Indigenous peoples have been able to identify and articulate their core values to broader audiences, especially the four R’s (Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity and Redistribution). These four R’s form the core of an emerging concept, Indigeneity.

well-being emerges when distinct aspects of our bodily lives, our relationships, and our planetary systems become linked together as an integrative, adaptive whole.

In my four books, The Developing Mind, Mindsight, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, and Aware, I proposed that mind is an emergent property of embodied and relational energy flow; this flow arises—emerges—within our skin-encased body and brain (embodied flow) and within our relationships with people and the planet (relational flow).

The good news about this identity lens is that we can adjust it—we don’t need to choose one level of identity and belonging over another because they are each real, and each have their importance.

Singing life in harmony. From a systems perspective, harmony emerges when differentiated parts become linked, just as a choir expresses its emergence through the different singers’ voices and the creation of harmonic intervals while also singing the same song. How might such integration at the heart of harmony become our shared goal for living on E

MWe, as a synergy of self that is not at the extremes of individualistic or collectivist cultures, as anthropologists have classified them in their studies, but as integrated self, identity, and belonging that honors differences while promoting compassionate, collaborative linkages.

we might find a way to have both a broad belonging and an integrated identity, which would allow for the wide focus of attention on our overall world while at the same time honoring the importance of the individual’s focus on inner experience.

Modern culture is not promoting an integrative self, identity, or belonging. This impairment to integration is leading to the accelerating chaos and rigidity in our personal, public, and planetary lives.

by understanding the true nature of ourselves and how our identities and belonging actually can be expanded beyond the body as a center of sensation, perspective, and agency, we come to a wider view of how we are in fact connected with one another as human beings and within nature as members of a broader belonging, an identity that is integrated wi