Evolution Toward Wholeness: Integrating A Holistic Paradigm into Adult Development

This article introduces a paradigm of adult development that integrates two major systems of cultural values. One is the holistic worldview of interconnectivity rooted in indigenous and pre-industrialized, traditional cultures. The other is the linear, progress-focused worldview of industrialized and post-industrialized cultures. The indigenous source of this work is rooted in the Taoist lineage of Nei Dan, Inner Cultivation, as well as I Ching, an ancient Chinese complexity theory.

This article is calling for a diverse, multi-cultural collaboration to develop a paradigm of adult development that embraces wholeness as well as cultural diversity. Our global civilization is facing an immense challenge characterized by climate change, ecological collapse and social disruption generated by grotesque political and economic divides. A culturally richer and more universal understanding of human development is needed to guide a new phase of human evolution and societal transformation through the current maze of complexities and uncertainties before us. This understanding needs to be sourced from the lived experience of cultural difference that affects historical perspective.

Evolution Toward Wholeness: An Alchemy Between Linear Progression and Holistic Inter-Connectivity

In the last 300 years, cultural values from the modern western world have played a dominant role in shaping the social, economic and geo-political landscape around the globe, first through colonial and imperial forces, then through economic and ideological influences. The thrust of modernity has broken the western mind out of the hold of Christian/mythic thinking and released the power of scientific materialism to transform mankind’s physical world, which had not been possible from a traditional, pre-modern mindset. Modernity has brought many invaluable gifts, including an abundant material life, a standardized knowledge base for science, engineering, and communication technologies such as the internet and cell phones.

One of the central values formed during the development of the western mind is the idea of linear progress. Linear progress identifies measurable outcomes that grow over time. The seed of this idea was planted in the Judeo-Christian tradition which sees time as a linear flow forward, from the birth of Christ to his return.[*] Although the scientific mind rejects the mythical narrative, as scientific materialism developed, it inherited the thought structure based on a linear flow of time, which eventually turned into the ideology of linear progress. While immensely powerful at propelling humanity out of an old paradigm, the idea of linear progress unleashed an unstoppable psychological and social addiction. As a consequence, we continue adding fuel to a global economy which consumes critical natural resources as cancer does with healthy tissue and disrupts the equilibrium of Earth’s ecosystems, driving our civilization to the brink of self-destruction.

Humanity has about 5000 years of recorded history. Older cultures such as China and India saw many peaks of prosperity and bursts in technological breakthroughs. However, none of them pushed those peaks to the extent modern western culture has. This is not necessarily because they lacked the raw potential to do so. In the case of China, not focusing on material and technological development was a conscious choice made by ancient leaders to intentionally avert the kinds of environmental disaster we are facing today. This choice also had its own tragic consequences. It restricts the development of individual identity and ultimately stifles creativity and innovation. When the Western armies showed up at the doorstep of Qing dynasty in the late 19th century, 4000 years of traditional culture succumbed to military powers with much more advanced material technology. The land and people in China suffered immense trauma under colonial forces. This theme played out in a variety of ways for many indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, North, Central and South America and Australia. The psychological impact of these collective traumas is still unfolding, powerfully influencing our lives today.

Instead of linear progress, the indigenous and traditional cultures of pre-industry share a different cultural perspective which can be described as a paradigm of holistic interconnectivity. With holistic interconnectivity, human life is viewed as part of a larger life that includes the ecological systems providing the context for human life. In a holistic system, a part cannot thrive independent from the whole. Nor can a part be understood without its connection to the whole. The intimately woven connections and mutual influences among the parts give rise to new properties within the system. 

Under the influence of holistic inter-connectivity, the traditional Chinese culture sees the development of self as a process intimately woven with its natural and social environment. A self cannot be defined in isolation from its environment. Thus, cultural values from the traditional and indigenous cultures emphasize sustaining the equilibrium between a self’s individual identity and its collective identity. This means that in these cultures, the actualization of self-agency is ideally developed only to the degree that is of service to the well-being of its social (and natural) environment. Maximal expression of one’s potential without careful consideration of its impact on the environment is usually discouraged or rejected.

