Psyche
The development of a self is also the development of possibility.
We become ourselves through experience.
Long before we can explain who we are, we are learning through our bodies, relationships, environments, language, memory, and imagination. We discover what feels familiar, what seems possible, what belongs, and what we have learned to expect.
Gradually, an inner world takes shape.
But this world is not fixed. It continues to move as we encounter new experiences, discover different perspectives, and develop the capacity to recognize what has been shaping us.
Psyche is where I explore that movement.
Not only how a self forms, but how it remains capable of becoming.
The Inner and the Outer
We are never formed entirely from within.
There are forces that gather around our memories, attachments, fears, desires, promises, and devotions. There are also forces that reach us through family, culture, institutions, language, economics, history, and the environments we inhabit.
I explore these relationships through two companion inquiries.
What is moving me?
Inner Gravity
Inner Gravity explores the patterns and meanings that acquire weight within a life. It asks how we can recognize what is pulling on us without surrendering our capacity to choose a direction.
Explore Inner Gravity →What is moving us?
Outer Gravity
Outer Gravity explores the larger cultural, symbolic, ecological, and institutional conditions that shape what we notice, value, imagine, and believe possible.
Explore Outer Gravity →Neither operates in isolation. The inner world develops in relationship with the outer one, and what we carry within us influences the world we help create.
The Development of Perception
There is a difference between having an experience and recognizing what is happening within it.
We learn to sense, distinguish, name, relate, and respond. We also inherit habits of attention that can limit what we are able to recognize.
My work with The Capacities keeps returning to four questions:
Perception — What is actually here?
Symbolization — What happens when I give it a name or image?
Relationship — What changes when something outside my interpretation answers back?
Participation — What becomes possible when I act?
These are not stages to complete, and they are not the whole framework — each capacity has its own practice, and the full work lives on its own page.
The Symbolic Imagination
Human beings do not experience the world through sensation alone.
We dream, remember, imagine, tell stories, make images, and give names to things that cannot always be held in our hands.
Symbols help us carry experience across time. They allow us to recognize relationships, explore possibilities, and communicate what ordinary descriptions may not fully contain.
But a symbol is not the same thing as the living reality it represents.
This is the heart of my work with Symbolic Literacy: learning to recognize how images, stories, myths, and language shape perception while remaining free to question and participate in their meaning.
A symbol can be explored without becoming a verdict about who we are.
Where Body and Sky Meet
Sometimes an idea becomes clearer when we move with it.
A balance can be imagined and physically explored. A threshold can be crossed. A circle can be entered or left. A rhythm can be felt before it is explained.
In Soma & Sky, I explore the relationship between embodied perception, celestial symbolism, rhythm, and imagination.
The sky offers observable patterns. Symbolic language offers possible relationships. The body offers a place to experience and explore them.
The purpose is not to make the symbol authoritative over the person, but to open another way of participating in an idea.
Human Development: How We Become
Behind these inquiries is a continuing interest in human development.
How does a child become a self? How do relationships and environments shape the capacities available to us? How do inherited patterns become identity? And how can a person continue changing without losing continuity with their own life?
I approach development as something that happens within an ecology of relationships, bodies, stories, institutions, and living environments.
A self needs enough continuity to recognize itself, but enough openness to continue becoming.
Explore Developmental Participation →
Begin Wherever Something Moves You
You might enter through psychology, mythology, imagination, movement, or a question about your own life.
There is no single sequence required.
These inquiries are connected, but each can be explored on its own.
And if you would rather explore them in conversation, my work with individuals begins with an Orientation: a space to discuss what is bringing you here and whether there is a useful way to continue together.
Work With Me · Book an OrientationThe symbolic work is also taught, one thread at a time, at the School of Symbolism.
The purpose of these frameworks is not to tell us what we are. It is to help us remain capable of discovering what else is possible.