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ОглавлениеTHE 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
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy….
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground….
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
— WENDELL BERRY, “A VISION”
If you’ve ever felt truly privileged to provide for or care for another being, human or otherwise, even yourself, or if you’ve ever translated an inspiration or vision into art or song, or into a manuscript, an invention, or a community project, then you’ve experienced and taken pleasure in the wholehearted and clearheaded qualities of your Nurturing Generative Adult. If you’ve ever dedicated yourself to the renewing and enriching of a ruined place — a clear-cut forest, a polluted river, or an overgrazed prairie — or rolled up your sleeves and volunteered to serve families or neighborhoods, then you’ve had a firsthand relationship with the North facet of your Self. If you’ve ever acted in defense of an oppressed people or an endangered species, spoken truth to power without desire for personal gain, or occupied public space in support of true democracy, then you’ve known your North Self in masterly action.
To nurture is to care for the well-being of other humans, our fellow creatures, Earthly habitats, and ourselves. To be generative is to design and implement innovative cultural practices that imaginatively and effectively restore, solve, or shelter, that truly serve the whole person and the web of life (endeavors in education, for example, or governance or healing). To be an adult, in this sense, is to enthusiastically and competently embrace opportunities to enhance the vitality of beings, places, and communities, present and future — and, where you don’t find such opportunities, to creatively generate them.
Every human is born with the capacity to be abundantly nurturing and generative. Some find it easy and natural to develop and embody this aspect of our humanity. Others experience it as awkward and challenging. But learning to embody the North facet of the Self is always an essential dimension of becoming fully human. We foster wholeness in ourselves when we contribute to the wholeness of something greater than ourselves.
Wendell Berry is a prolific author, an eloquent critic of our culture and economies, and a fifth-generation Kentucky farmer. In his poem that begins this chapter, he offers a vision of the many generations of hard work awaiting us this century and beyond, the labor necessary to restore the land and waters and engender healthy human communities existing in harmony and synergistic partnership with the greater Earth community. The Nurturing Generative Adult is an essential facet of the Self needed to accomplish this demanding and joyous work. Wendell Berry is an inspiring role model of a mature human with a well-developed North.
Thomas Berry — no immediate blood relation to Wendell — was a cultural historian, a Christian monk, and one of our leading twentieth-century environmental thinkers. At age eleven, Thomas ventured out for the first time behind his family’s new home in North Carolina. It was late May. He came to a creek, crossed it, and there beheld an astonishing meadow covered with blooming white lilies and filled with song. Writing seventy years later, he reflects,
A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky….
…Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation a well as in education and religion.1
This extraordinary watershed moment during his boyhood informed Thomas’s entire life and formed the substance, content, and method of his way of nurturing and providing for his people, who Thomas came to recognize as all the species of our world. His love for creation, for our entire cosmos, stands as a moving example of what it is for a human being to be nurturing and generative.
The North facet of our innate human wholeness is that which enables us to genuinely nurture others, provide for those less able, care for the environment that sustains us all, defend the lives of future generations of all species, carry forward the life-enhancing traditions and wisdom of our ancestors, and contribute to the vitality of our human communities.
NURTURING LOVE
Love. All four facets of the Self begin with love, are anchored in love. Yet each facet features its own favored form of love. The North facet of the Self is rooted in a nourishing and boldly resourceful love, like Thomas Berry’s for the Earth, a parent for her child, a devoted teacher for his students, or a true friend for another. This North aspect of love can also be seen in a benevolent leader for her people, a boy for his dog, a mature hunter for each species that feeds her family, and a healthy human community for the particular ecosystem within which it is embedded.
Nurturing love is embodied in a great variety of activities, such as healing, mentoring, parenting, teaching, feeding, protecting, consoling, encouraging, celebrating, and empathically listening and responding.
We are naturally moved and inspired when we meet people who exhibit exemplary development of the Nurturing Adult facet of their Self, or hear stories of their lives, individuals such as Jesus of Nazareth, Francis of Assisi, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King. But each one of us possesses this capacity for nurturing others in a way that evokes people’s courage, magnificence, and ability to self-heal. Each of us can remember times we stretched beyond our usual borders and found ourselves able to support and care for another selflessly and joyously, with love and compassion flowing freely through our hearts and hands. Some of us may have wholly embodied this capacity only a few times in our lives, but the fact that it happened even once confirms that this capacity has always been within us — and that it still is.
