Jessica Bockler, PhD
Alef Trust Founding Director
Jessica Bockler is an applied theatre practitioner and transpersonal psychologist with extensive experience of expressive arts facilitation, including participatory and educational theatre, as well as experimental movement and voice work. She specializes in embodied approaches to accessing creativity and imagination and she weaves this work into integrative and transpersonal practice for health and wellbeing. Jessica leads an arts-based mental wellbeing service called Creative Alternatives in the North West of the UK, which provides creative interventions to adults experiencing depression, stress and/or anxiety. The programme is one of the longest established social prescribing services in the UK and has won several awards for innovation in public service delivery.
Jessica serves as Programme Leader for the Master’s programme in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology. She teaches across a range of modules in integral psychology, creativity & transformation, research design, and applied transformative psychology, bringing spiritual perspectives to activism and social change. Jessica is the research lead of Alef Trust’s Conscious Community Initiative, which aims to galvanise projects for social change led by members of the Alef Trust community. The report on the first two years of the initiative and its research outcomes can be found here.
Jessica’s research interests include holistic and creative approaches to social change, integral psychology & practices, ritual & magical studies, and Jungian and archetypal psychology. She is on the academic advisory board of the Inner Development Goals initiative, and she contributes to working groups and publications in the UN’s Conscious Food Systems Alliance. She is also an active member of the research network and community of the Presencing Institute.
Jessica is a graduate member of the British Psychological Society and the special interest sections in Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness and Experiential Psychology. She is also a member of the Royal Society for Public Health, UK, and she is a fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, one of the UK’s oldest organisations championing social innovation.
