Transforming Personal Transformation
RE-membering Ourselves Back Into Life
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein
The personal transformation industry makes up a huge segment of the global economy. Our marketing, narratives and frameworks define our concepts of self and success, and pivotally shape the game dynamics of our world.
But why is there such a need for personal transformation? Why are we so urgent to change or better the self? Why are we in so much pain? The immensity of demand points to a deeper problem. We are disconnected from the power, beauty, and interconnectivity of life itself. Our civilization has made us lonely. It has taken our hands and our hearts out of our work and removed us from the village cultures, ecologies and mythopoetic landscapes that made us. In some ways, we have lost the plot on the meaning of our own existence.
To find our way forward we must transform transformation itself. It’s time to orchestrate the Great Re-membering. It’s time to restore our capacities for complex, richly contextualized, embodied relationships with each other, local places, our biosphere, and our shared society.
A Conundrum
In general, the ways we think about, talk about, enact, and transact personal transformation and wellness are “all about me.” Personal development obsessively focuses on self-optimization, empowerment, wealth, health, sex, beauty, and individual enlightenment. Self-interest rules the marketplace, while social goods such as community, reciprocity, belonging, ecological literacy and service take a back seat.
Meanwhile, our world burns.
Our most formidable personal and collective problems are fundamentally problems of relationship. From climate catastrophe to racism to political polarization to the ever-escalating mental health crisis, the things that plague us and threaten our very survival live at the level of “we.”
As an industry, we are spinning “I, me, mine” dreams when what we really need are “us, we, ours” dreams.
We can’t change our human systems if we don’t know how to connect with living systems. We can’t mend cultural divides when we don’t talk with each other. And we won’t recover from nightmares of addiction and loneliness when we don’t know how to become intimate or create shared meaning.
To heal ourselves and our world, we need to address the “delusion” of separation as a root cause and re-member ourselves back into life.
The Architecture of Separation
“But man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” ~Rachel Carson
The “elephant in the room” is that we have built our concepts of “personal” and “transformation” on an unconscious ideological foundation of separation. Separation assumes that humans are at the top of an evolutionary pyramid, that culture is separate from nature, and that individuation is the highest form of evolution.
Separation exists as a ubiquitous, invisible architecture of normative values and ways of knowing that shape everything in our society: how we view identity, how we construct success, how we enact markets, governance, and education, even how we conceive of and practice birth, maturation, and death.[1] It is the legacy of 10,000 years of progressive human development that abstracted culture from the places, ecologies, human-to-human and spiritual contexts in which our bodies, brains, and minds evolved, while moving us towards economic, political, and technological systems that isolate us from nature and atomize us from each other.[2]
Separation suggests: Matter is inert and dead; nature and the material world exist to serve humans; soul, if there is such a thing, is separate from the body; God may or may not be real, but if “he” is, then he exists apart from the world. Power is hierarchical. Individuals and entities (companies, nations, etc.) compete for dominance in the context of scarcity. You win or you lose. It’s a zero-sum game in which only the “fittest” survive and thrive.
The geometries of separation are the line, the arrow, the mountain, the pyramid, the skyscraper. Its bias is masculine, preferencing structure, planning, goals, measurability, control, consistent progress, and the predictability of complicated systems over process, presence, embodiment, mystery and complex systems or ways of knowing.
The goal is to get to the top, to get ahead, to ascend, to transcend, to win. The personal dream is to achieve individual freedom and success, regardless of how that dream impacts others or the environment. The collective dream is to sustain progress and development, regardless of collateral damage or externalized costs.
It is worth noting that these concepts have been ethically justified over the past 160 years by Social Darwinism — Herbert Spencer’s social theory based on Darwin’s concept of natural selection that superimposed a competitive notion of “survival of the fittest” onto social systems. While both colonialism and capitalism, as economic systems, tend to strongly aggregate power, we now know that Social Darwinism, as a framework to justify these tendencies, is both scientifically[3] and socially[4][5] inaccurate. It turns out that both ecological and social systems are more primarily collaborative than competitive, that fitness means many things depending on context, and furthermore, that, over the arc of many generations, fitness does not determine who survives in a diverse system.[6]
I’ll be blunt. I see separation, as a worldview, as the underlying cause and continuing catalyst of our most insidious personal and collective problems. It generates the stories and structures that perpetuate cancerous disconnects between humanity and nature and between individuals and society.
