Bart Vanmechelen is a member of the leadership team of the newly founded Section for Inclusive Social Development at the Goetheanum. Characterized by a sense of social responsibility and inspired by his enthusiasm for spiritual depth, he now sees inclusive social development as a humane work of art.
Franka Henn: In preparing for our conversation, you sent me a selfie in which you’re wearing a teeny woolen hat that points upwards like an antenna. I laughed so much! Whenever we see each other, I’m struck by your warmth and cheekiness. Where did you get this sense of humor?
Bart Vanmechelen: It is very alive in our family. You can’t take yourself too seriously. We like to be cheerful and joyful in company. My wife had knitted the hat, but it wasn’t finished yet. I put it on because I was cold, and then I noticed that I could shape it like an antenna. I liked the metaphor: me feeling connected with the world “up there.”
But there are two sides to our family. On the one hand, we are all very committed and conscientious. That means being reliable and available for others. My mother was a kindergarten teacher and later the principal of a school with many classes. My father was a social worker. They both came from humble families in Belgium and had the opportunity to study thanks to the church. That made a big impression on them. The priest visited the families, and if he had the impression that a child was intelligent, he helped them get higher education. So, during their entire professional life, my parents were filled with gratitude and wanted to give something back to society and the community. On the other hand, being grateful also means enjoying life, and humor was very important for us. It’s very Belgian. The art of humor is to put things in a different perspective and stay inwardly flexible.
Franka: Can you tell us a bit about your childhood environment and what shaped you?
Bart: The more I think about where I came from—how the landscape looked and what the family was like—the more relevant I think it is. I grew up in northern Belgium, close to the Dutch border. Geologically, this is a very old landscape shaped by the Ice Age and the sea. The sea isn’t close by today, but the landscape and soil are still quite barren. For instance, in my little village, we had a sand dune about 40 meters high. It was like a big sandpit where we could play. This is one of the dearest and most intense experiences that I remember from childhood. We’d walk with the kindergarten class about two kilometers to this sand dune and play in the sun the whole day. On the corner, there was a pilgrimage site, a little chapel sitting under large trees with a portrait of Mary with the child. This picture imprinted itself deeply into my soul. Being in the sun, out in nature, carried like the mother Mary carries the little child, being part of the whole natural world and the cosmos, belonging to it, and feeling safe.
The soil there was poor. My father’s father was a farmer, but at one point, the soil was not rich enough to sustain a farm. So my grandfather had to move with his family and find work in a factory. In the end, he died of pneumoconiosis from the dust in the factory. It’s a real tragedy when nature can’t sustain us. It’s risky and it’s dangerous. But this sparked my interest in sustainability, agriculture, and caring for nature. I grew up in a part of the village where the houses were built new for young families. We are a big family with uncles and aunts who all had children my age. I’m the oldest of four, and my aunt lived nearby, also with four children, and then there were friends and all their big families. So, I was always outside playing in nature with a lot of other children. That’s how I grew up.
Franka: When you spoke about the chapel and feeling carried by the world, does that reflect the start of your own spiritual development?
Bart: That is, of course, something very intimate. But I remember as a child experiencing a connection with nature and what is beyond. It was a living experience of a living world around me and also the reality of the Mother Mary, Christ, and God. It was natural and real for me. I learned from a teacher to study nature, and I saw how in a leaf there was a little egg where a little wasp was growing. Only later, when I discovered anthroposophy, did I find words to describe this interconnectedness of natural and spiritual experiences. Before that, I could connect with it and even rely on it. Later, in my teenage years, I read a lot and wanted to know more about these spiritual experiences. I found books about Flemish mysticism where religious people tried to put into words how they experienced their spiritual reality. Then I began to study philosophy. So, I always tried to find the limits and to find new perspectives or new ways to describe my experiences.
Paths Inward
Franka: Then you decided to study psychology. Why?
Bart: Because I was so interested in people and their diversity. And I wanted to understand why conflicts occur, how we can create a helpful social environment where it is nice to be and play with each other, and how we can support and learn with and from each other. In my youth, I was part of a choir for ten years, and we were invited to sing for children from an orphanage. One of the boys had problems walking because his legs were not equal in size. But he was very cheerful. It was the first time I’d seen a child with a disability, and I wondered how different it must be for him to grow up in this orphanage with this condition. We had a joyful meeting with him and danced together. This made a big impression on me, and it might be one reason why I wanted to study professional ways of supporting one another. Psychology, to me, meant studying the inner life of the human being.
