and ecological health are nourished and compound toward a reciprocal vitality. A world where the collective dissociation and malaise of our age has been replaced by a deep regenerative engagement with thriving ecosystems. A world where the human has come home to its senses.
Let’s Collaborate
Through decades of study, practice and application, Vaughan has developed a series of interactive practices that help people, individually and in groups, attune their senses to the natural world and begin to increase their awareness of their own agency and connection to the unique bioregions we inhabit. Vaughan offers these practices in both one-off experiences, and series, and also conducts talks on Enculturated Captivity (tm) , our collective, intergenerational, developmental trauma, and how we can begin to create new pathways toward more regenerative ways of living.