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Soulful human. 🦉🐺
Husband. 🐋
Dad. 🐢🐰🦋
Friend. 🫂
✨Following my soul’s guidance; learning embodiment.
👨‍🎓M.A. in Counseling Psychology
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🤔 As I’ve been saying, in many ways, who cares what I believe? 🤷 How’d I come to believe it? Does it connect me with myself, others, and nature? Is it capable of encountering novelty and adjusting? Does it respect others’ beliefs and sovereignty? If I apply it, if I integrate it into my life, does it move me and others toward LOVE, wholeness, coherence?
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This has been a fun exploration of the many things that I’ve been synthesizing over the past 5 years and the process of learning and growing has been invaluable!
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I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I feel (strongly) that one’s cosmology and their mental health are inseparable… and the health, wholeness, coherence, etc of the collective is undoubtedly both a shaper of individual cosmologies, and a byproduct of individual cosmological leanings. As we heal, WE heal, and the ONE heals and evolution continues.
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#cosmology
#mentalhealth
#oneness
#religion
#healing by @nathan.whitsell

💖 This one dives a bit more into detail into my cosmological leanings, particularly around quantum physics based ideas and “the point of it all”, which ultimately believe is the evolution of Love/Oneness.
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It’s quite a gift to speak all of this in a stream of consciousness format and see what comes out.
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This process has solidified my understanding that our cosmology, our process of acquiring it, our relationship to it, our flexibility within and without it, and our application/integration of it are huge contributors to our overall mental health.
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#cosmology
#mentalhealth
#psychology
#love
#religion by @nathan.whitsell

$*I believe that the “what” of one’s cosmology is less important than how they came to believe the what, much less important than how they apply/integrate the what, and FAR less important than if the what offers loving closeness and connection with self, others, and nature.* ✨ 🌙 ☀️ 🌳 🪞🦉 🐺 🫂 It’s fun to listen back and hear my stream of consciousness version of my ever-evolving cosmology. A bit vulnerable and cringy too! Haha. 🪐 I believe it’s ALL ONE. All of it. US. “THEM”. The organic. The synthetic. Anything made up of atoms, structures held together by the intelligence and intent of the ONE. 🧩 🧩 🧩 In the name of creativity, curiosity, and evolution, the One became the many and is constantly creating and evolving through relationship (ultimately, with self). 🌀 As fractal parts of the One, we too evolve or experience stuckness in relationship. Our trauma and pain loop, distort, constrict, etc our psychic energetic flow and we move away from love and toward fear. When we heal and flow begins to become coherent, we integrate and begin moving towards love again. 🪆 I didn’t get into the full details, but at this point I believe there are 12 dimensions, the One being the highest dimension where all is one, and the lowest dimension being the most fragmented and dense. 🎉 The exploration of this has been some of the most pleasurable and rewarding work of my life. 🙏🏻🫶🏻🦋 #cosmology #mentalhealth #12dimensions #reality #cosmos by @nathan.whitsell$

🙄 This was an unexpected beauty of a doozy. (Parts 1 & 2 are helpful for context if you want to go back and watch those first…)
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Believing that children are perfect reflections of their environments, particularly of their primary caregivers, religions (cosmologies), communities, and societies, it should come as no surprise that I was (and maybe still am 😬) judgmental.
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I was raised in non-denominational American evangelicalism and judgement ran rampant: women who dressed (any way really) were “causing men to stumble” and had “Jezebel spirits”, and married men who had women friends were sus, and if you drank in public and were in leadership you could cause your brother to stumble, and if you made out, or lusted, or were queer, or smoked weed, or went to the club, or cussed, or told dirty jokes, or weren’t in the word, or… then you may be lukewarm… and God might spit you out of “his” mouth and you might end up in hell. So, I definitely picked some of that up, because it helped me to feel more secure about me not burning eternally.
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Then my judgement became more fancy and refined and academic when I shifted to the reformed camp. I learned to question your doctrine, and theology, and eschatology, and baptism style, and egalitarianism, and creeds… and whether or not you “knew the Greek”.
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I am SO SORRY to all my friends and strangers and the human collective for the energy I was putting into the world. And for my moment of judgement lapsing now. Ram Dass has helped tremendously! 🥹
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I feel like this was an important detour though, as I discuss the link between cosmology and mental health. My cosmology created conditions in which the norm was judgement and I fell in line. Turns out judging starts within, and separates me from myself, and ripples outside, separating me from others, two huge symptoms of TRAUMA. Being told I was deserving of hell, and that my heart was wicked, and I deserved hell from 5 years old on was in fact traumatic, and it felt so safe to judge “them”.
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In my developing cosmology, there is no “them”… (more on that in the next post).
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#cosmology
#mentalh by @nathan.whitsell

