An Introduction to the Work of Animas Valley Institute

Well, folks, at last I am launching my Substack. I hope to post something at least a couple times a month. Many of my postings will also appear more or less at the same time on our Animas Valley Institute “Soulcraft Musings,” which you can access here. I encourage you to join our Animas list because our Musings also include the voices of our other Animas guides as well as soul-and-nature-oriented verse from familiar poets and those who may be new to you. Also, joining our list will provide you free access to several previous years of Soulcraft Musings. OK, now onto my first Substack post …

Preparing for the Descent While Living in Industrial Growth Society/ Trauma Culture [Collage]. Doug Van Houten

In these deeply troubling times, many of us are recognizing that the current diminishment and destruction of life on Earth is, ultimately, caused by unhealthy human societies. Consequently, increasing numbers of us are envisioning and working toward the generation or invention of healthier cultures. Current conversations on cultural change focus on topics such as new forms of democratic governance, regenerative agriculture, rights-of-nature laws, ecological restoration, community-centered economics, racial and social justice, and technologies that enhance life, technologies that empower rather than dominate. These are all, I believe, necessary and essential realms of societal reshaping. And they are all examples of what we might call outer change, alterations in our collective systems and structures.

In comparison, it seems a relatively small number of culture-change activists are focusing on what might be called inner change, on psychological or spiritual transformation — in other words, the development of healthier and more mature human beings. And, of those who do, few approach human development from a nature-based or ecocentric perspective, one that doesn’t separate us from our native entanglement with the rest of the Earth community.

At Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org), our mission is to contribute to the generation of healthier and more mature human societies by supporting what we call nature-based, full-spectrum human development (NB-FSHD).

At Animas, we believe that, in the long-term big picture, NB-FSHD is the central and single most important dimension of regenerative culture because everything we humans do is, after all, done by us, and everything we do is an expression of who we are, including the fullness and soundness of our individual human development. Healthier human societies require human beings who are healthy psychologically, spiritually, socially, and ecologically. Healthier human societies are generated by healthy humans. And it’s equally true the other way around: Healthier humans are what we get when we are born into, raised in, and come of age in healthier societies. Healthy societies and healthy individuals dependently co-arise together.

Yet, over the past 40 years, I’ve come to believe that what contemporary societies understand as healthy human development is missing a lot — and is misguided in some essential ways. It seems that over a very long period — probably thousands of years — most current human societies have lost touch with what constitutes optimal human development. The vast majority of contemporary human communities are no longer designed to support NB-FSHD.

But we can learn again how to do this. At Animas Valley Institute, this is the work to which we are dedicated. Our aspiration is to be a generative cauldron of visionary revolution, planetary evolution, human rejuvenation, and cultural renaissance.

To introduce you to our work, I want to highlight some of the distinctions we, at Animas, have come to believe are essential for doing a better job with human development and to distinguish our approach from what is more commonly found in most contemporary human societies. I’ve come to believe, reluctantly, that many of the most bedrock assumptions that modernity makes about humans and human development are actually wrong. In this light, please consider the following 18 distinctions. I gathered these just last month in preparation for a presentation to the Centre for Climate Psychology.

1. Healing in contrast to wholing. By “wholing,” I mean the cultivation of our innate human wholeness, which at Animas we identify in terms of what we call the four facets of the Self — that’s “Self” with a capital “S”. Our names for the four facets are the Nurturing Generative Adult, the Innocent/Sage, the Wild Indigenous One, and the Dark Muse-Beloved. (These four facets of wholeness are fully described in Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche.) Sometimes we refer to this healing versus wholing distinction as psychotherapy versus soulcraft. Healing and wholing are very different approaches to human development but are fully complementary. At Animas, we facilitate both healing and wholing but emphasize wholing because it is mostly neglected in modernity. We each need easy and reliable access to all four facets of wholeness in order to mature, to love, to heal ourselves and others, to lead, to participate creatively in the restoration of our world, to undergo the journey of soul initiation, and to competently use all four of our innate windows of human knowing: our full-bodied feeling, deep imagination, full-presence sensing, and heart-centered thinking. We can’t access or help build a new world without the cultivation of all four facets of our wholeness. Healing by itself does not create life-enhancing societal change, although it does enhance our adaptation to current circumstances. Through the cultivation of our wholeness, on the other hand, we can catalyze cultural innovation and renaissance. [This healing versus wholing distinction is related to the distinction between a double-negative approach to human development (reducing or eliminating undesirable conditions like psychological and behavioral symptoms) versus positive or wellness approaches to human development.] Most contemporary societies seem to be designed to suppress our conscious and embodied access to the four facets of our human wholeness. An egocentric, Dominator, patho-adolescent society cannot be sustained if even a large minority of its citizens have access to their innate wholeness. A corollary: Wholing is revolutionary because it is subversive to Dominator society. Psychotherapy by itself is, too often, consistent with and even supportive of modernity’s Business-as-Usual.

