The Deep Structure of Health
Fundamentally, all psychology is ecopsychology and all therapy is ecotherapy. This is so because the psyche exists within society and society exists within the environment. A person, or a society, cannot be healthy or whole without a respectful, reciprocal relationship with the encircling hoop of the natural world.
Building and maintaining relationships with other human beings and with the more-than-human world is one of the two components of psycho-spiritual health that seem to be pointed at by most, if not all, of the great wisdom traditions of the world. Modern psychology reaches much the same conclusion.
The other component, according to traditional wisdom and psychology, has to do with deepening and ascending for growth. My book, The Hoop and the Tree, explores these two components and shows how, taken together, they form a visual metaphor – an image – for the deep structure of psychological and spiritual wholeness.
Readers and students recount how this visual metaphor has helped them. The recent twentieth-anniversary edition of the book includes several of these stories. For example, Anne Parker, Professor of Environmental Studies, says: “When I went through the process of drawing the entire mandala of my life inside the Hoop and Tree framework, I noticed a feeling of integration and location on my path coming clear. It is a model calling us back to wholeness.”*
That an image of wholeness can help people become whole is no surprise. As Meister Ekhart says, “When the soul wants to experience something, she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it” (Ronneberg & Martin, 2010). Carl Jung says, “The wealth of the soul exists in images” (Jung 2009).
So, what is this Hoop-and-Tree?
When a sculptor creates something out of clay, the sculptor uses an inner framework or skeleton to support the figure. This inner framework is called an armature. The armature is the deep inner structure that keeps the clay figure from collapsing.
Similarly, the plastic material – the clay – of our human bodies is supported by a mysterious inner life energy. This energy has been given various names by various traditions. It has been called: the Self, Atman, primary point, Adam Kadmon, Buddha nature, and many other names, including the soul and the psyche – the focus of psychology.
This inner life energy, this armature of being, can be well-visualized using a mental model which in its simplest form looks like a horizontal Hoop encircling a vertical Tree. It is impossible to be entirely precise about what each of them “means,” because they are both patterns of infinite subtlety. But it is possible to suggest the realm over which each holds sway.
One might summarize by saying that the Hoop represents the affiliative aspect of the whole self and has to do with widening for growth while the Tree represents the autonomous aspect and has to do with deepening and ascending for growth. The vector of the Hoop is relational and the vector of the is Tree is aspirational. Neither of these two dimensions of wholeness is complete in and of itself; neither is “better” than the other. They are different, and complementary. The Hoop has a female tone and the Tree a male tone. Both dimensions are needed, developed and in balance with each other, for a person or a society to be psychologically and spiritually whole and healthy.
All the great spiritual traditions of the world as well as modern psychology point to this same deep structure or core. In this brief article I can only outline a few examples to illustrate the prevalence of the Hoop-and-Tree image. The main point is that the Hoop-and-Tree image can help us heal as individuals and societies and can help build bridges between different spiritual and cultural traditions.
In discussing these traditions, I am just trying to appreciate and highlight some suggestive commonalities and not intending to reduce what is rich, inestimably valuable, and complex to just a few sentences. My hope is that the Hoop and Tree image can help us all in discovering where we meet in wholeness.
Judaism reveals the Hoop and the Tree in the mystical practice of Kabbalah. Kabbalah presents a route to the Divine called the “Tree of Life,” or Etz Chaiim. One may follow this path to wholeness by meditating on the fruits of this Tree—their qualities and interrelationships. These fruit, or Sefirot, are most often depicted as spheres or circles (Hoops) on the Tree. In the Kabbalistic story, the composition of the primordial ideal human, Adam Kadmon, is patterned on the Tree of Life with its Sefirot. Thus, the ideal image of human wholeness has Hoops in balance on the Tree. The process of teshuvah – return to, or atonement (etymologically: “at-one-ment”) with the divine – enacts the Tree; and the principle of tikkun olam, or repair and improvement of the world, enacts the Hoop.
Tantric Hinduism also describes the fully developed self with the image of Hoops (or chakras – “wheels”) aligned on the Tree of the spine. Traditional shamans around the world practice their craft in a universe composed of layers of Hoop-shaped worlds centered around the axis of a world Tree. In Norse mythology, the Tree is named Yggdrasil; it is surrounded by an enormous serpent biting its own tail, making the shape of the Hoop.
Christianity offers the Tree of the cross and the Hoop ritual of Holy Communion. The teaching by Jesus Christ about the best way to live, “love the Lord and love your neighbor” (Mark 12: 30-31), is a Hoop-and-Tree teaching: Accept Divine love (ascent/descent along the Tree axis) and then give this love to the world (Hoop).
“If a mandala [Hoop] may be described as a symbol of the Self seen in cross section, then the tree would represent a profile view of it: the Self depicted as a process of growth.”
