Course Descriptions for the East-West Psychology Programs

EWP 6000: Introduction to EWP (1 unit)

This course provides new students with an introduction to the field of East-West psychology, pedagogical approaches, and departmental standards of scholarship for both MA and PhD levels. Students also become familiar with historical foundations and selected issues of the East-West-North-South encounter in psychology and spirituality.

EWP 6001: EWP Community Retreat (1 unit)

This is an off-campus retreat for all new MA and PhD students. Emphasis placed on community building, story-telling, interactive exercises, and interpersonal communication skills.

EWP 6011: Nondual Perspectives in Spiritual Counseling (3 units)

Students undergo traditional methods for the direct apprehension of nonduality, explore the effects of such understanding on their own psychology, and then translate such understanding into therapeutic schools and methods.

EWP 6015: Integrative Seminar (1 unit)

Taken during their last semester of coursework, this seminar provides the opportunity for MA students to reflect on their learning experience in the program, to create a portfolio of their most important work, and to prepare future professional goals.

EWP 6039: Living the East-West Vision (1 unit)

Barely 10 percent of the Eastern archive on spiritual teachings has been translated. This course examines how this fact has contributed to historical biases and creates the need to revision our understanding of Eastern philosophy and religion. Topics discussed include an examination of the spiritual value of the 60s; Satyagraha, or engaged political truth-power from Gandhi to Obama; Grihasthya, or the path of lifelong relationships; Kundalini and Tantra Yogas; and Vasudhaiva kutumbakam, or "the one world ecology." Students are invited to reflect on their personal East-West history.

EWP 6048: Deep Psychology (3 units)

Pierre Janet's explorations of dissociated trauma and William James' of "transmarginal" psychical activity opened an era of investigation for Fechner, Freud, Jung, Adler, Horney, Maslow, Rogers, May, and other explorers of the mind's relationship to itself and its environment. Students learn about and apply their key findings to inner work, relationships, organizational life, cultural life, and politics to see what we can discover about the real-life depths of the human heart.

EWP 6051: Eastern Theories of Self, Mind, and Nature (3 units)

This course discusses the spiritual tenets common to religious traditions and disciplines originating in India, such as Advaita Vedanta, Samkhya Yoga, and Buddhism. It offers the foundation necessary to understand Eastern approaches to psychology and spirituality. The course includes experiential components centering on meditation and spiritual practice.

EWP 6077: Transformation of Emotions through the Heart (2 units)

This course offers students an experiential review of dual and nondual approaches to working with emotions. The exploration starts with the study of models based on the conceptual mind, but then moves beyond it, allowing students to become familiar with nonconceptual approaches that emphasize working with the energy of emotions to facilitate deep insight and psychospiritual growth.

EWP 6107: Ecopsychology and Expressive Arts: Reawakening the Wild Heart of Being (1 unit)

From deep within our perceiving, sensing, feeling, and imagining body arises the knowing of the intimate indwelling of our body within the Earth body. Students in this course will engage in creative expressive modalities to evoke and celebrate an embodied, Earth-embracing consciousness. These practices will unfold within an exploration of the growing field of ecopsychology and its urgent appeal to develop an ecological self.

EWP 6108: Ecopsychology: Foundations, Applications, Frontiers (3 units)

This course provides students with an overview of the field of ecopsychology. After explicating the foundations of the discipline, emphasis is placed on contemporary applications and challenges in light of the current ecological crisis. The course includes training in wilderness practices.

EWP 6017: Ecospirituality and Creative Expression: Touching the Sacred Within and Without (1 unit)

Enlivening and embodying our deepest spiritual apprehensions of the cosmos and our place in it might be our most urgent task indeed. This experiential course explores human intimate relationship with the fabric of the living earth, in which spirit and matter take form in the unfathomable dance of being.  

EWP 6111: Planetary Psychology (2 units)

This course surveys such diverse fields as environmental psychology, conservation psychology, ecopsychology, deep ecology, ecotherapy, bioregionalism, and integral ecology to see what they can tell us (and what they cannot) about nature, culture, mind, and sustainability. It also explores how to enhance active participation in ecologically sensitized modes of consciousness that foster grounded growth in ourselves, our fellow species, and the land whose presence supports our lives and sense of selfhood.

