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Spiral Dynamics

Evolving in Relational Being

What is Spiral Dynamics to me?

SD is the Swiss army knife of developmental frameworks. From the moment I encountered it I saw answers to questions I had carried since studying psychology at university. It works at every level from individuals to nations and explains so much about how humans function. It is about how people think, what is important to them and how they develop. It describes how we humans adapt to our life conditions, like a socio-psychological Darwinism.

How I use it

I use in it coaching and in organisational development work. I nearly got to use it at the national level in a Balkan country, met with embassy people, ministers, and party leaders. It would have been really good for their problems.
It is a lens through which I see anything psychological or societal.

Spiral Dynamics and Relational Being

Spiral Dynamics is inherently relational because it is about interconnections and interactions, alignments and conflicts. Relational Being articulates much of what shows up in the later stages (Second Tier), so the two models fit together really well.

Further exploration of Spiral Dynamics

I can’t describe it adequately in the space of a single web-page, so here are some links for you to follow:
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It is well-known that many shamanistic cultures experience direct connections with the spirits of plants and animals.  Assuming that you don’t regard that as illusion or projection, you might ask  - what is that for us and for today’s world?

There are “modern shamans” – people who work with that realm of connection.  In fact there are many – horse whisperers, plant spirit medicine practitioners for example.  There are well-known examples of people who garden in collaboration with nature, and books such as Dorothy Maclean’s “To hear the Angels Sing”, which describes how enormous vegetables were produced in the seemingly barren soils of Findhorn.  Machaelle Small Wright has given in-depth accounts of how she created the Perelandra garden.

There are also stories of animals – particularly horses - being used in healing.  There is a great story of one such in my Substack “A tale of a psychic horse”.  I also talk about nature spirits in the “What’s Nature to you” chapter of “What makes you YOU” and the chapter on shamanism in “The Science of Possibility”.

It is an inevitable outcome of the “information field” as a central theoretical theme in both books, that our ability to connect with what animates other parts of the living world will reveal itself in many ways.”

Read this substack article: The Tale of the Psycic Horse

Your body is made of cells, which form organs and other systems. Anything in the world has sub-elements. Anything in the world is also part of a larger whole. This is the nature of holons, that they are identifiable, nested elements that we can choose to focus on, as we zoom in or out to the scale that we need.
“The whole context of Relational Being is that the universe is governed by a Field of Information. This includes the relationships we have with the flow of the universe in the sense of “God”, or “The Divine” or “The Force” or any equivalent term for the spiritual context”