About Silvaticus Mundus

Silvaticus Mundus is an educational, therapeutic, and immunological project dedicated to the renewal of planetary health through the rewilding of human life and society. It hinges on the thesis that the most characteristic, pervasive challenge on earth right now is the widespread mechanization of life, which manifests as the psycho-spiritual-social disease known as wetiko. Machines, computers, and industrialization are fundamentally at odds with the vital nature of life. Modern high-tech society has taken us far beyond domestication: human life has been mechanized into a global system of biological computation and abstract, algorithmic activity. We are now faced with the task of remembering how to be truly alive elements of the wild world we never actually left, but merely paved over and forget daily through the disembodying distraction of digital displays holding captive our attention and vital creative energies.

My professional training spans a wide range of practices, theories, and modalities. I am trained in:

• Trauma Informed Yoga Therapy™ (Sundara Yoga Therapy Academy)
• trauma-sensitive mindfulness
• sexual assault survivor advocacy
• intergroup and interfaith/interreligious dialogue
• mindfulness and embodied cognition
• Registered Yoga Teacher - certified in Hatha, Vinyasa, and Yin Yoga

Through a Doctoral Research Fellowship, I earned my PhD from the School of Education at Syracuse University. My doctoral dissertation advances the current paradigm shift in the life-mind sciences that leaves behind the obsolete mind-body/mental-physical dualism in favor of what's called the "deep continuity of life and mind" at the core of the emerging paradigm of ecological cognition. In essence, where there is life, there is mind. As I like to say, mind is not inside the head; we are inside mind.

In my research, writing, and embodied practices, I draw from a variety of ancient and contemporary traditions including the Tzʼutujil Maya; Taoism; contemplative and mystical Christianity; modern postural yoga; and secular traditions/practices including Eugene Gendlin's "Focusing" method; American pragmatic psychology (specifically Deweyan); and postsecular mindfulness.

At the core of my approach to cognitive immunology and soul care is the idea that teachers, healers, clinicians, and guides of all sorts should be in the business of supporting people in connecting with and furthering their own inner/innate teacher, healer, and guide. As Sherri Mitchell (Weh'na Ha'mu Kwasset) says:

The primary role of an external teacher is to empower your relationship with your inner teacher. Your inner teacher is the all-knowing part of you that is connected to the Creator and the entire creation." (from Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change)

Aside from my professional work, I enjoy a wide range of activities including hiking, cycling, backpacking, reading/writing, cooking, slacklining, gardening, rock climbing, playing and listening to music, poetry, fixing my car and bikes, and walking labyrinths. 

"of the wild world"...behind the name Silvaticus Mundus

The core conviction of Silvaticus Mundus is that we need not relinquish our wild, instinctual nature in order to be human (as has featured centrally in the "mechanization" of human mind and society). Instead, to be fully human is to embrace and put to intelligent use this ineradicable dimension of our being. Just because we live in cities and are surrounded by machines and computers doesn't mean that the ancient, untamed elements of our evolutionary ancestry have faded away - they are still as much a part of us as our "highest" reasoning capabilities and conceptual cognition. In fact, all our best sciences are converging on the same basic truth: 99% of cognition is non-conceptual: it is sensory, qualitative, somatic, instinctual, and spontaneous. All the so-called "higher" and more "refined" aspects of human intelligence are ultimately dependent on, and emergent from, these more primary dimensions of a wild, untamed, undomesticated cognitive realm that operates independently of linear, conceptual logic.

Silvaticus is Latin for "wild, woodland;" literally "of the woods." It is the etymological root of the modern English term "savage," which for a time was used pejoratively to label people and cultures who maintained a working, integrated, sustainable relationship with the ecosystems surrounding them. Among other meanings, mundus is Latin for "world, universe, earthly." I created this name Silvaticus Mundus as a way of reclaiming our "savage" nature as belonging to the wild Earth. It is a celebration of our being as much a part of nature as birds, bees, floods, and viruses, rather than a shaming, denying, or escaping from this original belonging.

It is an affirmation of the vast intelligence inherent in life -- in all living forms and flavors, not just in the linear, conceptual, symbol-based logic commonly relied upon in modern industrial society. For 99% of human existence on Earth, we thought, dreamed, spoke, and moved like/as/with/in nature, which is to say mythologically, poetically, narratively, qualitatively, artistically, musically, and aesthetically. Only in the tiny proportion of human history characterized by what Lewis Mumford calls the "myth of the machine" have humans shifted to thinking primarily in linear, logico-deductive and quantitative terms. This, quite literally, is highly unnatural. And, this program of social mind has reached its nadir.

It has been estimated that in the past 50 years, humans have generated more data and information that what was produced in the entire previous history of humankind. And yet -- is the world really that much better off? By any robust measure of the question, we're not. In industrialized societies today -- where there are vastly more machines and computers than in any society, ever -- the large majority of people are chronically depressed, anxious, and metabolically diseased. The global industrial consumer economy has destroyed thousands of ecosystems in its relentless demand to produce more -- more of anything that can be commodified, sold and consumed, regardless of its impact on planetary or social health. Species diversity has plummeted in many ecosystems around the world, and an estimated one third of available agricultural land has been degraded from living soil to lifeless dirt. In short, the civilizational project of society has failed. There is no conceivable way to continue this manner of living and expect to solve our individual and collective challenges.

It is the driving conviction of this project, Silvaticus Mundus, that the only path forward for humans is to reclaim and reestablish our place within the larger community of life, as partners and stewards of life shared with our more-than-human kin, rather than as dominators and conquerors. The civilizational project of humankind was premised on humans trying to take control of nature, to subdue and put in order a supposedly "red in tooth and claw" world of chaotic competition among more "primitive" beasts. What an absurd irony! Looking at how humans have acted throughout the 20th century (the most violent and murderous century in human history, by many measures), and how we are collectively acting today, it is contemporary society that is among the least "civilized" of animal cultures on Earth. We have not lived up to our self-given title of "most evolved" or "highest" form of life on Earth; we have betrayed our highest ideals in the mindless pursuit of commodity consumption, material acquisition, and monetary possession.

Moreover, the sciences themselves have revealed that we are not, in fact, the most intelligent form of life on Earth. Life as such is intelligence, and we are part of that intelligence. To be maximally intelligent, then, is not to battle nature but to work and live with Her, as component parts of a holistically integrated biosphere, which is to say a planetary organism - Earth, Gaia.

In no way whatsoever are humans separate or independent from nature. We are nature, we have always been nature, and will continue to be nature -- if we relearn how to live as part of the larger community of life rather than separate from and against that community. We must reclaim our wildness; we must re-become part of the wild world, silvaticus mundus.