Growing Up is one thing—but “if we don't Grow Down, we remain childish, and our wounds and traumas fester and govern our lives unconsciously”
We received a request from a valued reader this week: to keep in mind, as they put it, the “ecocentric shifts we need to make internally and collectively, shifting our story of separation from nature to one of belonging and connection with.”
Noted. Alternatives may sparkle and attract externally, but they often never get initiated without an internal strengthening and integrity—which itself emerges from an active and conscious weaving of relations around you.
So on that theme, we picked up this passage from the Facebook page of therapist Jack Adam Weber. He explores a simple but striking metaphor: it’s not about Growing Up, but Growing Down:
Below is a passage of rare wisdom, by Richard Rohr, a modern day progressive priest. What he shares is what I call "growing down," which is in stark contrast to the consciousness of ascension and the spirituality of bypassing.
Growing down means growing into being more fully human, embodied, connected to others, and with a heart broken open enough to become a wounded healer with hard-earned wisdom to help others.
When we grow down, we automatically "grow up." This is the beautiful alchemy of paradox, what Rohr refers to as thriving in the contradiction. We catalyze both Yin (down) and Yang (up), which is wholeness.
In contrast, unilaterally growing up does not ensure growing down—in fact, it more often buries and neglects our brilliance, trapped beneath our unreckoned trauma.
By growing down, we encounter our core love wounds, and to work through them is an initiation to clear and integrate our childhood pain so that we are actually able to become emotionally intelligent (mature) adults.
Because growing down confronts us with our shadow, it gives us the greatest opportunity for genuine, hands-on transformation so that we can become people of integrity. This creates a foundation of deep light for the privilege to affect the world as adults.
If we don't grow down, we remain childish, and our wounds and traumas fester and govern our lives unconsciously.
We don't actually grow up, except most notably in the perverse capitalistic way of leaving home and making our own financial way in the world, which has its own merits, but is certainly not the grand sum of maturity, wisdom, and caring for the greater good (and in many cases is its antithesis).
When we don't grow down to grow up, we end up with a childish culture, and a tsunami of shadow trying to grab what it can from others to fill the void of what we have left untended.
Rohr says [in this post]:
Human consciousness does not emerge at any depth except through struggling with our shadow. It is in facing our conflicts, criticisms, and contradictions that we grow. It is in the struggle with our shadow self, with failure, or with wounding that we break into higher levels of consciousness. People who learn to expose, name, and still thrive inside the contradictions are people I would call prophets.
More from Jack Adam Weber, and from Richard Rohr.
Also on the theme of acknowledging the shadow and trauma-driven forces behind current affairs, see Zhiwa Woodbury’s major 2022 paper Climate Trauma: Reconciliation and Recovery. The precis:
Here is a synthesis of ten years of study, research and writing on the psychology/pathology of the climate crisis. My hypothesis is that climate trauma is a new and superordinate trauma arising from the grievous wounding of a living planet, of which we are all integral cells and organelles, and that this is triggering all of our unresolved cultural and generational traumas, demanding resolution.
My synthesis is that a post-modern, holistic indigeneity is emerging in non-Indigenous peoples, and that by adopting an attitude of radical humility and an ethic of shared responsibility, we may become indigenous to Gaia.
This will in turn affect all our relations, and create an effective bridge of communication and understanding between Indigenous peoples and the dominant, settler class of peoples, which in turn will facilitate the recovery of human nature.
With appropriate reconciliation and reparations in relation to both Indigenous peoples and Nature, this recovery of human nature will then become the path of resolving and recovering from our collective, climate trauma.