In this article, I introduce the Resonance Paradigm that synthesizes both the modern and indigenous/traditional cultural values. The Resonance Paradigm proposes that just as biological evolution has resolved into two sexes in most of the animal species on Earth, the evolution of human cultures also differentiates into a masculine and feminine mode. The progress-focused drive represents the masculine mode of psyche. Sustaining a holistic equilibrium represents the feminine mode. While all cultural systems contain both modes, each culture expresses its unique blending proportionally between them. Human history is shaped by a temporal ebb and flow between these two modes.

It is the interplay and counteraction, as well as mutual enabling between these two modes that propel and drive the evolution of human consciousness. I call this process evolution toward wholeness.

Beyond the Current Adult Development Models

Table 1 summarizes adult development work done by Kegan, Torbert, Cook-Greuter and O’Fallon. These ground-breaking works have proven to be extremely powerful in guiding the self-actualization process in modern, industrialized or post-industrialized cultures. While the holistic mindset has become a major concern for the later developmental stages in all these models, these models all share an architectural structure featuring a masculine mode of linear progression.

Figure 1 is a schematic illustration of the architectural feature shared by these models. The arrow points to a vertical development trajectory from earlier to later stages. Even though theoretically, later stages are not inherently better than earlier stages, later stages are given more positive and empowering descriptions. Later stages are associated with a higher capacity for sense-making and meaning-making, as well as a wider range of agencies. The development from earlier to later stages is the primary focus of many coaching practices. The reverse direction from later to earlier is commonly viewed as regression, or “crashing into the shadow”. All these dynamics influence people to harbor a subtle yet palpable prejudice that favors the later and averts the earlier stages of development. These prejudices compromise the inter-connectivity among different stages within one’s psyche, thus compromising the holistic intelligence built into its architecture.

Under the influence of this linear architecture, these models’ descriptions of the earlier developmental stages, in my view, are partial. I want to emphasize that these descriptions are not incorrect. However they are incomplete. They do not fully represent the contributions made by indigenous and traditional cultures associated with the earlier developmental stages. This limitation is understandable because most of the western researchers did not grow up in a pre-industrialized environment. Their understanding of indigenous and traditional cultures primarily comes from an academic view instead of a felt-sense, native-born experience.

Most of the models associate one of their measures of development with a refined capacity to use language to reflect oneself, articulate one’s thoughts and formulate new ideas. While this capacity is one of the most important skills to develop in modern times, we cannot equate this capacity with the whole of human development.

The Resonance Paradigm proposes that one of the most significant contributions of the indigenous and traditional cultures lies in cultivating, maintaining and regenerating the intelligence of somatic processing of complex information. In indigenous and traditional cultures around the world, including the European indigenous cultures, the capacity to engage with complex living systems does not just lie in linguistic sophistication. It is intricately connected with embodied wisdom and traditional knowledge passing through familial and spiritual lineages. Coupled with this vastly rich somatic and traditional wisdom is also highly sophisticated understanding of subtle energies and subtle realities. (In current adult development models, subtle awareness becomes available again at the later stages.) Since most of this wisdom is not spelled out in linear, logical language, or it takes on sparse or abstruse linguistic representation, it is very difficult for a standard western intellectual mind to digest. For example, many Taoist and ancient Chinese classics expound complexity theories written in highly encrypted poems and prose.

A healer and tribal leader from an Amazonian village may not pass the test to type anywhere beyond “Conformer” stage in a language-based adult development test, yet he carries somatic intelligence to engage with a complex system no less sophisticated than an “Alchemist” of a late stage. The somatic processing of complex information has tremendous implications in modern leadership. Authors such as Doug Silsbee and Otto Scharmer proposed presence-based leadership which emphasizes the importance of embodied presence in a leader’s capacity to connect and inspire people. Somatic processing is also critical for a leader to discern the connections between the complexities of the outer environment and the complexities of her inner environment through felt-senses and intuitive perceptions.

The kind of leader who will thrive in the future will need to develop both the capacity to exhibit the embodied leadership similar to the Amazonian tribal leader as well as the intellectual capacity to articulate and perceive patterns cognitively.

