Storinggaard, K. (2022). Finding our way back home: An organic inquiry into the journeys of people committing to an earth-widsom teaching [Unpublished Master’s thesis]. Alef Trust & Liverpool John Moores University.
This study examines what brings highly educated, global citizens to seek earth-wisdom teachings. To derive at this answer organic inquiry is used as a methodology, appropriate to examine psycho-spiritual growth. The methodology is suitable for uncovering subtleties and mundane spiritual experiences using the researcher as instrument in the research and inviting also the co-researchers to access liminal or unseen realities to remember deeper experiences, small or large, as well as transpersonal signals. Six co-researchers were invited to share their story after being guided through an intentional breathing exercise helping them bring back memories. Follow up questions around the co-researchers prior psychological and spiritual experienced were added. The co-researchers were also asked to bring a special item that reminded them of the tradition. Ten themes were derived from the study, which has been distilled into two main reasons why people join descending earth-wisdom teaching; a desire to “integration earth-wisdom philosophies into all aspects of life” with “self-authorship” at the core. Secondly, the research suggests that it is the co-researchers lived experiences, or the e-motions attached to the experience, be it positive or negative, that move them towards a spiritual tradition, while transpersonal signals are crucial in making the actual decision. Further research into a larger sample would be needed, to detect if such patterns are more widely spread. Additional research into the specific tradition, which the co-researchers have joined, called the Origin of the Delicate Lodge Teachings, may also add to transpersonal research within the areas of earth-wisdom teachings.