Healing the Shadow of Stolen Land: Jung, Steiner, Yunkaporta & Macy on Restoring Peace

By Dr Demeter (Emily Samuels-Ballantyne)

The Wound Beneath Our Feet

The phrase “No peace on stolen land” echoes across our world, painted on banners, whispered in prayer circles, shouted at rallies. It speaks an uncompromising truth: peace cannot be built on a foundation of denial. Every field, city, and coastline that carries the memory of dispossession holds an unhealed psychic and spiritual wound.

But beneath this cry is also a question: Can peace be restored, and if so, how? To explore this question through a healing lens, we must descend into the deeper currents of psyche, spirit, and story. I will weave in here four teachers: Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Joanna Macy, and each of them offer a path not of forgetting, but of remembering. By remembering I mean, remembering what we are part of, and what we are responsible for.

Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Joanna Macy by Regen Era Design Studio

Firstly, lets explore Jung through his lens of The Shadow of Civilisation thesis. Carl Jung reminds us that what we refuse to face becomes the shadow that governs us. The colonial enterprise was not only a material conquest; it was a projection of the Western psyche’s own disowned parts: the feminine, the Indigenous, the Earth herself. We see and feel this fracture everywhere today. 

“No peace on stolen land” therefore mirrors a deeper unrest within consciousness. Jung would call for an individuation at a cultural scale…a process in which societies, not just individuals, make the unconscious conscious. There is a great responsibility of traditional and social media platforms to embrace these principles. Research shows much media these days is binary and performative. Healing the shadow means acknowledging complicity, integrating grief, and transforming guilt into responsibility and it asks that we replace domination with dialogue, not only with one another, but with the land itself.

Secondly I weave in Steiner and his insight called “The Spiritual Law of Balance”. For Rudolf Steiner, the Earth is not an object but a living being, so to take from Gaia without spiritual reciprocity creates karmic imbalance, which equates to a kind of moral drought. He urged humanity to develop a “threefold social order”: cultural freedom, political equality, and economic fraternity.

Applied to our context, this means:

1. Cultural repair through reverence and education of the spirit. 

2. Political repair through self-determination and honest dialogue.

3. Economic repair through transforming ownership into stewardship.

To Steiner, peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the “presence of balance”, between matter and spirit, between taking and giving, between human will and cosmic rhythm.

Thirdly, I weave in Yunkaporta, and his tapestry offering of Custodial Mind and Pattern Thinking. 

First Nations philosopher Tyson Yunkaporta takes the conversation further by dissolving the illusion of ownership itself. In his worldview, land is not a thing to be stolen or possessed: it is a web of relationships. What colonisation breaks is not just geography, but the pattern which is the living,  intricate, reciprocal law that keeps Country alive.

Healing, then, is the restoration of right relationship “custodial mind”. We are in essence custodians of land, layer, upon, layer upon layer.  It is not about guilt or transaction, but participation in the story of place. Yunkaporta teaches that peace is not achieved through comfort, but through correct relation, through ceremony, conversation, and care. When humans remember themselves as one thread in a living system, the land begins to remember them in return.

Fourth in the foundational woven offering I bring today, is Macy and her concept of “The Work That Reconnects”. She is an Eco-philosopher who now brings us the missing piece: the praxis of collective transformation. By praxis I mean idea/theory in practice! She names our time as the “The Great Turning”, a transition from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilisation.

Macy invites us to feel the world’s suffering as our own, not as despair but as a doorway. Her “Work That Reconnects” moves through four stages:

1. Coming from Gratitude and anchoring in what still lives.

2. Honouring Our Pain for the World: facing grief and rage together (this is also a community engagement methodology P2P if you were interested to read more on it). 

3. Seeing with New Eyes: by recognising interbeing and systemic wholeness.

4. Going Forth: by acting from compassion and courage.

Through Macy’s lens, “No peace on stolen land” becomes not an accusation, but an initiation, a call to transmute sorrow into sacred action.

From Sorrow and Shadow to Soil: A Praxis Offering

At Magical Farm Tasmania, we live these teachings as daily practice. Each Thursday (Jupiter Day), our Landcare Group gathers to tend the earth, learn herbal wisdom, and farm in rhythm with the cosmos. Through biodynamic agriculture, we explore the sevenfold patterns of life, the seven planets, chakras, and days of the week, as mirrors of wholeness. Here, peace is not an abstract hope but an embodied rhythm: composting grief into growth, listening to soil microbes as teachers.

Toward a Regenerative Reconciliation

Through the lenses of Jung, Steiner, Yunkaporta, and Macy, peace emerges as a “living verb”,  a process of becoming whole again.

• Psychic repair (Jung) integrates the shadow.

• Spiritual repair (Steiner) restores balance.

• Custodial repair (Yunkaporta) renews relationship.

• Collective repair (Macy) transforms grief into generative action.