One may ask, if somatic intelligence is associated with earlier developmental stages, why would most of the western modern scholars not see it? From my view as an Asian immigrant living in the West, in western cultures, the thrust toward modernity and the drive to develop a more refined intellectual capacity cast a powerful “spell” to mask the somatic intelligence inherited from indigenous and pre-industrialized ancestors. This spell is held in place by the collective unconscious and sustained by a complex set of cultural norms, rules and ethics to ensure it remains intact. Examples of such include the industrialized standards of beauty imposed on both women and men, the civilized behavioral codes that shame and suppress spontaneous bodily expressions, absence of physical, non-sexual touch in social interactions, an emphasis on cultivating independence and individuality from infancy[†], isolation from a multi-generational and collective environment in early childhood, and the way an individual human’s body is treated as a machine, dissected, analyzed and quantified by reductionist-based medicine rather than an intelligent organism capable of self-regulating. These norms, rules and ethics are numerous. Some of them may appear trivial by themselves. Yet, woven together they ensure the spell stays intact and passes from generation to generation.[‡]

For a person who was born into a culture with this spell, it requires either an extraordinary natural gift or an unwavering, intentional effort to lift the spell and “see” his or her indigenous, somatic intelligence. Even if she is successful at doing so, should she incorporate her indigenous somatic intelligence into her social environment, she would need to develop a new linguistic ethos to anchor this ancient intelligence in the modern mind. It is a daunting task! Therefore, even though most of these western scholars hold an empathetic and reverent attitude towards indigenous culture as an external object, it is difficult for them to experience and identify that indigenous part of themselves internally.

Resonance Paradigm: A Vibratory System

The Resonance Paradigm builds upon the groundbreaking works of western scholars and integrated holistic thinking in its architectural design. This paradigm presents a model of the psyche with three planes, Dense, Middle and Light Planes, as shown in Figure 2.

The Dense Plane represents somatic awareness, instinctual and bio-emotional processes. The Middle Plane represents the linear rational mind as well as the heart mind, the ability to empathize and relate to linear representations of reality from another perspective. The Light Plane represents pattern awareness and perception of subtle, thus un-embodied, reality. When we apply this pattern awareness to our sense of self, we have access to the part of ourselves akin to what is called the “soul”. With our soul awareness, we become aware of the subtler existence of ourselves beyond our own body or limited lifetime. Unlike the ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the soul needed to be liberated from “the prison of one’s body”, the Taoist thinkers and practitioners of ancient China viewed the body as the crucial vessel within which one may attain the realization of one’s soul. This gave rise to its unique thought structure which the Resonance Paradigm has inherited.

One of the breakthroughs of the Resonance Paradigm lies in its architecture, a toroidal structure. The toroidal structure enables an energetic cyclic flow (shown in Fig 2) between the high and low poles, as well as between inner and outer. Cyclic flow of energy is critical to ensuring the sustainability of an ecological system. For example, the energy sequestered within living systems is gradually released from microbial to plants, and eventually to animals residing at the highest ladder of the food chain. Yet, at each rung on the evolutionary ladder, the decomposition of the dead returns the energy back to the microbials of the soil, the lowest of the food chain.

Figure 3 shows two complementary pathways fundamental to this model. The upward movement from denser to lighter planes is driven by what is called the Enlightening Pathway. It is the evolutionary drive to extract embodied, concrete, and lived experience into abstract and symbolic information/knowledge. This corresponds to the vertical upward movement shared by all the developmental models presented in Table 1.

The downward movement from Light to Dense plane is the called the Enlivening Pathway. It is the psychological drive to enfold symbolic information and abstract knowledge into embodied, concrete and lived experience. For example, for someone to evolve from a competitive to a collaborative mindset, it is not enough to speak with collaborative language and conduct herself with collaborating behavior. The enlivening pathway also allows one to feel her somatic presence as an embodied representation of a collective, so that she can learn and experience what collaboration is at her deepest instinctual level.