PART 2.
This is a stream of consciousness exploration of the relationship between one’s cosmology and their mental health. For part 1, I shared the cosmology/religion I was given and how, for me, it was actually deeply hurtful and led to me being separated from myself, others, and nature, which is a sign that it may have been more traumatic than transformative.
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I spent a good amount of time in a liminal space between Christianity, and whatever this is that is taking shape in me now, and it was quite challenging. I still had a pretty active hell reflex, which would hit me out of nowhere, like, “what if they are right and now I’m not ‘saved’ and going to burn forever?” Healing from religious trauma is slow and winding and you end up seeing just how deeply its tendrils reach into all parts of your being.
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Once I began exploring, I found so much magic, and everything that was off limits before, was now on the table - I could dance under the stars, write down the things I wanted to let go of and burn them underneath the full moon, delve into astrology and tarot, visit a magical numerologist/astrologer, talk to trees and animals and the ocean, and the list goes on. The whole world became alive and my relationship with the living world was a portal. Animism is a part of my new cosmology, and come to find out, it was a part of my ancestors’ as well.
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The most important part of this whole process was that I was now an active participant in creating my cosmology and I had a relationship with the cosmology and with the process; and as I had new experiences, they could alter me and my beliefs and as I changed, I saw my beliefs differently in turn and my cosmology continues to evolve in this way. I don’t think what we believe is as important as our relationship to those beliefs. The internal freedom and diminished rigidity feels amazing, and has taken a lot of pressure off of friendships and other relationships - most importantly the relationship with myself.
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I’m curious if anyone else here has gone through a similar process?
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#religioustrauma
#healingjourney
#mentalhealth
#chrysalis
#cosmology by @nathan.whitsell

I am absolutely convinced that what I believe about the natural world and the cosmos, and how I relate to the universe, is inextricably connected to my mental health.
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This is a multi-part mini-series touching on the importance and mental health implications of one’s personal cosmology.
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I was raised in two Christian households (divorce), attended many churches, served in ministry, went to Bible school to pursue a bachelors of biblical studies (the school disbanded), became an “elder” (pastor), led many a small group, and attempted to live a life that honored God (whatever that means).
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The more I live and relate to others, and study psychological wellness, the more I am convinced that the rigidity and dysfunction of my interpretation of the cosmology that was handed down to me by society through my parents was very traumatizing. Trauma leads to separation from self, others, and nature, and the American Evangelical Christianity that I was a part of certainly seemed to shape worldviews that led to all three.
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I think the most detrimental and traumatizing theological stance was that we are born sinful and therefore cannot trust ourselves, and need something/someone outside of us to save us. I was taught that as young as five years old! I can’t imagine telling my children they are sinful and need saving… I instead understand their behaviors as a reflection of our family system, and if there is any “sin” then I have work to do. And I’ve seen it time and time again… when I change, the family system shifts, my kids heal and grow and the less than healthy behaviors begin transforming. From five years old to 41 years old I believe I was a wicked sinner, deserving death and hell, and my only hope was in Jesus’ blood. Living under my new cosmology, I can’t even begin to tell you of the joy, and peace, and lightness I get to experience compared to my fear of hell in the past. It’s really hard to love yourself when you’re a wretched, filthy sinner.
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I wanted to start this exploration of one’s cosmology’s impact on their mental health by sharing the cosmology I was born into.
🙏🏻🫶🏻� by @nathan.whitsell

PART 2 of 2:
*if you didn’t watch the first one, start there, and come back!*
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This is the no-bypass caveat to part 1. There are intersectional coordinates that make safety and trust in the universe easier or more challenging. Interestingly, the communities who are least safe societally, often hold the keys to wisdom that can create communal and individual, internal and external safety.
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Posting this on the heels of Juneteenth and in the middle of Pride month, I cannot help but acknowledge the collective grieving necessary to acknowledge the unsafe conditions intentionally created in the US to perpetuate the scapegoating and marginalization of black, indigenous, brown, and queer individuals; healing through this together is the ONLY way we can begin to creat a new society wherein we are all safe.
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All this said, and I do believe it’s possible to begin now, individually and in our communities. And from there, it will ripple out into the greater collective. For now, I just hope the people I share time and space get a taste of “nothing to prove” because it has become my default… and when I forget, please help me to remember.
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#nothingtoprove
#happyjuneteenth
#happypridemonth🌈
#collectivehealing
#aswithinsowithout by @nathan.whitsell

PART 1 of 2:
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Oh, to fall intentionally into the void and trust you’ll be caught. To move from performing life to authentically living it. To truly believe you have nothing to prove. What a privilege and a joy to live like this.
*much easier said than done*
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In childhood we’re taught whether this world is safe or unsafe, fair or unfair, kind or cruel, beautiful or ugly, abundant or scarce; sadly, the majority of us learn that the world we were born into is harsh, judgmental, unsafe, unfair, unjust, cruel, etc. Society (which we built and continue building) uses parents/caregivers to pass down its pain to children and they grow up believing it’s “just the way it is.” And if you are on this app, just a few scrolls will tell of just how terrifying and unsafe this world is, always demanding we prove our value/worth.
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It’s a really sick way to exist. And fortunately we CAN change it.
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It takes indigenous wisdom and cosmologies, and decolonized therapies, and dance, and song, and community, and each other, and the list goes on. But there are ways to heal and realize that we have nothing to prove, and can just be who we really are (which, BECOMING OURSELVES is a deep and long and powerful process adjacent to this), trusting that that is enough and that we are safe and loved.
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#abundance
#youareenough
#nothingtoprove
#healing
#newearth by @nathan.whitsell

