Walking in Beauty: From Ancient Tradition to Future Orientation and Prosociality

Walking So That Beauty Appears

​While walking along my mountain path that circles around from our chalet, I came upon the small chapel of Notre-Dame de La Salette, nestled quietly in the forest beneath a canopy of arching Larch trees. The air was still, softened by the hush of branches overhead, as if the place itself invited a slower rhythm of presence. Drawn inward, I stepped into the wooden chapel to say a prayer as I often do.  Kneeling on the simple, almost austere pews, I felt filled with a quiet, contemplative atmosphere. On the far wall, a painting caught my attention: Our Lady of La Salette speaking to the peasant children in the mountains of France. There was something deeply human in the scene—an encounter across worlds, grounded in care, sorrow, and revelation.
 
But what held me most was this: she was standing on roses. Not above them, not beside them—but upon them. In that moment, something shifted in my understanding. The image did not speak of escaping the difficulties of the path, but of walking through them in such a way that beauty emerges beneath one’s feet. The roses seemed to suggest that even within sorrow, even within the rough terrain of human experience, there exists the possibility of transformation—of grace woven into the ground we walk.
 
I found myself reflecting on what it might mean to follow a path of beauty—not as something external to seek, but as something that unfolds through the way we walk. A way of moving through the world with intention, awareness, and care. A way of being that allows beauty to arise, quietly, where it might not have been seen before and noticed.
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As I stood there, in that small chapel under the shimmering spring buds of the larch trees, where the forest seemed to breathe in quiet renewal, a phrase formed within me:
to walk so that beauty appears.
 
This insight has stayed with me, weaving itself into my reflections on story, transformation, and the practices that shape our lives. For perhaps the paths we walk—whether through landscapes, relationships, or the narratives we carry—are not fixed. Perhaps they are living, responsive, and capable of becoming something more. And perhaps, through the ways we attend to them, we begin to participate in their unfolding.
 
In my books Crafting Peace and Autoethnography as a tool for Integral Human Development and Wayfinding, I have often returned to a central intuition: that transformation is not only a cognitive or analytical process, but an aesthetic and relational one. It is a process of beautifying the story mandala—of weaving golden threads of meaning into fractured life narratives so that they may once again become coherent, alive, and generative. As weavers of wisdom and beauty, our oeuvre opens passageways of transformation. It is not the final destination or artform that matters most, but the creative process itself, which becomes an ascendant pathway.
 
Recently, I have come to see how deeply this intuition resonates with Indigenous wisdom traditions—particularly the philosophy of Hózhó in the Navajo Nation. This resonance does not collapse difference; rather, it reveals how distinct traditions can arrive at similar understandings of beauty as a pathway to wholeness.
 
Beauty as a Way of Being: The Meaning of Hózhó
 
In Navajo philosophy, Hózhó is often translated as “beauty,” yet this translation only begins to gesture toward its depth. Hózhó encompasses harmony, balance, wellness, and right relationship—a way of living in alignment with the self, the community, the natural world, and the cosmos.

As described in this article:

Hózhó is not merely an idea but a guiding principle for thought, action, and relational life. Wellness emerges through practices that sustain this alignment—what might be called the beauty way. When I speak about conflict wisdom and the movement from fragmentation toward living wisdom, I recognize a profound resonance here. The Navajo understanding of living spirit—a dynamic, relational presence—mirrors the process through which narrative transformation becomes not just intellectual insight, but embodied alignment.

 Beautifying the Story Mandala as a “Beauty Way”

In my own framework, the Story Mandala is a form of aesthetic and ritualized practice. It is a space where lived experience—especially conflict and illness—is gathered, re-membered, and woven into meaningful form.

Through this process, I have described transformation as “beautifying the story mandala”:

• not embellishing,
• not masking,
• but restoring coherence through meaningful patterning.

Seen through the lens of Hózhó, this becomes a beauty way.
Just as Navajo healing practices restore balance through alignment, the story mandala becomes a narrative technology of restoration, guiding the individual back toward wholeness. This approach reintroduces an older, deeper paradigm:
that we heal by reweaving beauty into the fabric of experience
 
 Sandpaintings, Mandalas, and Portals of Transformation

​There is a striking parallel between the Story Mandala and the sacred sandpaintings created in Navajo ceremonial contexts. These sandpaintings are not simply artistic expressions—they are ritual enactments of harmony, temporary yet powerful configurations that restore balance after disruption. In this sense, both forms function as what might be called:
portalling devices that mediate extraordinary experiences. They can be understood as a technology of enchantment.
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They create a threshold space where:

• disorder and disruption can be transformed,
• fragmentation can be reassembled and remembered,
• and new patterns of meaning can emerge.

