Right Place-Right Time for Anthroposophic Psychology

By Leigh Glenn

Thousands of moments and their reverberations. The pattern there, in Rose Hall (Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Kimberton, Pennsylvania) takes on its own life, living reflections of activities of the worlds-holders linked with the worlds within each of us, raying outward. All forms in potential are present, including their shattered, post-Sacred Wound versions. We hold our mirrored shards, our work together: Lifting the darkened silk that obscures, wiping away condensation, brushing dust from the reflecting glass—allowing our karmic kindreds to witness themselves through our witnessing, our listening. We hold steadily, creators and created, to what is given and received. Sometimes we move slowly-slowly like a eurythmist as if through deep waters, sometimes trudging along, sometimes flying beyond light’s speed, yet always within the light .

Perhaps a growing awareness prompted us to seek soul certainty through nine seminars of the Association for Anthroposophic Psychology’s (AAP) 2022–2025 three-year certificate program.

“Us” was 35 pilgrims who came together in August 2022 - hot days in Rose Hall with its stone-supported and -framed stage, its walls in ever-changing tones of pink-periwinkle-lavender. There, we were graced with and sustained by the presence of the image of Christ through the brushwork and heart of Carlo Pietzner, whose painting of the Deed on Golgotha often served for me as a pause-point for reflection.

Karmic Intertwinings

One of the spiritual bequests of Rudolf Steiner, an awareness for karma, carries a lingering question around sense of timing: Will we meet those we need to meet in order to accomplish our work here, which is to grow our capacities to love?

A chance remark from a friend at the Florida Waldorf School Association conference in 2022 prompted me to seek out AAP. I was accepted, along with fellow seekers, into a journey, part of a longer journey for each one. We count among us, by profession or vocationor even avocation - therapists, teachers, farmers and gardeners, volunteers, facilitators, social workers, ministers, nurses, Camphill coworkers, and artists of all kinds.

Before meeting, two of our faculty, James Dyson, MD, and Simon Kuttner, PhD, gave an overview via Zoom of the threads of psyche- logos that preceded Steiner in his psychosophy work and developed since with warm relationality as a guiding star, for self- self - and for self-other - relations.

In the first in-person meeting, James and Simon could join us in Rose Hall only via Zoom, and we learned (or relearned) the importance of refraining, holding oneself back, to allow another to come forward, in any kind of relationship, professional or personal.

In every meeting, the faculty1 and graduate interns 2 brought a curriculum both of wide and deep anthroposophical and psychological content supported by artistic activities in multiple guises, to introduce, support, and deepen our own know-thyself quests. Each carried unique insights into the subject in a harmonious interplay of offerings, like sunlight through a multi-faceted crystal.

Every Encounter an Opportunity

In the last few years, we have infused Ideas with practical actions and artistic exercises, transforming them into Ideals. That any of us can ever come to truly know ourselves, that any of us ever comes to know aspects of another fairly well, seems like a miracle, yet more than possible - likely - through this program.

Take the common drama triangle of persecutorvictim-rescuer as an example. Most in our group feel themselves rescuers. This work helped me see the upside of the rescuer’s sense of sympathy - of a feeling-with, and how, with discernment, this may turn toward and become empathy. The danger: “fixing”, interfering in what is not mine to take care of, and perpetuating an unhealthy dynamic.

We also witnessed two prominent polar beings active in us and in the world: Lucifer and Ahriman, as portrayed eurythmically by our eurythmists. It has been an abiding question for me how these polarities work in me. This task is ongoing - to be “on the senseout” for their influences, which seem to grow more subtle with time, perhaps indicating both their boredom and their tenacity, their sometimes loosened, sometimes tightened grip, according to how I think-feel-act.

, An overarching question for anthroposophic psych -ology is: How can a person truly make room for “the ‘I’ of the other”? This question is not one only therapists and people who practice healing arts need to answer. Each of us needs to answer this. Each of us needs to come to know the skill of empathic resonance, to practice holding back or coming forward, in and with empathy.

In this practice, we need patience. Answering requires time, requires us to hold further questions, including the key one: Who am I?

The answer will be different depending on whether it’s Mars’ Day or Saturn’s Day; whether our liver is doing its “sucking” activities well or sluggishly; whether we have just driven through a place steeped in the grief of souls or elementals, present or past; whether we might induce a chuckle from a memory of a three-person drama we enacted based in the facts of our own lives and how our colleagues portrayed us. The influences are legion, both earth-bound and cosmic.