One way to evoke your Nurturing Adult is to recall inspiring exemplars you’ve known — maybe an uncle, your mother, a teacher, or a friend. You might imagine one such person standing behind you with their hands on your shoulders, conveying with a strong, warm touch their love for and faith in you, and imparting with their words their unconditional support and guidance.
I recall a middle-aged woman I met in my twenties, a consummate mentor with an extraordinary capacity to love. Dorothy Wergin had a part-time job as manager of the sleep lab at the university psychology department where I was a graduate student, but she was present on a full-time basis. Few people were aware of what she was actually paid to do. Most of those who visited her office came for the world-class counseling she freely offered. It was her daily pleasure and talent to support people in their confusion, pain, and grief as well as their joy and enthusiasm, all the while assisting them in stepping through the risky but necessary doors into a bigger life and the dangerous opportunities waiting there. In Dorothy’s presence the room seemed to fill with more air, more life. Tension eased, previously unnoticed emotions and bodily states arose into awareness, and the way forward became clear.
I find that my own Nurturing Adult is evoked by another person’s tender need and simple trust in my capacity to love and support. A friend, child, or someone I’m serving as soul guide might offer this implicit invitation. What a blessing to be invited in this way and be able to respond!
We’re also inspired by the nurturing qualities we see in the more-than-human world around us: in mammal mothers and bird parents as they care for, feed, and fiercely protect their young; in the synergy between wild-flower and pollinator; even in predator species that evoke the evolutionary development of the species they prey on; and more generally in the way the world provides the resources, habitats, and ecological niches that such an immense diversity of species needs in order to flourish and evolve.
It’s obvious that Earth has amply provided for us. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the great question before us is whether each of us can fully access the resources of our Nurturing Adult and learn to sustain and enhance the diversity and vitality of the Earth community, which now wholly depends on our collective awakening to our ecological responsibilities and opportunities.
Embracing Each Other in Our Wholeness
When we’re centered in the consciousness of our Nurturing Adult, we’re able to accept everything about other people. We understand — or attempt to understand — each characteristic, trait, or state of others as a coherent feature of those individuals, part of what makes them who they are. Naturally, some human traits — such as violence, hatred, or greed — are deeply troubling, but we sense how such characteristics are expressions of others’ current conditions. By embracing people in their wholeness, we create the conditions within which they can change or mature. The Nurturing Adult facet of the Self — at any age — enables us to experience others, in their essence, as creative, resourceful, and capable of wholeness. From this perspective, we do not judge, although we are highly, sometimes profoundly, perceptive and discerning. We also act to minimize and heal the damage that people cause through violence as well as through actions that might have been well intentioned but unskillful.
With a well-developed Nurturing Adult, we act from the heart, act out of an uncompromised love for others and for the world. We also act from Soul in the sense that we can see from our own depths into the depths of others and into the depths of the world as a whole. We have the capacity to both discern the truth and respond with love. (Buddhists refer to these naturally paired qualities, those of heart and Soul, as compassion and insight.)
The capacities of our Nurturing Adults also enable us to protect our loved ones and ourselves. When another person is a significant danger to us — despite our attempts to love — our Nurturing Adult will lead us away from the encounter if possible and if doing so is the highest good. With Nurturing Adult awareness, we perceive and feel holistically and ecocentrically, seeking to assist not only individuals but also, even more important, the whole system, community, and ecology to which we belong. On those rare occasions when a choice must be made between the well-being of an individual and that of his environment (the family, community, or ecosystem), our Nurturing Adult chooses to serve the needs of the latter, because without a viable environment all members suffer. But most often our Nurturing Adult sees a way to support both the individual and his ecological or social sphere.
Our North Self enables us to nurture ourselves, too. When we have access to our Nurturing Adult, we can embrace, without judgment, our own woundedness or immaturity, enabling a healing shift when our psyche as a whole is ready for it.
