About

The Institute for Soul Ecology

The name came to me late one night, in my mother's house in Florida.

She had died a few months earlier. I was there sorting out her estate: the administrative, relentless, lonely kind of grief. I was on the phone with a friend I had met in New Zealand during a training, one of those friendships that arrives unexpectedly and turns out to be the kind that lasts.

After we hung up, I found myself thinking about a CrossFit gym I had belonged to years earlier. The owner had named it Summit deliberately, because summit has two meanings: a peak, and a gathering of people collectively committed to something that matters. He had quietly changed the slogan from "forging elite fitness" to "forging community fitness." He understood that the point was never just the performance. It was the people, and what became possible between them.

Lying in the dark, I said out loud: I want a Summit for the Soul.

That is what the Institute for Soul Ecology is.

The word ecology comes from the Greek word oikos: household, or home. In the developmental frameworks that inform this work, ecology refers to the systemic impact of any change on the whole.

But ecology is never one directional. The self moves through the world and shapes it. The world moves through the self and shapes it back. Relationships, losses, thresholds, the people who have stayed and the ones who have gone. All of it is continuously forming who we are, even when we are not aware of it. The soul is not a stone dropped into still water. It is part of the water.

Soul Ecology takes that seriously. Who we are at the most intimate level affects everything around us. Everything around us affects who we are. The work is learning to inhabit that truth consciously. In other words, to understand the impact we have on the systems we are part of, and to understand what those systems have made of us, and to ask, with genuine curiosity, whether any of it still fits.

This is not self-improvement in the conventional sense. It is not optimization. It is something closer to what serious researchers and practitioners have spent their careers pointing toward: the possibility of genuine change at the level of being itself, in the context of genuine relationship, with consequences that ripple outward into every system the person inhabits — and inward from every system that inhabits the person.

The Institute exists to offer that kind of encounter. In small groups. In individual work. In the sustained relationship that makes depth possible.

A summit for the soul: a peak worth climbing, and a gathering place for people who take the climb seriously.