EWP 6112: Wilderness Rites of Passage (3 units)

Ancient cultures performed rites and ceremonies as a way of renewing their connection with the Earth and their communities.This course introduces ancient rites of passage while giving students the opportunity to experience themselves the initiatory threshold in a safe yet challenging way with a solo vision quest in the wilderness. The ceremony follows the traditional stages of a rite of passage: severance (leaving behind what is familiar), threshold (the actual solitude and fasting), and reincorporation (return to the community with gifts and insights).

EWP 6133: Science and Living Systems (3 units)

This course introduces the systems paradigm, with emphasis on Living Systems Theory and various excursions and explorations of cybernetics, general systems theory, Family Systems, the latest discoveries in neuroscience, chaos, fractals, and a dash of complexity theory.

EWP 6154: Consciousness, Science, and Religion (3 units)

An interdisciplinary approach to the dialogue between science and religion through the study of consciousness. Discusses issues related to the study and the practices of consciousness, East and West.

EWP 6156: Interreligious and Intermonastic Dialogue: From Conversation to Contemplation and Mutual Transformation (3 units)

This course explores the efforts undertaken over the last century in the field of interreligious dialogue.  The first half concentrates on the history, theory, and practice of interreligious dialogue throughout the 20th and 21st century. The second half focuses on the sharing of contemplative traditions and experiences that has characterized the East-West intermonastic dialogue.

EWP 6175: Cross-Cultural Psychology (3 units)

Cross-cultural psychology is a comparative study of psychologies of different cultures.  This course surveys contemporary cross-cultural research on important aspects of psychological functioning: sense of self, values, thinking, perception, emotions, development, relationships, and spirituality.

EWP 6204: The Body in the Transformation of Consciousness-Awakening Joy at the Heart of Being (1 unit)

In this course, students will engage body, mind, emotions, and imagination in creative practices such as expressive movement, kinesthetic awareness practices, active imagination as dialogue with the body, poetic writing, enactment, and painting. They will reflect on the role of the body in psychotherapy and explore skills and practices to attend empathically to the movement of joyful transformation in self and other.

EWP 6205: Embodied Spiritual Inquiry (3 units)

An introduction to the practice of embodied spiritual inquiry in the context of participatory and cooperative research paradigms. Students go through cycles of experience and reflection on collaboratively selected spiritual questions.

EWP 6219: Integrating Sex and Spirit: An Embodied Inquiry (1 unit)

While sexuality is fundamental to bring us a sense of embodied vitality and organic growth, spirituality is central to foster our evolution from an awareness that lies beyond mental understanding. In the spirit of embodied inquiry, we will explore the importance of integrating sex and spirit in order to foster the unfolding of our deepest potentials in our daily lives. The course includes "interactive embodied meditations," which involve structured and respectful physical contact among participants. Through these meditations, we will explore the personal aspects that shape us in either connecting to or separating from our sexuality and spirituality, as well as open a path of self-reflection aimed at their integration.

EWP 6230: Psychology of Consciousness: An Integral Approach (3 units)

This course explores the variety of scholarly approaches that have contributed to the contemporary understanding of consciousness. The integral perspective is crucial in terms of the methodologies we apply, the levels of explanation that are appropriate, and - most important - our personal sense of exploration. The course integrates material from areas as diverse as cognitive neuroscience, quantum physics, philosophy, depth psychology, and mysticism in arriving at these conclusions.

EWP 6231: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening (2-3 units)

Psychological transformation and spiritual awakening are inseparably one process. This course surveys the key spiritual pathologies, as well as the integrative possibilities that emerge in contemporary spirituality. Students will be exposed to cutting-edge psychospiritual technologies, as well as important evolutionary understandings in contemporary spirituality.

EWP 6237: Archetypal Mythology (2-3 units)

This course explores the role, weight, and significance of life's mythic dimension from the standpoint of depth psychology. Freud, Jung, Hillman, Campbell, Downing, and a host of theorists and thinkers and writers have claimed that mythic presences, events, and situations are not dead or extinct, but alive and addressing us continually. This course examines this claim through discussions, dreamwork, film, and other media that disclose deep myth-making layers of the psyche.

