The Fifteen Lands

The Icosa model measures five domains — Physical, Emotional, Mental, Relational, and Spiritual — each existing in one of three conditions. The mythic layer translates each condition into a landscape, a Land that captures what it feels like to stand in that territory. Where figures describe what you are doing, lands describe where you are standing.

The Fifteen Lands

Each row tells a single territory’s story across its full range. The physical row runs from cracked earth (Wasteland) through tended ground (Garden) to impenetrable overgrowth (Jungle). The emotional row runs from permafrost (Tundra) through flowing water (Spring) to white-water flooding (Rapids).

Every land is a precise synonym for its structural state — the translation is exact, not approximate.

Physical Lands

The Wasteland — Physical Under

A barren landscape of cracked earth. No pulse, no warmth. The sun gives light but no heat. A person has vacated the body: sensation dimmed, touch unavailable, the physical experience of being alive reduced to the minimum required for function.

People inhabit the Wasteland for years without registering it because nothing demands their attention. A forty-six-year-old executive has sat through a decade of twelve-hour stretches, eating at her desk without tasting. She is not in acute distress — she has simply abandoned the body as a place to live. People who inhabit the Wasteland describe themselves as “not really a body person” or “I live in my head.” They forget to eat, do not notice cold, and are surprised when the body forces a reckoning through injury or collapse.

The Garden — Physical Centered

Body inhabited and alive. A tended landscape where the seasons turn without catastrophe. What grows is what belongs. Sensation arrives and is received: warmth is warmth, cold is cold, hunger is hunger. The body is not a burden to be carried but a home to be lived in.

The felt quality is quiet sufficiency: the body hums along without demanding attention, but when called upon to register pain or pleasure, it responds. A person in the Garden can be hurt, sick, exhausted. What the Garden provides is ground — the capacity to receive physical experience without the territory itself causing distortion.

The Jungle — Physical Over

Body in overdrive. Physical sensation so loud that nothing else can be heard. Pain, arousal, hunger, fatigue, restlessness — whatever the signal, it dominates the entire system. A twenty-seven-year-old marathon runner cannot sit still. Rest feels like a threat. Every moment without exertion produces agitation that escalates until she moves again.

Emotional Lands

The Tundra — Emotional Under

A frozen landscape where no warmth moves. Emotions exist the way ancient organisms exist in glacial ice: preserved but inaccessible. Often mistaken for calm — the Tundra presents as level, steady, unperturbed. But equanimity is the Spring: feeling that flows without overwhelming. The Tundra is absence masquerading as composure.

A sixty-three-year-old widower lost his wife three years ago. His children are concerned because he “never cried.” He knows the loss is significant but does not feel it. The Tundra has preserved his grief beneath permafrost.

The Spring — Emotional Centered

Heart alive and flowing. Water that rises from somewhere deep, clear and constant. Emotions arise, are noticed, are felt through, and pass. Sadness arrives, is recognized, is felt, and eventually gives way. Being in the Spring does not mean feeling pleasant. It means emotions are available and moving. The felt quality is emotional weather that passes through instead of settling in.

The Rapids — Emotional Over

Heart in flood. Every feeling hitting with overwhelming force, every stimulus producing affect that exceeds the container. Joy becomes mania. Sorrow becomes devastation. A casual remark wounds sharply. A thirty-one-year-old new father describes the first months with his newborn as “beautiful and unbearable” — love that produces chest pain, worry that prevents sleep. A minor disappointment becomes a crisis.

Mental Lands

The Mist — Mental Under

A landscape without visibility. Thoughts dissolve before they form. Ideas arrive half-made and evaporate. Decisions feel impossible not because options are too complex but because the capacity to evaluate has dimmed. People in the Mist often describe wading through something thick.

A twenty-four-year-old doctoral student cannot write despite caring deeply about the research. The ideas are “in there somewhere” but will not organize. The Mist is not a motivation problem. It is a clarity problem. People frequently mistake it for stupidity or laziness, which compounds the fog with self-reproach.

The Vista — Mental Centered

Mind clear and seeing. A high place where the air is clean and the view extends in all directions. A person can hold a train of thought, evaluate options, make distinctions, and arrive at conclusions. There is room to think, and thinking proceeds at its own pace, neither racing nor stalling. One stands at the Vista, looking out. Clarity — not brilliance. The condition in which whatever cognitive capacity a person has can operate cleanly.

