Mental Health as a Vision of Ecological Safety | Part 7

John P. Flynt, PhD
Oct 31, 2023
5 min read

Updated: Nov 10, 2023

Safety in Rituals of Mental Health

Safety and Meaningful Adventures

During her keynote address the 2016 ESRI conference, Wulf showed a photo of herself dressed in outside gear while following the path of Humboldt in Ecuador. Other photos, available on the web, add dimensions to this.

In the background of these photos is Chimborazo, and the path between the author and the mountain reveals the progress of ritual discovery. While this is the work of Wulf as a historian and journalist, it is more: Wulf found in Humboldt emotional and intellectual orientations that inspired her to make this journey her own.

Inspiration is a form of safety. It sustains ritual discovery because it motivates you to continue with discovery after the initial moment. When you feel safe, you explore. With safety you start with a feeling. You can know this feeling if you complete three deep cycles of respiration through your nostrils and then allow your attention to go to the feeling you experience in the whole of your body. What you encounter with this experiment is the work of neurotransmitters (oxytocin and serotonin, for example) mediating the flow of neurological impulses. You are experiencing renewed activity of the hippocampus and circuits of the prefrontal cortex. You are experienced the increased capacity of your brain to assimilate information and discover meaning. You are experiencing the whole of your system extending itself into the environment that sustains you.

This is the most fundamental role of “safety,” and with it comes the feeling that you thoughts, feelings, and actions broaden and deepen the meanings you experience. With the experience of safety, you reach out and take a step along a path that is characterized by what feels safe to you. What feels safe to you is also what brings the greatest meaning into your life. This includes reaching out into the environment and exploring your relations with it.

As you might suspect, this is one of the most fundamental psychological process leading to mental health. The ancient Greeks knew it as eudaimonia. We sometimes call it happiness. Eudaimonia involves both feeling that life is meaningful and that you have purpose in the actions you engage in. You feel good and know immediately what to do next. Meaning and purpose become possible in an enhanced way when we feel that we are following a path that leads to what we desire: with each new step, our awareness increases of how life is meaningful.

One of the most well know researchers of fulfillment in this context was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who introduced the concept of flow. In his book Creativity: Flow and the psychology of Discovery and Invention, Csikszentmihalyi recalled his discovery as follows:

Many years ago I started to study people who seemed to be doing things that they enjoyed but were not rewarded for with money or fame. Chess players, rock climbers, dancers, and composers devoted many hours a week to their avocations. Why were they doing it? It was clear from talking to them that what kept them motivated with the quality of experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling did not come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities the stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery. The optimal experience is what I have called flow, because many of the respondents described the feeling when things were going well as an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness. (p. 110)

The richest meaning often arises from simple things that effortlessly expand into great complexity and yet remain simple and safe regardless of their complexity. Inspired by the literature of exploration he had read and the studies he pursed in the laboratory, Humbolt climbed a mountain with little concern about the harshness of the weather or the dangers of the heights. During her journey, Wulf moved forward from work she had performed as a historian of gardening. Her work was prefaced by research into the life and works of naturalists over the past four centuries, but she committed herself to a path of ritual discovery that involved launching out to explore islands, jungles, and (yes) climbing mountains.

We can say that a writer experiences a vision. It is a resonant, fulfilling vision, one that sweeps out over life and into the depths of feeling and thought. It sustains an immediate sense that life can go on from this moment, with safety, by following the subject of study. For Wulf and Humboldt it involves experiencing the vision of Chimborazo. It involves telling this story to audiences around the world. It involved creation, such as the invention of a way to view nature that uses an extraordinary, exhilarating form of graphical art.

Safety can be described as a self-state in which positive awareness of self is optimized. We feel free to extend our activities in multiple directions, and our attention and awareness open out to a maximum scope of inclusion. With optimal experience of a self-state, emotionally and intellectually, we can recall, visualize, and perceive more pathways and possibilities in life that are resonant with meaning than in any other self-state. The neural network of our brain-body system is free of inhibitions due to trauma, stress, lack of self-esteem, and dissociation. They all fall away, and we are able to experience everything as related to everything else.

Safe states unfold with ritual discovery in a pattern that is shaped by the emerging awareness of every subsequent moment. A heuristic takes form. In his exploration of heuristics, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, Gerd Gigerenzer explains that a heuristic is a form of intuitive knowledge that emerges in your feelings and interactions. It enables you to accomplish a task with the least expenditure of energy and the greatest chance of a positive outcome. It is also an action that is not characterized by conscious, structured, cognitive activity. It can be thought of as an outcome of flow, a discovery of how to go on with an action based on feelings of safety that are largely unconscious. Trough a heuristic pattern, our attention is mediated by the sense of safety to move smoothly from one point of focus to another toward a fulfilling outcome.

As a note, it is also possible explore such experiences as flow and intuition in the context of Daoism (Xing De, Johan Hausen, Allen Tsaur, The Arts of Daoism.

Two benefits result form ritual discovery. One is that our awareness is broadened. The increased complexity of our brain allows us to take in more of the environment around us. At the same time, our attention is enhanced, and we are able to be more flexible, self-aware, and creative in our encounter with what we are paying attention to. From this emerges the greatest feeling of fulfillment because, as mentioned before, our neural network is integrating with the environment in optimum ways.