The antidote to separation is a worldview of wholeness — an approach to human existence grounded in the knowledge that our lives as part of a larger, implicate order that makes everything, including our own consciousness, possible.[7] Wholeness, as a way of living, defines the good life as the physical, ethical and spiritual process of living in harmony with life.
I believe (and I am hardly alone in this) that we must move in this new (and ancient) direction, and usher in a sea change in almost all aspects of human behavior or suffer dire consequences. It is therefore both the responsibility and the opportunity of the personal transformation industry to move culture in this direction. To do this, we must reimagine our maps, models, narratives, and value propositions in terms of belonging, interbeing, collaboration and community so that we can help people find their way back to life and regenerate our world.
Knowing Wholeness
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” ~Chief Seattle
Wholeness is an ancient way of knowing. Indigenous peoples the world over see the world through cosmologies that embrace the unity of all things and express a human responsibility to steward harmony between man, nature and the spirit realms.
Wholeness starts with these givens: all things have place and purpose; all things are interconnected; all things are sacred; all things change. Everything exists in context of everything else. Wisdom emerges through the lived experience of these truths.
In wholeness, we know other people, plants, animals, elements, and forces of nature as our relatives and guides. We know the reality of our souls; and feel unity with the souls of each thing and all things.
Wholeness assumes an infinite game. The object of the game is not to win but to keep the game going.
Geometries of wholeness include the circle, the web, the spiral, the trinity, the network, the constellation. Behaviors include collaboration, reciprocity, mutuality, praise, gratitude, restraint, and stewardship. Wholeness is both metaphorically and physically anchored in the reciprocal intelligence of ecosystems.
The dream of wholeness is one of belonging. An individual finds her place in the universe both through soul realization and through right relationship. Wholeness doesn’t polarize individuality and collectivity. It begins from the recognition of the oneness all things, then nurtures both tribe and individual within this context.
In wholeness, people understand that to be connected to their own souls requires tending rich and meaningful relationships with land, intergenerational community, ancestors, guardians, guides, and forces of nature. Initiation and rites of passage support maturation, wisdom, and responsibility. People know that they belong. They develop a strong “I” sense and a strong “we” sense simultaneously.
Wholeness balances the masculine and feminine. The feminine births life. How could it not be honored and protected? Wholeness upholds the irreplicable and primary value of the dark void that holds creation — the womb, fertility, fecundity, the body, and the sensual pleasure of life.
Our Indigenous Relatives have petitioned “the West” for centuries to remember these teachings essential to the deeper coherence of life. Their ways of knowing allowed their ancestors to create sustaining cultures long before western science, technology or economy existed. They know we are not the top of a pyramid but part of a Circle; and tending to the Circle through reciprocity, praise and ceremony nourishes the body, the soul, and the community.
We’re starting to realize that this way of thinking isn’t at all random. It’s scientific fact. Physics, ecology, and climate science consistently reveal the interdependence of an infinitely complex and fragile web of life.[8] Evolutionary biology shows that our brains, bodies, and minds evolved in community with other human beings and nature. Contemporary neuroscience affirms that we are biologically hardwired for belonging[9] — to each other, to nature and to our shared world(s), and that our mental health becomes severely compromised when starved of these connections.
We are more than individuated brains, bodies, and minds — we are social organisms who know self over time through complex webs of relationship. The ongoing process of interacting with human and more-than-human others co-regulates every aspect of our cognitive and emotional lives. Relational neurobiologist Dr. Daniel Seigel writes, “Living the lie that the self is separate is a form of impaired integration.” In other words, the very belief that we are separate from others or nature stunts wellbeing. Conversely nurturing the awareness that we are interconnected supports healing, health, kindness, and compassion. (!) We become better humans when we embrace other as part of self and choose to become skillful in connection. Wellbeing expands or contracts in proportion to the depth, integrity, and lovingness of our relationships.
Putting the Parts Back Together
“The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” ~Thomas Berry
While we yearn for wholeness, we can’t go backwards in time to some romanticized, unbroken past. Instead, we can re-member our way forward by creating frameworks for personal and collective transformation that resolve unconscious underpinning of separation through conscious architectures of wholeness. These frameworks build on the breadth, depth and pragmatism of indigenous wisdom while incorporating the insights of contemporary physics, ecology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience.