As expressed in the article:

​“Beauty is what one projects into happenings and objects from within oneself” (p. 10).

This insight is profoundly aligned with autoethnographic practice.
Through re-membering and recollecting, we do not merely recount experience—we reconfigure it, weaving it into aesthetic mandalas that transform the storyline itself. This is what I have described as shapeshifting: a narrative and existential reorientation through symbolic integration.
 
Re-membering, Wholeness, and the Return to Beauty
 
At the heart of both Hózhó and autoethnographic transformation lies the act of re-membering.

To re-member is:

• to gather what has been fragmented,
• to reconnect what has been severed,
• to restore coherence across time, body, and story.

In Navajo thought, returning to Hózhó is a process of putting things back into right relation—a movement toward wellness understood as wholeness (from the root meaning of “health”).

Similarly, the beautified story mandala becomes a site where:

• broken narratives are rewoven,
• meaning is restored,
• and the self is brought back into alignment.

Through such practices, one once again walks in beauty. In this way, our ceremonies and rituals work to help reduce suffering. They don’t erase what happens or what has been given to us, however they can help us carry it with us. I refer to this process as narrative atonement—a sacred lifting of the life story in which wounded experience is gathered into meaning, and each lifework is blessed, honored, and recognized through an act of spiritual witnessing.
 
Art, Inner Necessity, and Seeds of the Future
 
The connection between art and transformation is further illuminated through the work of Wassily Kandinsky, referenced in the same study. Kandinsky spoke of art arising from the “inner necessity of spirit”—a generative force that moves through the artist and gives rise to new forms.

In this sense:

• Art is not decorative
• It is prophetic and generative

It carries, as the article suggests, “the seeds of the future.”
When we engage in aesthetic practices such as the beautifying the story mandala, we are not only healing the past—we are opening pathways for future becoming. In this way, the Story Mandala becomes a narrative portal, a threshold space where transformation unfolds.
 
The Holy Grail Way as a Beauty Way
In my work, I have spoken of the Holy Grail Way as a sacred path of transformation—one that moves through conflict, illness, and fragmentation toward renewal and integration-I refer to as the walkthrough.

Seen through the lens of Hózhó, this path can also be understood as a beauty way.
It is:

• a path of alignment,
• a path of restoration,
• a path of returning to right relation with Self, others, and the living world.

The Grail, like the mandala, becomes a symbol of wholeness regained. While the Navajo concept of Hózhó offers a powerful articulation of “walking in beauty,” similar orientations toward alignment, vitality, and sacred pathing can be found in European traditions.

In the work of Hildegard of Bingen, we encounter the concept of Viriditas—the “greening power” of life. This refers to a divine vitality that flows through all living beings when they are in harmony with creation. Illness, in this framework, arises from disconnection; healing is a return to flourishing alignment.

In this sense:
Viriditas mirrors the living vitality that emerges when the story mandala is restored to coherence.

Similarly, Ignatius of Loyola describes the spiritual life as that of the pilgrim—one who walks a sacred path through discernment, continually aligning inner movements with divine guidance.

This pilgrim consciousness resonates deeply with what I have called the Holy Grail Way:

• a path of transformation,
• a journey through rupture and renewal,
• a movement toward coherence and meaning.

By engaging with autoethnographic practice we can walkthrough our conflict and illness narratives in a search for meaning. Across these traditions, we find a shared insight:
- that life is a relational, meaningful process,
-that suffering reflects disalignment,
-and that healing involves a return to harmony, vitality, or right relation.
 
Our strength lies in our capacity to engage the deepest layers of our wounds, where regenerative potential is held—much like stem cells within the bone marrow, sustaining the possibility of renewal.
 
The Wending and Ascending Pathway
 
The Way of Beauty is not always a pathway stretched across the earth. Sometimes it rises vertically. I see this in my son Nils, who climbs the faces of mountains, finding his way upward through stone. As he ascends, he reads the contours of the rock, navigating colored rockways and searching for holding points that will sustain the climb. Each movement requires balance, awareness, trust, and continual recalibration.
 
