Ginny Anderson holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University, and an M.A. in psychology from New York University. She maintains an ecopsychology practice in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, and a psychotherapy practice near Menlo Park. Ginny draws upon 35 years of experience, in addition to her academic training, to help individuals and groups tap into inspiration, healing, and transformative possibilities through guidance to one’s own wisdom and through interactions in the natural world.

Mountain climbing in the Pacific Northwest as a teenager and young adult offered Ginny her earliest openings to the transformative spirit of nature. While raising five children, working full-time, and earning her doctorate, she found perspective, rejuvenation, and joy through family adventures in the forests and waters of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The human potential movement brought Ginny to the San Francisco Bay Area, and Stanford in particular. Ginny’s doctoral research (Self-Management of Internal Responses: Heart Rate Control) was inspired by Alexandra David-Neel’s work in Tibet with thought-forms. Ginny later traveled to sacred sites world-wide, trekking in Nepal and working deep in the mountains of the Andes with Peruvian shamans, including Americo Yabar and Q’ero elders. There, she received a number of shamanic initiations, including Hatun Carpay. Mindfulness meditation weaves a thread through her practices of shamanism, therapy, and work in nature.

Sacred places in the Andes have been a major inspiration for Ginny’s central project, “Circling San Francisco Bay,” through which she helps local residents explore and work with their own community’s sacred sites. Through public speaking engagements and her book, Circling San Francisco Bay: A Pilgrimage to Wild and Sacred Places, Ginny offers other communities inspiration and guidance in how to find the sacredness of the land wherever we find ourselves. Ginny makes an annual pilgrimage to a remote Canadian island for personal renewal, and to share with the women of that community, events related to transformation of consciousness.

Courageous women in Ginny’s ancestry foreshadowed the women’s movement in the messages of empowerment that came through her lineage. Ginny’s grandmother was a diviner, and served a wide community of men and women. Feminist spirituality shaped Ginny’s earliest encounters with spiritual ceremony, and guided her through some of the most challenging times in her life. Ginny is a founding member of a Bay Area women’s circle that spans more than two decades and through which she continues to explore women’s issues via myth, ritual, research, journeying, art, and music. This group also serves as a model of form and intent for workshops, spirituality retreats, and events she creates for her clients.