CAREGIVING VERSUS CARETAKING
The actions that characterize the Nurturing Adult can also be enacted by our immature subpersonalities, but the results are utterly different. It’s entirely possible, alas, to lead, teach, or encourage others from the woundedness of our North subpersonalities, whose purpose, since early childhood, has been to protect us from harm. What distinguishes one form of caring from the other is our motivation. When centered in our Nurturing Adult, we act with heart (compassion for the other) and with Soul (insight into the real needs of the other). In contrast, our North subpersonalities (our Loyal Soldiers and Rescuers, which we’ll explore in chapter 6) prompt us to act on the basis of a persistent and self-diminishing experience of fear and incompleteness. Although these subpersonalities possess a natural human desire to be accepted, this longing is enacted in a manner that is ultimately undermining, family weakening, and self-defeating. When merged with these wounded selves, we might appear to be nurturing — and are, to some degree — but our primary motivation is to avoid abandonment, criticism, or poverty by securing an accepted place in the lives of others. This is a form of “nurturing” that is more properly described as caretaking than as caregiving. We appear to be giving, but there’s at least as much taking going on. Consider, for example, the socially isolated single parent who does too much for her teenage son because she fears he’ll leave home if he’s able to care for himself. Or the farmer who grows and provides food but, in order to ensure his profits, knowingly degrades the health of the land, water, and people with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified organisms.
In contrast, caregiving is its own ample reward and source of joy, not a means to garner acceptance or socioeconomic gain. By simply being herself, a person with a strong Nurturing Adult contributes to her family, her community, and the ecology of which she is a member. Cooperating with and supporting others is an authentic and intrinsic expression of her innate human wholeness.
GENERATIVE LOVE
To the same degree that it is nurturing, the North facet of the Self is also generative — supporting us to sustain and enhance life by careful planning; designing and organizing projects; preparing meals; dreaming up stories and telling them; building houses; creating art; taking out the trash (or, better, supporting cultural changes and creating a sustainable lifestyle so that there is no trash); governing; and giving birth to children, ideas, or organizations. In short, getting the jobs done — the life-enhancing jobs.
But, again and alas, the Generative Adult is not the only doer in the diverse cast of the human psyche. No doubt our subpersonalities have had a major hand in generating most of the wars, toxic substances, depraved acts, dysfunctional relationships, and life-threatening enterprises of our world.
Here, too, the distinction is a matter of both heart and Soul. A woman with a well-developed Generative Adult does not innovate or fabricate in order to impress others or to secure a place of belonging. Rather, she is simply herself — her Self. If she impresses others, it’s because she imagines, designs, and manifests authentically and in a way only she can. She’s unique in her way of loving, contributing, and belonging. But she’s not inflated about it. Nor is she shy or reserved about what she can do and what she loves. She’s both humble and bold.
Although not as common in contemporary Western and Westernized psyches as one would wish, the Generative Adult, by whatever name, is a familiar character found in stories and communities throughout the world, embodied in images such as the good doctor (Jonas Salk, Benjamin Spock), the mature leader (King Arthur, Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln — even the Lion King), the genius inventor (Leonardo da Vinci, Buckminster Fuller, Martha Graham), or the social activist (Frederick Douglass, Dorothy Day, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai).
In the other-than-human world, we observe life-enhancing generativity everywhere we look. We see that our own lives are made possible by nature’s endless giveaways: bacteria, worms, and fungi transforming crumbled rock into fertile soil; herbs and grains providing us with food; ocean-dwelling phytoplankton providing nourishment for other sea creatures and producing oxygen for everyone; mature forests creating wetlands, rain clouds, and habitat for uncountable species; and rock, fossil carbon, and trees providing the materials for our human homes and projects. Everything in nature gives away to others.
GIFTING COMMUNITIES
Those who have cultivated their North facet enjoy nothing so much as offering themselves to the world. They generate opportunities to do so. In the now-rare human communities in which most adults are psychologically mature (which is to say, initiated adults),2 community life is founded on what Lewis Hyde calls a gifting economy,3 in which the most important things are not for sale (things like child care, preparing meals, making music, care of the elderly, leadership decisions). Selling and buying tend to distance or impersonalize relationships. Gifting builds, sustains, and grows relationships and real communities. Like nature more generally, everybody in a healthy community freely gives away to others. And there’s no waste. Every “byproduct” is a resource for somebody or something else.
In Western cultures, people with well-developed Nurturing Generative Adults operate whenever they can as if their community is in fact such a society. Doing so incrementally shifts an adolescent society toward a caring and life-enhancing future.
In this regard, I think of the men and women I’ve had the honor of guiding on their descent to Soul — the three-phase journey of psychospiritual dying (shedding of one’s outgrown social identity), the revelatory vision of a Soul-infused mythopoetic identity, and the embodiment of the new identity in acts of culture-transforming service. Their Nurturing Generative Adult is evident as they go about their world-shifting work. Here are two examples of such individuals, both utilizing the metaphor of song (as well as actual song) as a way to convey the experience of discovering and performing their soulwork.
