fbpx
 
Southwestern College Santa Fe, NM



Reflecting on Indigenous Peoples Day by Kira Jackson, SWC Student

Being in the northeast, the hustle and bustle of the cities domineers everything. Regionally the energy is impatient, it’s fast-paced, it’s strong-willed. There’s always people, TONS of traffic, and a hundred different moving parts. You were never really encouraged to put your feet into the grass and just allow yourself to be when growing up…
Continue reading


Residency for the Ph.D. Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership Program

Southwestern College & New Earth Institute launched their first Ph.D. program, called Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership. This program embodies three life-changing residency experiences that include Seeking, Gathering and Grounding, and Crossing the Threshold. As one of fifteen students, I attended the first residency of our first cohort, “Seeking,” in early September of 2022. On…
Continue reading


My first week at SWC by Tya Bussell -Student and Graduate Assistant

The anticipation from July to September was immense, knowing grad school was a big life step for me. I prepped my spare room that was my old high school bedroom into my new office/yoga space. It was a total room renovation. I strongly feel the energy of physical space arrangement and needed to make this…
Continue reading


Living in the Desert by Tya Bussell, SWC Student and Graduate Assistant

Ah, the sweet New Mexico landscape. Enchanting, delicious, wild, entertaining, clear, infinite. The home, I’ve called my own since I emerged from the womb. A place of lots of dirt and unending blue sky, fresh air, and S P A C E! !Òrale! I grew up in central NM, spanning from Estancia to ‘Burque…
Continue reading


Capstone from a Distance: Zine pages, blood, sweat, & tears

Our Capstone process underwent a new iteration this year. With the class split in half with students who are learning at a distance, and students who are local to Southwestern College, Jennifer Albright and I decided to have the distance students create their own process. Click here to see their zine, Pilgrimage. And read on…
Continue reading


2 new murals, a Capstone Process

Our Capstone process underwent a new iteration this year. With the class split in half with students who are learning at a distance, and students who are local to Southwestern College, Jennifer Albright and I decided to have the distance students create their own process. Click here to see the zine that was created by…
Continue reading


Murals, Relationship & Endings

As I move towards facilitating my last mural painting process at Southwestern College, I am thinking about relationships, legacy and love. Debbie Schroder and I have co-facilitated this process since 2013, and since the pandemic of 2020 the process has undergone many changes (see Group Murals During a Pandemic and Cracked Wide Open).  The mural…
Continue reading


Hope’s Tree & New Beginnings at SWC

Jennifer Albright Knash joined the Southwestern College family as department chair of the Art Therapy & Counseling program this past spring 2022. She has brought diplomacy, kindness, creativity and a trauma-informed approach to the Art Therapy / Counseling program. Please read her bio on the SWC website.  This link will lead you to Hope's Tree-…
Continue reading


Relatedness and Regeneration by Marna Hauk, PhD

adrienne maree brown, in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds “Developing your capacity for adaptation can mean assessing your default reactions to change, and whether those reactions create space for opportunity, possibility, and continuing to move towards your vision… I believe that regardless of what happens, there is an opportunity to move with intention—towards growth,…
Continue reading


Pleasure and the Erotic in a Time of Emotional Winter

Looking out my window here in Minnesota, I see a lovely blanket of shimmering snow covering the ground. Here and there, the dried brittle skeleton of a plant pushes through. It certainly has its own beauty, but it is harsh. The kind of beauty that will give you frostbite. The glitter of ice coating a…
Continue reading


Arts-Based Research: Symbols of Internalization and Identity

One of the required courses in our Art Therapy for Clinical Professionals Masters program is a 1-credit Arts-Based Research course. Students are asked to choose a symbol to engage with over the course of the quarter through arts-based inquiry and symbolic research. Part of the course asks students to identify their social location and multiple…
Continue reading


Calling All Visionaries!

Calling All visionaries! By Ann Filemyr, PhD. President and Founder/Director of the   in PhD Visionary Practice & Regenerative Leadership The new transdisciplinary PhD in Visionary Practice & Regenerative Leadership at Southwestern College in Santa Fe features a unique approach. This low residency doctoral degree is designed to support adult learners who seek to…
Continue reading


The Magic of Trans-Formation: Alchemy, Gender, and JKR  

  Trans- (prefix): From Latin. (1) On the other side of : across : through : beyond (2) so or such as to change or transfer Southwestern College offers a curriculum that initiates transformational learning. Meaning, through the process of education one will emerge differently than they arrived. The mantra of the institution is “transforming…
Continue reading


Integrating Brain, Body & Heart!

I attended the NEI Certificate Program class “Integrating Brain, Body & Heart Intelligence” taught by Tim Burns, M.A.  The course is one offered periodically in the Applied Interpersonal Neurobiology Certificate program here at Southwestern College. The weekend course took a dive into the science of the brain and nervous system to enable us to better…
Continue reading


An Alternative Higher Education

When I applied for the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at Southwestern, I knew I was seeking an alternative form of higher education. If the second half of the college’s name, “New Earth Institute,” didn’t give it away already, the school’s style of educating certainly does. “Transformational Learning”, a term used frequently by Southwestern, is…
Continue reading


Knowing when to say “when”

I attended the Ecotherapy workshop “Exploring Kinship Relations Using Ecotherapy and Art Therapy” and so enjoyed being out on campus spending time walking through the gardens, meditating in the labyrinth, and sitting by the desert fountains. It was definitely food for the soul and, even better, to be able to make art as well was…
Continue reading


Sexual Inheritance by Laura Rademacher, MA, LMFT, CST, CSTS

Fall is here and as we approach holidays that acknowledge the thinning of the veil between worlds and honor our loved ones who have passed (Día de los Muertos, Halloween, Samhain, All Hallows Eve, etc.) I’d like to tell you a ghost story from my own life. Years ago, I visited an Intuitive, planning to…
Continue reading


“Healing the Racial Complex in our American Psyche” by Kate Latimer, Program Chair MA in Counseling

  As I reflect on the recent guilty x3 verdict of Dereck Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd, I hope Mr. Floyd’s family feel some relief with the jury’s decision, but I know from experience working with survivors of violent crime that the outcome of a trial does not erase loss or stop the…
Continue reading


Beyond “Bad” News by Kate Latimer, Program Chair MA in Counseling

  I recently read a New York Times article titled, Bad News Bias, (published Wednesday, March 24, 2021) citing a recent study showing that press coverage of COVID-19 was overwhelmingly negative in the US, compared to other countries. The article’s author, David Leonhardt wrote, “When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage…
Continue reading


This Week’s Hard Walk

By Deborah Schroder   At Southwestern we believe that therapists should be grounded by their own connection to their spirituality. And we hold a wide view of what those spiritual practices and beliefs might be. Walking in nature, meditating, singing, being part of a faith community, so many varieties are represented in our diverse community. …
Continue reading


Finding My Inner Strength by Chelstina Rosera, SWC student

Finding My Inner Strength,  March 2121  Inner strength is this magical power we all have yet often forget it’s there. When you tap into it you can achieve great things. When I think of times in the past when I had to be strong, I envision instinctual animalistic power. I don’t think about what I…
Continue reading


back to top

Want to know about Southwestern College & New Earth Institute?

Enter your email and stay on top of things,