Franka: Many people in anthroposophy have reservations about psychology. “If you meditate well, you don’t need psychology.” Have you heard that?
Bart: Yes, and partly I can relate to it. I recall another childhood event that has to do with my choice to study psychology. When I was around 14, I was very interested in liberation theology. Priests had been traveling to foreign countries, in this case Latin America, to support the liberation of people from oppression and dictatorship. They were prosecuted, tortured, imprisoned, and killed. I was full of admiration for the way those people were socially engaged because of their spirituality. So, I made a presentation about them with drawings. But my teacher, who was a priest, thought I was mocking them. After my presentation, he called me into his room for a talk. Then he told me, “You think you’re happy, but you’re not.” That was a big shock for me. When I left the room, I knew I had to leave the school. I sensed that something was wrong there with the way the priests behaved and treated us children. I felt unsafe, and much later, I found out there had been cases of abuse at this boarding school. When someone tries to make me doubt my own experiences, I feel unseen and disrespected. How can someone say that he knows you better than you know yourself? This gave me the impulse: I wanted to become a psychotherapist. But when I eventually came to study psychology, I was disappointed because the image of the human being was so narrow. I did not want to work with a toolbox. One of my professors told me that I reminded her of someone who was there 10 years earlier, and that maybe I could do my internship with him. I did, and ended up on a farm where people with disabilities worked and lived. That’s how I met social therapy, anthroposophy, and the Youth Section at the Goetheanum. I still remember my first day there: first of all, the person who invited me had time for me. Secondly, he brought so much into the conversation. In his words, I found the interconnectedness from my childhood reflected. That was the bridge to anthroposophy for me: integrating sense perception, inner experience, and the spiritual experience that goes beyond that, and being able to study and connect these three realms of being human.
Franka: It’s amazing how life works! Psychology is quite popularized these days, and a lot of people state that they do inner work, which usually involves mindfulness, communication, self-regulation, etc., and finding “tools.” People in an anthroposophical context are more likely to meditate, but seem to place less emphasis, for example, on communication skills or psychological safety within their organizations. Is it possible to fruitfully combine the pragmatic “toolbox” way of thinking from psychology with the more meditative inner work?
Bart: It’s a complex, but relevant question. On the one hand, I think it is important to understand the human soul. It’s a new science that started with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Rudolf Steiner. We need to develop the scientific foundations to work ethically and scientifically. The second element, in my view, lies in what Steiner describes about people who have difficulties being present in the moment and fully realizing the impulses that they bring. He says that for these people, it is important to create the conditions to achieve presence and incarnate better. He summarized this by saying that the children who need special care need us to take care of their souls. Caring for the soul means enjoying life in all its richness and creating a human culture together with this richness of culture. Through rituals and so forth, we celebrate being human together. This means caring for, nurturing, and strengthening the inner life. Psychology and psychotherapy are needed where the soul gets stuck. It may be because of a shocking experience, when your healthy inner flexibility—the option to change perspectives and be open towards new experiences—is lost. Then your inner life becomes narrow, and you can be overwhelmed with the same experiences again and again. It is very good if you can get help from psychotherapy to regain the ability to breathe within the soul. But in general, it’s more important to nourish our souls. Especially today, when so many of us feel overwhelmed, I see an important task for anthroposophy in nourishing the soul. Many people come into psychotherapy and learn to think about their soul life in terms of illness. They are stuck, unhappy, and depressed. I think that they are actually seeking nourishment and meaningful initiatives to connect with reality.
Franka: I have the impression that through spiritual awareness, we can focus on the potential or the strength that we can create. And, for me, the additional “bonus” offered by psychology is learning to acknowledge yourself. You mentioned traumas that block us or mental illnesses for which therapy makes sense. But since you are trained in organizational development, you have probably experienced dynamics in workplaces that develop because people do not know how to deal with the “wounds” that they carry and often suppress their pain. Would it help to integrate some psychological approaches into our spiritual practice?
