What Is a Reclamation Modality?
‘Reclamation Modality’ is the term I use for a profession that, regardless of the specifics or scope of its focus, is fundamentally concerned with the larger systemic wellness and generativity of both human and ecological systems.
Reclamation Practitioners understand that to be concerned with human (physical and/or emotional/mental) wellness outside of the context of, and without also attending to, spiritual and environmental wellness, is to be shortsighted and irresponsible. To this end, a Reclamation Practitioners’ goal is to support intelligent, generative communities of individuals and families who are stewards of their human and ecological systems.
Practitioners of Reclamation Modalities focus on the cultivation and support of sovereign, initiated, free-thinking adults, partnerships and communities. These pioneering practitioners assess their success by the measure of their communities and individuals – "How are my people doing? Are they physically, spiritually and emotionally well enough to live intelligently and responsibly with themselves, each other and the land?"
Most of the credentialed, culturally accepted healing professions in Western culture today are not Reclamation Modalities. I call these modalities Dominant Culture Modalities. Largely, they share one specific goal: to help individuals function & feel better immediately.
Borne from a culture whose success comes at the expense of human and environmental wellness, these modalities focus on symptoms, not root causes. Because they come directly out of the Western culture and its philosophy of individual wealth and achievement without concern for the systems within which the individual is rooted, most of these modalities come from a cosmology of disdain and disregard for indigenous wisdom traditions, preferring to turn toward surgical and synthetic pharmacology to ameliorate superficial symptoms.
For this reason, and many others, Dominant Culture Modalities are part of the disease ailing Western culture. In many cases, not only do they support the paradigm and philosophies of Western culture, but because they do not overtly acknowledge the collateral damage of Western culture’s strategy of short-term individual wealth over long-term environmental and human wellness and generativity, they are directly contributing to the catastrophic state of our world. From this attention to and treatment of mere superficial human ‘wellness’, Dominant Culture Modalities are irresponsible and dangerous, no matter how well meaning its practitioners may be.
Reclamation Modalities are ones that specifically aim to restore us to the contextual-rich soils of our soul-embedded homelands, homelands that are more-than-human and larger than our domesticated life.
These modalities do not have okayness or undisturbed, rule-bound participation as their goal. They have as their metric for success the extent to which we are alive and curious (even if uncomfortable and disturbed); the extent to which we are embedded within a larger context of meaning and value; the extent to which we have unfettered access to our authentic essence.
Importantly, Reclamation Modalities understand that this is work that often disturbs a person’s sense of wellness as they strip away old identities and re-connect with their authentic wild nature and embodied experience. Relationships, jobs, living situations and former ways of being might all fall away as a person uproots themselves from their identifiable behaviors and expectations. And whether it is a direct aim of a Reclamation Modality, or the by-product of the work done, the work necessarily helps to reconnect us to our innate awareness of the primary importance of earth’s healthy environmental, eco- and human systems, without which we will not survive.
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