Uploaded July 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
An Interview with Dr. Jean Houston, by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.
Jean Houston is almost legendary in popular culture for her passionate engagement, poetic rhetoric, and her poignant appeal for transformation and belief in what she calls “the possible human,” also the title of one her nearly 30 books. One of her many current projects is the collaboration and production of a play, "Tonight in Dreamland,” a “serious comedy” as Houston refers to it, was written with Cheri Steinkellner, an award-winning writer and producer of a multitude of plays and TV shows (including the hit series, Cheers), and who is also currently a student in the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life program at Pacifica.
Having just returned from the “Sister Giant” conference in Washington D.C., where presented alongside Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson, Thom Hartmann, and Robert Thurman (among others), Houston’s passions were clearly stirred when she sat down to speak with me. That conference, also streamed live around the world, explored the intersection of spirituality and politics—a befitting arena for Houston’s long track record of advocating and fostering leadership and personal and social transformation. We are powerfully connected, she asserts, because we don’t just live in the universe; the universe also lives in us. We are called now, more than ever before, to use the incredible powers that exist in us, tapping into powers that we have rarely collectively been required to use.
In Washington, Houston recited a poem from playwright Christopher Fry (1907–2005): “Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now....” The poem goes on to proclaim, “The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move.” Houston uses the poem to allude to how we are “living in a time of the rising of the dark,” when principles of freedom and liberty and justice are in the process of being destroyed. Her displeasure at the new United States administration and all that it stands for is apparent. People are being tricked by “show business,” she asserts, where one can “say or do anything and people believe it.” It is an era of bait and switch.
However, this darkness also heralds an opportunity, a time of stupendous shift in the understanding of what is possible, she insists, pointing out that such seemingly cataclysmic events may potentially serve as training wheels. We have arrived on earth at the time of great recreation; a place of reinvention, for the culture, the government, ecology, and even ourselves. We are experiencing a time of potential new destiny where our finest creations, opportunities, understanding, ideas, and deeper purpose are increasingly coming alive and available. What this moment requires, then, is “a whole new order of problem solving and exploration of purpose.”
For more information, visit:
DepthInsights.com
OR
InstituteforSoulCenteredPsychologyAndCoaching.com
An Interview with Dr. Jean Houston, by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.
Jean Houston is almost legendary in popular culture for her passionate engagement, poetic rhetoric, and her poignant appeal for transformation and belief in what she calls “the possible human,” also the title of one her nearly 30 books. One of her many current projects is the collaboration and production of a play, "Tonight in Dreamland,” a “serious comedy” as Houston refers to it, was written with Cheri Steinkellner, an award-winning writer and producer of a multitude of plays and TV shows (including the hit series, Cheers), and who is also currently a student in the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life program at Pacifica.
Having just returned from the “Sister Giant” conference in Washington D.C., where presented alongside Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson, Thom Hartmann, and Robert Thurman (among others), Houston’s passions were clearly stirred when she sat down to speak with me. That conference, also streamed live around the world, explored the intersection of spirituality and politics—a befitting arena for Houston’s long track record of advocating and fostering leadership and personal and social transformation. We are powerfully connected, she asserts, because we don’t just live in the universe; the universe also lives in us. We are called now, more than ever before, to use the incredible powers that exist in us, tapping into powers that we have rarely collectively been required to use.
In Washington, Houston recited a poem from playwright Christopher Fry (1907–2005): “Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now....” The poem goes on to proclaim, “The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move.” Houston uses the poem to allude to how we are “living in a time of the rising of the dark,” when principles of freedom and liberty and justice are in the process of being destroyed. Her displeasure at the new United States administration and all that it stands for is apparent. People are being tricked by “show business,” she asserts, where one can “say or do anything and people believe it.” It is an era of bait and switch.
However, this darkness also heralds an opportunity, a time of stupendous shift in the understanding of what is possible, she insists, pointing out that such seemingly cataclysmic events may potentially serve as training wheels. We have arrived on earth at the time of great recreation; a place of reinvention, for the culture, the government, ecology, and even ourselves. We are experiencing a time of potential new destiny where our finest creations, opportunities, understanding, ideas, and deeper purpose are increasingly coming alive and available. What this moment requires, then, is “a whole new order of problem solving and exploration of purpose.”
For more information, visit:
DepthInsights.com
OR
InstituteforSoulCenteredPsychologyAndCoaching.com