While the Enlightening Pathway expands our mind and identity from egocentric, ethnocentric to world-centric (as symbolized by the light blue triangle in Fig 3), the Enlivening Pathway animates our somatic presence to be more alive, so that we can experience our bodies not just as instruments to express one isolated individual, but also to express our family, ethnicity, community and global citizenship in a creative way (as symbolized by the light grey triangle in Fig 3). Evolution toward wholeness requires concerted coordination and conscious attention to both Enlightening and Enlivening pathways. With these bi-directional impulses, the psyche becomes a vibratory system, capable of resonating with complex social organisms around it like a musical instrument. In this way, a leader or change agent may generate powerful resonance effects around her.

The skills associated with the Enlivening Pathway maybe thought of as a conscious decomposition of one’s formed knowledge and operating systems as well as personality constructs. It is through this conscious decomposition that one may regenerate the “soil”, the ability to respond to the unknown and uncertainty with aliveness, spontaneity and creativity. In traditional farming practice, “enlivening the soil” through composting waste materials is given the highest priority. Industrialized farming, however, strips the soil with harsh chemicals. This outer environmental crisis is a mirror image of the inner crisis of the psyche. When we do not consciously compost ourselves, we neglect our “soil”, our natural gift for spontaneous creativity. In turn, the “topsoil” of our psychic landscape is stripped from its vital somatic foundation. The “soil” of our psyche is polluted with personality constructs that need to be thoroughly broken down and composted. In this light, the regression, or “crashing into the shadow” is the system’s natural intelligence attempting to bring our attention back down into the “soil” we have neglected.

The 12 Archetypes and Hidden Gifts of Earlier Developmental Stages

With this Enlivening Pathway visible, the view of human development shifts from a mono-lensed perspective to a double-lensed perspective. Moreover, a higher resolution map comes into focus. Table 2 lays out 12 developmental archetypes of the Resonance Paradigm, in comparison to Kegan’s, Cook-Greuter’s and Torbert’s models.

These 12 archetypes are distributed among all three planes. Each plane is maintained by four energetics, Being/Embodiment, Doing/Productivity, Allowing/Regeneration and Becoming/Transcendence. They are responsible for not only the formation and growth of the type of intelligence specific to each plane, but also the decomposition and recycling of outdated knowledge and expertise held by each plane so that the psyche can prepare the “soil” for new knowledge to grow. When these processes are organized coherently in relationship with one another, the system is in a resonant state like a well-tuned musical instrument. To keep this article brief, I will not go into the detailed construction of the model which was laid out in the recently published book, The Resonance Code. Instead, I will focus on how this model sheds light on evolution toward wholeness.

These 12 developmental archetypes play equally important yet definitely unique roles within the entire system. Notice that archetypes equivalent to the earlier developmental stages are now assigned with roles that are not only crucial, but equally likely to become a leader as any other archetype.

It is the inter-connectivity and intimate weaving among these 12 archetypes that promotes the intelligence of a system. Each one of these archetypes is described as a spectrum between a resonant and dissonant mode. A resonant mode is enabled when a particular archetype is intimately interwoven within the whole of an individual or an organization, maintaining a resonant response with the rest of the archetypes. A dissonant mode occurs when a particular archetype is disconnected from the whole of an individual or an organization.  

I’d like to draw your attention to the resonant expression of the Dense Plane archetypes, as highlighted in yellow in Table 3a. These qualities all have to do with the somatic and instinctual processing of complex information. As you can see, it is when these archetypes are expressed in isolation from the whole that they show the qualities characterized by the existing adult development work.

The resonant expression of the early development stages is not restricted to indigenous people or people born and raised in a pre-industrialized time. When I adopt this perceptual lens provided by the Resonance Paradigm to engage with modern people or people born in western culture who operate primarily at earlier developmental stages, my experience is amazingly rewarding. The innate, somatic intelligence of early developmental stages wants to be seen and known, despite the limitations of the mental framework it may represent. However, to experience that I need to exercise social skills grounded in my somatic (Dense Plane) and subtle awareness (Light Plane), rather than in the linear, rational mind.

I believe a conscious cultivation of both Dense and Light Plane awareness will open up a tremendous opportunity to accelerate human evolution at a greater stride. When we reintegrate the indigeneity hidden in our early development stages, we will expand our resources and gain momentum in embracing the wisdom and power residing in the Light Plane, our soul awareness!

