In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is time to build a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller on this journey into possibility. And once in a while I come across someone whose life’s work lights up every fire in my being. Jessica Buckler is one of these and she is this week’s guest. Jessica is an applied theatre practitioner and yes, we will hear what this is, but she is so much more than this. She’s a transpersonal psychologist who co-founded the Alef Trust, which, as you will hear, is a globally conscious non-profit offering online graduate education programs and open learning courses for people who really want to step into what Indy Johar so beautifully calls the emergent edge of inter becoming. Jessica is also integral to the Nurturing the Fields of Change program that brings together people from really diverse walks of life to create an emergent community of practice built around change. She’s also the program leader for the Alef Trust’s master’s program in Consciousness, spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology. And doesn’t that sound like something that would be fun to do? She teaches a range of modules bringing spiritual perspectives to activism and social change. So all in all, you can see why I find her work so enthralling.

Manda: Jessica stands at that nexus where neuropsychology meets shamanic practice. Where being and becoming are an art and a practice in themselves. Grounded in modern science, not the reductive head mind science of the 19th and 20th centuries, but today’s 21st century science, where complexity and systems thinking lie at the heart of all we do. Where we recognise that only by becoming fully present in the moment can we access the whole vast intelligence of the all that is and find what is ours to do within this. Jessica brings all this great breadth and depth of thinking and being to social prescribing programs, to theatre, to the MSC at Liverpool’s John Moore University and in her own daily life. And she shares all of this in the conversation you’re about to hear, including a clip of one of her own practices that is solid podcasting gold. If you are at all interested in finding out how we can access our own inner intelligence and build with others similarly inspired, to co-create the foundations of that more flourishing future we would be proud to leave behind, then this is absolutely the podcast for you. So people of the podcast, please welcome Jessica Bockler of the Alef Trust.

Manda: Jessica, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this sunny May morning?

Jessica: Thank you Manda. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m in my home, which is in the northwest of England on the Wirral, which is a kind of peninsula not far away from Liverpool, and it’s a sort of cloudy day, a little bit blustery outside. And I was going to say I feel quite differently, actually, this morning. I feel sunny. But there’s a lot going on at the same time. So maybe blustery captures something of what’s alive, in my experience. Yeah. Thank you.

Manda: The turbulence of these times. Yes. We are only about three hours south of you and we have beautiful sun. I will send you some of our sunniness. So you are one of the co-founders of the Alef Trust, which I found through the wonders of LinkedIn. Actually, sometimes social media actually works in a useful way, and it seemed to me so inspiring on so many levels. So I’m really grateful to be able to unpick all those levels with you today. Can you, as a start, tell us what the Aleph Trust is and how you came to be one of the co-founders, and we’ll explore from there.

Jessica: Thank you for the question, Manda. The Alef Trust is a global learning provider. We work in higher education, but also in community development. And within those fields, we really weave together different cross-disciplinary explorations. So we work in consciousness studies, we explore ecology, we explore fields of psychology associated with spirituality and personal growth. And we also build community programs that are all about exploring human transformation. So this may be within the arts, it may be within the health sector. More recently, we’ve worked a lot in social change and supporting people who are interested in building projects and initiatives around the world, wherever they are, to bring about the more beautiful world that we all long for, in the words of Charles Eisenstein. So that’s from sort of looking from the outside, in a nutshell. But really, what’s at the core of Alef Trust is a kind of deeper spiritual or esoteric orientation. And I can explain that best by looking at the name Alef. Alef trust. Why Alef trust? When people hear that, they think, oh, they’re some kind of legal trust. And that’s not at all the case, we’re a social enterprise; everything we’re doing is in service of the greater good, the greater whole. So the name Alef Trust actually comes from the letter Alef. And the letter Alef, well, you can find it in the Hebrew scripts, but it also goes back to the Proto-sinaitic alphabet. And within that, in the sort of hieroglyphic alphabet, it’s the symbol of an ox, right? With the horns pointing upwards towards the heavens. So we’re talking here about a letter that represents a connection to the divine, to the kind of primordial creative energy that initiates the process of creation. And in Alef Trust, we really want to be in service of that. And we trust in that. We trust in this divine, in this higher creative energy that informs everything that happens in our world. So we bring ourselves into alignment with that.

Manda: That is so amazing. Right. I love it. And you trust and it is a trust. There’s so many layers to this. And I’m guessing that was not an accident. Goodness. So for orientation, because there are so many layers of this, what you are doing is is so Thrutopian. It sounds to me you’re right at what Indy Johar calls the inter becoming emergent edge of how we need to be in order to emerge into a new system. And you’re doing it so much under the radar of the general media, and the general narratives that are locking us into ‘there is no alternative’. And you’re working at the point where the alternative is not only possible, it’s actually happening. How did you, Jessica, come to be one of the co-founders of this? Give us a little bit of your history that gave you the depth and understanding to know that Alef comes from an ox and it’s a primordial creative force, but also to know that you could bring spirituality and creativity and social work and all of the other things that you do into a container and make it work.

