Feel more: relational healing in a fractured world

Unlearning the disembodied logic of domination, and coming back home to ourselves

Embodied intelligence and relational being

As I sit in what seems like a permanent state of chest nausea, feeling the swirling existential anxiety in my body, sensing into the harmful patterns and dynamics our human-made systems have forced on the world, I am acutely aware of the way I am integral to the system sensing itself. My physical discomfort, far from being some personal failing—a pathology of ‘me’—is part of the intelligence of the living biosphere. My body, your body, every body, are sensors in the constitution of this extraordinary living planet¹. How we feel is an indicator of the health of the entire system.

As someone who has spent her life wired by, and successful in, the Western² education system that privileges abstract codified knowledge over all other kinds, an understanding of embodied intelligence has been a revelation to me. It has expanded my capacity to attend to aspects of the world that measurable data and templated procedures cannot touch. It has helped me much more deeply understand my own yearnings towards the intangible, fluid, in-between realm and my overwhelming desire to feel more. And it has given me a far greater understanding of, and skill with, my own intuition. Embodied intelligence is the most extraordinary source of agency.

And when you learn to sense into and understand your feeling self—the internal sensations that are part of how our bodies regulate themselves in all the ways, from hunger and thirst, to threat detection, to desire—you become much more equipped to relate to other beings and other aspects of the world we depend on to live. Embodied self awareness—which is not the navel-gazing of self consciousness, but a more expansive sense of self as part of a wider context—is the foundation for right relationship.

Separation, supremacy, and epistemic domination

When I read the news, look around me, listen to conversations, experience dysfunctional systems, engage with institutions, and see the cruelty and the polarisation that is growing, I recognise the patterns. Relational rupture all the way down. And an inability to (a) recognise that this is where the dysfunction lies, and (b) repair it, because relationality is not legible within our dominant cultural worldview. It is not a ‘thing’. And we have been taught that the world is made of things—objects in space—whereas it is the space between the things, the relationships, through which life lives.

The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.³

My beautiful friend Krissi Smith, who is a linguist and teacher and translator of te reo Māori, points out that English and Western European languages wire us for separate-self-centrism in their very structure. We are constantly reinscribing a view of the world that is based on a (separated) self-and-other perspective every time we speak. Whereas other languages, such as te reo Māori (and many other indigenous languages), encode a relational perspective into their logic.

An example of this is that our English plural pronouns—we, you, they—are all defined in reference to the speaker only. In te reo Māori, you need to simultaneously consider yourself as speaker, those whom you are speaking about, and those to whom you are speaking. So the single word ‘we’ in English could be: ‘māua’ (me and one other, but not the person/people I am speaking to); ‘mātou’ (me and several others but not including the person/people I am speaking to); ‘tāua’ (me and the person I am speaking to); or ‘tātou’ (me and several others, including the person/people I am speaking to). This is only one example of many ways the language itself brings about a relational understanding. In speaking te reo Māori, one cannot help but consider the perspective of, and one’s relationship to, others. Each sentence lays down neurobiological wiring for interbeing.

But the intangible realm is not well-understood within the dominant cultural architecture that governs us—within which our selfhood is defined. Captured by a narrow logic of separated subject and object, we can only exist as either/or, and that is the logic of zero sum games and competition. We are split from the relational fabric of the living world on which we depend, competing with each other for survival.

In addition to separation, there is also an (abstract and hierarchical) binarised value system at play that ranks everything (including us) according to constructs of ‘better’ or ‘worse’, ‘higher’ or ‘lower’, ‘more’ or ‘less.’ We internalise these constructs, which in turn condition the ideas and behaviours that we use to shape our external world—including the systems and institutions that structure society. It is a logic of separation, sorting, and supremacy that drives our Westernised existence, so thoroughly baked into our ways of knowing, being, doing, and valuing that we believe it to be ‘human nature’ and unconsciously enact it everyday. We⁴ cannot imagine ourselves outside of it.

The difficulty is that because this Eurocentric worldview has become dominant—an epistemic monoculture that has crowded out the biodiversity of other ways of knowing through rampant growth—its logic has become the imposed logic through which everything must be evaluated. This puts us in the most knotty of binds that keeps us all incarcerated in its constraining criteria for discursive legitimacy. It has assumed a constitutional role in our ways of knowing—acquired through dominance and force—that requires adherence to its narrow rules in order to even participate in conversations about truth⁵. This is manipulation at a planetary scale, whereby an exclusionary (and only partial) worldview has appointed itself the global arbiter of human thought and behaviour, and required all other ways of knowing to submit—proving themselves using the narrow criteria that it has unilaterally determined.