2. Being healed by someone else in contrast to healing ourselves. Self-healing, I believe, is deeper and longer lasting than being healed by another. The capacity to Self-heal, however, requires adequate wholeness because the healer in Self-healing is the person’s four-faceted Self, which must be adequately cultivated before Self-healing is possible. (To call it “Self-healing” makes it sound like this is done alone in isolation. But ideally, we Self-heal in the context of our most important relationships, in community. The resources of our fourfold Self are required for Self-healing but, preferably, our closest companions (human and otherwise) are supporting us to Self-heal. We share with one another our successes and challenges with Self-healing, ask for and offer support to one another, and practice and assess our Self-healing capacities by embodying our healed or healing selves during our daily interactions with each other.) We might wonder what percentage of contemporary people are capable of Self-healing. It may be more than I fear, but most people with adequate wholeness would need some coaching to be able to Self-heal because it’s not a possibility found on the map of contemporary societies. For support, see Wild Mind or contact an Animas mentor (email us at soulcraft@animas.org and ask for our current list of mentors).

3. Psychological healing as the reduction or elimination of psychological and behavioral symptoms (including the symptoms of trauma) versus psychological healing as the embrace of our Inner Protectors and our cultivation of gratitude for their psychosocial survival strategies. This second kind of healing is what I mean by Self-healing (again, that’s “Self” with capital “S”). And, again, I believe that this second kind of healing goes deeper and lasts longer than healing provided or supported by another. The capacity for Self-healing travels with us because the Self, of course, does, while our therapist usually doesn’t. (The process of Self-healing and the four groups of Inner Protectors are fully described in Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche.)

4. Egocentric and anthropocentric forms of healing and wholing in contrast to ecocentric forms of healing and wholing. Egocentric and anthropocentric healing and wholing treat the individual human as a separate being rather than as a part of a larger, interconnected ecological and relational system. Healthy humans, healthy human communities, and healthy Earth communities — all three are co-generating. Ecocentric forms of healing and wholing include our active participation in the healing and wholing of the natural world, the greater web of life. Ecocentric forms of healing and wholing also incorporate ways for us to be in relationship with the natural world as itself a healer and agent of wholeness (in addition to other humans as our healers, our guides to wholeness, and our Self-healing coaches).

5. Healing and wholing considered together as a single realm in contrast to addressing the developmental tasks of our human life stages. These are not at all the same things. In contemporary approaches to human development or psychotherapy, there’s little explicit focus on supporting people to address the developmental tasks of their current life stage or to address the most unfinished tasks from earlier stages, especially ecocentric and soulcentric versions of human life stages. (At Animas, our experience is that, in modernity, there is, for most all of us, a very significant degree of unfinished developmental tasks from childhood and early adolescence.) This is in part due to the lack of awareness of what such optimal human life stages look like, in the first place, including what the developmental tasks of those stages might be. At Animas, we’ve generated a nature-based, eight-stage model of human development that we call the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (fully described in Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World). Addressing the developmental tasks of these ecocentric and soulcentric stages may very well be even more important than healing or wholing — although it’s true that people often have trouble addressing developmental tasks precisely due to psychological woundings and a lack of personal wholeness. Healing, wholing, and developmental maturation go hand in hand. The problem, again, is that most contemporary human development guides, including parents and educators, neglect or are unaware of eco-soulcentric developmental tasks. There’s an implicit assumption that developmental progress is simply or primarily age-dependent and that everyone proceeds automatically to the next life stage simply by getting older. But … what if the majority of contemporary humans actually get stuck in the psychological stage of early adolescence and never reach even late adolescence, no less true adulthood and elderhood?) [This fifth distinction is also related to the distinction between individual-based approaches to human development versus community-based and relationship-based approaches.]