Jessica: So a little bit then about the story, and it’s really a story of synchronicity and of following what is unfolding and of trusting in what is unfolding. I’m from Germany originally, and I came to the UK some 25 years ago to study acting and directing at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. And that was only the beginning of the journey. The kind of exploration for me has been one of discovering what is creativity and how can a creative life path empower people. Empower me, give me a deeper sense of self, who I am, how I show up in the world, what I bring to the world, my sense of purpose and connection to the wider world. But also then how is creativity in service of others in terms of their healing and their personal unfolding? This took me into working in community arts here in the UK, working in arts and health. I set up one of the longest standing adsum prescribing programs that is still running here in the UK today. And from there, well, I always had an interest in consciousness studies, spirituality and psychology, so I wanted to bridge deeper into that field. To really get to grips with the psychosomatics of creativity, what happens when we’re creative, how does creativity help us in our daily lives? And that took me into a master’s degree in transpersonal psychology, and then later on, a PhD at combining all these fields, looking at the kind of creative vehicle, particularly theatrical practices, movement work, voice work. Looking at those practices through psychological lenses to discern, okay, when we’re creative, what really happens?

Jessica: And it feels a little bit like Alice going into Wonderland, right? And this tunnel that I’m going into and this wonderland I’m exploring has got so many branches and so many dimensions, that it’s been an ongoing exploration ever since. And it has led to the establishment of the Alef Trust. Because it was through these studies, through these explorations, that I met Les Lancaster, who is the other co-founding director of the Alef Trust. He is a professor of psychology, he has been immersed in exploring consciousness studies and mysticism for decades, and he was based at Liverpool John Moores University. And this is where we met. And it was after some years that that Les felt he wanted to step out of the mainstream university sector and really explore these areas of interests we were converging there. Creativity and application on the one hand, that’s what I was bringing to the table, and he was coming with the depth of knowledge and insight in consciousness studies and mysticism. And we brought these two together in the founding of the Alef Trust, which is now a global learning provider catering for students from some 40 plus countries. And we’re independent. So we are validated actually by Liverpool John Moores University, but the programs we’re running through our faculty who are also people worldwide, some 35 members of staff, they’re broadly stitching together this beautiful tapestry of creative practices, integrative practices, integral psychology, ecopsychology, consciousness studies, mysticism, shamanism, you name it. All these things are dancing. All these threads are dancing together in the Alef community.

Manda: Thank you. You’ve got an MSC coming up in consciousness, spirituality and transpersonal psychology. And if I could mine a few extra minutes out of every day, I would so want to do that, it sounds so inspiring. We’ll park that one for another time, there are so many threads in this that I want to unpick. Let’s head back a little bit. You said that you were working in arts and prescribing. Tell us a little bit more about what that is and how it works and what the potential is.

Jessica: Yes. So this is a field which has really grown up in the UK now, which is wonderful to see. The central idea behind social prescribing is that we don’t need to rely on medication alone to tend to mental health conditions like depression, stress or anxiety. That these are in a way natural states that we don’t want to medicate. People get depressed or stressed or anxious about any number of things, and we don’t want to just reach for a pill in order to medicate and kind of tranquillise ourselves. Which is what the medical system has been leaning towards. So social prescribing is saying there are other determinants for our mental health, such as the dynamics in the family, what’s happening in our work lives, what’s happening in culture more widely. And we we can tend to ourselves and we can nurture well-being and health between us by drawing on the arts, drawing on physical activity, sport, looking at our diet. And really coming together in community in order to alleviate stress and come back home to ourselves and engender more positive states of being. So we do that specifically through Arts On Prescription, drawing on many different types of media, from visual arts to working with clay, working with natural materials, creative writing. But we also weave in mindfulness as a way of bringing people together in groups where they feel grounded, they co-regulate, they self-regulate their nervous systems. They’re in a space that feels calm and grounding, centring, and from there we play. In our in our team, we have a team of artists who deliver this work in the north west of England. So it’s a local service.

Manda: And the local medics, the general practitioners know that this exists. And are they, this is very UK centric, but I’m guessing that this actually does happen around the world. Do the various forms of either the NHS here or health insurance around the world recognise this and fund it? Because it seems to me that the pharmaceutical industry has pretty much captured medicine and also defined what is allowed to be considered a treatment modality. But this is getting through, clearly, or you wouldn’t be doing it.