A Japanese American man, while camped in a wild place, awakened one morning to hear a songbird singing his name: “Awaken to truth and sing its beauty.” Having been raised in an American Shin Buddhist tradition, he understood truth to be the Buddha Dharma, he told me. But he recognized that “the traditional Shin sound of the Buddha’s song was too foreign to be appreciated by the tempo of our times.” With this insight in mind, he embarked upon several years of study of Buddhism and transpersonal psychology and was eventually ordained a Shin priest. He has learned to “transpose an ancient truth into a contemporary melody.” Although shy by nature, he now teaches the Buddha Dharma with boldness, ingenuity, and modern meaning — and, as he says, “as visibly as a singer on a stage.”
A woman on her vision fast was profoundly moved, she told me, by the image of “a deeply rooted tree, a Sitka spruce, a sentient being leaning into the wind to hear the messages of Gaia and to sing and share the beauty, grace, and grief of our world.” Living into this image during the ensuing years, this woman has cultivated her voice as a singer and facilitator, creating songs, practices, and workshops that link activism, creativity, and the sacred. She “supports others to grow deep roots of their own, helping people to claim their unique gifts and serve their communities with courage and grace through the gathering storms of our times.”
As Wendell Berry declares in his inspiring poem “A Vision,” “the songs of [the] people and [the] birds / will be health and wisdom and indwelling / light” — once, that is, we remember as a species how to take our true place in the world, the place ecologist Aldo Leopold called “a plain member of the biotic community.”4
An initiated adult is motivated, not significantly by wealth, fame, or social acceptance, but rather by the opportunity to offer his hidden, transformative treasure to the world, to deliver, by means of his Nurturing Generative Adult, his most creative, Soul-rooted response to his planetary moment.
But a person need not be an initiated adult to cultivate and embody the North facet of her Self. A psychologically healthy person in any stage of life finds herself naturally drawn to serve and nurture others.
THE NURTURING GENERATIVE ADULT IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
The North Self is an invaluable psychological resource at all ages and stages, appearing in its incipient form in early childhood. We see it in an infant’s empathic emotional response and in a toddler’s desire to help. Given a healthy social environment, middle childhood (generally ages four through eleven) gives rise to the North capacity to befriend others, provide care to people and animals, invent games that have rules and structure, and share possessions and knowledge.
A healthy early adolescence promotes additional nurturing and generative behaviors in realms such as courting, environmental stewardship, craftsmanship, and civic responsibility.
Thomas Berry’s experience in a springtime meadow at age eleven is an exemplary instance of an experience on the cusp of childhood and adolescence that can inform a long life of mature, ecocentric caregiving and ingenuity.
ARCHETYPES OF THE NORTH
Each of the four facets of the Self is in relationship with each of the other aspects of our psyches as well as with other people. The former relationships constitute the facet’s intrapersonal dimension, and the latter the interpersonal.
In its relationships to the other elements of our own psyches, the North facet of the Self is what I think of as our inner Nurturing Parent or Adult, as you can see in map 1. This intrapersonal face of the North Self is our primary resource for healing our fragmented or wounded subpersonalities beset by fear, loss, hurt, addiction, obsession, and other tumults. You might prefer other names for this facet of the Self, such as the inner Comforter, Coach, or Listener.
In its interpersonal face — in its relationships with other beings, human or otherwise — the North facet of the Self is experienced as a variety of cross-cultural archetypes, such as Elder, Leader, Teacher, Parent, Healer, Empath, Mentor, or the (benevolent and compassionate) Queen or King. (See map 2.)
THE NORTH’S PRIMARY WINDOW OF KNOWING: HEART-CENTERED THINKING
Feeling, imagining, sensing, and thinking: together, these four modalities make up what psychologist Eligio Stephen Gallegos calls the “four windows of knowing,” the four human faculties through which we learn about self and world.5 Each of the four is of equal power and importance in living a balanced and creative life. Each is a distinct faculty not reducible to any of the other three.
