Mary-Jayne Rust BIO:

I am an art therapist and Jungian analyst in private practice in North London. Alongside this, I lecture and facilitate workshops on Ecopsychology in a wide range of settings.

My therapy training began in art therapy in 1979. During the 1980s I worked in a men’s prison, as well as with women with eating problems at the Women’s Therapy Centre, London during the early years of feminist psychotherapy. These two workplaces offered diametrically opposed experiences: working in a male hierarchy with perpetrators of abuse versus working with victims of abuse in a women’s collective.  This taught me a great deal about perpetrator and victim. Feminist psychotherapy helped broaden my understanding of how culture shapes our internal worlds.

In the early 1990’s I made several trips to Ladakh (on the Tibetan plateau) where I spent time with Helena Norberg-Hodge of ISEC.  This experience impressed on me the seriousness of our environmental crisis. I then discovered Ecopsychology, an emerging field weaving together the ecological, psychological, political and spiritual. I joined a group of like-minded therapists, and together we explored ecopsychological thinking, facilitation, and supervision. John Seed and Joanna Macy were two of our mentors in this journey. My interest in eating problems expanded into an inquiry into our collective consuming of the earth, and the relationship between mind and body, soul and the land. I became fascinated by the differences between indigenous and western worldviews and how we might enable ancient and modern to live together today.

I love colour and I am a visual artist. I live in Nth London beside Queenswood, part of the forest which originally covered Britain. Highgate Hill and Muswell Hill are on the terminal moraine left by a glacier of the last ice age.  I have an ongoing love affair with swimming in wild waters. Forest and pond, kingfisher, owl, cormorant and humans; it is all these places and relationships to whom I owe my thanks for the ideas that you find here.