Bart: The “wound” is a profound theme. I really appreciate the work of Christine Gruwez. She shows that the wound is a portal. Integration means living through the experience, not trying to close it off or separate it from the rest of your inner life. Then the wound becomes a sensing organ, even in the spiritual world. For me, meditation is the path of working with your inner life towards perceiving the truth or reality of how we connect with the spiritual world that is always there, and learning to work and interact with it. Then it becomes part of our daily and professional life. For instance, Rudolf Steiner uses this image: when you look at a child, you have sense organs to perceive it. But in “child observation,” it is very important to be aware of how you look at the child. If you look in a judgmental way, then the child does not feel seen. They retreat and cannot show their individuality. If, on the other hand, as Rudolf Steiner describes, you interact and dialogue, and play with the child, you create a space where the child feels safe. This is the condition needed for them to reveal their individuality, questions, and difficulties in learning and relating to the world.
Meditation as a Professional Practice
Franka: You speak from experience because you were a teacher for children with special needs and the head of a day care center for children with complex disabilities for a long time. Could you describe how meditation flows into your actual work?
Bart: Inner work is a meditative path. It’s about building up images and then letting go of your experiences step by step to create the conditions for a perception of what lies behind the outer experiences. It’s not easy to put into words, but I think Rudolf Steiner is one of the most profound researchers to describe these steps.
When we work with a child who trusts us, we can rebuild our experiences with them in our mind as an image. We connect with the child’s development and ask ourselves what the next step should be and how we can support it. I understand this image to be an “imagination” that represents the complexity of our experience with this child. It could also be a narrative or the expression of an inner dynamic that we have perceived in the encounter. Once we have built up this image, we let it go again. Something emerges that we feel resonates with our own abilities and the deeper reality of what this child wants to bring into the world. In this resonance, we can become active and creative. This is the level of “inspiration.” We can also become aware of what this has to do with our own path, and then let the “inspiration” go again. In this way, an “intuition” can arise later, usually not during meditation but when we encounter the child again. We let go of all ideas about what we could do with the child as exercises, etc., and are open to the “intuition” that guides us: “This is what I need to do now. This is exactly what this child needs to know or hear in this moment.”
The meditative steps are very practical. That’s what I have learned from anthroposophy that excites me about this inner development path: that we can create the inner conditions to explore and connect with spiritual reality. The spiritual world is always there. But how do I relate to this reality? That’s inner work that I need to do.
Franka: Thank you so much for this intimate exploration of your spiritual practice! To conclude, because you are also a member of the leadership team of the Section for Inclusive Social Development at the Goetheanum, what have you learned about inclusive social development that you would like to share?
Bart: To this day, in the context of schools, people think inclusion means offering support for children with special needs within the so-called “normal” schools. But I have come to understand that inclusion is not just relevant for children with special needs. It is relevant for all children. All children—and we adults too—want to live in a world that is diverse and includes everyone, no matter how different we are from each other. It’s only through these encounters and differences that we find our own unique being. One-sided and imperfect as we are, this connects us with a higher reality of being human. Interaction with children with special needs takes our understanding of what it means to be human to a much higher level. We need a new kind of education to be able to support these children. We need another perspective on how to bring the new generation into the world and into our culture, with a new way of interacting and reflecting on questions of humanity, the future of humanity, and human values and qualities. The challenges these children bring with them are not “problems” that we must “solve,” for instance, by creating separate classes. The field of inclusive social development is not about solving problems. It’s about bringing respect and an attitude of learning about being human into culture and humanity at large. A wound can be a trauma or a problem, or it can be an opportunity to become sensitive to a higher reality that enriches our lives. Living in a diverse culture and having the opportunity to meet people with all kinds of ways of being human makes our human culture so much richer and so much more resilient in facing the challenges of our time.
Franka: Yes, and we are all under the pressure of so-called “normality”—of performing well in the expected ways. Working with a perspective of diversity frees us to be truly individual and to contribute our unique potential to the community.
Bart: Exactly. I can be free because you are different than me.
Franka: Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us!
Bart: Thank you, Franka.
Recommendation No time to read? You can listen to this interview on our podcast Anthroposophy to the Point on Spotify, Apple Music, or the Das Goetheanum website.
More The Section for Inclusive Social Development
Title image Bart Vanmechelen at the Goetheanum, Photo: Xue Li