6. (Implicit in distinction #5) Contemporary understandings of stages of human development versus the stages of human life as understood in the framework of nature-based, full-spectrum human development (NB-FSHD). Most contemporary models of human development are based on empirical studies of “average” contemporary humans. In contrast, our Animas understanding of NB-FSHD is based on two things: nature’s own templates of wholeness as seen, for example, in the patterns and rhythms observed in the four cardinal directions, the four times of day, and the four seasons and, second, similar in this way to Maslow’s approach, the study of the healthiest humans we can find.

7. Rites of passage, on the one hand, and addressing the developmental tasks of our life stages, on the other: In other words, do we focus on the passages between stages or on the stages themselves? Or both? I believe that what happens during our life stages — or, rather, what ought to happen — is quite a bit more important than the passages. After all, the stages encompass the majority of life; the passages are relatively brief. (Life-stage passages and their associated rites of passage are discussed in depth in Nature and the Human Soul.)

8. Systemic human development oppression (SHDO) versus full-spectrum human development (FSHD): SHDO operates through social, educational, religious, and political systems that suppress our full and natural humanity. From where I’m sitting, SHDO appears to be the fundamental structure of modernity — arrested human development is modernity’s actual intended outcome (because egocentric consumer-conformist society is not possible in communities of mature humans). I believe that SHDO is at the root of all other oppressions: racial, class, ethnic, gender, and religious. These other forms of oppression will not be fully overcome until we have adequately dismantled SHDO and replaced it with FSHD. [Consider the following signs of systemic human development oppression and cultural breakdown now found globally: a widespread questioning of self-worth; the impoverishment of purpose and meaning; existential anxiety and a sense of helplessness; pervasive emotional, moral, and spiritual crises; social fragmentation and an erosion of interpersonal trust; pervasive dynamics of deception, propaganda, and manipulation; the weakening of traditional values such as empathy and community; meaningless, repetitive labor and jobs that are mind-numbing and maturation-suppressing; enslavement and servitude; social and racial injustice and oppression; anthropogenic ecological disasters and climate disruption; the development and use of weapons of mass destructive, including bio-weapons, germ warfare, and engineered pathogens; totalitarianism and the rise of surveillance societies.]

9. The personal ambitions of most contemporary humans in industrialized societies versus primary human satisfactions: The ambitions of too many humans today (not counting the billions who are simply struggling to survive) seem too often to be what has been called “compensatory ambitions” or “pseudo-satisfiers” — for example, the ambitions to shop, acquire, accumulate wealth, to “win” or gain power over others, ambitions for fame or “higher” socioeconomic or political status or for what might appear to be glamorous memberships. Primary human satisfactions, in contrast, include making and deepening friendships, singing and dancing together, art-making, praising the magic and miracles of this world, storytelling, preparing and sharing meals, creating and participating in ceremonies to grieve our losses and to celebrate our good fortune, making love, the joy of growing children and in turn being grown by them, our daily awareness of grace received, and, most fundamentally, the arts of not just sustaining but enhancing the life of the more-than-human world (the world that includes us humans but so much more.)

