Indigenous Cosmology as a Path Towards Healing the World’s Soul Wound

According to psychotherapist, author, and healer Eduardo Duran, the soul wounding of sentient beings is in direct parallel to Earth wounding. The ongoing collective spirit of violence is having a direct impact on our world’s soul, which is none other than the human soul. Because there is no separation between us and the Earth, violence done to either systematically affects the other. Presently, many of our problems are being understood at the surface level and we must go deeper into the archetypal layers of human/Earth psyche in order to begin a new awareness of the deeper implications of how we are to restore harmony to our lifeworld. 

Join Eduardo and CIIS Chief Diversity Officer Rachel Bryant for a powerful workshop exploring our current moment of collective consciousness through the lens of Indigenous cosmology. Eduardo and Rachel address the significant zeitgeist that has been part of our lifeworld recently, inviting participants to explore the idea of “wrathful hope” as a new way of understanding and gaining insight into what the problem is and leading the way toward healing. 

Wrathful hope has been coined for this workshop to take a more critical approach to understanding the root metaphors of how we have gone astray from primordial awareness. By exploring the violence that we see all around us at a deeper layer of knowing, we can bring understanding to the idea of unconscious sacrifice.  

Unconscious sacrifice, if not made conscious, will seek awareness through the repetitions of violence that will continue until we bring awareness and consciousness in a primordial way. This awareness will bring a new understanding and ceremonial form in the transformation of codependent hope into wrathful hope that can only be accessed through warrior courage.  

This experiential workshop includes deep listening, guided meditation, journaling, Q&A, and break out groups. Engage with Eduardo and Rachel in these powerful and transformative Indigenous cosmologies to open up your understanding and awareness to support your healing, and the healing of the Earth.


Eduardo Duran is a Vietnam Veteran who started his academic training after being discharged from the US Navy. He has worked in Indigenous communities most of his professional life. Clinical work in communities has informed his theoretical and clinical approaches to psychotherapy. His work is informed by traditional teachings from Indigenous elders that continues to unfold into an ongoing hybrid model to address individual and collective soul wounding. 

Early on he was providing community interventions when an Indigenous Woman Elder approached him and told him that he needed to write and publish what she heard him speak about. That meeting with the Elder has resulted in several books including: Native American Post-Colonial Psychology, Healing the Soul Wound, Buddha in Redface, and Quantum Coyote Dreams the Black World. The unfolding themes in these writings are an integration of traditional Indigenous and Buddhist cosmology as these interface with the shape shifting of consciousness in our present zeitgeist. Eduardo lives in Bozeman Montana.

Rachel Bryant, MA, is an educator and administrator with more than two decades of experience in public mental health and a pedagogical orientation in Black, Indigenous, and Liberation Praxis. She currently serves as the Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where she has helped teach, mentor, and launch the careers of hundreds of emerging mental health clinicians from diverse backgrounds. From 2009 to 2017, she was the Director of the Mental Health Services Act Project at CIIS, which recruited and retained graduate students underrepresented in the mental health workforce. Skilled in group facilitation, strategic planning, program development, fundraising, and evaluation, Rachel has experience winning and managing six- and seven-figure grants from state, county, and private foundation partners. She has administered behavioral health services and programming at the Alameda County Public Health Department and the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. She holds a Masters of Counseling Psychology degree with a concentration in Community Mental Health from CIIS and has also served as an Assistant Professor in CIIS’ Masters of Counseling Psychology and Undergraduate Studies programs.