Buddhism points to the Hoop-and-Tree shape of wholeness in many ways. After Buddha obtained enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, he taught, “turning the wheel [Hoop] of the Dharma.” The Buddhist stupa has been said to be “an abstract image of the state of enlightenment attainable by all beings” (Landaw & Weber, 1993). This “abstract image of enlightenment” takes the form of a Hoop extended upward along the Tree axis.
Similarly, the architecture of the kiva, the sacred space for the Puebloan people of the American southwest, has a Hoop-and-Tree shape: an underground chamber in the shape of a mandala (Sanskrit for “magic circle” or Hoop) and a series of levels on the Tree axis, symbolic of spiritual emergence. And, like the stupa, the kiva “is a structural symbol of the mystical soul-form of all creation,” according to Frank Waters, an expert on pueblo ceremonialism (Waters, 1950).
The Hoop and the Tree cites numerous other examples from around the world and throughout history. One example that is most inspirational to me is the tradition of the Haudenosaunee (“hoh-DEE-no-show-nee,” also known as Iroquois) people, who model their society on the Tree of Great Peace whose roots extend out in a mandala to reach the Hoop of all beings (Wallace, 1986).
Anne’s drawing in “The Hoop and the Tree”
From the field of psychology, one of the clearest expressions comes from Carl Jung when he speaks about our innate image of psychological and spiritual wholeness, which he called the archetype of the Self: “If a mandala [Hoop] may be described as a symbol of the Self seen in cross section, then the tree would represent a profile view of it: the Self depicted as a process of growth (Jung, 1967).”
Understanding and developing these two dimensions can help us become happier in our lives, feel more connected with others – even those who may seem different from ourselves, help us in raising our children, and improve our societies and our relationship with the natural world. In this new edition of the book, I describe some methods that anyone can use to help develop their Hoop-and-Tree core of wholeness.
In my own counseling and consulting work, having this Hoop-and-Tree image in mind has helped guide my interventions even when I didn’t explicitly talk about it with my clients. I have seen how Hoop work helped a brilliant male engineer salvage his career by learning how to relate better to others. I have seen how Tree work helped a newly promoted female supervisor regain her self-confidence after she delved into her roots to repair her relationship with her remembered father and then ascended to the upper reaches of her Tree to discover her creative aspirations.
Today we are witnessing massive environmental destruction. Individuals and corporations who view the natural environment as “other” and who are unconscious of our interdependence with the natural environment, or who imagine the earth is infinitely abundant, siphon the vitality out of the earth, our home, and fill it with toxins.
We are living in an age almost entirely without Hoop, having at best a truncated Tree with rapidly withering roots. We need to expand our sense of relationship to include not just the Hoops of Moreno’s “Social Atom” (Moreno, 1953) but also the Hoops of the environment in which we are embedded – the lands, waters, plants, and animals. We need to recognize, as a recent article in Ecopsychology says, that “object relatedness between people and their land forms a psychological arc of physical and mental wellness” (Bodner, et al, 2023).
The Hoop-and-Tree shape of wholeness says that at our best we are all ecological beings, and we all belong here.
AUTHOR BIO:
Chris Hoffman is a (retired) Licensed Professional Counselor and organization development consultant and (active) ecopsychologist, poet, and climate justice advocate. He is the author of The Hoop and the Tree: A Compass for Finding a Deeper Relationship with All Life recently re-released in an updated and expanded 20th anniversary edition, and four books of poetry.
REFERENCES:
Bodnar, Susan, Aljovin, P., O’Neill, P., Alavi, S., Gamoran, J., Liaqat, A., Bitensky, D., Bi, H., Grella, E., Kiefer, M., Morenberg, L., O’Leary, C., Yadav, P., & Wasret, A. (2023) The Environment as an Object Relationship: A Two-Part Study. Ecopsychology, 15(2), 116. DOI: 10.1089/eco.2022.0070
Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. S. Shamdasani, trans. M. Kyburz, J. Peck, and S Shamdasani, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 232.
Jung, C. G. (1967). Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Volume XIII). Princeton: Princeton University Press. 253.
Landaw, J. & Weber, A. (1993). Images of Enlightenment: Tibetan Art in Practice. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications. 42.
Moreno, J. L. (1953). Who Shall Survive? Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy, and Sociodrama. Beacon, NY: Beacon House.
Ronnberg, A., & Martin, K. (Eds.). (2010). The Book of Symbols. Reflections on archetypal images. Køln: Taschen. 6.
Wallace, Paul. (1986). The White Roots of Peace. Saranac Lake, NY: The Chauncy Press. [Originally published by The University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1946]
Waters, Frank. (1950). Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism. Chicago: Swallow Press. 174.