Theoretical background
The program will be a journey with personal transformation, exploring healing and wholing our relationship with nature within us and outside of us. The journey will include an experiential enquiry into Bill Plotkin’s Nature-based Map of the Human Psyche. This map offers a nature-inspired model for the empowering journey of reconnecting and developing our wholeness. Our wholeness is the constellation of innate capacities that our psyche naturally has when we live in a way that is wholesomely connected to ourselves, the other and the wild. Bill Plotkin’s map presents 4 main archetypal aspects of our wholeness:
- Our Nurturing Generative Adult: this part of us who knows healthy and mature love and care for ourselves and our communities. This is also the part of us capable of generating vision-activated, soul-rooted action that sustains and furthers all life.
- Our Innocent Sage: this part of us who knows the sacred art of the Fool and the Trickster – who knows how to see the bigger picture at all times and navigate the balance between seriousness and lightness. It is also our untouched innocence and sense of wander that allows to be in touch with the transcendence of life.
- Our Wild Indigenous Self: this part of us who knows that our primary place of belonging is with the wild earth as an animate being. It is the one of us who knows that to be fully human is to allow all emotions and sensations run through us without judgement or fear. It is the one of us who feel comfortable and fully alive in the body and in the wild.
- Our Muse Beloved: this part of us who is in touch with the revelations and mysteries of our unique place and purpose in life. Profoundly animated by creativity and vision, it is the one who longs for meaning and deep reciprocity with the wild. A courtier to the underworld, this one knows that the key to our fulfilment lies in the enamoured exploration of our darkness.
The course will be an opportunity to discover and learn practices to re-awaken these archetypes within us, enabling us to be more resilient, connected and mature adults in the world.
Nature and the wild outdoors are a great ally to support the development of our wholeness and our “eco-awakening”. Eco-awakening is the process by which we remember our primary place of belonging and purpose as Earth. Our individual and collective historical loss of connection with Nature has caused us to live with profound unmet developmental needs that would have contributed to the development of our wholeness. Eco-soul-centric development proposes not only to address the symptoms and consequences of these losses, but, more importantly, brings a roadmap towards re-acquiring these skills and re-meeting these essential needs we have if we are to develop as healthy, mature adults in service to a changing world.
This program will provide innovative ways and methods to address these developmental needs and take steps towards self-healing and personal transformation in a more wholesome and connected way. It will also aim at empowering the participants to offer these methods to the various groups and individuals they work with and become agents of visionary change within their communities.