Project "Eco-Awakening": An Invitation [Plotkin MMG]

[OutOfTheBlue]

[Part I]

In this thread, I'd like to extend a public invitation, for anyone interested, to engage (along with some of us in the MMG) in evoking Eco-awakening, a major life passage that occurs when a post-pubescent person raised in an egocentric cultural environment has their first conscious and embodied experience of their innate membership in the Earth community and recognizes this membership as their primary place of belonging in the world (all other affiliations then becoming secondary, and in fact, derivative of their inherent participation in the more-than-human-world).

For those familiar with the Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (the eight-stage model of human development rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, see diagram [JPG] and intro [PDF]) that Bill Plotkin introduced in Nature and the Human Soul, Eco-awakening represents a crucial addition.

In Nature and the Human Soul, Plotkin describes what human development might look like in an ecocentric "Life-Sustaining Society" and contasts it with what generally happens in our egocentric "Industrial Growth Society", which is, as he diagnoses, in a state of widespread developmental arrest, with most of its members stuck in an egocentric version of psychological early adolescence (or "pathoadolescence"). Eco-awakening would then be the early-adolescent transition from egocentrism to ecocentrism (and, in Plotkin's terminology, from the egocentric stage of "Conforming and Rebelling" to the ecocentric one of the "Oasis"[see stage 3 in the diagram]). According to Plotkin, this shift is necessary for anyone raised in an egocentric society to unlock the possibility of accessing further stages of ecocentric human development, including "true adulthood" (or second adulthood) after the passage of Soul Initiation.

It is worth nothing that Bill Plotkin's concept of Eco-awakening does not exist in a vacuum. In his own words:

Over the last few decades, what I call eco-awakening has been noted and discussed, in other terms, by a number of authors, including ecophilosophers, deep ecologists, and depth psychologists. As previously noted in this series of Musings, Thomas Berry wrote of “the re-enchantment with the earth as a living reality.” Ecophilosopher Joanna Macy speaks of “the greening of the self,” the expansion of our experienced circle of identity. The Norwegian philosopher and deep ecologist Arne Naess introduced the notion of an “ecological Self,” an identity that is “widened and deepened so that protection of free nature is felt and conceived of as protection of our very selves.” Depth psychologist James Hillman wrote of “a psyche the size of Earth.”

Additionally, in his paper "Ecopsychology: Where Does It Fit in Psychology in 2009?" the author, John Scull, suggests that:

The “unitive” experience of being an essential, interconnected part of a larger reality occupies the core of ecopsychology. While this “peak experience” of interdependence with the rest of the universe defies accurate verbal description, it has been reported often over many centuries in many cultures. David Abram and Andy Fisher, two of the most important writers in the field, have placed experience at the heart of ecopsychology, citing the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

That same paper notes the particular link between ecopsychology and (Jungian) depth psychology. In fact Bill Plotkin's work (at least in Nature and the Human Soul and Wild Mind) falls squarely within the new field of eco-depth psychology or depth-accented ecotherapy as he has also described it.

My curiosity is piqued. Where do I learn more?

I invite to read what Bill Plotkin has to say on Eco-awakening and its relevance in a seven-part series of blog posts/Musings: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6 and part 7. These essentially reproduce the corresponding description of Eco-awakening from his last book, The Journey of Soul Initiation.

Below is also another, shorter description, presented by StarterCulture, if you'd like a foretaste and/or an additional take :

Eco-awakening (alternative shorter description)

Eco-awakening, a term coined by Bill Plotkin, is the awakening to the visceral and emotional knowing of your deep belonging to Earth. It is the sweet relief marking the end of the illusion-of-separation from “nature” and a re-membering yourself as part of the Earth community, no moreor less than every other creature. In fact, it could be said, it is the experience of knowing that each of us, yourself included, are Earth in human form.

Eco-awakening is a way of understanding and experiencing ourselves as intimately participatory in an ecosystem - and a call to act in ways of reciprocal relationship. It is not something that happens once and is finished. Nor is it a certificate or badge of having arrived anywhere. Within power-over culture, with its continuous demand of making something commodifiable and sellable, eco-awakening is absolutely of no value - in fact it is counter-cultural. At its essence it is a fundamental shift in world view and consciousness. It is in fact such a complete shift that it is often not possible to continue participating in what Joanna Macy calls ‘business-as-usual’. Rather than making us happier and better consumers or more successful entrepreneurs, eco-awakening has as its goal, the humbling force of true belonging.

