Remembering Participation — with Roger Duncan
In this conversation, Cordula Frei speaks with systemic psychotherapist, ecopsychology educator, and wilderness guide Roger Duncan about a fundamental rupture in modern consciousness: the deep separation between human psyche and the living world — and what it would mean to remember participation again. This dialogue moves through threshold spaces where psychology and ecology are no longer separate domains, but expressions of one continuous field of relationship. Here, imagination is not escapism or fantasy, but a mode of perception. Nature is not “outside” the human mind, but formative of it. And human development itself is inseparable from initiation, passage, and reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world. Roger Duncan’s work integrates systemic psychotherapy, ecopsychology, imagination studies, and wilderness rites of passage. His perspective opens a rare space in which psychological healing and ecological belonging begin to converge again — not as abstract ideas, but as lived experience, practice, and embodied awareness. Together, the conversation explores: • The psychological consequences of separation from nature • Modernity as a condition of lost participation in the living world • Imagination as a perceptual organ rather than fantasy or escape • The absence of rites of passage in contemporary culture • Ecological consciousness as a developmental necessity • Thresholds, transformation, and what it means to become human in transition At its heart, this episode asks a central question: What if the ecological crisis is also a crisis of imagination, initiation, and belonging? This conversation resonates with anthroposophical threads of understanding human development, imagination, and the formative relationship between soul and nature — not as doctrine, but as lived inquiry into perception, becoming, and the thresholds of consciousness. It also connects closely with Cordula Frei’s work: Her German book Wild & Wunderbar explores neuroregulation, embodiment, nature connection, ritual, feminine consciousness research, and the lived experience of thresholds — how the nervous system itself participates in transformation when life structures shift. Her English-language book Alchemy of Soul moves into the imaginal and alchemical dimensions of meditation inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s work How to Know Higher Worlds, exploring transformation as lived inner passage rather than conceptual framework. Both works echo the central field of this conversation: transformation not as theory, but as experience — as passage, initiation, and becoming.
Cordula Frei is a writer, consciousness researcher, and founder of Roots of Enlivenment. She is also a former editor of the anthroposophic magazine Info3 and Head of Media at Integral Perspectives, bringing long-standing engagement with anthroposophical and integral thought, cultural reflection, and systems change into her work on embodiment, relational intelligence, ecology, and cultural transition.
Roger Duncan is the author of Nature in Mind. His work integrates systemic psychotherapy, ecopsychology, imagination studies, and wilderness-based human development, focusing on how psychological wellbeing is inseparable from ecological relationship.
You liked this video? Consider supporting us by donation via PayPal, Patronage or by becoming a Academy member.