Soul Journeying – Entering the Promised Land of Renewal, Regeneration & Reconnection

Times they are a changin’, perhaps now more than ever, with so much volatility, challenge and opportunity. 

Breakdown leads to breakthrough only if we see through challenges and tensions with a different quality of thinking than created them. Then the tensions offer new steps of change into new horizons, new beginnings. This is the wisdom life is trying to show us right now, whereupon our ‘polycrisis’ becomes a ‘metacrisis’ – a ‘moving beyond’ the status quo into a new dawn.

This article explores a shift in how we sense our own selves, and how this lies at the heart of the regeneration (r)evolution.

Mind, Psyche & Soul

While mechanistic reductive thinking has increasingly dominated Western (now near global) schools of thought over recent decades, there have been enduring currents of a deeper more animist and soulful confluence throughout Western history.

Take psychology, for instance.

It’s largely dominated by today’s mainstream mechanistic scientism that perceives the human psyche in a narrowed reductive way: Consciousness a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity.

We’re taught at schools and universities that the individual mind is the creation of brain activity between our ears; the psyche is a ‘thing’ or ‘ego’ formed from neurological activity. That we are discrete bubbles of self-created consciousness separate from the world around us, save for the physical interactions and exchanges we undergo to survive. This mindset assumes the ‘self’ reacts to outer-change in order to ‘fit-in’ to its niche. Its struggles to survive by adapting to a changing world ‘out there’, and this outer-change impacts the inner-psyche, like a one-way reaction. Inner-outer psychical co-creativity and interdependence are, at best, clumsily handled by this mainstream mechanistic science, largely sidelined even supressed.

In this regard, our psychology is debased – reduced to egoic urges, survivalism, functional utility and individualism.  This has led to the consumerization of the ‘self-as-separate’. The egoic-mind becomes center stage, anything deeper dissolves, disappearing from daily awareness.

Unfortunately, this narrowed superficial (and essentially corrupt) view of the ‘self’ is inherent in the modern Western belief system served up through mainstream education today and promulgated through our economic and social patterning.

With this perspective reigning supreme, the human psyche lurches between individualistic egoic narcissism on the one hand, and collectivistic nihilistic humanism on the other. An extremification of me-versus-we forms.

We flip-flop between this polarity – either individualistic ‘me’ or collectivistic ‘we’. We fail to realize what lies beyond the dualistic tension of me-we, missing out on the polarity’s pearl of wisdom.

Terms like ‘true nature’, the ‘wisdom of life’ or ‘soulfulness’ come to be seen as pseudo-science or just mere wishful thinking for the dreamer or poet – a quaint relic left-over from earlier times when we lacked the sophisticated understanding of our present belief system.

Quite the opposite is true. 

Our current thinking about our own selves falls far short of what ancient peoples had insight into. These earlier insights are not lost in our Western heritage and vestiges are here today, resurging even.

Enter: Depth Psychology, Archetypal Psychology, Spiritual Psychology, Ecopsychology and Psychosynthesis. Such approaches reach beyond the dualistic polarities inherent in mechanistic thinking and welcome-in inner realms where we find a soulful and holistic sense of the sacred providing connectedness to our own selves, each other and Life. Enter authentic individuality as part-and-parcel of wholesome community development.  No longer a flip-flop of me-to-we but a me-and-we alchemy.

It’s our opening into the depth of life, and the depth of our own selves, our own psyches and souls.

This allows us to find our way home, into the heart of regeneration, for true community within this more-than-human world of immense diversity-within-unity. Far beyond exclusive in-crowds/out-crowds, group-think and an insecure need to fit-in while supressing our true nature.

Western Heritage

The sixties and seventies, in the West, were characterised by the self-actualization movement. While much of the counter-cultural movement became hoodwinked by the powers-that-be, hijacked by egoic self-as-separate, and consumerized by corporate forces, there was more to it than an ‘outer’ ego-urge for ‘self-realization’ (searching ‘out there’ for the ‘good life’). It invited a turn inward that returns our conscious attention to the depths of psyche, soul, nature and cosmos within and all around us.