Let’s say, for example, that you want to better understand a woman with whom you have an important personal relationship. You might begin by thinking about her and about interactions you’ve had with her, and this will lead to some valuable insights and conclusions, or at least hypotheses, about her. If you then let yourself feel the full range of emotions evoked by her and by the qualities of your relationship, you’ll learn additional things you wouldn’t have otherwise appreciated — often surprising and as valuable and relevant as what you learned through thinking alone, possibly more so. You might then use your imagination to empathize with what it’s like to be her, to have that particular life with those gifts, difficulties, and opportunities. Doing so will result in additional discoveries you’d never have made by thinking or feeling alone. And the next time you two are together, you might carefully observe the way she walks and gestures and laughs, or you might listen mindfully to changes in the texture of her voice as she discusses different topics. What do you learn about her through your senses?6
As we’ll see, each of the four windows of knowing has a special resonance with one of the four facets of the Self. The four natural pairings are North and thinking, South and feeling, East and sensing, and West and imagining. By cultivating our relationship with all four facets of the Self, we are in this way also cultivating our capacity to use all four windows of knowing, which in turn enhances our ability to fully know the world in all its facets. The most accomplished scientists, artists, musicians, and journalists, for example, are those who are adept at feeling and imagining as well as thinking and sensing.
Of the four windows of knowing, it is thinking that’s most closely partnered with the North facet of the Self, because the Nurturing Generative Adult depends on keen insight and clear planning in order to provide effective care and leadership. However, the specific mode of thinking that characterizes the North facet of the Self is heart-centered thinking, not the merely logical, analytical, deductive mode of thinking more common in the contemporary Western world. Heart-centered thinking is independent, creative, moral, and compassionate. It is “critical” in the sense that it reflectively questions assumptions, discerns hidden values, and considers the larger social and ecological context. Entirely distinct from the rote memorization commonly stressed in mainstream Western schools, heart-centered thinking is distinguished by an animated curiosity that leads to a constantly adjusting, in-depth knowledge of the environment, the human culture, and its individual members. The Nurturing Generative Adult is a compassionate systems thinker, understanding the patterns and dynamics that connect the interdependent members of the more-than-human community. The Self, by way of its North facet, possesses an avant-garde insight into how our current actions ripple across space and time to other places and future generations.7
THE NURTURING GENERATIVE ADULT’S PLACE ON THE MAP OF THE PSYCHE
Why have I placed the Nurturing Generative Adult in the north of the Nature-Based Map of the Psyche? What, exactly, is it about the north that suggests nurturance and generativity?
The north is, implicitly, where the Sun goes after it sets in the west and disappears for the night before rising again in the east — a place of coldness, darkness, and stillness.8 Even during daylight hours, the north-facing sides of things are the darker, colder sides. At most times of year, the winds from the north are the colder and mightier ones. The north is also associatively partnered with the middle of the night, the time of least light and least plant growth, the winter solstice, and, consequently, the ripening depth of winter.
As with winter, the north direction is a place of hardship, but hardship that has become familiar and accustomed (in contrast with the sudden changes associated with the west, which represents the sunset and the mere start of the long night). By the middle of the night or the winter, with its dangers and challenges, we’ve adapted to darkness and devised means to survive and do well. It takes knowledge, skill, and fortitude to thrive in the cold and dark, and so the north is linked with the generative qualities of intelligence, foresight, competence, endurance, and strength. And it is these very qualities that we most need during the dark times, the qualities that enable us to care for and nurture ourselves and others.
The north, then, is said to be the place of healing, service, caring, and creative thought — in short, nurturance and generativity.
PRACTICES FOR CULTIVATING THE NORTH SELF
Because the four facets of the Self are innate resources existing in latent form within each of us, cultivating them can proceed by our simply choosing to embody or enact them the best we can in any moment. To evoke our wholeness or any one of its four facets, the single most important step is just to remember to do it!
Yes, sometimes this is easier said than done. As we begin our conscious cultivation of the Self, we may discover that our subpersonalities are in charge most of the time. But by regularly reminding ourselves and each other to practice the conscious shift to wholeness, we develop the habit and it becomes more natural and instinctual.
What part of the psyche calls on the Self when it is not already the perspective from which we’re functioning? The 3-D Ego: that neutral pivot of consciousness cognizant of its rainbow range of possible manifestations, like a craftsman with an array of tools or an artist with a palette of colors. The 3-D Ego has access to all the capacities of the Self, as well as to the contributions and vulnerabilities of the subpersonalities.