EWP 6273: Ethnoautobiography as Research Method (2 units)

The focus of this class is on the pragmatics of ethnoautobiography as research method. The class will be applied and experientially and ceremonially grounded. Ethnoautobiography is an indigenous-based protocol for decolonizing the modernist self. It takes ethnic origins (genealogy) as pivotal starting point for critical autobiographical inquiries; it grounds itself in time (smaller and larger planetary and celestial cycles), place (ecology, history of place), history (stories and myths), ancestry, and stories of origin and creation. Ethnoautobiography is moral and politico-historical discourse, enlivened by the subjectivity of the inquirer, as it strives to overcome modern strictures and reimagine a native sense of self-actualization and sovereignty during its transformative learning process. It is a creative endeavor inquiring at the intersection of imaginal and consensual realities through the ruthless use of exact imagination.

EWP 6532: Asian Religions in America (2 units)

This course considers the ways in which the practice of Asian religions in America has both reflected and continued the insidious legacy of colonialism and Orientalism, and the ways in which it has challenged and subverted Western ethnocentrisms and dominant narratives. It traces the various ways that Asian religions (particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, but also Daoism, Jainism, and Sikhism) have been received in America, as well as explores Asian religions in America from the perspective of Asian Americans themselves.

EWP 6536: Shamanic Journeying in Global Perspective (3 units)

This class provides the historical and cultural background, as well as the psychological dynamics, of various traditions of shamanic practice. Students will be initiated into the ancient shamanic practice of the shaman's journey. Discussions will also explore how to integrate this practice into one's daily life and the practice of psychotherapy and spiritual counseling.

EWP 6537: Entheogenic Shamanism (3 units)

This course explores the fundamentals of shamanic traditions whose practices are based on sacred visionary plants, with a deeper focus on Amazonian ayahuasca shamanism. Cultural, philosophical, and psychological questions will be addressed, concerning, for example, the "dark side" of entheogenic shamanic practices, the ontological status of visionary experiences, the spread of entheogenic shamanic practices into the West, and the issue of integration.

EWP 6539: Shamanism and the Origins of the Sacred (3 units)

This course explores the worldviews, spirituality, and methods of tribal shamanic cultures, and explains how they are viable, valid, and necessary in our modern world. Through lectures, writings, and stories, the thought processes of shamanic people are presented.

EWP 6544: Alchemy as Gnosis of Nature, Elements, and Landscapes (2 units)

This course begins by introducing the basics of Jung's understanding of alchemy, emphasizing how he translated the major operations of alchemy into psychological language. Then it discusses what the alchemists themselves had in mind with their explorations: deep transformation of human consciousness toward matter and, by extension, things, Earth, and cosmos.

EWP 6556: Contemplative Psychology: East-West Perspectives (3 units)

An investigation of the psychological insights, knowledge, and methods embedded in contemplative traditions and practices, East and West, and their relationship to Western depth psychologies.

EWP 6752: Transpersonal Psychology (3 units)

Discusses the historical origins and theoretical foundations of transpersonal psychology, drawing from the main representative authors and models: Jung, Assagioli, Maslow, Grof, Wilber, Washburn, Almaas, and others. Students learn the nature and significance of transpersonal phenomena and work with experiential exercises to integrate this understanding.

EWP 6900: Thesis or Dissertation Proposal Completion (0 units)

Provides support for thesis or dissertation proposal writing after all coursework and research colloquia are completed.

EWP 6990: Supervised Fieldwork (MA) (1-3 units)

Applied psychological work in an approved off-campus setting under individual professional supervision.

EWP 7010: The Psychology of Death and Dying: An East-West Exploration (2-3 units)

This course allows students to develop a deeper understanding of death and dying and, through that exploration, a more mindful experience of living. Emphasis on the study of East-West theories of death and dying, the spiritual potential of life-threatening illness, and psychospiritual counseling for the dying and their caregivers.

EWP 7011: Indigenous Traditions: Ancestral Consciousness and Healing (3 units)

Indigenous traditional knowledge is every person's birthright. This course provides students with an opportunity for reclaiming their indigenous heritages, allowing them to make breaks with beliefs, tradition, extended family, community, and homeland. Students focus on aspects of their individual ancestral heritages and family lineages that call for healing.

