Not Separate: Embodiment in a Living World
Every day, I wonder what it would be like to live in a world in which most humans built intimacy and collaboration with other life on Earth. I wasn’t born into a time where this could be said. I have to remember that it hasn’t always been this way, nor will it be forever. It simply can’t - that is not how this living planet works.
Earth is not a static stage upon which life unfolds; it is a continually changing mega-organism built collaboratively by smaller life forms. Microbes come together with rock and make fertile ground. Roots aren’t just in soil, they build it. Forests don’t just passively get rained on, they call in the rain when they need it and create conditions for clouds to accumulate water. The atmosphere we breathe and ozone that protects our skin are themselves products of all the green earthlings exhaling for millennia, making our evolution possible at all.
We can see here that relationship is the foundational unit of life - without it, possibility would come to a screeching halt.
As a politicized somatic practitioner, this shifts how I understand embodiment. It is not only a practice of self-improvement and learning how to be with our nervous systems. Embodiment is a practice of rejoining the creative force of aliveness already moving through us and around us. It is remembering that the intelligence animating our breath is inseparable from the intelligence animating forests, rivers, fungi, birds, and trees. It is letting that intelligence help us re-member who we are, and shape who we become. It is finding out how much better we treat each other when aliveness streams through us unimpeded after spending so much time severed from our beyond-human allies.
Vivien Sansour of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library speaks of "tending the seeds of aliveness" through inter-species relationship. Along with many others, she notes that beyond-human kin become living archives of home, grief, resilience, and adaptation. When we convene with beyond-human kin that we have co-evolved with, we have an incredible capacity to recall what it means to be human. It gives us something to aspire to other than the socio-political status quo. Expands our imaginations, lessens the risk of reproducing domination over and over again. As I see it, inter=species relationship has the power to not only change the way that we relate to the Earth, but also with one another in profoundly meaningful ways.
I am interested in embodiment that runs this deep.
Instead of asking, How do I end my suffering? we might ask:
What is asking to come alive in me?
How is this kinship creating new possibility in me today?
How is my body already participating in the life unfolding around me?
What shifts when I learn to listen with my whole bodyspirit to the teachers surrounding me?
What am I ready to give up to rejoin the stream of aliveness that animates this planet?
These questions move us beyond temporary pain relief and toward relationship. They invite us to experience ourselves not as isolated individuals seeking personal pain relief, but as participants in emergent futures that dissolve systems of unnecessary harm. They invite us to notice the possibility generated only through connection.
Consider this —
When we pause long enough beneath a tree, we often discover that the tree is not asking anything of us except our presence. In that simple act of showing up with one another, we begin to remember that presence itself is participation.
We get to be seen in a different way than we are seen by our human relations. We get to experience the energy of a being whose approaches life, survival and community in radically different ways than we do.
As we rest into this mutual presence, aliveness stirs. The stories inside us get to be witnessed—not only through words, but through breath, movement, sensation, and subtle energies. We become more available to possibility. We understand new ways forward in our personal lives and political moment. We feel support of the living world enter our bodyspirits.
The next time you pass a tree, consider slowing down for a moment. Notice their texture, their movement, the patterns of light passing through their leaves. Feel your body making contact with the Earth. Let your breath synchronize with the gentle rhythms of the living world. Rather than asking what the tree can do for you, notice what becomes possible when you simply join it in the shared practice of being alive.
You may discover that what you've been seeking is not somewhere else. It has been moving through and around you all along.
We’re making a conscious return so we can collectively embody regenerative futures.