The primary practice, then, for cultivating the North Self is to simply turn inward and call upon this facet to make itself present to you, or to feel yourself stepping into the North’s perspective, experiencing the world from the North’s wholehearted and clearheaded point of view. As often as you can remember to do so, pause for a moment and ask your Nurturing Generative Adult to step forward into consciousness, into your embodied experience of being present to your world as you find it right then. You might remind yourself of other times when you fully experienced yourself inhabiting this generous and effective North perspective — perhaps when you were compassionately caring for another or in a leadership or teaching position or when engaged in a challenging project that demanded great skill or courage. Or you might call to mind one or two inspiring role models. As you move into this North consciousness, notice how your experience of being in your body shifts. Now, from this North perspective, what feels like the best and most important thing to do in this moment? Or what seems like the best way to proceed with what you’re already in the midst of? What opportunities for nurturing and generative loving offer themselves to you right now?
You can also cultivate your North Self by enrolling in courses and programs that focus on Northerly realms, such as leadership development, nonviolent communication, negotiation skills, sensitivity training, parenting, conscious loving and intimacy, sustainability, permaculture, creative expression, social artistry, and cultivating genuine participatory democracy.
Next are four of the best general self-development practices I know, followed by some additional activities specifically designed for accessing and cultivating the North facet of the Self.
Voice Dialogue, Four-Directions Circles, Dreamwork, and Deep Imagery with the Nurturing Generative Adult
These four self-development practices work equally well for cultivating all four facets of the Self and also for healing the four groupings of subperson- alities. Because these four practices apply to all aspects of healing and whol- ing, I’ve placed them together in the appendix, rather than dividing them up among eight chapters. I recommend you consult the appendix and use these practices regularly.
North Walks
Go for a walk in a neighborhood, city park, state or national park, or wilderness area. Lead with your Nurturing Generative Adult. Be aware of how you walk, sit, look, listen, think, imagine, and feel from this North perspective. Be in relationship to the things, creatures, and other humans you encounter. What opportunities for service, compassion, or caring arise? What insights emerge about the authentic way you belong in the more-than-human community of life? What emotions or longings surface? Record your discoveries in your journal.
Another walk: Wander in a wild or semiwild place where there are few other humans, asking the world or Mystery for help in finding — or being found by — a nurturing, other-than-human thing or place. Take your time with this; don’t settle for something that doesn’t truly feel nurturing to you. If you find such a thing or place, sit or lie down there and let yourself fully feel, viscerally and emotionally, the nurturing love present in this place. If you can’t feel this everywhere in your body, notice if even one part of your body can receive it. If so, allow the experience of that love to spread throughout your body. Then, in your imagination, let yourself merge with this thing or place, experiencing the world from its nurturing perspective. Allow this to feed your remembering of your Nurturing Generative Adult. Perhaps you’ll write one of the following letters while in this place.
Love Letter from the Nurturing Adult
Write yourself a letter of fiercely loving support from the perspective of a mature and unconditionally accepting parent. Embrace all your current emotions and life challenges and help yourself appreciate what each tells you about your relationships to yourself, to others, and to the world. Offer advice about what you could courageously do to further grow or develop those relationships. While in this consciousness, embrace your strengths and your weaknesses. Remind yourself, as you write your letter, that the goal of individuation is wholeness, not perfection.
Write a series of these letters and notice how they change over time. If you’d like, make a copy of one, place it in a sealed envelope, give it to a trusted friend who knows you well, and ask him to mail it to you when he intuits you could use some support from your North Self.
Love Letter to Another
The love letter from the Nurturing Adult to yourself aims at cultivating the intrapersonal dimension of the North facet of the Self. The interpersonal dimension can be cultivated by writing a love letter from the North Self to another being, usually another human, or possibly a member of another species or a whole species.
This love letter, and the ones that follow, can also take the form of a song or a poem, a dance or performance art, or a painting, sculpture, or weaving.
Love Letter to a Mountain, River, or Watershed or to the Earth, Sun, Milky Way, or Universe
In order to access and cultivate the ecological or cosmic dimension of your Nurturing Generative Adult, write a love letter to an ecological feature of your world — a particular mountain, river, desert, forest, marsh, or glacier. Or write a letter to the Earth. Or to our local star. Or to our galaxy or the entire Universe.
Love Letter to the Mystery
Write a love letter to the vast Mystery that informs and expresses itself as every thing in the Universe. For example, Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet, wrote more than 150 such letters, in verse, when he was in his midtwenties. These letters Rilke bound together in his Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, in which he acknowledges that he has a personal relationship with Mystery, has personal obligations to Mystery, and has opportunities for passionate and wild celebration of this relationship. You, too, may want to acknowledge your relationship with Mystery — from the consciousness and perspective of your Nurturing Generative Adult. Rilke recognized that Mystery appears as universally as “the Limitless Now,” on the one hand, and as uniquely and specifically as mountain, fire, or “a wind howling from the desert’s vastness,”9 on the other. The Self of every person knows this to be true.