Re-Cognizing Our Selves

In time and with practice, we work with the “Who Am I?” with ever-present reminders that every single one of us has “survival parts” and may be acting from them, may be trying to integrate them - or may not be ready to. That kind of resistance, as noted at our first meeting, is a way to stretch the soul, and in that way, every time we encounter resistance, we find an opportunity to build a relationship to the process...of stretching. This stretching may involve making time to repeat the “Logic of the Heart” exercise or to sit in meditation-concentration and come away from that, pastels at the ready, to create a soul-gesture drawing we can spend further time with in concentration and imagination. All of these practices help us to cultivate patience with ourselves and, in turn, patience with others, strengthening us to meet what is.

This has been our work together, that is, in community. AAP, by far, has been the best “practice field” for developing empathy that we might now carry into the “proving grounds” of the world. As noted in an early seminar, bringing fruits of our encounters in this earth-world into the spiritual world is one of our tasks as human beings.

Each seminar has been a special microcosm of this work-in-community, from our triads enacting the soul’s thinking-feeling-willing as the Three Graces to sitting opposite one another and, without thinking, without reacting, listening to that person share part of their biography; from dramatically portraying the polarities of the planetary beings - one can enjoy the surprise in improv-representations of the Mars-Venus polarity - to, literally, feeling our way through the nowords miracles that are the cardinal organs of liver, lungs, kidneys, heart.

In studying our spiritual ancestors’ evolution through Steiner’s Inner Experiences of Evolution , we learned of the Sacred Wound and, perhaps, the need to carry a seed of awareness of de-personalizing what could be perceived as a wrong. Through working with Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis, we can bring into consciousness what may have been living in our unconscious for years or for lifetimes - and so we are closer to our genuine Self.

It is not possible to hit every height or depth of experience from the more than 400 hours we will have been together in this fifth cohort of AAP. As a former agnostic who doubted the existence of karma, my time with these kindred souls has been one of deep joy, and I know with certainty that these experiences have formed a right-place/right-time meeting.

I leave this program with more questions, seeds of questions, to tend, perhaps to germinate - if and when they are ready. I am sure that rather than reflectingglass shards, we each are coming away from our times together and times apart having fused these shards into a large, flexible mirror, with greater capacity for accuracy, for fewer distortions. We have essential tools to work with every aspect of thinking, feeling, and willing, and far greater understanding of the human soul, of ourselves.

1 AAP Faculty: James Dyson, MD; Simon Kuttner, PhD; Susan Overhauser, PhD; Tonya Stoddard, LCSW; eurythmists Karen Derreumaux and Gillian Shoemaker; Spacial Dynamics instructor Alex Schneider, LMHC; teacher/musician/astrosopher Alan Thewless; multi- spectrum artist Vincent Roppolo; heart of AAP/counselor/teacher Roberta Nelson, PhD; counselor and AAP chief operations officer Christine Huston.

2 AAP Graduate Interns: Heather Ross, LCSW; Sudha Gutti, MSW, LCSW; Christina Sophia, PhD; and counselor/coach Joyce Reilly.

Leigh Glenn is a member of the fifth cohort of the Association for Anthroposphic Psychology’s (AAP) three-year certificate program. A new cohort begins November 2025. For more information, visit https://anthroposophicpsychology.org/3Year-Certificate-Program-Cohort-6-2025. 

Anthroposophia

Anthroposophy, the gnosis of Man, Is the beginning of perfection.

But the gnosis of God, or Platonism, Is the perfection of perfection.

Thus, Platonism, whose end is the Good, Is the sister-half, or Sophia, of Anthroposophy.

Intuition / Reason

Intuition, as the eye of the heart, Embraces things; Thus, in its way, comprehends them.

Reason, through the circle of thought,

Comprehends things; Thus, in its way, embraces them.

Threshold

Reason discovers truth, Thereby giving rise to reality, But, to bring truth to light, Which truth has its own light, The intellectualized mind

Must cross a threshold.

John Urban

When Life Slips Out

When life slips out of the body

And it can’t get back in

But is pushed out into the general

Background of things

Then life being life

Can’t not but go on

In search of yet another form

Better than the last one

Death’s heavy curtain

Opens on a further scene

A bustling city square

Or a forest in Arden

Where life is love must be

The body’s only summary

A blueprint for new stars

Peter Rennick