Life is hard. The world seems mad. Injustice appears to be the norm. Dissociation seems the sanest response to the status quo. And yet…
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According to my understanding, the external world is a reflection of our internal worlds, both individually and collectively. I believe that we are all ultimately One. And, in the presence of nonjudgmental, loving awareness, everyone and everything loves from where they are toward increasing levels of coherence and wholeness, toward LOVE.
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One method of moving toward Oneness, toward LOVE, is through the portals created by what we colloquially refer to as “triggers”. I have come to believe that a (not the - Bashar’s method is another beautiful path) way to heal, grow, expand, is to go deep into the things, people, behaviors, situations, etc that make us feel uncomfortable. Today, creating such a vulnerable and channeled (for lack of a better term) video in a very public stretch of my daily dog walk was the discomfort I moved into… and through. It was fun and light work today.
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It’s not always light, fun, playful work, though. If we are all One, and our varying conceptualizations of “god” or source, universe, angels, etc. are all also part of that Oneness, and all of the pain and trauma and “evil” exists, we, god, the One, have that in all of us and what is happening in the world outside is showing us what resides inside.
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There is real gold waiting to emerge, your higher self waiting to emerge, on the other side of the portal of your pain and discomfort. Will we move through it knowing as within, so without, and that as we heal our souls, we heal the world?
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#oneness
#psychology
#depthpsychology
#trauma
#triggersareteachers by @nathan.whitsell

PART 2: *If you didn’t watch part 1, go back to it and then return for part 2…
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How could the same energy that created the “monster” (remember, I don’t believe there are any monsters… no bad people; just hurt people, hurting others) heal it? Those we deem “evil”, “corrupt”, “depraved”, “irredeemable”, “monsters”, are mirroring back to us the collective energy, the unhealth that lives in the collective “us”… there is no “them”… just the “us” we’d rather not acknowledge.
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You cannot lock up nor kill the bad guy, you can only heal them with love. Of course there must be accountability and a way to keep a perpetrator separate from the vulnerable as they heal, but our current shame and punishment based carceral system only exacerbates the pain and problems (and then we can discuss how issues of race, gender, poverty, etc intersect with an inherently harmful “justice” system).
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What if we started singing, and dancing, and grieving, and playing together, and engaging one another with curiosity and love as we truth-tell-and-listen, and begin seeing “them” as “us”?
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What if we started living:
“As within; so without…”
and
“Heal your soul; heal the world”?
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All roads forward will be hard. We can choose our hard: one road gets more of the same, while the other opens up possibilities we’ve all felt latent beneath our breath, inside our bones…
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#healing
#trauma
#changefromwithin
#wegotus
#iseeyou by @nathan.whitsell

Through the process of writing my thesis I became more and more convinced that a world of love, play, peace, harmony, joy, abundance, awe, wonder and… did I say LOVE yet?… is not only possible, but inevitable if those able to do so, actively participate in becoming that world.
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I believe it’s as simple as living two hermetic, shamanistic phrases:
“As within; so without…”
and
“Heal your soul; heal the world”
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Living these out requires relationships, intentionality, vulnerability, openness, and trust in the inherent goodness of all beings - it is my understanding that all open systems move ever closer to wholeness, coherence, and harmony (essentially, LOVE). Do you believe that given the right context, all of us melt into love?
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Let me know what you think in the comments… I sincerely believe that a utopia is possible - there will still be bumps in the road, but this utopia will have containers and rituals that can hold and harmonize conflict, pain, grief, loss, etc.
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#aswithinsowithout
#healyoursoul
#healing
#trauma
#newearth by @nathan.whitsell

I didn’t expect this 3-part series on trauma (this is 2 of 3) to be so enlightening. I feel like I understand some of the way forward as a nation/collective much better; it’s going to take a lot of collective grieving, singing, dancing, and truth telling (and listening). It’s going to be uncomfortable.
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Many will say I am too liberal with the use of the word trauma, but I’m starting to understand trauma as the most foundational aspect of “American” culture. Remember, symptoms of trauma are fragmentation and splitting (which is why so many of us have a hard time accepting the “other” as a part of self), as well as disconnection from self, other, and nature. Honestly, it’s pretty miraculous that we are getting by as “well” as we are. Sheesh.
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It’s wild that we are remaining so true to our origin story as we “celebrate” 250 as an official nation… entertaining ourselves with brutal violence that profits those at the top while the employees are exploited as MMA takes center stage in front of the White House. Whoa. Guilty little secret, I do sometimes enjoy MMA and violent movies… I’m swimming in this water too!
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*If you’d like a reading to locate the areas wherein our collective trauma has coursed through your family line and some tools to begin healing, DM me!
#trauma
#collectivetrauma
#AmericanTrauma
#250yearsofamerica
#fielddynamics by @nathan.whitsell

Nathan Whitsell

@nathan.whitsell