embodiment | earth connection | dharma | transformation
the four elements | ways of seeing
Embodiment | The Body As Doorway
A lived experiential understanding of anything begins in the body.
Without this everything exists as left hemisphere dominance; a kind of disembodied ‘thinking about’ world. Contact with the body orientates us in life through the felt sense, moving us from the map to the terrain.
When we move from alienated awareness to integrated awareness we stop holding all that is messy and inconvenient (emotionally) at arms length, which shuts down our wider vitality. And finally arrive at a simple truth: I am here and I can feel.
Just as animism invites reciprocal relationships with the natural world, somatic awareness practices show us how to enter into fuller relationship with our own internal landscapes. We need to bring the deadened parts of ourselves back to life to reclaim our vitality.
If we are interested in experiencing an animate world we must first bring our inner nature alive. This forms part of a larger body of work I’ve been developing called Embodied Animism.Earth Connection | Embodied Animism
It is very hard to live in a world defined as dead matter. A purely materialistic worldview dehumanises us and breaks our spirit.
By fostering a dynamic connection to our surroundings, and ourselves we remember we are not isolated beings but part of a vast, interconnected web of life.
This way of being in the world is what buddhists might call Inter-Being, what wilderness guides might call, The Mirror of Nature and what some shamans might call Animism.
Animism is a way of seeing the world as a living, breathing community where everything is interconnected and participatory. It offers a deeply, relational way of being in the world, inviting us to remember that we are not separate from nature - we are interwoven within it. This is our deepest inheritance - it is where we find belonging.
The Art of Rewilding offers a living enquiry into how we shape the kind of world we perceive. In doing so, we may remember our place in the web of life and root ourselves once more in relationship, reciprocity, and reverence.Transformation | Crossing The Thresholds of Life
Life continually invites us into new stages of growth and understanding.
Dying-Through-To-Life ceremonies (think of a snake shedding its skin) are renewal ceremonies for those seeking greater depth and clarity about life’s purpose and meaning. These are known as vision quests.
They mark natural thresholds in our lives: moments when we are called to step into the next chapter. On one level these ceremonies bring about personal change.
On another level, vision quests shift our sense of identity from something isolated to something rooted in relationship - with each other and with the living Earth. From this place the quest is not only for personal insight, but for what we bring back to the community. Some systems-change thinkers might describe this as regenerative culture - the tending of a healthy community.
There is also a self-transcendent dimension to this work - what might be called the realm of deep imagination. This territory has been explored in different ways by thinkers such as Tyson Yunkaporta, Thomas Berry, Stephen Harrod-Buhner and Carl Jung.
And then there is what different traditions call the Holy Wild, Great Mystery, or the Nature of Mind. Dare I say it, the spiritual heart of it all. At this level these initiations are not a single event, but a journey into relationship with the sacred. Dharma
The Nature of Reality and the Nature of Perception are territories I hold close to my heart as a buddhist.
These phrases can sound a little dry, yet they point toward ways of seeing that re-sanctify existence. - a renewed sense of the sacredness of things.
My favourite album cover has written across it again and again: ‘the world is not a cold dead place.’
I’m drawn to ways of working with mind and body that invite shifts in perception and a deeper sense of reality - not somewhere else - but here and now, beyond the surface of an apparent humdrum physical world.
Rebecca Elson wrote of a responsibility to awe - a phrase I love. The reawakening of awe, and how to keep it aflame are pat of my personal practice.
My other main practices are loving-kindness, insight, śamatha (calm spaciousness) and sādhanā. My current curiosity is exploring how sādhanā and Nature of Mind meet vision questing.
I have been practising meditation and Buddhism since 1997. The name given to me at my ordination twelve years ago is Nagadipa.
It means Light in the Depths.