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How CIIS honors the Earth through curriculum, retreats, events, and practices that root learning in the living world.
There is a reason CIIS is called an integral institution. For more than five decades, it has brought together mind, body, spirit, community — and Earth. The natural world is a foundational teacher, partner, and home.
From experiential learning along waterways to leadership retreats among ancient forests, from ancestral healing practices woven into clinical training to doctoral research conducted at mountain retreat centers, CIIS offers an education rooted in — and in reverence of — our living world.
Earth-based literacy, spirituality, and praxis shape how this institution understands what it means to learn, to listen, and to teach.
The Department of Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion is one of the few graduate programs in the world dedicated to the intersection of ecological science, spiritual wisdom, and transformative practice. Students in both the M.A. and Ph.D. tracks examine the deep relationship between worldviews and the environmental crisis — asking not only what is being lost, but why, and how shifts in human consciousness might open pathways toward healing.
Coursework draws on indigenous biocultural knowledge, feminist epistemologies, traditional ecological knowledge, and the writings of visionaries like Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, and Wangari Maathai. Students graduate equipped to work across academia, activism, nonprofit leadership, and spiritual counseling, prepared to become what the program calls visionary thinkers and thought leaders of hope.
For alumni like Jessica DiVento Dzuban, Global Head of Mental Health Policy at TikTok, that curriculum didn't stay in the classroom. One summer, her Spirituality and Ecology elective took the class to Costa Rica for several weeks — an experience that became one of the most formative of her time at CIIS.
"The first part of the trip we worked on a biodynamic farm, harvesting ginger and turmeric and learning about the biodynamic farming process and ecology. Then we spent time near an active volcano, in the hot springs. Later we went to the east coast (of the island) and spent time with indigenous tribes and the Rastafari people, learning about their cultures and ways of being. I had done things like that before, but not when it was paired with the teachings. Being paired with an educational experience helped me to think about things — and reflect on them — in a different way. That was really powerful."
- Jessica DiVento, Clinical Psychology Alumna
Some of the most transformative education at CIIS happens not in a lecture hall, but under open sky. The Blue Sky Leaders Certificate Program — a leadership program for visionary leaders, influencers, creatives, and professionals — holds its in-person residencies in Northern California redwood forests where participants engage questions of ecology, inner development, and regenerative futures while immersed in the landscape itself.
Leadership discussions happen on trails. Contemplative practices unfold outdoors. The land is a co-facilitator and teacher of presence and being. Drawing on ecopsychology, indigenous knowledge systems, and new cosmology, Blue Sky Leaders reimagines what it means to lead: authentically, embodied, and in living relationship with the Earth.
Like many of the degree programs at CIIS, this philosophy extends into doctoral life as well. Each year, CIIS Research Psychology Ph.D. students gather for a retreat among the redwoods — a space to ground in their studies and step into a new chapter of learning together.
Honoring Earth also means honoring the lineages of knowledge that have always understood life as deeply relational. The Integrated Wellness Fellowship (IWF)— a yearlong cohort-based program developed in partnership with Healing Clinic Collective and supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — trained emerging clinicians in cultural and ancestral healing practices alongside rigorous clinical skills in community-based settings.
Fellows brought ceremony, land-based practices, and ancestral frameworks into a clinical context, recognizing that ancestral medicine must be experienced, felt, and integrated over time. Through CIIS' Division of Community Engagement and Belonging (DCEB), the Fellowship found an institutional home from 2024-2025, closing with a beautiful, spiritually centered event in January 2025. Based on the wisdom gathered from the Fellowship, DCEB is envisioning what integrated wellness practices and programs look and feel like at CIIS in the future.
CIIS Public Programs bridges the University and the wider community — and Earth is a recurring teacher and partner. A guided foraging tour led by Alexis Nikole Nelson, widely known as the Black Forager, brought the CIIS community outdoors to learn the edible landscape of their own region, honoring indigenous plant knowledge and the living abundance that surrounds us when we know how to look. Events like Cultivating Earth for Resources and Resilience deepen this work, exploring how communities can build practical, sustainable relationships with the land.
The CIIS Public Programs Podcast carries these conversations further. In the episode Seeds as Ancestors, recorded live at CIIS in November 2025, Mohawk seedkeeper and Sierra Seeds founder Rowen White joined CIIS Associate Professor of Anthropology and Social Change Michelle Glowa to explore Indigenous food sovereignty and what it means to truly nourish a community. For White, seeds are never just botanical — they are political. Reclaiming the varieties that fed Indigenous communities for generations is an act of recovering power, dignity, and self-determination. Her invitation is simple and immediate: find one plant your lineage cared for, learn its story, and take one small step toward reconnecting with it.
This April, the Division of Community Engagement and Belonging activates the whole campus with Earth Month — from hosting events on eco-sustainability practices with SF Recology and SF Transit Riders to crafternoons where attendees create artful postcards from reusable materials.
Being connected to the Earth is also about collaboration and relationship. This month the Division uplifted amazing Earth month events across campus, including an expressive arts gathering exploring ecological identity hosted by the Office of Student Affairs, and a rewilding meditation workshop hosted by CIIS Public Programs. CIIS lives these values on campus every day through a Ridwell recycling partnership, a new secure bike and scooter enclosure in partnership with Facilities and Business Operations, offering the community ongoing guidance on ecotherapy, composting, and sustainable living.
At CIIS, choosing Earth is not a seasonal initiative or a curriculum component. It is a teacher and a home. The Earth is integral to CIIS because CIIS has always understood that inner and outer transformation — personal and planetary — begins with relationship. And relationship, at its most primary, begins with the ground beneath our feet.
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