The word remember literally means “to put the parts back together,” and is an excellent way to describe the process of moving from separation to wholeness. Re-membering implies vast shifts in what we pay attention to. It implies revitalizing our ability to commune with each other and nature. Each interaction we have — with our own bodies and emotions, in an act of deep listening, in connecting with a growing plant, the wind, a local beach, or a crow — offers us an opportunity to “put the parts back together.”
By shifting our values, narratives, and practices we can re-member our relational capacities. Though this, we can experience and share wholeness. We can find our way back into belonging, intimacy, and empathy.
As we re-member, identity, the deep psycho-social architecture of our experience of self, shifts from a rigid “I/me/mine” into something more fluid, permeable and considerate of others. We learn to balance self-interest with common good, self-esteem with compassion, sovereignty with interbeing, self-authorship with collaboration, growth with sufficiency, inner truth with shared sense making. Me with we.
Instead of feeling alone and insecure, we know that we belong.
We tend both solitude and togetherness as complementary aspects of the path of maturation.
We understand that we are more fully free, expressed and empowered when we share both freedom and responsibility with others.
We expand into greater pleasure, meaning and purpose as we restore loops of reciprocity, respect, gratitude, and service to a greater whole.
Success gets redefined. We still dream of beautiful homes, exotic travels, and professional impact, but we come to understand that we aren’t measured by our bank accounts, possessions, promotions, or Instagram followers.
We re-know success as the sum-total of the life we live, the positive impacts we have and the love we share.
We come home to our souls, our bodies and the beauty and integrity of our relationships with living people and places.
As we re-member, we create communities of belonging. We consciously nurture collectives of place and purpose — some local, some global. We know ourselves as participants in many diverse and healthy circles where individuals thrive in connection and distributed networks generate trust, accountability, wellbeing, and change. We become more willing to meet the challenges of living and making choice with other people, because we know that there is no away. All our destinies are shared.
The overarching trajectory is towards a civilization in harmony with all of life. As we re-member, wholeness becomes the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual ground of culture upon which we weave the social fabric. We re-discover then learn to tend the undeniable interdependence we share with each other, our biosphere and the cosmos. As we lean into the unavoidable truth of unity in diversity, we will find our way forward through the challenges of this time.
How to Tend Wholeness — Six Principles for Remembering
Facilitating a whole-scale transition from separation to wholeness is an audacious goal. But I believe it’s a worthy True North if we want to co-create a sane, livable, and beautiful future.
To achieve this, I offer Six Principles for Remembering: re-contextualization, re-sacralization, embodiment, immanence, stewardship, and trauma wisdom. Together, these six principles are designed to help us put the parts back together by providing a framework for facilitating personal transformation in ways that re-vitalize the lived experience of wholeness.
I’ve chosen these six not because they are immediately obvious, but because they are meta-principles that house a rich complexity of sub-principles. For ease of reading, the main Six Principles are offered below in broad strokes. The sub-principles follow in the next article.
1. Re-contextualization — skills and practices that restore our bodies, brains, minds and currencies of attention to the contexts we share with other humans, other cultures, other living beings, our places and ecologies, the planet as a whole and our cosmos. Rich context generates rich meaning, sense-making, and the capacity for non-relativistic ethics.
2. Re-sacralization — bringing the sacred back into life. Restoring the ability to feel and relate with life as sacred. Sacredness is a function of communion with the unique value of each thing. To re-sacralize implies a shift towards seeing the irreplaceable meaning, worth, and purpose of each being within the web. Re-sacralization responds to and repairs deficits in appreciation for the beauty, majesty, and implicit value of the web of life.
3. Embodiment — welcoming what we can know and experience as whole-bodied beings who are deeply alive, mortal and sensually connected to the physical world.
4. Immanence –the quality of being within something, i.e., within the world. Immanence, as an ontological category, also refers to the interactions between things: interactions between subjects and objects and between selves and worlds. To further understand how I use the term, I recommend a more detailed study of Forrest Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics. His concept of Foundational Triplication fleshes out immanence, transcendence and omniscience as fundamental categories of existence.
5. Stewardship — acknowledging that humans are organisms nested within the macro-organism of the Earth and have a ecological and spiritual caretaker role to fulfil within this larger ecology.
