Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World

the concept of personal powers, which divides into three categories — abilities, knowledge, and values — each of which enables us to do things we could not otherwise, which is what renders them personal powers.12 Our soul powers are the ones that enable us to take our ultimate place.

True adulthood, or psychological maturity, has become an uncommon achievement in Western and Westernized societies, and genuine elderhood nearly nonexistent. Interwoven with arrested personal development, and perhaps inseparable from it, our everyday lives have drifted vast distances from our species’ original intimacy with the natural world and fr

The most inspiring work in the world today is being performed by those who have undergone this initiatory passage, those who have returned with precious resources for a soulcentric or life-sustaining society. This is the descent of which Thomas writes, the mature hero's journey described by mythologist Joseph Campbell, the descent to the goddess po

If it weren't for the existence of the ego, we wouldn't wonder about our true place. We would simply take it. It's our egos that do the wondering. Without egos, we would take our place instinctively, as everything else does, and like everything else, we would not know that we knew our place. And yet, if we didn't wonder about our place, if, that is

For four hundred years now, Cartesian thinking and language have gotten us into all sorts of difficulties — scientific, religious, spiritual, and educational. I'm joining the many others who are practicing an alternative way of thinking and speaking within psychology, philosophy, and ecology.6 So, for example, rather than say that we humans are phy

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

With the holistic approach, in contrast, dysfunction is not a central focus. We ask instead, “What qualities or capacities are missing from this person's embodiment of wholeness, and what can be done to cultivate these qualities or capacities?” The goal is to encourage and foster something functional and fulfilling rather than to remove something d

FIVE FACETS OF THE WHEEL The Wheel of Life represents not one but five things: A map or story of optimal human development A set of guidelines for individual psychological healing and wholing20 A design tool for creating healthy human communities and life-sustaining societies A deep cultural therapy — a way to heal and transform our existing human

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 symptom-suppressi