As a graduate student in Religious Studies, Anthony Gallucci (MA Religious Studies, 2020) made a huge impact both academically and in the wider community of Naropa and Boulder. “I was welcomed by the BIPOC community and felt I had found a cohort to grow my future with.” He recalls “countless hours of organizing with student groups, advocating to administration, and standing up with my moral compass to evolve Naropa culture to reflect more accurately its current ethos. All in all, a few unique and well spent years of internal and academic work, which culminated in a more balanced beingness, a degree, and a career!”
Working with some of Naropa’s founders “helped me to shift into a more self-realized place. The intrapersonal and interpersonal work that I did while studying at Naropa influenced how I regulate my emotions and show up more fully as my authentic self in both my personal and/or professional life.”
Fortunately for us, Gallucci is building that professional life right here at Naropa, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology. His graduate courses include Diagnostic Psychopathology, Transpersonal Psychology, Research Methods, Jungian Psychology, and Multicultural Foundations of Counseling. In the undergraduate program, he has taught Peace Studies, Introduction to Psychology, Introduction to Jungian Psychology, Personality Theories, and Psychology of Meditation. He also introduced African-centered counselling to Naropa through a graduate course and workshops on Black psychology.
As an alumnus, he occupies “a unique location of remembering the lived experience of being a Naropa student while also being chartered with teaching them. The duality of the experiences has informed my awareness of the general challenges that students face. The awareness helps me to act in ways that minimize the challenges for the students. The students are valuable scholars, and they are also people with emotions, dreams, and spirit.”
He continues to contribute as a community organizer, activist, and author, with a particular interest in social equity, justice, and Dharma studies. In addition to curating the Boulder African American History Museum, Gallucci supports various BIPOC organizations and initiatives, including NAACP, Naropa’s Afrofuturism Movement, and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ). He is also the primary contributor to Boulder Weekly’s “Black in Boulder” column, highlighting empowered voices of African Americans in Boulder County.
Gallucci is a PhD student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, focusing on Jungian, Indigenous, and African scholarship, masculinity, and fathering. “Today I am focused on psychological research regarding the topics of Black masculinity, the Transpersonal Fatherhood experience, African plant medicine, and Afrocentric Transpersonalism,” he explains.
“The main purpose of my research is to use phenomenology to observe what aspects of single fathering are transpersonal. The potential findings could then be utilized to support the inclusion of parenting in the breadth of practices which are able to inspire the arising of transpersonal experiences such as: meditation, holotropic breathwork, love, hypnosis, shamanic journeys, active imagination, dream work, and more. The inclusion may benefit the field of psychotherapy by allowing space for parenting to be a valid transpersonal practice, which may elicit transpersonal mental experiences to arise. My dissertation study might profoundly impact both the disciplines of classical psychology and transpersonal psychology.”
All of this comes back to what Gallucci describes as his “magnum opus”—parenting his children. With his biological family of origin devastated by the US crack-cocaine epidemic, Gallucci was in foster care before being adopted. “My youth was full of experiences which were meant to displace my biology and insert the ethos of a lower middle-class American,” he writes. “Ultimately, however, my life work and gift to the world has been my commitment to my children as a father.” As a single parent with four children, Gallucci “acquires energy from parenting, which enlivens my mind and transmutes into spaciousness in my heart. The fruit of the labor of parenting is bright and makes more clear how an individual’s love, begetting a cease to oppression, can assist in the cessation of collective suffering.”