It is a way of becoming regular sized, as Martin Shaw says. This way of finding our place as a human within the ecosystems of Earth, is a huge step towards shifting our way of participating in, or even stepping out of, the modern paradigm with all of its attendant horrors, extractive practices and mass scale suffering produced by those consuming, without giving back to either Earth or those working to make the products that are consumed.

In an ecosystem, no creature, plant, insect or being is out of place. Each fills an ecological niche receiving part or all of the physical bodies of others as food and, through its own body, giving itself, in part or whole, to another in the web as food. How might we, as a species, remember our place within the ecosystem of Earth and create cultures that are nourished by and nourishing to the ecosystem within which we live? Imagine that at scale. This is the potential and necessity of eco-awakening. It is a recognition of our place as a species within the web of life and a reciprocal relational way of being with the Wild Others that participates in the cycles of birth, death, decay, transformation, gestation and rebirth. This inner transformation of inter-belonging can only happen one person at a time, meaning it is simultaneously both deeply personal and essentially non-personal.

Eco-awakened adults are able to shift consciousness, hearing the dreams of trees, animals and stone. This might be what we mean when we say, remembering our original instructions as humans, meaning the way that humans are essentially and originally a part of the ecosystem within which we have lived and the ways of being and choices that are made arising out of that chthonic knowing - the deep knowing arising from being of a place. If our species survives the current socio-ecological collapse, in the future, eco-awakening holds the keys to us being renewed by, and as a culture, guided by, Earth’s dreaming.

At Starter Culture our approach to change sees eco-awakening as a vital component to consciously navigating this collapse and the deep cultural transformation inner-led change seeks to support. Without including embodied eco-awakening practices within our action plans and theories of change, we will continue to source our ways forward from the power-over consciousness that created our current crises.

Our deep longing is that humans will someday live into a time where eco-awakening is no longer necessary because our children will grow up knowing themselves as part of Earth. Imagine with us what that would mean? Human cultures would be reciprocally renewed in relationship to the ecosystem within which they are a vital part. Eco-awakening is the threshold to such a future, will you join us at the threshold?

Source: StarterCulture

PODCAST

Or would you rather listen to a podcast about it? We got you covered as well!

Eco-Belonging - awakening to our place in Earth Community

Wild Mind guides Bell Selkie Lovelock and Sara McFarland, speak about Eco-Awakening, or Eco-Belonging, which is the psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual remembering or awakening to the fact that we each are a part of Earth, are Earth and Water and Fire and Air and that all beings are our Kith, in reciprocal relatedness. Poetry, song, stories of our own Eco-Awakening and the wandering way of trying to put the ineffable into language that can only point to the Mystery which is at the center of Life and our place in the larger web. We talk about Descartes and mechanistic thinking versus thinking like a cosmos, Animas Valley Institute, Mary Oliver, Birdsong, Welsh words of place and the ancient ancestral knowing that each of us has in our bodies. Come along with us for an imaginal journey into the heart of belonging to Earth Community.

PARTICIPATION AND NEXT STEPS

I've read/listened to this and I'm in! Where do I sign up?

Eco-awakening describes a shift in world view and consciousness, a transition, the crossing of a threshold, but it is not simply "something that happens once and is finished, nor is it a certificate or badge of having arrived anywhere." Once that threshold is crossed, it marks a lasting change that manifests as a drive/call towards belonging more fully to the world and acting/participating in ways of reciprocal relationship.

But while Eco-awakening is a deeply personal transition, this thread can be a place where we discuss and share notes, experiences, readings, inspirations and invitations.

Towards the end of Plotkin's blog post series on Eco-Awakening (part 6), he offers some good hints on how one would go about if they wished to evoke that major life passage.

In part II of this post, we'll start looking in more detail into practices and experiences that might help in that regard (and share part II of the podcast that promises to discuss exactly that).

There will also be invitations for common readings and experiments.

Stay tuned! In the meantime, feel free to express interest and questions or discuss the above content and the concept of Eco-awakening.

[OutOfTheBlue]

As a first common experience, I invite you to watch the YouTube recording (duration: 1h) of the storytelling event: "Slip into your Bearskin and remember yourself home to Earth Community" and work with the invitations offered by Wild Mind guide Sara McFarland.

Share your findings here!

Here's the home page of the Storytelling events, explaining more about the relevance of storytelling towards inner-led cultural change: https://starterculture.net/storytelling ... al-change/

Slip into your Bearskin and remember yourself home to Earth Community

How might we slip out of our human skin and into the skin of bear, or tree, or falcon and return to the creatureliness of ourselves more alive and more wild? Some might say that at the heart of the ache and trauma that afflicts our world today is the misunderstanding that we are separate from life. The belief that all of life is either dead or dumb and that we are the only intelligent life on the planet and are therefore ordained to have dominion, is rooted in our modern culture. However, there is an older way, a way that the ancestors of each of us once knew, before the great forgetting, of recognising our being Earth, Water, Fire, Air and having breathed in particles of all the creatures that have ever lived and offer our breath to that great river. In this intimate relational experience of sentient agential interbeing, we rewild ourselves and awaken into a world that is interwoven with consciousness.