Complementing “Transcend-and-Include” with “Dive-and-Enliven”

The Resonance Paradigm challenges us to examine an old assumption embedded in the current understanding of human development.

Old assumption: Capacities to engage with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity are only associated with late stage development. 

Opportunity: Humans are naturally equipped with gifts to engage with complexity and ambiguity. Many of our natural gifts lie dormant in the parts of us that represent earlier developmental stages. To gain greater mastery of complexity, in addition to pursuing higher stages of consciousness, diving deep down and integrating with lower stages is equally important.

If you doubt our natural gift to engage with complexity, watch how a toddler learns their native language. Learning language is the first vastly complex, often ambiguous and uncertain task most of us master without a consciously focused effort and within a matter of three or four years. This is genius by adult standards. Do you remember how you did it? As an adult, can you learn a new language in the same way you learned it as a child? Most likely not. That is because the bulk of our natural ability to engage with a complex task has been inhibited in the process of becoming an adult.

This is the paradox of human culture. Language and the development of cognitive capacities provide us with the critical skills to be socialized into the culture. However, the culture we build also inhibits our natural ability to engage with complexity. This happens in more harsh ways in industrialized societies. In indigenous cultures and in pre-industrialized time, with the absence of the pressure to achieve, compete and proves one’s self-worth, there tends to be a more nurturing condition for a child’s natural, embodied intelligence to unfold.

The gift of industrialization is that it created conditions for the linear rational and reasoning faculty to blossom, which led the development of a linguistic ethos to describe and affect complexity in many fields of society. The cost of that gift is forgetting we have a natural, somatically gifted intelligence to engage with complexity. In our forgetfulness, we shut these gifts out as taboo. We see them as monsters in the basement of our psyche. We keep those parts of our gifts locked up with addictive substances, indulgent habits, and entertainment containing high-levels of sensory stimulation.

The progress of modern developed society promoted by Euro-American cultures is built upon a set of meaning-making constructs and cultural values that privilege the intellect and reasoning faculty far above embodied and somatic intelligence. This is unique to Western-European cultures. Almost all indigenous cultures and pre-industrialized societies have a much more balanced view between mental intelligence and somatic intelligence.

In indigenous cultures or traditional societies, somatic processing of complex information associated with Dense Plane archetypes plays a crucial role in sustaining the well-being of the community. In African culture, there is a rich traditional practice of meaning-making through embodied gestures and movements. In Chinese culture, the traditional education of the intellect was accompanied with a rigorous somatic training.

A gift not expressed will turn into a “shadow” we carry.  The “crashing into the shadow” is an unstoppable longing for the fuller expression of those gifts. What if we take a 180-degree turn? Rather than a single-minded focus on enlightenment and transcendence, what if we open ourselves to the gifts of the Dense Plane by committing ourselves to a long journey back “down” to reunite with our natural gifts and the ancestral wisdom we inherit in our bodies? To do that, we need a new set of perceptual lenses to engage with the earlier developmental stages so that our minds can discern and affirm the subtle forms of intelligence inherent in those parts of ourselves. Imagine if we learn to appreciate beauty in its plethora of forms, to receive healing through plunging into our fear and pain, to see intelligence and wisdom in places we least expect! When our gifts on the Dense Plane are awakened, complexity and uncertainty are no longer to be dreaded and feared. Instead, we will be able to dance, surf and rejoice embodying and relating with complex systems.

In this light, the Resonance Paradigm proposes that consciously diving into the Dense Plane, into the earlier developmental stages is a necessary and important aspect of evolution toward wholeness. The old model of “transcend and include” is not enough. We also need to “dive and enliven”. Only when we grow deep enough roots, can we find nutrients that will enable us to grow even taller and straighter towards higher consciousness than we could without that deep dive.

Dissonant Mode of Light Plane archetypes (Later Developmental Stages)

I also would like to draw your attention to the dissonant mode of the archetypes of the Light Plane, as highlighted in blue in Table 3b. In a culture dominated by linear progress, we are driven by the unconscious habit of reaching for the highest. When our awareness of the higher archetypes is not fully integrated with our whole-bodied intelligence, it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling subtly superior to, judgmental toward, and disconnection from the rest of the humanity. It is easy to harbor the illusion that “we have arrived”.

