Franciscan Spirituality Center
920 Market Street
La Crosse, WI 54601
608-791-5295

https://www.fscenter.org

Steve Spilde: Today it is my special pleasure to welcome Trace Bell. I love listening to podcasts, and my all-time favorite is the RobCast. Trace is a regular co-host there with his father, Rob Bell. Last year, Trace and Rob changed how I see life with their four-part podcast series titled, “Me, We, and Everybody.” In the podcast, they provide a great introduction to Spiral Dynamics and helped me grasp an integral perspective on spirituality. I am excited to welcome Trace to this podcast. Trace, I appreciate that series of “Me, We, and Everybody” so much because it helped me understand what has been happening in our politics for the last five or six years. It also helped me understand the path of spiritual growth that I’ve been on, and the spiritual struggles I encounter with many people I meet in Spiritual Direction. Trace, I apologize for putting you on the spot, but for our listeners who may be unfamiliar with what we mean by “Spiral Dynamics,” how would you describe this theory?

Trace Bell: First off, I’m so honored for everything you said; it makes me so happy to hear people’s response to that series. I’m honored. It’s not putting me on the spot. I’ve been explaining this in a lot of ways to a lot of people, and I love it. I love sharing this with people. Spiral Dynamics is a psychological development model that maps the evolutionary patterns of humans and individuals. It models how _____ individuals psychologically develop in collective. It was developed a couple decades ago by guys named Clare Graves and Don Beck, who were psychologists. They found that humans over time, their value systems change as they go through these stages of growth. This is what Spiral Dynamics is ultimately mapping: It’s mapping that there are certain stages of growth the humans go through, and groups go through as well. It’s been a really illuminating and helpful model because it allows you to see your own growth and the certain stages you went through in your own journey. It allows you to understand … A lot of people are simply acting from different stages in this model, and they’re acting from different perspectives. Another way people describe Spiral Dynamics is it maps the evolution of consciousness. Your consciousness increases in its ability for complexity and depth and compassion and empathy over time. That’s what Spiral Dynamics ultimately maps: It maps how humans grow to more whole, aligned, integrated individuals.

Steve: [On] the RobCast, everything is spiritual, so it always looks at things through sort of a spiritual lens. How do you connect Spiral Dynamics with spirituality, in particular?

Trace: The spiritual implications of Spiral Dynamics kind of hit me in the face when I first learned the model. It describes the growth that people go through on their journeys. And you can see as people grow in this high-level development, spirituality becomes an integral aspect of these higher levels of development. The higher levels on this model of Spiral Dynamics, people at these higher levels are often maturing to a deeper spirituality and taking a very spiritual perspective on things. Spiritual development and spiritual evolution, if you will, is kind of inherent in the design of our reality. A model that maps this development of humans in groups is going to say a lot about the spiritual evolution of the people that it’s mapping. There are a lot of spiritual implications … One of the stages in Spiral Dynamics – which we teach in our class, “Living the Spirals” – [is] actually a stage about your deep connection to your personal connection to spirituality, your personal connection to reality itself. It’s literally a stage … There are actually stages in this model that describe and...