This inner ‘re-turn’ was not a new adventure for the Western psyche, but rather an inherent hallmark of the West that’s often overlooked in our fashionable desire to critique anything ‘Western’ these days. For instance, Plato many centuries ago, emphasizes the ‘inner turn’ as a primary step to ‘knowing thy self’ – the journey of becoming soulful, connected, and in harmony with Life. 

Modern scholars often make the mistake of judging Plato’s Forms/Ideas as abstract concepts that separate mind from matter, yet this is because we apply our modern mechanistic lens to something much deeper and more profound. Platonic Ideas/Forms are animistic archetypal aspects of an imaginal realm (a ‘Field’) pervading the physical world – psychical informing the physical, and immanence within transcendence.

For the ancient Greeks, knowing one’s own nature and soul was essential to becoming more fully human and living up to our name as Homo sapiens – beings who work with wisdom; beings who work their soul-craft in service of inner-outer nature. Many of the Pre-Socratic philosophers that informed the likes of Plato and Aristotle – such as Pythagoras, Empedocles, Heraclitus and Parmenides – were not the mechanistic thinkers they are often fashionably portrayed as today. No. Look deeper into their original works and one finds a cornucopia of panpsychic understanding (a ‘pantopia’) of Mind, Nature and Cosmos steeped in sentience, with the personal soul reverberating within the World Soul of Gaia’s interbeing. Every place a pantopia of heaven pervading earth. This chimes with ancient wisdom found elsewhere, from the Far East (Daoism) to the Indus (Tantric-Vedic) to Peru (Caral-Supe) to Egypt (Hermetic), to Crete in the Mediterranean (Minoan), to Northern Europe (Celtic), to the British Isles (Druidic), to the Middle East (Sufi & Kabbala), to the original peoples found the world-over (Indigenous Shamanism). This inherent belief of mind-matter, inner-outer, human-nature, heaven-earth, masculine-feminine, me-we alchemy is core to our humanity regardless of West, East, North, South.

This ancient animist understanding is now being verified by the frontiers of Quantum Complexity science. Enter the ‘quantum vacuum’ or ‘Field’, an all-pervasive presence, a sea of consciousness informing all form – inner informing outer, mind informing matter.

‘The Field is the only reality.’  Albert Einstein

It’s only the relatively recent rise of Mechanistic Materialism over the last couple of centuries in the West that’s abstracted mind (‘inner’) from matter (‘outer’) decoupling the psychical from the physical.

‘The whole philosophy of hell rests on the recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specifically, that one self is not another self… it means the sucking of will and freedom out of the weaker self into the stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘to be in competition.’  C. S. Lewis

This worldview of Mechanistic Materialism (MM) – the ‘philosophy of hell’ – corrupts our sense of self-other-world to such an extent that we de-sacralize and un-soul our experience of life.  We rob ourselves of our own humanity. We get ensnared in self-as-separate egoic-bubbles bouncing around in a hyper-competitive nihilistic fear-filled world. But this is just a mindset, a way of seeing, that we have become inured in. It’s not actually how life really is. The time has come to take-off these threat-tinted glasses, and open to the creative potential of life in all its fecund fullness.

Moving Beyond Fear

It’s our own anxiety and fear that’s not just a symptom of the ‘philosophy of hell’ (our worry about the state of the world, what to do, what to fix, how to fit-in, how to plan, how to cope amid rising complexity) but also a cause, a catalytic-contributor, that twists us down pathways of over-achieving and outer-doing up-rooted from soul.

It’s our own minds, our quality of attention and intention, that breeds ontological deprivation, a loss of being-and-belonging, spawning fear and anxiety.

Rather than reaching down into the root of this deprivation, we all-too-easily grasp ‘out there’ for any form of connection and belonging we can find in today’s consumerized digitized society, further confusing our authentic becoming.  

True belonging and authentic community depend on developmental integration of the ‘self’ beyond the recesses of the thinking mind, trending meme opinions, or the convenience of group-think echo-chambers.

When we’re insecure, we prioritize fitting-in to a ‘tribe’ over our own authentic being.

However, true community helps the ‘self’ sense insecurity, notice it, learn from it by leaning ‘in’ to it rather than suppressing one’s true feelings.