We can never reach our highest potential simply by chasing higher stages. When we lose connection with the whole, we reach the ceiling of our development because the power of a disconnected self is limited. Here is a Buddhist teaching that describes this dynamic. How do you prevent a drop of water from drying up? Throw it back into the ocean. The secret pathway of ascent lies in our willingness to dive back into the ocean of the unconscious so that we can ride and surf with the waves rising out of the ocean itself!

When one reaches a certain degree of wholeness marked by an inter-connection among all the archetypes, it is impossible for someone with a refined awareness of the higher archetypes to feel superior or judgmental toward the lower archetypes. There will only be infinite compassion for those who suffer and an unstoppable passion to serve and engage. These experiences of compassion and passion are our most direct connection with the power of the whole.

To complete the information, I present the spectrum of the Middle Plane archetypes below. Since the discussion of these archetypes are tangential to the topic of this paper, I will not discuss them here. The table is offered as a way to complete the picture of all three planes of psyche, their archetypes and modes.

Resonance: A New Vista of Human Evolution

Resonance Paradigm opens up a new vista for conscious evolution. The possibilities from this vista are endless. I introduce a few to end this paper.

Intelligence of the Whole

The feature of a holistic system lies in the interconnection of the parts giving rise to new features within the system. When the inter-connectivity among parts reaches a certain threshold, remarkable new features arise. These features are beyond the capacity of any single part.

As you can see in Fig 4, these new features are represented by the lines of energetic flows connecting the archetypes at the highest and lowest positions at the two poles. These flows are the powerful “enlightening” and “enlivening” surges that are only accessible when one achieves a certain level of inter-connectivity among all the archetypes. With these powerful surges, one can possibly have sudden bursts of enlightenment (enlightening) as well as sudden bursts of healing (enlivening). Having access to the whole system’s intelligence, the influence of one’s actions and choices over a social organism can be greatly amplified. These are the critical skills of leadership explored by the Resonance Code. The book details specific techniques to access the intelligence of the system in Chapters 5 and 6.  

64 DNA codes: A High-Resolution Language to Engage with Wholeness

The Resonance Paradigm is derived from the I Ching, an ancient Chinese cosmology. The permutation of these 12 archetypes leads to 64 patterns that describe the energetic state of an evolving, complex living system. I Ching provides a wealth of historic information associated with each of the energetic states. The authors of The Resonance Code are working on adapting this wealth of information to be applicable in individual and personal transformation, as well as to be employed in adaptive leadership challenges that require interfacing with complex systems. With these patterns, we can engage in a complex system with refined discernment and a powerful agency to influence.

With this model, instead of focusing on developing more sophisticated cognitive capacities associated with higher developmental stages, Resonance Code emphasizes strengthening and weaving a tight inter-connection and integration among Dense, Middle and Light Plane archetypes. This integration will lead to a natural blossoming of one’s cognitive capacity as well as much faster and more grounded growth in embodied skills to engage with complex systems.

Develop a compassionate relationship with Dissonance, Pain and Chaos

In the journey toward wholeness we will inevitably encounter painful aspects of the past locked in reactive patterns. The automatic and normal response to these patterns is to shy away, deflect, deny, react and resist them which is exactly why they remain with us.  This avoidance causes us to naturally shift into the dissonant mode of expression of the archetypes from all three planes.

The Resonance Paradigm provides maps of the psyche and a set of distinctions and processes that invite and empower us to gently lean into the dissonance, rather than away from it. With these maps and processes, we can rotate the processing of complex information among three different planes which allows a much more efficient and elegant approach to transform dissonance into resonance. Chaos in this sense is not something to be tamed but to be embraced and mined for possibility.

Earth-Indigeneity: The Child of Linear Progress and Holistic Interconnectivity

The challenge we are facing now as a global community requires us to be recommitted to becoming the indigenous inhabitants, not just to our local community, but the Earth as a whole. This Earth-Indigeneity will come from the marriage between the ideology of progress, freedom and individual sovereignty championed by the modern western culture, and the embodied wisdom and subtle awareness of holistic inter-connectivity stewarded by the indigenous and traditional cultures. It will require the nurturing of a global, multicultural family. It is my hope that the ideas presented by this paper will contribute to the well-being of this “child” of humanity.


