Publications by Molly Young Brown
Books by Molly Young Brown
Coming Back to Life –
The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown. New Society Publishers, 2014.
Growing Whole: Self-realization for the Great Turning by Molly Young Brown. Psychosynthesis Press, 2009
Growing Whole: Exploring the Wilderness Within (2024) MP3 and Study Guide.
Unfolding Self: The Practice of Psychosynthesis by Molly Young Brown. Skyhorse Publishing, 2004.
Lighting a Candle: Collected Reflections on a Spiritual Life by Molly Young Brown. Psychosynthesis Press, 2010.
Held in Love: Life Stories to Inspire Us Through Times of Change, edited by Molly Young Brown and Carolyn Wilbur Treadway. Psychosynthesis Press, 2009.
Consensus in the Classroom: Fostering a Lively Learning Community by Linda Sartor and Molly Young Brown. Psychosynthesis Press, 2004.
Selected Essays and Musings by Molly Young Brown
Molly’s Musings have been moved to substack in January 2023. To read recent musings and to subscribe, please go to https://mollyybrown.substack.com/archive
Introducing our joint memoir-in-progress – published bi-weekly on substack. Read now and subscribe: https://jimollymemoir.substack.com/
Psychosynthesis-related Essays and Musings
by Molly Young Brown, 2012
Opening Keynote for the International Psychosynthesis Conference, Rome, June 21-24, 2012
Hello, brothers and sisters in the global psychosynthesis community. I am so happy to be here with you on the Summer Solstice to begin this International Psychosynthesis Conference. I want to thank the Istituto di Psicosintesi for accomplishing the enormous will project that has brought us together in such a beautiful place, with such an amazing program before us. For these four days, we’ll explore how psychosynthesis can help us face the enormous challenges of our world today. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2009
For some time now, I have been distressed about the level of greed in the corporate world today, and its destructive effects on our social and economic institutions, especially but not exclusively in the United States (e.g. two very greedy corporations, Nestle and Monsanto, are based in Europe). The scale of this greed has become glaringly apparent in the multi-billion (or is it now trillion?) dollar bail-out of failing financial institutions in the US, with most of the funds lining the pockets of the very executives who drove their companies into ruin. Greed seems the primary driver of the health insurance industry’s lobbying against any kind of public health insurance or any meaningful reform of the current profit-driven system. Greed drives the oil and coal companies to mislead the public about global climate change and the need to immediately reduce our use of fossil fuels. ...read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2006
This September [2006] I had the privilege of presenting workshops in Sweden and Finland to teachers and advanced students of psychosynthesis—a two-day workshop in Stockholm and two three-day workshops on Nagu Island in the archipelago off the southwest coast of Finland. I considered it a privilege because the people attending participated so fully—immersing themselves in the exercises, asking keen questions, and offering their own ideas to the dialogue that ensued. In the second Nagu Island workshop, as we explored the relationship between systems thinking and psychosynthesis, we discovered we could use the classic “Egg Diagram” of psychosynthesis to map a key concept of systems thinking: “self-regulation” through “negative feedback.” I found this new model very exciting and would like to share it here. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2003
Paper presented in a workshop at the AAP Conference, April 2003.
My study of psychosynthesis over the last 30 years has shaped the philosophical foundation of my life. When I encountered systems thinking (also known as General Systems Theory or GST) ten years ago, I welcomed this scientifically based explanation for understandings I already held. I rejoiced in how perfectly congruent psychosynthesis seemed with the systems perspective. Yet somehow in the intervening years, I have kept these two disciplines fairly separate in my teaching and writing. It seems high time to address their integration. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2002
Keynote for AAP Midwest Conference – April 6, 2002
(Written while living in Heartwood Cohousing in southwest Colorado)
Thank you for inviting me to share with you today what is in my heart and mind. These days I spend a lot of time in the woods that surround my home, thinking, journaling, trying to open to the wisdom of the ecosphere to guide my response to all that is happening in the world today. It is a privilege to have your ears for this piece of time to share some of what I see and how I think we might respond. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 1999
Lead article in the 1999 edition of Conversations in Psychosynthesis, the journal of the Association for the Advancement of Psychosynthesis (AAP)
We live in a world of relationship, entwined and sustained by interconnecting webs of dynamic interactions. And today we are awakening to that world, discovering the enormity of our past human folly along with the creative potentials within and around us. Psychosynthesis has contributed to that awakening through this century, by exploring the intricate world of interrelationships within the human being, within human groups. …read more…
Work That Reconnects-related Essays
by Molly Young Brown, 2017
Sustainability column, Mount Shasta Herald, March 15, 2017
I’ve been reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014), and considering the relationship between how white settlers treated the Native people of Turtle Island and how we white folks treat the land today. The United States came into being and expanded “from sea to shining sea” through centuries of conquest and violence. Most of us of European ancestry do not have a generational relationship with the land we occupy, having moved onto the land rather than living for generations within it. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2016
