Lighthouse Conversations: A Journey Toward Shared Transformation
Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Clinical Psychology Program continues its “Lighthouse Conversations.” These faculty-led talks are designed to address the question: How do we become the people called for by our time?
This year we are adding talks by our graduates and current students.
The series emerges from our commitment to respond to the multiple threats affecting us personally, within our communities, nationally-internationally, and as a species. We recognize that our circumstances are simultaneously external and internal. Global and cultural warfare, climate change, and social injustice threaten our world and communities. Simultaneously, these external burdens match internal crises: increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD, alongside an epidemic of loneliness as screens replace human connection.
We gather to talk about this and to help one another find our voice and our contribution.
Each of the clinical program’s faculty, our graduates, and our students are determined to contribute primarily through clinical practice and additionally through our research, scholarship, and lives as citizens. We recognize there are so many good ways of doing this and we start with cultivating belonging.
Pacifica has cultivated belonging through its cohort model for decades. We bring students together in groups that progress through the entire curriculum as a community. We begin by renewing our communal nature. Like mycelia, invisible connections form between staff, students, and faculty. We are cultivating our individual and shared emergent potentials. The whole is greater than its parts.
From the ground of belonging, the program nurtures each student’s unique vision. And we begin by offering our own. Faculty speakers will address the program’s distinctive approach to clinical practice, drawing from our roots in philosophy and the arts, extending into psychoanalytic thought and practice, and finding current expression in relational, emotion – focused, individual and group practice.
These Lighthouse Conversations invite listeners to participate in an emerging vision of psychology that integrates what’s going on in the world with what’s going on with each one of us. These are not separable. We do not divide the individual from the collective, or clinical practice from social transformation. In daunting times, we offer a path toward becoming practitioners, scholars, and citizens capable of meeting the complexities of our times.
Our Clinical Psychology program will host the following webinars:
April 1, 2026, 5-6:30pm PT- Dr. Phil Garrity & Dr. Sierra Dawn Warren
Depth-Oriented Psychedelic Research: Research with Soul in Mind
In this lighthouse conversation, we bring in two graduates of Pacifica clinical psychology program to discuss their experience in the program and their research into the opportunities of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
Dr. Phil Garrity will talk about his time at Pacifica Graduate Institute as an opportunity to deepen his longstanding commitment to supporting the mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing of people with serious and life-threatening illness and to respond to some of the urgencies of our moment. He describes the way in which the clinical psychology program felt like entering a living lineage: a community that takes the soul seriously and honors the wisdom of the unconscious. Through his dissertation, we weaves together Meister Eckhart’s apophatic mysticism and Jung’s analytical psychology into a hermeneutic framework for understanding psychedelic-assisted therapy at the end of life. His work emerges from a calling to bridge psychology, theology, and medicine—helping to articulate how experiences of ego death, surrender, and rebirth can transform how we meet suffering, mortality, and the sacred at the end of life. He can be reached at: phil.garrity@my.pacifica.edu.
In our conversation with Dr. Sierra Dawn Warren, we will explore ways to navigate psychedelic research as a doctoral student at PGI. Sierra will share insights into exploring the growing world of psychedelic-assisted therapy through a depth-oriented lens, highlighting ways that depth psychologists can make vital contributions to conversations around psychedelic theory, practice, research, and policy. Dr. Sierra will share insights from her recently published dissertation, Tending the Embodied Soul: Exploring The Reintegration of Psyche and Soma with the Support of Psilocybin, and some of the awe-inspiring synchronicities that she encountered throughout the research process. Sierra will offer reflections on how the clinical program at Pacifica equipped her to find her voice as a “wounded researcher” through core clinical courses, mentorship, and the cohort experience. She can be reached at: www.drsierradawn.com.
April 29, 2026, 5-6:30pm PT- Dr. Camille Jarmie
Stories of Belonging Lead to Our Shared Development
Dr. Camille Jarmie will host a conversation about the dynamic relationship between psychotherapy and citizenship. While psychotherapy is often thought of as “internal work” and while community engagement can be thought of as “external work,” the integration of these is wholly possible. This integration begins in stories of belonging which help us understand the reasons we become healers. Such stories then extend from the consulting room into our communities and into the fabric of our shared collective history. Rooted in our shared history we are learning to focus on our shared becoming, that is, the way we are all fragments of an emerging, shared future. Through story telling we can learn to tell this deeper story, to find the way in which we can fit ourselves back together, into a shared remedy, into a highly practical vocational and professional path that enables us to become the people called for by our time. Dr. Jarmie can be reached at: cjarmie@pacifica.edu.