The insecure self-as-separate needs to see beyond itself to find the freedom and true belonging of the soul. The simplicity of stillness is a great antidote here.  It costs nothing yet changes everything.

Beyond Transhumanism

The MM mindset asserts control over life because it fears change, unpredictability, and instability. In doing so, it started to tyrannize over our own selves, starving our souls and sickening society. To say society is ‘sick’ might feel harsh but take a real look at what’s going on in the world today in the name of ‘progress’. 

Today’s infatuation with the ‘outer’ decoupled from the ‘inner’ creates weapons of mass distraction that siphon off billions of dollars and humongous levels of creativity, intellect, engineering prowess, rare-earth resources, and vital energy-sources in attempts to control life. Enter transhumanism. Often masquerading as helping us become more ‘sustainable’ or ‘resilient’ when in actuality taking us further away from our true nature, making us more lost, disconnected, dis-eased, fearful and anxious.

Let’s fix this polycrisis by making everything always-on AI-enabled, engineering our weather systems, nanotech biohacking our bodies, tracking and tracing every moveable part of society, gamifying a digitized metaverse, satellite imaging our every move, artificially molding our minds – all hallmarks of the insecure ego attempting to assert power over life, to control and commodify this life-experience.  

This is a massive brain-drain. An utter waste of our humanity, leading to yet more pollution and exploitation of our inner-outer worlds.

The mechanistic-mind often prides itself on being efficient and effective. Yet it fuels a fragile insecure ego endlessly searching for security and certainty, producing woeful inefficiency. The vast majority of the workforce across our organizations today are disenfranchised, disempowered and demotivated.

We allow ourselves to succumb to technological titillation, digital distraction and commodified artificial connection because we have failed to come to terms with this inner lack.

None of these transhumanist, geoengineering, smart-grid or space-travel programs attend to the root problem of dis-connection at a soul-level.  The MM mind simply can’t see beyond the need to control life when still wearing the threat-tinted egoic-glasses that warp its worldview.

Imagine if all (or just 50%) of this creative energy, investment, human ingenuity and infrastructure was re-siphoned toward encouraging a more soulful engagement with life, and deepening our connection with others and the world around us, creating regenerative futures, like regenerative farming, food production, energy systems, health, economics, wellbeing, nature connection, and life-affirming business.  None of this is actually that difficult for us to do. The tools and technologies all exist, but the appetite is far too engrossed in outer infatuation ungrounded from inner connection.

Enter today’s malaise.

It’s a hard pill to swallow that our own minds might actually be THE problem.

Fail to deal with this crisis of consciousness at its root – by re-connecting to heart and soul – and initiatives directed toward economic, environmental and social regeneration, no matter how well-funded, become impotent. We busy ourselves shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, too blind to what’s right before us – our own beingness, and our innate capacity to participate in (rather than gain control-over) creation.

As Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr notes, ‘The ecological crisis is only an externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man.’ This insight of Nasr’s applies not only to the ecological crisis but to all the crises making up the polycrisis now facing humanity. Try and deal with these crises without attending to Nasr’s ‘spiritual rebirth’, and our progress will be doomed from the get-go.

And to be clear ‘spiritual’ does not mean organized religion, signing-up to a cult, or engaging in anything particularly ‘woo woo’. It simply means being human, not some inauthentic mask-version, but connecting to our true nature; to be soulfully embracing this adventure called ‘life’. This invites an exploration—a journeying—into what deepens humanity in ways that respect diverse creeds.

‘To be human is to be spiritual; there is no separation between spirituality and life itself.’ Reginald Ray, Buddhist teacher

Without relying on anything overly spiritual or religious, my latest book Keys for Future-Fit Leadership is aimed at catalyzing such a rebirth right in the heart of our corridors of power. Leaning into the science available to us today along with the inherent desire of the entrepreneurial business mind to be future-fit, we uncover keys that welcome-in our deeper, truer humanity in-tune with Life. 

Why is this of relevance for our business leaders?

