Local, human-scale economies and food systems that honor the “triple bottom line”: people, planet, and profits.

Readers familiar with biologist Rupert Sheldrake's work might recognize that the Wheel is a description of the “morphic field” underlying human psychospiritual development.24 A morphic field is the underlying formative pattern of a self-organizing system, such as an oak, a bear, a human, an ecosystem, Earth, the Milky Way, or the universe. The

What I mean by place is similar to what ecologists mean by niche, which refers to the position or function of an organism within a community of plants and animals. A niche consists of a set of relationships with other creatures and with the land and sky and the waters. It's a particular node in a living web.

There are two general approaches to alleviating psychological problems: pathology-centered and wholeness-centered (holistic). (This is also true for medical problems more generally.) Using the pathology approach, we ask, “What symptoms of dysfunction is this person exhibiting, and what can be done to eliminate these symptoms and/or this

in the case of the human soul, a niche is highly differentiated both psychologically and ecologically. The human soul is a psycho-ecological niche, a niche whose essential features include the capacity for conscious self-awareness as well as social and ecological attributes. We humans occupy both a noosphere and an ecosphere. This is an essential

Through psychospiritual adventure, the adolescent comes to know what she was born to do, what gift she possesses to bring to the world, what sacred quality lives in her heart, and how she might arrive at her own unique way of loving and belonging.

Just as the universe evolves through moments of crisis, so do individual humans. Each of the nine life-stage passages on the Wheel evokes a crisis, a death-rebirth transition. And just as grace is an element in the universe's evolution, so it is in our personal unfolding.

A core hypothesis stemming from the holistic use of the Wheel is that the “mental health” needs of a large percentage of troubled children, teens, and older persons would be much better addressed by helping them with their unfinished developmental tasks from the first three life stages than by pathology-centered psychotherapies or

nature's intention for us is not static. This intent itself has been evolving from the very beginnings of the human story: how we are presently designed to grow whole is not quite the same as how we were designed to grow whole in the past. For example, one of the things I've learned from Thomas Berry is that modern science and cosmology require us