Together, they form a mandala of healing, a compass for those who seek not just to protest the past, but to re-pattern the future.

Conclusion: Peace as Praxis

To heal the statement “No peace on stolen land” is not to soften its truth, but to evolve its meaning. Peace cannot be declared, it must be CULITVATED.

When we acknowledge the shadow, honour our pain, reconnect with the living Earth, and act from love, peace becomes a praxis, a daily tending of relationship between people, place, and planet.

At Magical Farm, we hold this as both philosophy and practice: Healing the land is healing the self and restoring the pattern is restoring peace.

Join us at Magical Farm Tasmania to volunteer, participate in our YoFence Immersion, www.magicalfarm.org or explore regenerative living through the Regen Era Design Studio. www.regeneradesign.org

“Together, we can re-imagine peace, not as a treaty signed upon the Earth, but as a seed sown within here”

— Dr Demeter

Imagining Healing: The Third Path for Tasmania

Tasmania is at a crossroads and there is a great opportunity to make this beautiful island a place of renewal. The debates that dominate our island aquaculture expansion, forestry, tourism, renewable energy, are often framed in binaries: jobs versus environment, growth versus preservation, progress versus collapse. These debates are real, but when they harden into opposites, something deeper is lost.

Rudolf Steiner called this the hardening of the soul. In modern life, thinking becomes mechanic and abstract, feeling grows dulled, and willingness is outsourced to bureaucracies and machines. Carl Jung described the same danger in psychological terms: when opposites split apart, we risk paralysis or rage unless we awaken the Third, a symbolic organ of integration, a space that can hold tension long enough for something new, whole, and healing to emerge. The challenge before us is not just political or economic but tis spiritual and psychological. Tasmania needs the Third. Not neutrality, not compromise, but the courage to imagine beyond the binary. 

The Third as Social Practice

The Third is not a theory, it is in fact a lived practice. It shows up in a community food hub, a biodynamic farm, a seed library, a convivial festival and even a thought process that holds complexity without jumping to a conclusion. ‘Third’ places and mindset are where imagination, justice, and reciprocity can breathe together. Third ways of thinking, being and doing act like acupuncture points in the social body: small but intentional mind and/or physical spaces that release vitality into the whole. Steiner’s vision of the threefold social organism gives us a map. A healthy society balances:

• Cultural freedom: imagination, education, and spirit free to unfold.

• Political equity: governance grounded in fairness and rights.

• Economic mutuality: livelihoods based on reciprocity, not extraction.

Applied locally, these principles are deeply practical. They remind us that social healing begins not with abstract strategies but with lived experiments, participatory action, and transparent processes that keep head, heart, and hands together. I love the deep green design Prof Seaton Baxter (from Scotland) theory called “way of the prototype” - much of my work is based around this methodology. 

Local Government: From Strategy to Practice

Nowhere is this more urgent than in local government. Councils produce endless strategies, reports, and consultation papers, yet communities often see little translation into practice. Strategy is not an outcome and true outcomes happen when policies take form in gardens, services, cultural initiatives, housing solutions:  the fabric of everyday life. Fair local government means shifting from paperwork to practice. This doesn’t mean abandoning strategies, but holding them accountable to lived results. People in communities (rate payers) deserve transparency: to trace how decisions are made, where funds are spent, and how outcomes are measured. Without this, government risks serving mechanical and abstracted systems instead of people they are there to serve.

Imagine a local government that functions as an enabler, not just an administrator? Councils can support neighbourhood initiatives, co-design projects with residents, and facilitate cooperation across sectors. In this way, governance itself becomes a Third space: not caught between bureaucracy, process and populism, but a living practice that restores vitality to communities. Tasmania, small enough to be nimble and rich enough in imagination, has the potential to pioneer this. If we can re-root governance in action, ensure transparency, and honour community-led practice, we can show how local government can become not just functional, but regenerative.

Magical Farm Tasmania Festive Agriculture event 2025

Feminised Intelligence and Plant Allies

Ecofeminist thinkers remind us that what the world needs is not more domination but feminised intelligence: cyclical, regenerative, relational, rooted in care for land and community. This intelligence is already alive in Tasmania in community gardens, co-ops, and creative economies but it needs recognition, resourcing, and policy support. Even plants point the way. Yarrow teaches us to heal what is torn and to hold paradox. Rosemary sharpens memory and discernment. Nettle brings courage and vitality. Together they embody what the Third requires: integration, clarity, and action.

The task before us is not neutrality but imagination, beyond binaries. This heart shaped island Tasmania must reawaken the Third, and inspire other places to do the same. The Third is a space where grief can be honoured, paradox can be held, and new forms of life can be designed. The future of this island will not be built by choosing sides in collapse. It will be built in the Third space where we move from abstraction to life systems and community practice becomes the foundation of renewal.