He climbed the rock faces near Arches National Park and Zion National Park—lands shaped by ancient geological forces and deeply connected to Indigenous traditions that understood landscape itself as sacred presence and living teaching. In this sense, his ascent becomes another expression of the Beauty Way. Not all pathways move forward in a straight line. Some rise.

Some require us to:

• pause and search for the next holding point,
• trust what cannot yet fully be seen,
• and move upward through vulnerability toward expanded perspective.

The climber’s path reveals that transformation is not only a journey across terrain, but also a process of elevation—of learning how to orient oneself between gravity and possibility.

Like the Story Mandala, the climb becomes a practice of wayfinding.
Each hold is a point of meaning.
Each movement is relational.
Each ascent reshapes the Self.
And perhaps this is also part of walking in beauty:
discovering that every person must find their own way upward.
 
 Walking in Beauty Through Narrative Practice
 
The resonance between beautifying the story mandala and the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó reveals a shared human insight:
That beauty is not superficial—it is a practice of restoring life to alignment.

Through autoethnographic writing, ritualized storytelling, and aesthetic creation, we engage in processes of creative mythology that:

• heal fragmentation,
• cultivate relational harmony,
• and reconnect us to living wisdom.

In doing so, we participate in an ancient and ongoing human endeavor:
to walk in beauty.
 
The Transformagram Learning Model: A Pathway to Living Wisdom
 
The Transformagram Learning Model and Approach emerges as a methodological extension of this insight—a structured yet fluid pathway for engaging transformational processes that reconnect us to living wisdom. Rooted in autoethnography, symbolic integration, and aesthetic practice, the Transformagram Approach:

• guides individuals through cycles of reflection, re-membering, and re-patterning,
• invites the weaving of golden narrative threads into mandala-like forms,
• and cultivates a space where inner experience, relational awareness, and planetary consciousness can come into alignment.

Much like the Navajo practice of returning to Hózhó through ceremonial alignment, the Transformagram model offers a contemporary pathway for restoring coherence in times of disruption. It provides a way of:

• navigating conflict through conflict wisdom,
• engaging narrative as a mediating force,
• and accessing what may be called a living field of wisdom—a dynamic interplay between personal story, collective memory, and emergent future possibilities.

In this sense, the Transformagram Approach does not simply analyze experience—it transforms it through aesthetic, relational, and spiritual integration. It becomes a practice of walking the Holy Grail Way as a Beauty Way, where each narrative act contributes to the restoration of wholeness.
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Through this lens, beautifying the story mandala is no longer only a metaphor—it is a method:
✨ a way of learning
✨ a way of healing
✨ a way of becoming
—and ultimately, a way of walking in beauty while co-creating the stories of the future.
 
Toward a Science of Meaning, Beauty, and Future Orientation
 
These cross-cultural pathways—Hózhó as walking in beauty, Hildegard’s viriditas, the pilgrim consciousness of Ignatius of Loyola, and the Holy Grail Way—can also be understood through a contemporary scientific lens as forms of quest orientation: structured ways of engaging life as a meaningful, future-directed journey. Recent research supports this connection. In the study Awareness of Meaning and Quest for Meaning: The Mechanisms Between Future Orientation and Prosociality Among Youth During the Pandemic:

​Researchers show that both the presence of meaning and the search for meaning mediate individuals’ capacity for future orientation and prosocial behavior. In other words, when individuals experience their lives as meaningful—or actively seek meaning—they are more likely to orient toward the future with hope and to act in ways that contribute to others. Seen in this light, the practices explored in this blog are not only spiritual or philosophical—they are developmental and regenerative processes that cultivate the very conditions for human flourishing.
 
Whether through the greening vitality of viriditas, the sacred path of the pilgrim, or the aesthetic reweaving of the story mandala, these traditions and practices enact pathways through which meaning is generated, sustained, and projected forward—nurturing both individual transformation and collective wellbeing. The Transformagram Learning Model and Approach cultivate both the presence and the ongoing search for meaning through narrative and aesthetic integration, thereby supporting future-oriented and prosocial ways of being.

The rockways Nils climbed

An ascending pathway

Nil’s ascension