Jessica: Yes, it’s been a journey. So I would say I’ve observed that field now for the past 25 years. And to begin with, you could see pockets of practice where there was a kind of local champion in the NHS, or maybe the local council who understood the work and was able to tap funding and then set up a project that would run for a number of years. That’s what I’ve seen and that’s what I’ve experienced as well, with the work that I have looked after and that I’ve been involved in. But then over the years, gradually, the sort of evidence base has become stronger and more and more people have been talking about it, writing about it, showcasing the benefits and telling the stories. And so what I’ve seen in the UK is that there is now a much more national orientation towards social prescribing. There’s a social prescribing academy, there is a network of practitioners, there are social prescribing link workers. And so within the NHS and within the local councils in public health, there is much greater awareness now of the of the benefits of this kind of work. And so it’s getting easier, but it’s by no means available everywhere in every part of the country and around the world. Often people refer to it as lifestyle medicine, right? They might talk about yoga or they might talk about the impact of diet. Sometimes there’s more of an integrative approach towards it, but it’s still very much in pockets of practice, I would say. Yeah.

Manda: Right. So we need to create the vision that this is a complex system. People are complex systems within a complex system and they need a holistic view. I remember when I was down at Schumacher, we went to visit Tamar Grow Local, who were just on the Cornish side of the River Tamar. And they’re a farming group. They set up originally because they realised that people were reducing the price of their honey at the farm gate, to the point where it was costing less to buy than it cost to make, and that perhaps if they all got together, they could at least agree on a price that wasn’t that. And now it’s huge. And he was delivering social prescribing of boxes of food that they had grown. So mostly organic, definitely here are actual carrots and actual potatoes. And they had reckoned in the local council, Plymouth Council, that they were getting a 17 to 1 return. So for every pound they spent on one of these boxes, they were getting £17 of return. And the gentleman who was speaking to us, Simon, said he didn’t necessarily trust the numbers on that because you can make the numbers be what you want. But he had an email from one of the people who had been prescribed, a single mother with a couple of kids who said it’s like Christmas when the box arrives, every morning, the kids are running down the stairs to see what it is.

Manda: And also part of the prescribing was you have the boxes on the condition that you go along to learn how to cook with this stuff that you’ve very likely not encountered before. And she was getting this huge social benefit as a result. And it seems such an obvious thing to do, that we are in the middle of a mental health epidemic because the system is breaking down and people don’t have the support networks that we have evolved to have. And that if you can help bring those and give people that sense of creativity, I want to come back then, because social prescribing isn’t just boxes of food or local choirs. I’m imagining that go and sing in a choir, and you have that amazing sense that people get when they sing together. But creativity is an arm in and of itself. And you have done masters and PhDs in the neuropsychology, neurophysiology of spirituality and creativity together. And this makes my whole brain light up. So I don’t know how much we can edit the highlights. It could become very geeky, and I would be very excited and we would lose most of the listeners. So if it becomes a bit geeky, we’ll unpick things. Tell me what you can of the neuropsychology of creativity and how we can understand it for ourselves and bring it into our lives. Does that make sense as a question?

Jessica: Yes it does. I don’t want to talk about the brain and what happens in the brain, but rather I’d like to really talk about what is it that happens in consciousness? So there’s something when we’re creative, that we can talk about entering into flow states for example, looking at the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that’s been written about quite extensively now. But we can also talk about entering trance states, or we can talk about opening the gating mechanisms of consciousness, de-automatising our perception, our behaviour, our thinking. So when we’re creative, there is this opening of the aperture of our awareness. In daily life, when we engage in whatever it is that we’re doing, we’re quite on autopilot. That’s a normal state of consciousness, we do things in a habituated way. And that helps us to function in daily life. If that wasn’t the case, we’d be constantly preoccupied with, you know, how do I pick up this glass of water? How do I put one foot in front of the other? So we need the automatisation, it helps us to function. But, and there’s a lot of research around this now, automatisation is beneficial, it enables us to function, but it also means that we lose a sense of what it is that we’re doing or why we’re doing it. Like, it’s not just motor behaviour that is automatised, it’s thinking and perception. We no longer see things.

Jessica: Just to give you one example, when we drive a car from maybe our home to a place that we often visit. We all know this. We get in the car, we then get wrapped up in our thoughts a little bit, and we get to this other place and we think, how did I get there? It’s almost as if we weren’t paying attention. We were, but our automated systems were taking over, getting us from A to B. So the creative process and not just creativity, but contemplative practices, martial arts systems, they can all help us come back to the moment and open the aperture of our perception and enable us to think and feel afresh in the moment. And that is the critical piece. So we want to get past Automatisation back into a freer state, a liberated state of consciousness, where we then have much broader options available to us. Where we can suddenly see more, our perspectives open. We can look at things through multiple lenses from multiple angles and we can make fresh choices again, in terms of mindfulness, right? We no longer just react to circumstances, but we enter into that space where we have a moment’s pause. Spaciousness opens up, and we can choose how to respond to a