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

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

In contrast to those presented in most other developmental models, the stages of life portrayed here are essentially independent of chronological age, biological development, cognitive ability, and social role. Rather, the progression from one stage to the next is spurred by the individual's progress with the specific psychological and spiritual ta

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

Arrested personal growth serves industrial “growth.” By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citi

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

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.

What makes you the individual you are is not your autonomy but your interdependent and communal relationship with everything else in nature. But having a specific and unique way of belonging to the world in no way implies that you necessarily know what that place is. Although you were born with the potential to occupy that place, you were not born

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

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.