[*] In contrast, many indigenous cosmologies see the flow of time as circular. From the circular perspective, the evolution of a complex living system takes on a vibrational nature in relation to time rather than a simple linear function.

[†] In The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost, Jean Liedloff has shown that babies in indigenous cultures receive much more sustained physical contact from mother and other caregivers. The children sleep in the parents’ bed until they leave of their own volition, which can be as late as when they are three or four-years-old.

[‡] Perhaps the seed of this spell can be traced back to the origins of western intellectual tradition, when Greek philosophers such as Plato and Pythagoras invented philosophical systems featuring a dualistic separation between body and soul.


Author of this paper can be reached at spring@resonancepath.com.

For detailed reference of this body of work, please refer to: The Resonance Code: Empowering Leaders to Evolve Towards Wholeness.

For training programs offered at Resonance Path Institute, please go to www.ResonancePath.com and click Engage.


Acknowledgement

I thank Joseph Friedman and Ellen McCord for their extensive review and professional expertise that made this paper possible. I thank Brenda Harrington, Valerie Brown, Wendy Moomaw, and Vernice Jones for fruitful discussions about materials presented in this paper. I thank the members of the Resonance Code Research Lab for their unwavering support of this work. 

7 thoughts on “Evolution Toward Wholeness: Integrating A Holistic Paradigm into Adult Development”

  1. This model fills out the adult development picture further, and does feel like a fruitful upgrade to help us recognize the areas of dissonance in our field so to be able to engage more readily toward coherence. It does seem to be a more balanced and integrative way or perspective from which to relate with our whole self, from center to circumference, and with relational exchange between. Brilliant!

  2. Greetings with tone and harmonics towards a bright future now on.
    I enjoyed the the thought provoking article above. I am on page 103 of Volume 1, The Resonance Code and in the Tuesday/Wednesday Group and enjoying the landscape.

    My question below tries to summarize my perspective on evolutionary being and is meant to elicit a chime of a tone in dissonance or harmony as an echo in collective memories to come.

    Is evolution, as can be understood by us, the child of intention born not from human beings but actions of all things through pure energy expressed (light plane, now on) with matter and space colliding (middle plane, now) from a time past (Dense Plane, now been) as we conceive it?—the conception is all ours you see or is it?

  3. As a western non-Indigenous person who is working professionally with Indigenous and non-Indigenous in support of Indigenous Peoples around the world for the past decade or so, your below quote rings true. One interesting twist is that because it is so rare to find a non-IP in touch with their Indigenous consciousness, many/most IPs naturally assume non-IPs do not have the capacity. Accordingly, they tend to “own it” as part of their IP identity, and can feel like a non-IP person who has the capacity to lift “the spell” is threatening because s/he is assumed (at least at first) to be indulging in cultural appropriation, recapitulating (legitimate) fears of ubiquitious global historical theft of IP culture and territory.

    So, to realize this wonderful vision will indeed require evolution on all sides.

    “For a person who was born into a culture with this spell, it requires either an extraordinary natural gift or an unwavering, intentional effort to lift the spell and “see” his or her indigenous, somatic intelligence. Even if she is successful at doing so, should she incorporate her indigenous somatic intelligence into her social environment, she would need to develop a new linguistic ethos to anchor this ancient intelligence in the modern mind. It is a daunting task! Therefore, even though most of these western scholars hold an empathetic and reverent attitude towards indigenous culture as an external object, it is difficult for them to experience and identify that indigenous part of themselves internally.”

  4. This is an outstanding contribution to this field, to the larger conversation about human evolution and to humanity writ large. You have precisely and carefully woven truth about what is missing into an essential Conversation that relates to our survival as a species. I am eager to share this widely, participate in the ongoing conversation and extend a deep prayer of thanks for your work as it is emboldening me daily.

  5. Pingback: Why Ancient Ritual Postures in the 21st Century - Belinda Gore

Leave a Reply to Lisa Fitzhugh Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.