Selene Kumin Vega, Ph.D. is a licensed psychotherapist (CA MFC #32604), workshop leader, and dancer as well as a Full Professor in Saybrook University‘s College of Integrative Medicine and Health Sciences. Selene’s work with movement and other experiential modalities has evolved over many years of teaching and developing approaches to facilitating self-exploration, connection, and transformation in workshops and courses.
Selene has been dancing since early childhood, studying ballet, modern dance, ethnic dance forms, theater, and later exploring yoga and other spiritually based systems of movement. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook University with a specialization in Consciousness and Spirituatlity, a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology with a specialization in Addictions from J.F.K. University, and a B.A. in Ritual and the Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
With Anodea Judith, Selene developed the 9-month Chakra Intensive (the basis for their book, The Sevenfold Journey: Reclaiming Mind, Body and Spirit Through the Chakras (translated into six languages) which they taught together from 1985 to 1997. Selene and Anodea have taught a weeklong Psychology of the Chakras training together annually at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health since 2001.
From Fall 1994 to Spring 1997 she explored her interest in psycho-spiritual emergence as the editor of the Spiritual Emergence Network Newsletter and joining with other therapists to present a seminar on the subject at UC Santa Cruz. Selene has used movement and ritual to deepen the understanding and experience of Ecopsychology. Her concerns in this area led her in 1993 to coordinate a group of Santa Cruz therapists exploring the relationships between therapy work and social/political/environmental issues and to write a regular bimonthly column on these issues. Since 1999, Selene has been working with the Self-Relations psychotherapy model developed by Stephen Gilligan, Ph.D., incorporating SR into her teaching and therapeutic work. Her chapter in the book Walking In Two Worlds: The Relational Self In Theory, Practice, And Community describes some of this work. She is currently assisting and teaching in Gilligan’s year-long Creative Mind Coach certification program. Selene has also been working together with Kylea Taylor, teaching and developing the work of Inner Ethics, based on Kylea’s book Ethics of Caring: Finding Right Relationship with Clients.
Through workshops, performances, and lectures, Selene has introduced movement and mind-body techniques to universities, hospitals, high schools, performing arts centers and psychospiritual growth centers throughout the U.S.A. and internationally. She has been adjunct faculty at Bastyr University and JFK University, associate core faculty at Sofia University (formerly the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology) and is a past president of the Santa Cruz Chapter of CAMFT (California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists).
At Saybrook University, Selene teaches courses, mentors students, and works with dissertation students in the Mind-Body Medicine graduate program in the College of Integrative Medicine & Health Sciences (CIMHS). She developed courses in Body-Oriented Approaches to Psychotherapy, Mind-Body-Spirit Applications in Psychotherapy, and the 4-day Mind-Body-Spirit Integration seminar, which debuted in January 2017 for incoming graduate students in CIMHS, and has been presented face-to-face eight times and will be presented for the fourth time in an online format for January 2022.
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New Office in San Francisco!
Shine a Light Counseling Center is please to merge with New Perspectives Center for Counseling. NPCC has been serving the San Francisco community for thirty years. Now NPCC is transitioning to become the San Francisco site for Shine a Light. NPCC will retain its name, character and history. For information about NPCC or counseling in San Francisco:
New Perspectives Center for Counseling (link)
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