we can begin Self-healing; and Self-healing accelerates our capacity for wholing. Wholing and healing reinforce each other.
Personal wholing and healing, however, require more than simply developing relationships between parts of our own psyches and between our selves and other humans. Psychological wholeness also necessitates a mature and reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world of which we are members. We are served therapeutically and in so many other ways by nature, yes, but it is also vital that we each step up to our responsibility and opportunity to protect and serve the natural world. We can do this in any number of ways, including planting trees, preserving and restoring habitat, eliminating waste and pollution, protesting ecological crimes, and helping to change the laws, policies, and customs that enable such crimes. Engaging in the good hard work of such service may, in fact, be one of the most effective paths to our individual psychological healing — for many people, ecological service alone (including service to our fellow humans) may be more therapeutic than psychotherapy.21
A true adult is in conscious relationship and service to our mysterious and endangered world and, more generally, is a creative, joyful, and contributing member of the Earth community. Our private psyches are meant to be public resources. The personal contributes to the cultural, and vice versa. The personal also contributes to the ecological, and vice versa: as healthy humans, we enhance our more-than-human environment, and we have no life at all, of course, without a thriving environment.
THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION
Individuation is the word Carl Jung used for the cultivation of the psyche into a coherent whole, the process of becoming one’s “true self.” I think of it as the process of becoming fully human. From the perspective of the Nature- Based Map of the Psyche, the goals of individuation include the following:
•Cultivating our awareness of and our ability to embody the four facets of the Self
•Becoming aware of how our subpersonalities operate and then embracing them from the holistic perspective of the Self, in this way integrating our subpersonalities within the functioning of the 3-D Ego
•When developmentally ready, embarking upon the descent to Soul in order to discover our ecological or mythopoetic place in the world — “the truth at the center of the image we were born with” — and then cultivating our ability to embody or manifest this place or truth
•Developing a personal relationship with Spirit and/or cultivating our capacity to be conscious from the perspective of Spirit
•Applying ourselves to the developmental tasks of the life stage we’re in, as well as to the most incomplete tasks of earlier stages (a nature-based perspective on these tasks and stages can be found in what I call the Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel, introduced in my book Nature and the Human Soul)
ASSESSING OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH
In addition to serving as a guide to the development of wholeness, the Nature-Based Map of the Psyche provides a constructive, person-affirming method of psychological assessment. It’s an aid for identifying the innate psychological resources that are most in need of cultivation in an individual, how to go about this cultivation, and what sorts of symptoms are likely to become apparent when these resources are unavailable.22
A COMPLETE PORTRAIT OF THE PSYCHE
After considering our humanity from nature’s holistic perspective, it seems fair to conclude that previous maps of the psyche offered by Western psychology have been incomplete. The principal intrapsychic elements identified by the major schools of psychology are all represented on the Nature-Based Map of the Psyche (not because I was specifically attempting to include them, but because the seven-directions matrix suggested them), but none of these schools have included all the elements identified by the Nature-Based Map; most incorporate fewer than half, and many essential distinctions are missing.23 Twentieth-century Western psychology provided many advances in our capacity for self-understanding, but it developed in a time and within a cultural framework that limited its vision, making it difficult for us to see the whole picture.
In contrast to earlier Western models of the human mind, the Nature- Based Map of the Psyche has been constructed using all four of the following design criteria. It is
•nature-based (ecological);
•holistic and integral (comprehensive);
•wholeness oriented (as opposed to pathology oriented); and
•contextual (recognizing that our psychological health depends on the health of our social, cultural, and environmental worlds and our active engagement in these worlds through regular participation, service, and social artistry).
A complete portrait of the psyche, however, makes possible something even more important than advances in psychological theory. It enables us, as individuals, to identify elements of our own psyches whose existence we may never have suspected or that may never have made themselves known to us. The map shows us “where” to look.24 And psychotherapists, counselors, educators, clergy, life coaches, parents, and other human development facilitators can use this map to help people undertake an inventory of their psyches and further cultivate their relationships with Self, subpersonalities, Soul, and Spirit.
The Nature-Based Map of the Psyche helps us see which of our psychological resources might be underdeveloped or completely cut off from awareness. Without a comprehensive map, we might never know what we’ve been missing. Hidden and latent facets of our horizontal wholeness (our Selves) often hold the resources we need to solve personal challenges, move through blocks, overcome inner resistance, see our way forward, succeed at careers, develop or improve our relationships, uncover the secrets of our Souls (and live them), and cultivate our personal relationship with Spirit. And hidden and unconscious subpersonalities can control our perceptions and behavior as much as the parts we know consciously, so there’s great value in having a map that helps us discover which subs might be operating outside awareness.
The representation of the psyche on the universal nature-template of the seven directions makes it easier to understand psychological complexities, elevates into awareness what has fallen into forgetting, and reestablishes an order that is both comforting and constructively disturbing — comforting because it evokes our original wholeness; disturbing because it summons us to a long and demanding journey.
THE NURTURING GENERATIVE ADULT
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