10. Contemporary understandings of adulthood versus what I call soul-initiated adulthood. More generally: Contemporary understandings of maturity (what Steffi Bednarek of the Centre for Climate Psychology refers to as “being functional, productive, and socially acceptable — a form of adaptation to a world that is unraveling”) in contrast with ecocentric and soulcentric understandings of maturity. These two continua of maturity are different and mostly unrelated but both valid. The eco-soulcentric continuum of maturity might be eco-poetically approached by asking: What kind of human would a buffalo experience as mature? Or that a wild river would? Or that human children seven generations from now would as they look longingly back at us from the future, hoping we’ll make the choices that will allow them to be born someday? At Animas, we define an adult as someone who experiences themself, first and foremost, as a member of the Earth community, who has had one or more revelatory experiences of their unique place in that ecological community, and who is embodying that unique place as a gift to their people and to the Earth community. (All this is discussed in depth in The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries.)

11. The difference between an older and a true elder. (See Nature and the Human Soul for an in-depth definition and portrait of true elderhood.)

12. Contemporary egocentric communities versus healthy, mature, ecocentric communities or in Rhianne Eisler’s words: Dominator societies versus Partnership societies) (or, as I see it, patho-adolescent societies versus societies with 25% true adults and 25% genuine elders).

13. A life-destroying society versus a life-sustaining society versus a life-enhancing society (which is to say, an egocentric patho-adolescent society versus a healthy ecocentric adolescent society versus a truly mature society). To get from our current life-destroying societies to possible future life-enhancing societies, we will first have to create life-sustaining societies, which will require the creation of a great variety of transitional social systems and structures (all of them ecocentric) not found in because not needed in mature societies of the past, present, or future. Plans and strategies for navigating this long road is what I call The Chrysalis Project.

14. Psychological or theological definitions of soul versus an ecological definition of soul. At Animas, we define soul as the unique ecological niche of any creature or species. Psychological and theological definitions of soul tend to see soul as some kind of object. An ecological definition of soul sees soul as a set of relationships. (See Soulcraft, Nature and the Human Soul, and/or The Journey of Soul Initiation).

15. Eco-niche versus mythopoetic identity versus “soul names” versus delivery systems for soul. Mythopoetic identity is the metaphorical way a person on their journey of soul initiation or a soul-initiated adult learns to consciously understand their unique ecological niche. A “soul name” is a shorthand way of pointing to mythopoetic identity. A delivery system for soul is a social role, vocation, or creative project that enables an initiated adult to embody their ecological niche. (See The Journey of Soul Initiation.)

16. Egocentric leadership versus ecocentric leadership versus soul-initiated leadership versus councils of true elders.

17. Models versus theories: A model (also known as a conceptual system) identifies the range of possible facts within a certain domain (like the domain of human development). A model is a pre-empirical, theory-neutral framework that defines and organizes essential concepts with the goal of mapping out all the possible facts within that domain. A theory, in contrast, is an empirical, falsifiable explanation that attempts to help us understand specific observed phenomena. Our Animas maps are primarily models, not theories. If the conceptual models available to us for human development are inadequate — if they do not afford us systematic, coherent, and comprehensible access to all the possibilities inherent in growing whole as a human person, we end up in muddles when thinking about, conversing about, theorizing about, and attempting to be in relationship with our own psyches, each other, and the more-than-human world. Conceptual inadequacy is, I believe, a common phenomenon in modern (Western) psychology. The reason it is common is SHDO (systemic human development oppression).

18. Models versus praxis: To support our own and others’ nature-based, full-spectrum human development (NB-FSHD), we need specific effective practices and the skills to use those practices. My four books are filled with such practices. But every bit as much as a set of excellent practices, we need models that help us see which practices would best serve which people or communities under which circumstances. I believe our models are Animas’ primary contribution to human development and to the generation of healthier and more mature human societies. These models are described in Nature and the Human Soul (an eight-stage model of optimal, nature-based human development as well as an eight-stage model of the limited, egocentric human development typical in modernity), in Wild Mind (a nature-based model of the human psyche including the four innate facets of wholeness as well as a model of the four clusters of our Inner Protectors), and in The Journey of Soul Initiation (a five-phase model of the Descent to Soul).

We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but “inscendence.”

The entrancement with industrial civilization . . . must be considered as a profound cultural disorientation. It can be dealt with only by a corresponding deep cultural therapy.

— THOMAS BERRY, The Dream of the Earth

Animas Valley Institute

www.animas.org

soulcraft@animas.org