EWP 7034: Qualitative Research Methods (3 units)

This class offers an introduction to methods of qualitative research, with special emphasis on including the personhood of the researcher as an integral part of the research process. Heuristics, phenomenology, case study, and theoretical are a few of the approaches surveyed and explored through various exercises and work with film.

EWP 7300: Narrative Research (2 units)

Covers methods of working with narratives in research context: interviewing, analyzing, and reporting; and looks at the methodological, theoretical, and ethical issues of doing life-history research.

EWP 7311: Jungian Psychology and East-West Spirituality (3 units)

Examines Jung's historic contribution to the study of East-West psychology and religion, and the significance of Jungian psychology for a contemporary understanding of spirituality.

EWP 7347: The Soul as Artist: Jungian Art Therapy (1 unit)

This course will unfold within a conversation of Jung's unique insight into the nature of the psyche, this shared creative energy at the core of our being that finds expression in images, is purposeful in its mystery, and is lucid in its unfathomable depth. Students in this course will establish personal relationships with this creative spirit by expressing themselves in painting, movement, creative writing, enactment, and other media.

EWP 7510: The Psychology of Advaita Vedanta (3 units)

Focuses primarily on the Vedantic concepts of self and mind, and the nature of bondage and liberation.

EWP 7515: Holistic Sexuality (3 units)

This course offers the foundations of holistic sexuality, an integral approach to psychospiritual growth and healing that works experientially with the body, sexuality, heart, and nature.

EWP 7565: Self/No-Self/Authentic Self: The Buddhist Psychology of Self-Experience (3 units)

An in-depth exploration of important Buddhist understandings of the self and self-experience, including early Buddhist formulations; the importance of sunyata (emptiness) teachings; the Yogacara model for transformation of self-experience; and the Zen teachings on self and no-self. Key practices that have evolved from these understandings of the self and of suffering including mindfulness, tonglen and other relational compassion practices, zazen, and work and other engaged ethically based practices.

EWP 7592: Nonduality and the Self (3 units)

The purpose of this course is to give students a traditional experience of Advaita Vedanta as a means of self-knowledge, as well as an academic understanding of the basic tenets of Advaita Vedanta, with emphasis on the meaning and lived experience of nonduality. The course is designed to be personally useful to students in their understanding of themselves and their psychology.

EWP 7606: Integral Psychology (3 units)

An in-depth examination of the implications of the work of Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and Haridas Chaudhuri for psychology and psychotherapy. Integral philosophy provides an integrative framework for the divergent schools of Western psychology, as well as a synthesis of Eastern psychological perspectives. Integral psychotherapy is a psychospiritual method of working that is relational, embodied, and transformational.

EWP 7731: Dreaming the Soul: Dancing the Dream-A Jungian Dream Catcher (1 unit)

This course offers a reflective and experiential exploration of dreamwork from a Jungian ecopsychological perspective, as a process of befriending the soul. The soul, in turn, is understood as world soul in which the human psyche dwells. Students engage their dream images through creative movement and painting, enactment, story making, active imagination, and a creative dream journal. Through such creative embodied engagement, dream images disclose new insights; evoke rich, intuitive resonances; and instill the experience of a deeper belonging.

EWP 7792: East-West Spiritual Counseling (3 units)

Explores the meaning and purpose of spiritual counseling and the ways in which it complements, coincides with, and differs from psychological counseling. Theoretical emphasis is given to understanding the belief systems within which the counselor works and the impact they have on the counselor, his or her clients, and the counseling relationship. Eastern and Jungian perspectives are integrated into the spiritual counseling model.

EWP 7793: Spiritual Counseling Skills (3 units)

This course will explore-through experience and reflection-the meaning, purpose, and practice of the transformative art of spiritual counseling. This inquiry unfolds within a creative dialogue about Eastern wisdom traditions, Jungian psychology, and the evolving perspectives of ecospirituality and integral spirituality, characterized by the celebratory awareness of human embeddedness in the community of Earth and the sacredness of being.

EWP 7799: The Psychology of Spiritual Guidance (3 units)

A study of the historical significance and contemporary relevance of spiritual guidance, and the psychological principles and understanding required to practice it effectively.