Durable, sensitive connection to our own deeper natures, and the natures of our organizations, will be the critical success factor that separates leaders who struggle to cope with rising complexity from those who thrive. To thrive, you’ll need to embark on a death-rebirth journey. Period.

Isn’t it simplistic, naïve, or unrealistic to envisage the Western psyche enduring a rebirth?

The more we look into Western heritage we see that death-rebirth is woven into its collective psyche, and a ‘spiritual rebirth’ is a natural playing out of deeper mythic-archetypal forces already at play in us. It’s less a case of hoping for a rebirth than it is of becoming more attentive to what is really going on beyond the narrow confines of today’s ego-malaise.  To start to see with a more attentive perspective and so recognize reality, beyond deckchair shuffling, hyperbole and PR propaganda.

Can we see beyond the weapons of mass distraction, amid so much fear, and sense reality in all its stillness?

Of course we can, it’s our human birthright. Sure, times are turbulent and the social waters are choppy which brings dissonance, but this can help wake us from our status-quo sleeping-pill slumber.

‘Understanding the illusion only comes after the understanding of reality, not before… Until we have the experience of reality, in all its stillness, we are still lost.’  Peter Kingsley

Sensing into our Soul-Consciousness

Today the word ‘soul’ has been largely overlooked by modern mechanistic-humanistic psychology, sidelined as something ‘religious’ that can’t be measured so seen as unscientific, nebulous, fanciful. Yet a resurgence of a more ancient holistic-humanistic/animistic psychology is bubbling-up once again. A ‘science of the soul’ is capturing the Western mind. Enter the exponential rise in consciousness studies, spiritual retreats, plant medicine ceremonies, vision quests and soul journeys.

What do we actually mean by the word ‘soul’?

‘You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you travelled by every path in order to do so; so profound is its meaning.’ Heraclitus

The soul is frequently thought of as the spiritual essence of the individual, and yet the soul is more like a portal into the inner spirit realm rather than a ‘thing’ in itself. By naming it the ‘soul’ it is easy to objectify ‘it’ like a seed or kernel inside us. Instead, think of the soul more as an aperture into a soul-scape, like a frequency channel on a TV set, which is located in the bodymind (immanent-body) and yet extends beyond the bodymind (transcendent-mind), an immanent-transcendent bridge between the two worlds of outer-nature (physical) and inner-nature (psychical). When in soul-consciousness we perceive (know) life as inner-outer nature; we are open to inner-outer dimensions, we are more in-tune with ourselves, others, and life in general.  With this quality of consciousness, we totally ‘get’ why we need to be regenerative and life-affirming, it’s a no-brainer.

‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Where the soul lies down in the grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’

Doesn’t make any sense.’    Rumi                                             

This field, land, or dimension beyond egoic-duality’s right and wrong, is the mythic ‘Promised Land’, or ‘Garden’, the one Life, conveyed in all the world’s great myths. Resonant and rhythmic, this soul-consciousness lies at the root of regeneration. It’s our way into an ever-flowing fecundity of sublime symphony that irrigates our nature and informs our knowing, far beyond facts-and-figures, or ‘me’ versus ‘we’ dichotomy.

Through soul-consciousness we can sense the transcendent, unlimited aspect of our own essence beyond space-time and we can sense the potent purposefulness of our unique soul journey in this lifetime, which is limited by space-time. The unlimited interfaces with the limited through the soul aperture within. We open our minds and hearts beyond the limited scarcity thinking that binds us to egoic survivalist separateness. We open ourselves into a different quality of consciousness than which created our crisis of crises in the first place.

The soul is the rhizomatic rooted fecundity that flowers diversity-within-unity. It provides our sense of belonging and meaning in this world. It unfurls purposefulness, enthusiasm, authenticity, integrity, true community, and hope in life-affirming futures.

The soul quests for depth, resonance and liminality. It dances through thresholds and plays with tensions. Uncertainty breeds novelty. Challenge brings opportunity. Adversity reveals genius. Conflict spawns creativity.   This is soul-making: poiesis.

As Future-fit Leaders we embrace volatility with not-knowing – Zen’s beginner’s mind – a soulful curiosity that opens our hearts and minds to immense creative potential so that we dance amid rising complexity rather than struggle against the torrent of tumultuous change.