Over 500 years ago, my European ancestors, the original architects of the Industrial Growth Society, invaded a faraway land inhabited by peoples with an entirely different way of life, people who had not developed along the lines of industrial, mechanistic, materialistic European culture. Instead, these people had sought to follow and cooperate with the laws and ways of their life support system: Earth and its ecosystems. Some groups had strayed from this at times, but never for long or with much success. (This is not to idealize the people so invaded, some of whom had violent and hierarchical cultures; nevertheless, most lived in relative harmony with the environment.) …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2010
(The article below was published in the Mt Shasta Herald, a weekly newspaper in South Siskiyou County in far northern California, on Wednesday, January 20, 2010)
Here in Siskiyou County, at the foot of a magnificent Mount Shasta, we live in relative peace in a relatively healthy environment. There is so much to be thankful for, and touching into our gratitude opens our hearts and minds to the beauty and abundance around us. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2002
General Systems Theory (GST), arising out of the biological sciences, attempts to map general principles for how all systems work, especially living systems. Instead of examining phenomena by attempting to break things down into component parts, GST explores phenomena in terms of dynamic patterns of relationship. This shift in focus– from things frozen in time to dynamic relationships–underlies systems thinking. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 1995
[Originally written in 1995 as a chapter for a book never published; recently updated.]
We live in a wondrous world of relationship, entwined and sustained by interconnecting webs of dynamic interactions. And today we are awakening to that world, discovering the enormity of our past human folly along with the vast creative potentials within and around us.
For hundreds of years, we who have lived within “Western Civilization” have struggled to master the natural world around us, to overcome the limits to our desired way of life. …read more…
Other Musings
by Molly Young Brown, October 2022
How can it be?
How is it that some people seem so driven by greed and hunger for power, while others seem happy to live simply and enjoyably with what they have? How is it that many people apparently believe themselves to be separate, always in competition with others, always having to grasp for more—more money, more fame, more power, ever more proof of their worth— while others feel pretty good about their lives most of the time, enjoying friendships, family, and simple everyday achievements of creativity and service to their community. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2019
“If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. As you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against … other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.”
(Bateson, 1972. p. 462)
I read this quotation from Gregory Bateson with a sinking heart. 47 years ago he foresaw so clearly the predicament we find ourselves in today. The dominant Industrial Growth Society (IGS) is largely based in a brand of Christianity that puts “God outside…his creation” and sees humans (or at least light-skinned humans of European ancestry) as “created in his image.” Therefore, many people in the IGS “logically and naturally see” themselves “as outside and against the things around” them. Almost all large corporations in today’s rapacious economy treat “the world as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration.” Most corporations view the environment as something to be exploited for short-term profits. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2015
All roads lead to Rome for me these days, Rome being the looming catastrophe of global climate change/warming. Journalist Dahr Jamail, in a series of in-depth articles on the subject, more aptly calls it “anthropogenic climate disruption” (https://truth-out.org/news/item/22521-climate-disruption-dispatches-with-dahr-jamail). “Anthropogenic” places the responsibility where it seems to belong, on the shoulders of humans with our shortsighted addiction to fossil fuels, money, and consumption. “Disruption” means this is not ordinary change, but something well beyond the normal cycles of planetary systems. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2010
My on-going inquiry into “how then shall we live in this time of crises?” has been informed by a number of really good books, articles, and conversations with friends. In one of my most recent adventures, I read Noel Charlton’s Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth (SUNY, 2008). Jim and I studied Bateson in some depth in the 1990’s in an informal seminar with eco-philosopher Tyrone Cashman. Charlton’s distillation of Bateson’s thought has renewed and clarified our previous understanding. In one of his key insights, Bateson declares that mind is not limited to human consciousness, but is vitally present in all living beings, from protozoa to trees to elephants to the living Earth itself. …read more…
by Molly Young Brown, 2009
For many years I have noticed that reporters often talk about “getting back to normal” only a few days after major disasters (with the possible exception of 9/11). They seem to want to reassure us that, even though something disruptive and tragic has occurred, we will quickly get back to normal, and things will go on as before. They seem to imply that nothing will be changed as a result of the disaster; we will simply pick up the pieces and reassemble our lives. They imply that we are immune to real change—maybe even immune to learning, or transformation.
What is this “normal” that comes so highly valued? …read more…