My work is shaped by the values, beliefs and tools described below.

The Map of the Psyche

Each of us is made up of several inner parts or voices. Most of us have had the experience of inner voices that seem to compete or argue with each other – for example, when we are trying to make a decision. Or we might have wondered who was in charge of our behavior when we did or said something that surprised us. The Map of the Psyche, developed by Animas Valley Institute founder Bill Plotkin, is a model that I have found useful in coming to know and understand these different selves, and learning to harmonize the relationships between them.

The Map of the Psyche is a nature-based model. As people have done for millennia, it utilizes the cycles of the natural world, the seasons and the times of the day/night cycle, to understand the parts of ourselves. The map is a wheel marked by the four cardinal directions — north, south, east, and west. Two inner selves correspond to the nature-based energies of each direction. As people have long recognized, outer wild nature and its cycles reflect to us the cycles and aspects of our own inner human nature.

The Map of the Psyche provides a guideline for work with the inner selves. Most of the work is done on the land where the correspondences between human nature and other-then-human nature are powerfully conducive to the strengthening and transformation of our selves.

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wind. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

—DEREK WALCOTT, LOVE AFTER LOVE