Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin
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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