6. Trauma Wisdom — trauma exists in most human bodies, brains and nervous systems. When we interact with others through the lens of trauma, we frequently cause more trauma. So, any work towards wholeness must directly name and work to heal physical, emotional, sexual, racial, class and ecological trauma. To a lesser or greater degree, there are systemic dimensions to any individual’s trauma. It is a recipe for insanity to try to create a culture of shared belonging while denying the very real structural conditions of racism, sexism and classism that systematically perpetuate the privilege of some at the expense of the many. These conditions are historical, multi-generational and ubiquitous. To deny them is to make the challenges many people face invisible. Healing and justice require visibility, care, reconciliation, repair and sometimes reparations. All of this must be addressed on the way to communities of belonging and a culture of wholeness.
In Conclusion
It’s time to transform personal transformation. In respond to the driving needs of our world, it’s time to move from outmoded ideas and practices founded in separation towards emergent, complex process of re-membering wholeness. I believe that, working together across a vast diversity of contexts and platforms, we can re-stitch the fabric of our shared world.
I offer these six root principles for your consideration and use: re-contextualization, re-sacralization, embodiment, immanence, stewardship and trauma wisdom. Think of these as first principles for creators of and participants in cultures of belonging — belonging to self, yes, but also belonging to a world worth calling home for ourselves and our children. One step at a time, together, we can remember ourselves back into life.
Endnotes
[1] For a nuanced and elegant exploration of “the Story of Separation” as an historical foundation for our current civilizational operating system, see Climate: A New Story, Charles Eisenstein.
[2] The beginning of “separation” can be historically mapped onto the advent of agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, which began the long arc of human domination and subjugation of nature. It has also been mapped onto the advent of debt-based economies. Or, it can be mapped onto the advent of axial religions, which decontextualized culture and spirituality from place, allowing for portability regardless of context. For further exploration, see Sapience, Yuval Hari.
[3] “The word “fittest” seldom means the strongest or the most aggressive. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most cooperative.” Micheel Le Page, New Scientist, 16 April 2008, https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13671-evolution-myths-survival-of-the-fittest-justifies-everyone-for-themselves/#ixzz74VCvCjwC
[4] The term “survival of the fittest,” was coined not by Darwin but by social philosopher, Herbert Spencer, who superimposed the assumption of competitive advantage onto Darwin’s concept of fitness and used it to justify hierarchical social structures. He wrote: “Society advances where its fittest members are allowed to assert their fitness with the least hindrance.” From the paper, The Flaws and Dissemination of Social Darwinism, by Michael Heeney, written for a course at Bryn Mawr College, https://serendipstudio.org/sci_cult/evolit/s05/web1/mheeney.html
[5] Economist Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize for economic science for her groundbreaking research demonstrating that local property could be effectively managed as a local commons without regulation by central authorities or privatization. “It was long unanimously held among economists that natural resources that were collectively used by their users would be over-exploited and destroyed in the long-term. Elinor Ostrom disproved this idea by conducting field studies on how people in small, local communities manage shared natural resources, such as pastures, fishing waters, and forests. She showed that when natural resources are jointly used by their users, in time, rules are established for how these are to be cared for and used in a way that is both economically and ecologically sustainable.” From the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2009/ostrom/facts/
[6] Fitness itself, as a fundamental determinant of survival over many generations, has been disproven. Stable diversity means that not only the fittest but also “the flattest “survive . Beardmore, R., Gudelj, I., Lipson, D. et al. Metabolic trade-offs and the maintenance of the fittest and the flattest. Nature 472, 342–346 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09905
[7] In Wholeness and the Implicate Order, the physicist David Bohm explores both the hard physics of wholeness and the implications of our persistent delusion of separation. He writes, “Some might say: ‘Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc., are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.’ But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought.”
[8] Fritjof Capra published The Web of Life in 1996. It “summarizes the mathematics of complexity and offers a synthesis of recent nonlinear theories of living systems that have dramatically increased our understanding of the key characteristics of life.” (https://www.fritjofcapra.net/books/) Due to the linear nature of scientific methodology, and the very complexity of ecological systems, it has been surprisingly difficult to prove the “web of life.” However, a cursory reading of the 2021 ICCP UN Climate Report reveals that everything is interconnected. The United Nations website headline reads: “‘Code red’ for human driven global heating, warns UN chief.” https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097362
[9] “The data suggests that we are profoundly shaped by our social environment and that we suffer greatly when our social bonds are threatened or severed. When this happens in childhood it can lead to long-term health and educational problems. We may not like the fact that we are wired such that our well-being depends on our connections with others, but the facts are the facts.” Gareth Cook, Scientific American, October 22, 2013, reviewing scientist Matthew Leiberman’s book, Social, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-are-wired-to-connect/ T