‘Never lose a holy curiosity.’ Albert Einstein

The ego wants to collapse tension into right-versus-wrong; the soul holds the tension just long enough for grace to enter. This is the act of rebirth at the root of regeneration found amid the learning vessel or our own selves. Mind-matter, inner-outer, masculine-feminine, me-we dualities become alchemic. Beyond duality we find trinity-in-unity. Enter the Field.

‘If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.’ Marie-Louise von Franz

If we invite in the stillness to listen to the soul then we can learn to sense dualistic polarities as signs that something is waiting to emerge – from the tension of the two, comes the third. This is the soul’s trinity-in-unity symbology right in the heart of everyday living. Turn the tension into the fertile landscape for novelty, then challenge becomes opportunity.  

We let life open us, emancipate us. We walk through thresholds. Compost the trash-and-clash to upcycle developmental learning. Rebirth becomes a natural process of becoming who we truly are, working with the wisdom of life. A labyrinthine journey, not a set of principles or 10-step programs, but symbolic signs, synchronistic mythmaking way markers and gut-knowings for navigation beyond destination.

‘When you make the two into one, then you will become’ Jesus Christ

To Summarize

The adversity and tension amid the day-to-day provide opportunities for mini-rebirths. All the while – through adversity, challenge, change and volatility – we become more conscious of our own soul-making.  No longer needing to control change and assert power-over life, we start to dance with change. The ‘metacrisis’ brings us through our own threshold of seeing with new eyes, becoming more human, whole and wise.

Our places of work, the organizations that we spend much of our lives in, can become places that stimulate our soulfulness if we so choose. Creativity, sense of purpose, developmental learning, innovation, entrepreneurialism and agility all exponentially rise when we unlock our innate potential.  We become future-fit, and start to thrive amid rising complexity, while also becoming true to our nature. It’s simply good business sense.

HOT OFF THE PRESS – latest book:Keys for Future-fit Leadership

‘Keys for Future-fit Leadership is nothing short of revolutionary—a compass for our times, providing the formula humanity urgently needs to navigate the seismic shifts we face.’   Marc Buckley, Founder ALOHAS Regenerative Foundation

‘Giles doesn’t just share his wisdom with the invigorating charm of a natural breeze—he embodies nature itself. He reminds us of our deep connection to the natural world, a bond we’ve neglected to our own detriment. Knowing Giles is like rediscovering the path back to nature.’  Lucy Cleland, Editorial Director, Country & Town House

Keys for Future-fit leadership can be found through major book channels or purchased directly from the sustainable/ethical publisher here: https://www.wordzworth.com/sales/authorbooks?ISBN=9781783243532

Next Deep-dive Immersion on Future Fit leadership is 8^th/9^th September – see more details here: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/

‘The nature immersion with Giles exceeded all expectations.  This is real space to develop strategies fit for the 21st century.’ – Stephen Passmore, CEO, Resilience Alliance

This two-day overnight deep-dive is for leaders and practitioners who wish to gain an embodied experience of Future-fit Leadership and also apply tools for activating Regenerative Leadership Consciousness in their own work and lives. The immersion will provide advanced techniques and frameworks for your own work as a leader and for practitioners/coaches working with clients/leaders and Future-fit L&OD (leadership & organizational development).

‘Feel I’ve been with a real master. What beautiful profound lessons’. – Simon Milton, CEO of Pulse Brands

For more details see: https://thenatureofbusiness.org/2025/04/15/keys-for-future-fit-leadership-8th-9th-sept-immersion/

‘Giles is a visionary and guide for anyone exploring the journey toward Future-fit/Regenerative Business. He’s been called a wise medicine man for our time and a magician of consciousness. When you are with Giles you get why these words are apt.’  Jannine Barron, Founder of The Growth Experience

To book for 8^th/9^th September Immersion or explore 121 Coaching with Giles contact him via his website https://gileshutchins.com/

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You can watch a short 2min video about Keys for Future-fit leadership here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjQ6s80ewNU&list=PL4fiSooXivB7D83ut1Igssgg0xZcf-mGN&index=34