Bayo Akomolafe writes in his book These Wilds beyond our Fences, "Look how things sprout from other things. How nothing is itself all by itself - or without the contributions of other things. When you happen upon a flower, especially one whose otherworldly beauty and feminine fragility contrast sharply with its less endearing environment, you might treat it as this localised “thing”, as an object - one deserving of admiration - but an “object” nonetheless: removed, unique, separate and even audacious. What our linguistic conveniences blind us to is how that very flower is no more distinguishable from the dirt, the erratic weather, the traffic of pollen bearers that come from far off, the blazing sun, and even the occasional imprint from a boot worn by an uncharitable tourist, than a wave is distinguishable from the sea….

Perhaps we could say that the environment “flowers”. And all we would be hinting at is a “new” paradigm of thought- one that inaudibly recognises how everything is connected and how what we “really” are define notions of size, hues, grades of quality, origin and destiny.”

In this intimate relational experience of sentient agential interbeing, we rewild ourselves and awaken into a world that is interwoven with consciousness. This is the story of the journey of Eco-belonging, re-membering ourselves as part of Earth’s Community. This is paradigm shift from the inside out. Will you dare to slip out of your human skin and into the skin of Bear? The reimagined story of Bearskin awaits to help us do just that.

[Divandan]

I know I am late to join the MMG for this but thank you for sharing the post.

The 7 parts shared above will be a perfect reference for me. I couldn't tell which book was the best one to start with so I picked Wild Mind and am about 1/3 of the way through. I like it so far and have some basis to compare it to because I did IFS work earlier in the year. I am excited to get into some of the exercises as well.

[OutOfTheBlue]

I know I am late to join the MMG for this but thank you for sharing the post.

The 7 parts shared above will be a perfect reference for me. I couldn't tell which book was the best one to start with so I picked Wild Mind and am about 1/3 of the way through. I like it so far and have some basis to compare it to because I did IFS work earlier in the year. I am excited to get into some of the exercises as well.

Hello Divandan,

Glad to hear this! I think you've made a good choice picking up Wild Mind for a start. We're currently working our way through that book. Last meeting was on the South subs, and next up we will try something different, instead of going to the next chapter: we'll dedicate the monthly session to playing with the "council" practice (a type of sharing circle).

I don't know how things will pan out (will we take up another book next? etc.), but I expect that completing this cycle will take us least at three more meetings, beside the next one. So if Wild Mind resonates, it might be possible to join (I'll have to check with the group on our next meet). At any rate, don't hesitate to post on the Plotkin-related threads, will be happy to share/discuss here as well and help with your exploration.

I haven't dived much into IFS yet, but from what I've gathered, It's probably quite helpful to be coming from that angle. There are definitely similarities and possibility of combining these approaches or integrating IFS into Plotkin's holistic framework.

Re this specific thread on Eco-awakening, if after reading Plotkin's essay it sounds like something you'd like to pursue, I can post some more resources here. We've chosen to keep our focus on Wild Mind for now, but it is a worthwhile project and very aligned especially with cultivating the South facet (the Wild Indigenous One). Cheers!

[Divandan]

Thanks for sharing those articles; they were very good. This is my first exposure to him so I am trying to understand how the cardinal directions map to his developmental stages but thank you for confirming that Wild Mind is a good place to start.

Right now I am just reading Wild Mind from beginning to end to see the story he is trying to weave and then I am going to work through some of the exercises in the appendix. Depending on how long that takes, I might then switch over to the journey of the soul initiation. I am imagining his work builds upon itself and that the two books are complementary. I also agree that his work lines up perfectly with ERE, and something that he covered early in this book that keeps popping up on the forums here is the concept of interdependence. Very cool to continue finding the alignment between people's work and ideas.

Yes please post here any resources, and I will share my observations. I would be happy to join the group or perhaps the next iteration. Thanks!

[berrytwo]

Yes please post here any resources, and I will share my observations. I would be happy to join the group or perhaps the next iteration. Thanks!

Wanted to say Divandan, that there is a bit of a transition point in the group at the moment. We just finished the Wild Mind book and are taking a hiatus. There is talk of having a different structure for reading Nature and the Human Soul later this year. Maybe that would be a good time to check in?