May 27, 2026, 5-6:30pm PT- Dr. Peter T. Dunlap
Integrating Healing and Justice Values: Small group work activates our psychocultural development
This work integrates Jungian psychology with social activism through experimental training groups uniting community leaders, activists, and therapists. The approach recognizes that climate change, warfare, and mental health crises are interconnected and require that we don’t separate political from psychological problems.
We can talk about how to shift focus from traditional healing or justice work toward cultivating belonging and shared development, toward our mutual, “psychocultural development.” Rather than bridging political divides we are learning to explore the left’s own ideology, worldview, multigenerational roots, and unresolved traumas to strengthen progressive movements.
Whether left or right, this helps us to become more psychological and approach our differences with compassion. Engaging in this way, enables us to become more emotionally resilience, it reduces our inclination toward ideological reactivity, and it activates our “public emotional intelligence.” We can scale this work by training “psychocultural practitioners,” professionals bridging healing and justice values through small group practices. We can address our interconnected global challenges, extending therapeutic insights into community organizations and politics. Dr. Dunlap can be reached at: pdunlap@pacifica.edu.
June 24, 2026, 5-6:30pm PT- Drs. Brenda Murrow and Cris Scaglione
Engaging in Research with Soul: The emotional intelligence of the researcher
Drs. Brenda Murrow and Cris Scaglione will host this webinar focusing on the opportunities to engage in research practices from a depth psychological perspective. In the mainstream paradigm of empirical research, it can be a challenge to explore complex psychological phenomena. Psychological research began as small-scale qualitative and quantitative projects that enriched our understanding of various human experiences. Modern research is approaching a “gold standard” of mixed method paradigms that are more ethical, culturally and contextually embedded, and less reductionistic.
There are ways to responsibly and creatively explore what affects us and the world in which we find ourselves. Dr.’s Murrow and Scaglione will highlight their own interests in researching animal-assisted therapy, and repressed/recovered memory with rigorous experimental depth-psychological perspectives. Both projects share a focus on emotional foundations, (un)conscious processes, inter- and intra-personal self within and across species, and student projects can contribute to the larger research team goals. Dr. Murrow can be reached at: bmurrow@pacifica.edu. Dr. Scaglione can be reached at: cscaglione@pacifica.edu.
July 22, 2026, 5-6:30pm PT – Dr. Nicholas Furnari
Using the Present-Moment in Clinical Practice
This conversation opens a door to how different therapy approaches can work together to help patients. Dr. Nick Furnari will share his personal journey of learning about various therapy methods, especially for patients who weren’t making progress or were struggling with obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
What stood out overtime is that patient’s responded quite well when attention was brought to what they’re feeling in real time. This included: noticing anxiety, emotional blocks, and authentic feelings as they arise. This supported approaching therapy with these patients simultaneously from a traditional talk therapy approach in combination with more hands-on, active methods, while also paying close attention to the relationship between therapist and patient.
Dr. Furnari has developed his reputation in this territory and is sought out for teaching and training regarding obsessive-compulsive symptoms. He also has begun teaching other clinicians based on personal and clinical experience and dissertation research. He can be reached at: nickfurnari2@gmail.com.
Speech is a precondition for the existence of an individual psychology– it is through language that we emerge from symbiosis into subjectivity. When it functions properly, we hardly notice speaking more than we notice breathing. But we are not quite at home in our assumed language or our assumed subjectivity. The research presented here deals with instances of non-normalcy, wherein the traumatic effects of language, both gained and lost, on the subject become notable at the points where access to language is confounded.
August 12, 2026, 5:00-6:30 PT- Sarah Demmeter and Saansaya Éesh Morta
Usages and Failures of Language in Psychology
This panel presents two areas of research being conducted by Pacifica Clinical Psychology students surrounding the usages and failures of language. Sarah Dettmer provides a psychoanalytic perspective on Latin American surrealist writing and the usage of creative expression in the clinic. Sarah can be reached at; Sarah.Dettmer@my.pacifica.edu. Saansaya Éesh Morta presents qualitative research on the relational healing process accessed through Indigenous language learning for Indigenous people, specifically his own clinical work with the Lingìt (Tlingit) language.” Saansaya Éesh can be reached at: Dan.Morta@my.pacifica.edu.
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