8. La Pachamama’s Soul: Understanding Ecospirituality Through Archetypal Intersubjectivity

Environmental Spirituality and Wellbeing - Integrating Social and Therapeutic Theory and Practice - Jeff Leonardi

Hannah Yakovah Armbrust [+-]
Psychotherapist
Dr. Hannah Armbrust is a Brazilian-American independent scholar, psychotherapist, and a former English and psychology professor at the Federal Institute of Rondonia, Brazil. She holds a Ph. D. in Psychology with a concentration in Jungian Studies from Saybrook University, an M.A. in Counseling from Eastern Mennonite University, and a B.A. in Language Arts from the Federal University of Rondonia. Dr. Armbrust has presented at various U.S., South America, and Europe conferences. She has presented papers about dream analysis, the meaning of archetypes, and the collective unconscious in trauma treatment during talks in Argentina and Spain. Dr. Armbrust has international experience working with the unprivileged population. She has been a motivational speaker for over a decade and developed an approach, CASA (Curiosidad, Apoyo, Simpatia, y Asistencia), to facilitate counseling sessions with the Latino/Latina population in Virginia. Her integrative therapeutic approach includes neuroscience, depth psychology, and mindfulness-based techniques. During her free time, Hannah enjoys walking with her husband, Martin, in the nearby forest, dancing, drawing mandalas, and drumming Brazilian rhythms.

Description

Ancestral peoples looking at the sky, wondered, “what is out there?” and buried their loved ones using rituals that reveal their beliefs of life after physical death. These archetypal feelings of longing to return to the womb of la Pachamama or Mother Earth have connected us through the ages. To the ancestral peoples, the Earth was sacred; it had a soul and was considered a common house. For the Andean people, for instance, all were alive and had a soul: the great mountains, the rivers, Pachamama, and majestic trees had subjectivity and alterity. Life and death were part of the same reality, a cycle in which humans took part but were not less or more important than other living beings. I will argue in this chapter that we can only attain spiritual enlightenment by being aware that our nature is interbeing or intersubjectivity. The longing is archetypal, and along with the concept of intersubjectivity, I introduce the concept of archetypal intersubjectivity as an epistemology concerned with Ecospirituality that alerts us to the urgent need for a new ethical centrality to take care of our common house, Earth.

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Citation

Armbrust, Hannah Yakovah. 8. La Pachamama’s Soul: Understanding Ecospirituality Through Archetypal Intersubjectivity. Environmental Spirituality and Wellbeing - Integrating Social and Therapeutic Theory and Practice. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. Sep 2025. ISBN 9781800505841. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=45138. Date accessed: 13 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.45138. Sep 2025

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