Current Perspective
On Narrative Excavation

Maybe at greater scale than ever before we now collectively face the weight, even the necessity of integrated self development. I mean this in the embarrassing way philosophers tend to deconstruct phrases: the self requires development.

This must be done through a combination of courageous social integration and introspection. The self must be felt as an agent with choice over action and impact, but this is meaningless in isolation. The self is interdependent with village, attuned to village, impacted by village. It vibrates not as a single note but as a string among many which form chords or disharmonies. And those sounds move in progressions, fluttering colorfully across unseen causal chains and impossible stretches of land. Littered across the earth and its histories are archeological imprints of collective trauma processing and paths of collective growth—vague, badly recorded, but deeply resonant imprints. Those societal progressions and regressions replay as songs again and again in our collective memory, the ruins left by grand designs and even grander decadence. This is why so many men report to “often think about Rome” today. They aren’t playing into a viral trend, they are mediums through which cultural memory is expressed. There is something about these ancient cultures that beckon us back to lost understandings. This is not a picture of lost advanced civilizations or aliens, though all of these are possible. In my view the issue is far less tangible, more covert and insidious. Unfortunately our governments and institutions with affiliated interests—like the psychiatric and psychoanalytic traditions—position ‘self’ as the problem in isolation, the individual as ill; the individual as misbehaving; the individual as ‘disordered; the individual as scapegoat.

Personal accountability is a useful but false heuristic, a lens through which we can look and see space for different choices. But we don’t actually make choices, in my view. We experience choices; we ride them like waves, but there is no locus of control. The self is a symptom. It is a symptom of its hereditary predispositions and the demands placed upon its living materials by environment. It is a symptom of the collective—its blindnesses, its frenzied violences, its most enormous shames, awes, hopes and loves. Perhaps my mentor would put it this way: it’s obvious that humans are a force, a will, a drive, but whence came the notion that such a will is free to choose differently?

My view is that we cannot change the will, the drive, the essence of life force, but we can change how it is expressed. We can change its strategy. We can move into greater and more sustainable expressions of power through connection and alignment on the qualities of life, rather than its quantities. Today its obvious our species has been hijacked by fear and fixation on quantities. Nearly every societal frame—from family systems, to civic duty, to industry and infrastructure itself—orients individual action to fear. These fears take three primal shapes:

I am bad

I am alone

I am in danger

These are the three mechanisms of inner and outer control. They are also the levers that move shame. When we face these fears, we integrate; when we suppress them, or are forced to suppress them, we fracture. It’s actually that simple.

These fears are the innate mechanisms by which we suppress and contort the self and other. When we allow these fears to govern us, they preserve us temporarily, maybe, typically based on a very biased assumptions, and certainly at the cost of many unwanted side effects—but sometimes it's worth it. Most of the time, though, it isn’t. It has simply become a default. Allowing these fears to govern us leads to greater and greater fracture, vivisection of self from soil and from social relationships, vivisection of self from living systems that support self.

When these fears are integrated the social individual naturally gravitates toward pro social values. Go figure. This is the raw center of the work we do.

Expose and integrate the primal fears.

Map and fully feel the impact of these fears, the resulting patterns formed through experienced and the nature of our attachment to fear patterns.

Integrate this new awareness and capacity into an embodied value framework.

When this work is done well, we take longer, more deliberate and natural strides in creative and constructive expression—rather than compulsively reacting to fear after fear. I saw the cost of these fear levers first in myself, and then for the next fifteen years was haunted by their ghosts in every pair of eyes I met. Most of us are badly impacted, even gravely damaged by current models of social cohesion. I believe we have reached the tipping point in this regard and need a new model for both self development and social cohesion.

This model should integrate physical, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive development. It must also address squarely, rather than bypass, the cultural illnesses which oppress the individual and have led us to this point of a great species-wide eruption of existential-level depression and rage. This is the aim of narrative excavation as a methodology and my own aim as mentor. But my audience knows this, I suspect. I’d guess most of you all know this isn’t about a brand or money. There are much easier and less heartbreaking ways to build those. This is about building practices that meet the actual needs of the organism and its social body, practices that actually move the variables that need to be moved.

In this way I see no separation whatsoever between physical and psychological practice. The “mind” is meant to reflect somatic experience; like the self it does not exist in isolation, and perhaps it doesn’t exist at all. In this light its obvious that “healing the mind” is healing the body. One will always be the bottleneck for the other, and one will always drag the other forward, even kicking and screaming. I’ve seen this many times: one facet of consciousness breaks through, and it drags the other out into the open with it. I reflect on my own life as a series of these breakthroughs and inquiries about the location of my spiritual bottlenecks—again and again, year after year. This is what I have been doing since 2012: testing, measuring, applying, adjusting, mapping, teaching, adjusting again.

Now here we are, in 2025, offering an evolving holistic model of mentorship centered in introspective practice.

— Devin