Dr. Elena Mustakova

Dr. Elena Mustakova is a social scientist, psychotherapist, spiritual educator, and former associate professor in transpersonal psychology whose recent book, "Global Unitive Healing: Integral Skills for Personal and Collective Transformation", has been called “a hymn to collective sanity”, and “a potentially life changing read for the individual and for the whole of modern society”. For three and a half decades, she has accompanied, mentored and coached diverse populations in North America, Europe, Africa and the Arab Peninsula on the path to developing resilient and mindful relationships to others and our world.

Dr. Mustakova has an interdisciplinary background which spans developmental and critical social psychology, literature, Eastern and Western philosophy, history of art, psycholinguistics and structural dimensions of meaning. Her re-thinking of the field of moral psychology received the 1995 Henry A. Murray Dissertation Award of Radcliffe College, Harvard, and the 1998 Outstanding Dissertation Award of the Association for Moral Education. Her 2003 book, Critical Consciousness, weaves together groundbreaking ideas promoting the evolution of consciousness. Norwich University Professor of psychology Melvin Miller described it as “a courageous tour de force on the order of Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being.” Her historical and evolutionary approach to the study of individual and collective consciousness emphasizes the spiritual integration of issues of personal growth and development with collective social change and global sustainability.

Mustakova served as tenured faculty in humanistic, transpersonal and spiritual psychology in the U.S., and taught in Switzerland, Zimbabwe, United Arab Emirates, and Bulgaria. She created opportunities for her graduate students to experience developmental, clinical and cross-cultural community psychology through serving marginalized communities. Her approach to educational praxis, which combines social science with the practical experience of Bahá'í spiritual and social justice communities worldwide, received the 2003 Carter Center Campus Community Initiative award.

Mustakova is senior editor of a comprehensive 2014 volume in Springer International Psychology series, Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era. APA PsycNet called it “a path-breaking resource, reframing the field in terms of its responsibility as a healing science and force for social justice”, focusing on “achieving a sustainable future, developing clinical practice suited to a global community, attaining global consciousness in the context of societal health, overcoming racism, sexism, and poverty, healing the causes of human suffering and environmental harm, conceptualizing and actualizing justice restoratively, and achieving a psychology of nonviolence.”

Dr. Mustakova’s current focus is on helping people understand our unique socio-historical reality and develop the skills needed in order to establish right relationships to ourselves, others, and society in this new and historic era of the emergence of planetary unity.