The Human Maturity Institute
A short, reflective look at how you stay open — to what you notice, what you feel, the people around you, what your body does under pressure, and who you take yourself to be.
You already know this word — available. Are you available to meet tomorrow?
The Snapshot asks the same thing, turned inward. Not when are you available, but what are you available to?
To someone telling you something you don't want to hear. To a feeling you would rather not have. To another person's version of what happened. To what your body is doing under pressure. To being wrong about who you are.
What this is for
Freedom. Not as a theme — as the reason.
I care about what lets a person see clearly and feel fully. What lets them be reached by someone else, stay in their body under pressure, and hold who they are lightly enough to change.
Someone who can do those things is much harder to define from the outside.
Most of us learned somewhere to measure ourselves against a picture we never drew. This is half an hour of looking at your own patterns using language you can accept or refuse. It will show you where you stay open, where you close, and how long it takes you to find your way back.
There is no ideal profile to move toward. What you do with what you find is entirely yours — which is rather the point.
dr. akasha · The Human Maturity Institute
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you write is sent anywhere.
No black box. Here is what happens to your answers.
Each domain gives you three numbers, kept apart on purpose. Open is how often you stay with what is happening. Return is how quickly you come back after you close. See is how often you catch yourself closing while it is happening.
Nobody stays open all the time. Coming back matters as much as staying.
See is never taken away from anything. Noticing yourself shut down is not the same as being shut down. It is the harder of the two to build, and it is what makes changing anything possible. Here it can only count in your favour.
There is no total score. Adding the numbers together would hide the differences this is built to show, and a single number gets read as a grade within about a second.
Closing is not counted against you anywhere. One section asks whether your closing tends to be chosen or automatic, because that difference matters far more than the fact that you closed.
What you write is never scored or analysed. Your words appear in the report exactly as you wrote them, so you can hold what the report says against the moment that produced it. Where the two disagree, trust the moment.
The practices come from my own work with people and from established research on how people return after closing. The reasoning behind each one is set out in the Practitioner's Guide.
Everything here runs inside your own browser. Your answers and everything you write stay on this device — they are never sent anywhere, and your report is put together on your machine at the end, not on a server.
One more thing. This asks you to remember real moments and stay with them for a bit. If right now isn't a moment when you can do that, it will keep. Your place saves automatically, so closing the tab loses nothing.
The Human Maturity Institute
This report exists only in this browser window. Closing the tab without saving it will lose it. Download or print it now — the buttons are at the bottom, and also here:
Save as PDF gives you a formatted document to keep or bring to a conversation. Download a copy saves a file you can reopen in a browser offline.
At this point, you can save your report and come back to it later.
Some people find it helpful to take a break between finishing the assessment and reading the report. The questions can open up a lot to be with. Sitting with that before reading the report can make room to metabolise it.
You may already have something that helps you transition from work like this. If not: writing down, or recording, what came up; going for a walk; doing something with your hands; or simply sitting still and doing nothing.
Maturity, as I work with it here, is not a stage you arrive at or a set of competencies you accumulate. We look at it through the dynamics of two capacities that influence each other: availability — letting reality actually reach us, and being genuinely changed by what it brings — and participation — what we then do with what reaches us.
Neither half is maturity on its own. Availability without participation becomes insight without movement. Not having real contact with others. Participation without availability becomes movement without learning. Contact that remains only surface level and can hurt.
Some years ago, I asked my son, Dakari, what I could do better as a husband and father, and without pausing he told me that when something happened that I did not agree with, I would defend myself at length and then stopped listening properly. He was right. What stayed with me was that in those moments the people I love and care about the most could no longer reach me. I was in the room and no longer in the relationship.
In this way of looking at human maturity, availability opens the door. Participation is what happens when we walk through it.
This snapshot measures the first half. It looks at five domains where reality arrives — through what you perceive, what you feel, who you are with, what your body does, and who you take yourself to be.
The goal is not to stay open all the time. Sometimes closing is wise. It can protect you when a situation is unsafe, overwhelming, or simply not worth entering.
What matters is the pattern. Did you choose to close, or did it happen automatically? Could you see it happening? And when you were ready, how long did it take to come back?
A longer petal means you stay open more often in that domain. A wider blue arc means you catch yourself closing more often. How quickly you come back is shown separately below.
How quickly you come back after closing, in each domain.
Each domain lands in one of five positions, set by how open you tend to be and how clearly you can see yourself close. None of them is a grade. They describe different situations, and they call for different work.
Moving right is worth as much as moving up. The upper right is not the only good place to be, and the lower right is where most real change begins.
As you read, mark anything that jumps out at you — a practice that you can imagine doing, a question you would rather not answer. Trust that pull. It might reveal more to you than responding to the sense of what you "should" pick. At the end, you will be asked to choose one of those to take beyond the pages of the report.
The other half of the conversation
This report has done what an instrument can do. It has proposed a pattern back to you and given you language for it. What it cannot tell you is what the pattern is for — what it protected, what it once cost you to build, or what participation might look like from where you are actually standing.
You have some options for carrying this further. Here are three. They solve different problems, and only you can say which one you have.
For when you do not yet know what you are looking at. The report named something and you cannot tell what it is protecting, what it once cost you to build, or whether it is still earning its keep.
We work through your results together — you read them to me, including where they were wrong. We find where this actually lives: the particular room, the particular people, the conditions making openness expensive. And we design one practice small enough that you would genuinely do it.
Book your inquiryYou'll purchase and choose a time on the next page.
For when you have read this and want to talk about it with people doing the same thing. Not a course. A room where we take one domain, one real situation, and work it in company.
Availability is not a private capacity. It is cultivated — or prevented — in conditions: the people around you, the room you work in, what your circumstances permit. A group is where those become visible, because everyone else's are different from yours.
Ask for a placeThis is called a Snapshot because it reads a moment. Take it again in a season and the numbers will have moved — a hard month, a new role, a changed relationship all show up in it. The difference between two readings tells you more than either one alone.
Nothing here reminds you to come back, and most people will not. If you would like a note from me in about three months, saying it might be time, you can leave an address.
Your report stays on this device. The only thing you would be giving me is an email address, and one note a quarter is all it is for.
Remind me in three months →Neither is required. Sitting with this report on your own and returning to it in a month is a legitimate use of what you have just done. If you do want company for it, the question above — do I not yet know what I am looking at, or do I know and have nowhere to put it? — is the one that sorts it.
dr. akasha · The Human Maturity Institute
For coaches and facilitators
If you'd like to use the Snapshot in your own practice, you can. It's free to take and free to send to a client.
Two ways practitioners are using it so far. Some send it to a client themselves and work with whatever comes back — often early on, when you want a wider view of the person than the presenting issue gives you. Others point someone toward me directly, when what surfaces sits outside what they want to hold, or when a second pair of eyes would serve the client better than one.
Both are welcome. Referring someone on isn't a failure of the coaching relationship. It is usually a piece of good judgement about conditions.
How practitioner use actually works — debriefing, framing, what I can offer alongside it — is something I'm working out with the first people using it, and I'd like that to include you. I keep a short list of practitioners I write to as this develops. Tell me and I'll add you.
Let's talk →