EWP 7800: Auroville: Spirituality, Community, and Multiculturalism in South India (3 units)

Against the rich living tapestry of the universal township of Auroville, India, this course provides an opportunity for deep inquiry into the nature of integral spirituality. Topical areas of study include the East-West encounter, the relationship between spirituality and religion, integral spiritual practice, spiritual authority, and community and spiritual transformation.

EWP 7815: Heuristic Research (2 units)

In-depth study of the heuristic method applied to psychological inquiry. Emphasis is on the development of research skills, heuristic inquiry, and practice with a pilot study. Students will experience practice of self-inquiry, focusing, immersion, and heuristic data analysis.

EWP 7878: Phenomenological Research (2 units)

In-depth study of the phenomenological method applied to psychological inquiry.

EWP 7900: Thesis or Dissertation Seminar (0 units)

The advanced student's research and writing of a dissertation progresses with the mentorship of, and in close consultation with, his/her dissertation chair and committee.
Prerequisite: Advancement to candidacy.

EWP 8100: Research Colloquium (1 unit)

Ongoing seminar with advisor. Students' presentation of their work in progress leading to the completion of dissertation proposal.

EWP 8510: Theoretical Research Methods (3 units)

Introduction to the logic of theoretical research and overview of different theoretical approaches, such as hermeneutics, comparative analysis, critical theory, integrative studies, deconstruction, and feminist research. Emphasis is placed on approaching research and writing as transformative spiritual practices.

EWP 8799: Independent Study (1-3 units)

Coursework that extends a student's field of inquiry beyond current CIIS courses. Requires a syllabus and contract signed by the student and faculty member, and approved by the Program Chair.

EWP 8888: Special Topics (1-3 units)

A course of study not currently encompassed in the curriculum but relevant to evolving topics of growing importance in East-West psychology.

EWP 8990: Supervised Fieldwork (1-3 units)

Applied psychological work in an approved off-campus setting under individual professional supervision.

EWP 9002: Advanced PhD Seminar: Psychoanalysis and Religion in the Twenty-first Century (3 units)

This seminar explores changing psychoanalytic views of spiritual experience and religious traditions, including Vedanta, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and mysticism. It offers doctoral students the opportunity to present their own research on the relationship between psychology, spiritual experience, and religion in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.

EWP 9104: Advanced Ph.D. Seminar: Principles of Healing (3 units)

An in-depth study of the principles of healing as practiced by therapists, shamans, artists, and spiritual counselors. Spiritual, emotional, philosophical, and psychological perspectives on healing are discussed. Students participate in a selected experiential healing method.

EWP 9109: Sri Aurobindo and Jean Gebser on the Evolution of Consciousness (3 units)

This seminar explores the evolution of consciousness, with a focus on the thinking of Jean Gebser and Sri Aurobindo. It traces the function of consciousness in the cosmic and planetary evolution; discusses the interplay of consciousness, perception, culture, and technology in the evolution of humanity; looks at our current psychological constitution as a stage in the evolution of consciousness; and contemplates the current mutation of human consciousness through which we are now living.

EWP 9405: Advanced PhD Seminar: Contemporary Transpersonal Theory (3 units)

This seminar provides an exploration of the state of the art of transpersonal studies. The history of participatory thought and the implications of participatory spirituality for transformative practices, integral education, personal identity, and modern and indigenous cultures are discussed.

EWP 9411: Advanced PhD Seminar: Spiritual Counseling (3 units)

This advanced seminar is designed for students who have completed Spiritual Counseling I and/or II, the Psychology of Spiritual Guidance, or other equivalent courses approved by the instructor. Students will (1) develop and explicate their own model of spiritual counseling, and (2) present their model to the class and demonstrate the model in role-plays.

EWP 9431: Advanced Seminar: Jung (3 units)

The purpose of this advanced seminar is threefold: first, to increase students' knowledge of Jung by immersion in his writings; second, to create a forum that allows for an in-depth inquiry personalized to the Jungian interests of each student; and third, to give students an opportunity to present their research and facilitate group inquiry and discussion. 

EWP 9566: Advanced PhD Seminar: Comparative Mysticism (3 units)

An examination of the different models in the field of comparative mysticism: perennialist, constructivist, feminist, contextualist, and participatory. Students select and compare two mystical traditions, applying one of these models or developing their own comparative approach.