Jim Channon conceptualised The First Earth Battalion as a new generation of spiritual warriors within the US military, specifically through his report, Evolutionary Tactics: The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual. Both the Battalion and the report were immortalised through Jon Ronson’s book, The Men Who Stare at Goats and a subsequent film by the same title. While both take a light-hearted approach, Channon’s work may be deemed visionary to various developing themes within transpersonal psychology. This paper provides a retrospective analysis detailing how Channon’s vision was far in advance of many themes within transpersonal psychology today, specifically through (i) the inception of transpersonal psychology, (ii) transpersonal practises, (iii) transpersonal values, (iv) personal transformation, and (v) ecopsychology. Ultimately, this retrospective analysis suggests that Channon’s vision of the First Earth Battalion, along with his mantra, ‘Be all you can be’, should warrant a renewed critical perspective to his work, while advocating Channon as a transpersonal pioneer. Indeed, from a transpersonal perspective, this mantra embodies Maslow’s concept of self-actualisation and self-transcendence.
Interdisciplinary research has consistently demonstrated that contact with nature supports wellbeing, yet this evidence is largely grounded in quantitative, exposure-based frameworks that position nature as an intervention. Less attention has been paid to the lived, subjective, and potentially transformative dimensions of human-nature encounters. At the same time, circle-based practices, particularly women’s circles, have been shown to foster relational connection, reflection, and personal growth across therapeutic, educational, and community contexts. This paper brings these strands together through an autoethnographic account of a nature-based women’s circle attended over several years. Drawing on embodied reflection and poetic inquiry, the study explores how encounters with nature are mediated and consolidated within a communal setting, and how these experiences give rise to connection, transformation, and meaning, positioning nature as unassuming educator. In doing so, it responds to calls for more qualitative and experiential approaches within nature-wellbeing research and contributes a transpersonal perspective that foregrounds relational, embodied, and meaning-making dimensions of human-nature engagement. The findings suggest that communal practices in natural settings can support deeper connections with self, others, and the more-than-human world. However, access to such spaces remains uneven, shaped by broader structural inequities. The paper highlights the value of transpersonal and creative methodologies for understanding human flourishing and rethinking human-nature relationships beyond instrumental models.
The plateau experience is one of the least explored areas of Abraham Maslow’s work, a theory he developed in the latter stage of his life. One of the defining areas of the plateau experience is the confrontation with death. This article explores how the anxiety of one’s impermanence can be reduced through different traditions. Approaches from the Stoic philosophers and their influence on mainstream psychological interventions, through to the Samurai and death poetry are examined, with the assertion that several practises ay help individuals to confront, and accept, death as a natural progression of life.
