TRP with In-Person Intensive in Lisbon, Portugal, Fall-Winter 2024: Participant Questionnaire - The Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice

Your Name	Jacques Abelman
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Cohort Assignment	Europe Summer-Fall 2023, Cohort 2
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?	Educator, Landscape architect, advocate for mental health, lgbtq+ issues, recovery from addiction
2. What role do you see as yours to play?	I bring my lived experience as a survivor into my work as an educator and landscape architect. I actively design and educate around the ideas of including those who are different in to the classroom, and into the physical space of the landscape. My two main roles are educator and designer.
3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?	- Working as an artist / designer to materialize ideas that are currently in development - Designing and building therapeutic spaces on the level of landscape architecture and urbanism - Developing my voice as a creative professional - Developing my pedagogical approach to strengthen my presence as an educator - Making clear the link between human health and ecosystem health, how human recovery must happen within landscape recovery - Working on resilience and adaptation to climate change on the level of landscape architecture - Understanding the role of collective trauma, grief, and healing on the human and landscape level within climate change
4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?	- Spirituality - Physical health - Creativity
5. And for professional growth?	- Running my own unique practice as a landscape architect and artist (after a long burnout in academia as a professor) - Coaching - Consultancy - Advocacy
6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?	10 years of education (4 BA, 1 post bac, 1 MA, 4 MLA) 10 years combined practice in offices and teaching in architecture schools and university level 1 year recovery from substance abuse disorder 2 years recovery from academic burnout
7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?	Art, design, architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture Gardening and permaculture Buddhism, Chogyam Trungpa and Pema Chodron The Gaia Hypothesis (Lynn Margulis and Lovelock) Steps to and Ecology of Mind ( Bateson) Anti Oedipus and The Three Ecologies (Deluuze and Guattari)
8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?	I do not have a succinct answer to this question! I think my fundamental beliefs are framed by engaged Buddhism and the possibility and presence of spirituality in life. Aside from that, I believe that human life is an expression of the universe moving towards self consciousness as a fundamental direction of creation.
Date Created	August 30, 2023