About
Sandy Greer, PhD, is the founder of Awakening to Possibility, Inc., a company whose focus is to help individuals discover their innate capacity to make a life-affirming difference in the world. Doing so, first of all, calls upon the awakening of inner qualities connected with our human potential. In turn, learning how to function more effectively from these higher qualities is how we grow towards our potential, through interactions in the wider world of family, community, work, and cross-cultural relationships. Doing so, as well, engages us to develop a sacred understanding of how human life is interrelated with all planetary life, and conduct ourselves accordingly.
Dr. Greer's professional experience is interdisciplinary and highly developed through many years of professional practice in diverse fields and extensive academic achievements. She also makes time for interludes of meditative reflection to synthesize life's external events and their meaning. Taking responsibility to do her own inner journey is a key element among her abilities in assisting other people to discover who they can be.
Her first calling was freelance journalism, in which Dr. Greer specialized in Aboriginal and related social justice issues. Working across cultures with First Nations, Metis and Inuit, offered life-changing opportunities, including travels from the Yukon Territory to Baffin Island, to discover her home land, Canada, through the first peoples. These encounters not only informed her about the history and contemporary realities of Aboriginal cultures. As well, they awakened a deep political awareness about Euro-western systems of thinking and institutions, and the broader recognition that each and every culture is limited from the fuller understanding of other cultures because of its specific cultural bias. She advocates, therefore, that exploring one's own cultural process of socialization is the key to negotiating a healthier interaction with other human cultures and nations.
The calling of journalism led to a second field of intensive activity - media literacy. As a media educator, Dr. Greer has facilitated workshops at more than twenty conferences around North America, for teachers, conflict resolution professionals and journalists. She also has received invitations to professional development seminars for teachers, and been invited to many classrooms as a guest speaker, at elementary and secondary schools and at universities. As a journalist and educational writer, her published work includes a number of articles on media literacy. Her work increasingly is cited in the writings of other scholars and authors.
Enchanted by the world of storytelling, and finding print journalism too restrictive, she entered the field of documentary filmmaking. Her first film Soop on Wheels was licensed to six Canadian broadcasters, as well as television abroad, invited to nine international film festivals and continues to sell through educational distributors. She has two, more recent, film projects in development.
Dr. Greer's experiential journey instilled a realization how our response to the world, whether as individuals or as nations, is not limited to our rationally constructed world views. But, much less understood and addressed in Euro-western society, is how our unconscious - psychologically and spiritually - shapes behaviours, attitudes, and the perception of self. That revelation culminates in her conviction today that what is essential to addressing a troubled world effectively is the evolution of human consciousness.
That recognition, however, required one further step, to interconnect the outer and inner life, through her own spiritual quest and healing journey, to address the serious issue of chronic burnout from overwork. For she became awakened to the imperative of finding a balance between being a change agent in the wider world and paying attention to one's own heart and soul.
All of her professional activities today - writing, workshops, teaching, mentoring, public speaking and filmmaking - are grounded in interdisciplinary studies, and training in the spiritual psychology of psychosynthesis, to which Dr. Greer adds her own insights in a particular formulation of transformative learning.
She loves to travel in her work, as a helper and lifelong co-learner among diverse groups of people. Her place of belonging and place of rejuvenation in recent years, however, is on a countryside homestead in Ontario. At her home, the world of nature is a constant teacher, to illustrate how all life sustains itself daily in an ever-changing world, through perseverance, adaptability, resilience, interdependence, participating in diversity, creativity and nurturance - lessons that she models and communicates through her professional activities.