The Storm — Mental Over

Mind that will not stop. Thoughts racing, ideas colliding, the cognitive system generating more content than it can organize. Not creative ferment — creative thought has direction and coherence; the Storm has only velocity. A thirty-five-year-old founder lies awake at three in the morning running through every possible outcome, each thread spawning five more.

Relational Lands

The Hermitage — Relational Under

The relational world collapsed to a single point: the self. Not chosen solitude but structural inability to hold other people’s experience in view. The person in the Hermitage typically feels complete. Conversations are smooth because they are one-directional.

A thirty-nine-year-old project manager receives consistent feedback that she “doesn’t listen.” She reads every email, tracks every deliverable. What she does not hear is the person behind the report: the team member struggling, the colleague needing recognition. The surprise comes from outside — repeated bewilderment when others express hurt that seems to have no source.

The Village — Relational Centered

A place where the self and the other exist simultaneously, both real, both visible, both granted their own subjectivity. People give and receive, speak and listen, influence and are influenced. The felt quality is accompaniment — the steady awareness that one is neither alone nor absorbed.

Villages have conflicts and difficult neighbors. The Village is the presence of relational structure sufficient to hold tension without collapse.

The Commune — Relational Over

The relational field dissolved into the collective. The person exists as a function of others’ needs, and their own desires have been absorbed. “I just want everyone to be happy” and “I don’t really have preferences” are structural descriptions, not virtues. A fifty-three-year-old woman describes twenty-eight years of marriage making every decision based on her husband’s preferences. Asked what she wants for dinner, she draws a blank. The relational territory has absorbed her selfhood.

Spiritual Lands

The Void — Spiritual Under

Featureless landscape without landmarks, without horizon. Not nihilism, not depression, but the specific condition where purpose, direction, and the sense of participating in something larger have gone offline. Experience continues but does not add up to anything. Days pass without narrative. Actions are performed without significance.

A seventy-one-year-old retired physician describes eighteen months of “going through the motions” — health good, family close, finances stable, and nothing means anything. The career that organized forty years is over, and nothing has replaced it.

The Temple — Spiritual Centered

Territory of present meaning. The person has a direction, a purpose, a sense of participating in something that extends beyond the personal. Not ecstatic, not enlightened — oriented. The felt quality is coherence — the sense that today’s actions belong to a larger arc. A person in the Temple can wash dishes and know the washing is part of something: a family held together, a practice maintained, a life lived with intention.

The Shrine — Spiritual Over

Meaning swollen past its banks. Everything becomes symbolic, every event a sign, every moment carrying a weight of significance that makes daily life nearly impossible. A forty-two-year-old accountant returns from a meditation retreat unable to function at work. Every spreadsheet feels like an insult to cosmic truth. She quits her job and plans a pilgrimage — not from joyful inspiration but compulsive obligation. The Shrine has overwhelmed the Temple.

The Paths Between Zones

Every off-center land has a named path back to its homeland. The Underlands have paths of restoration; the Overlands have paths of recalibration.

Arriving is the body coming back to life — beginning with the weight of feet on a floor. Sensing is the first thaw of frozen feeling, starting with small preferences. Clarifying burns off the fog one small act of distinction at a time. Extending expands the relational field to include the other. Orienting is the gradual recovery of direction.

From the Overland side: Settling reduces physical amplitude without pushing the body offline. Regulating restores proportionality without numbing. Softening quiets the cognitive overdrive. Individuating recovers the self within the relational field. Grounding restores the capacity to let the ordinary be ordinary.

Figures in the Lands

The power of the mythic geography is in how figures and lands combine. The same figure in different lands has a radically different experience.

Consider the Exile — Bond Under, cut off from connection. The Exile in the Tundra is isolation compounded by numbness: the person cannot reach others and cannot feel the absence. Two paths are needed. The Exile in the Spring is cut off from others in a territory where feelings flow normally — acutely painful because the feeling of isolation is fully available. Only one path is needed. The Exile in the Commune is a seeming paradox — cut off from connection in a territory dissolved into the collective. The person appears thoroughly embedded socially while experiencing inability to bond.

Every figure-land combination carries its own felt tone, its own clinical implications, and its own path forward. The mythic geography makes these distinctions immediate and intuitive — a language for experience that structural coordinates alone cannot provide.