A Vow to Your Soul
If you have come to understand your Soul’s desires mythopoetically (namely, in the Soul’s own language of metaphor, symbol, archetype, and image), write a vow of commitment to enacting or deepening your soulwork, your own unique life mission, personal mythology, or sacred story. Express your vow in writing, or sing it or dance it on a hilltop, and be sure to do so from the embodied perspective of your Generative Adult. Don’t hold back! Let Mystery know you say yes boldly, despite your appreciation that being so bold will occasionally lead to humiliations — mortifications (ego deaths) necessary for transmuting you into ever more effective shapes and semblances for embodying Soul.
And this probably goes without saying, but I’m going to say it nonetheless: as helpful and facilitative as vows are, much more important is the follow-through — the actual performance of your Soul-infused vision as a gift to others.
THE NORTH FACET OF THE SELF AND THE DESCENT TO SOUL
So far we’ve mostly been exploring how the Nurturing Generative Adult functions in the middleworld — our everyday reality of family, friends, school, work, and community. But the North facet of the Self is also an essential resource in the transpersonal journey to the underworld of Soul.
The descent to Soul offers some of the most harrowing challenges of a lifetime. There we encounter dangerous opportunities that range from the physical to the psychological to the spiritual. On the way to Soul, we might be compelled by our initiation guide or by our own psyche to wander into wilderness (remote mountain ranges, claustrophobic caves, or searing deserts) or into our own psychospiritual wilds (core emotional wounds, Shadow realms, nightmares, memories of personal or collective trauma, or confrontations with our own mortality) that demand a well-honed capacity for self-care, self-reliance, and creative response if we are to benefit from these experiences — or even survive them.
In Soulcraft I explore the many capacities that must be honed for a fruitful descent, or that are at least invaluably facilitative. The self-nurturing subgroup of these skills includes the abilities to relinquish attachment to our former identity, quit addictions (explored in chapter 8 of this book), welcome home our Loyal Soldiers (chapter 6), explore our core wounds (chapter 7), choose authenticity over social acceptance, and make peace with our past. The complementary set of generative skills for Soul encounter include those of soulcentric dreamwork, deep-imagery journeying, talking across the species boundaries, self-designed ceremony, symbolic artwork, journaling, and the arts of wandering, Shadow work (chapter 9), soulful romance, and mindfulness. Cultivating and deploying these two sets of underworld-relevant skills require a well-developed Nurturing Generative Adult.
And after underworld encounters, the work of embodying Soul likewise necessitates a well-honed North Self. Living our mythopoetic identity for the benefit of the more-than-human community requires determination and perseverance, as well as the skills and knowledge that constitute a delivery system (a Soul-resonant craft, career, profession, art, or discipline). As initiated adults, we also need to hone the strengths of character and the skills required to face active resistance or censure from those threatened by our culture-reshaping contributions, or to respond effectively to the often destabilizing projections of others — the positive ones as well as the negative.
THE NORTH FACET OF THE SELF AND THE ASCENT TO SPIRIT
The North facet of the Self is also an essential resource in the transpersonal ascent to Spirit, in which the Ego aims to merge with Mystery. On the path to cultivating spiritual equanimity, universal compassion, self-transcendence, and nondual awareness, there are a great variety of challenges, distractions, and pitfalls. In order to stay on the path, we need a well-developed capacity to nurture ourselves in the face of sometimes overwhelming emotions and memories, interpersonal antagonism and discord, the boredom that can accompany contemplative practices, or our own wounded subpersonalities screaming for their needs to be met or their addictions to be fed. And in the course of sustaining a contemplative, meditative, or yogic discipline, we require the mature generative capacities to care for ourselves, our families, and our environment — to sustain health and well-being.
WHAT WE NEED IN ORDER TO GROW WHOLE
If each one of us is born with the breathtaking bundle of latent human capacities I call the Nurturing Generative Adult, then perhaps you wonder if this set of potentials might be all anyone needs for living a fully human life. It isn’t. There are three additional treasure troves of psychological resources we must cultivate in order to grow whole — three additional and essential facets of the gemstone that is the human Self. Let’s turn now to the first of these three.