Western thought has trapped us all in an imperial prison of circular reasoning, forbidding access to other forms of logic that it cannot understand, so deems illegible and erasable.

What this means is that other cultural worldviews must painstakingly adopt the logic of Western thought to argue their case for their own legitimacy. In doing so, they are denied access to the very ways of knowing that give them their power. An example of this is the way that abstract codified knowledge is privileged in Western thought, so embodied situational knowledge is automatically assigned a “lesser” value, and filed in a box labelled “supporting material,” able to be discarded from “proper” consideration. And, most egregiously, holistic perspectives on the world must be proven using analytical means or modelled extensively through computation, even when they have for millennia held insights Western science is only now beginning to glimpse. This hamstrings us all in being able to address the multifaceted crises we are entangled in. Western superiority is cutting off the world’s nose to spite its face.

Coming back home to ourselves

When you are forced to use the master’s limited (and limiting) tools and live in the master’s house, under his rules, you become tethered to a confined existence and habituated to the boundaries he has defined for you. When those tools most expressly squash the imagination, positioning it as inessential or unserious, then the means of escape becomes very hard to see. But what is forbidden and denigrated by power is usually the very thing that threatens it the most. The flashing warning signs of “DO NOT GO THERE” are in fact pointers to the way out⁶.

The beautiful thing is that we each contain the map for escape from this limiting worldview within our own bodies, because the master’s logic is not based on natural law, but on disembodied abstraction. We’ve been acculturated since childhood to disregard our embodied knowledge—to dismiss our feelings as untrustworthy, our imaginations as naive, and to suppress both if we are to be seen intelligent and professional. But what this has done is cut us off from access to the full intelligence of the living world, of which we are all a unique expression.

Unlearning our dependence on the adaptive cognitive architecture we’ve grown in order to contort ourselves into the strictures and structures of this cultural worldview, and attending to our felt sense of being-of-the-world is how we liberate ourselves. We come back into right relationship with ourselves and can then come into right relationship with each other, the biosphere and technosphere, and the dynamic universe that has given rise to everything. This might seem esoteric, but it is profoundly material. It is also within such easy reach. Because it involves becoming aware of ourselves from the inside-out, and coming back into our bodies again, after centuries of attempting to escape them.

We are, each of us, living sensors for our world. We sense into our immediate environment, process and interpret it in multidimensional ways through the complexity of our wondrous neurobiological systems, and feed it back into the whole. We are ecological creatures, co-adapting with one another and our environments, through interrelationship and affect, in a dynamic evolutionary dance.

All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.⁷

Yet the predominant worldview, drummed into us since birth and imposed around the world without consent, through its systems and institutions, denies this reality. Its dominance damages us all because it has crowded out the ways of understanding the world that do address the relational and holistic nature of existence. We are in a severe imbalance of understanding.

Restoring right relationship

Here I must stress a significant non-binary point. This is not to say that there is no place for this worldview and its logic, that it is universally ‘bad.’ The tendency towards categoricity is itself part of that worldview. That is what makes this whole conversation so tricky, especially for those who have only experienced their own success through it. We are holding the both-and of it here—all its brilliance and its blindspots. The issue is its unfettered dominance in all domains and the default settings that it enforces on global systems and institutions, which in turn attempt to shape everyone in its image.

The orthodox Western worldview must come back into right relationship with the sophisticated eco-logics of the wider human species and find its place within that ecosystem so that the entire biosphere, and the technosphere that humans create, can flourish. For that to happen, the Western “we” must lose our arrogance and exceptionalism and come down to earth and back to life.

The difficulty is that the logics of separation, sorting, and supremacy that underpin our ways of knowing are so embedded in the ways we constitute ourselves and our societies that they get in the way of what we need to do. The moves we need to make necessitate some serious internal work to counter the wiring that we do not recognise as cultural, because it too is invisible to our worldview’s logic and its valorisation of codified (and categorised) knowledge over embodied knowledge.

White supremacy is so hard to unlearn because supremacy itself is an organising feature of its operating system. We have been rewarded for demonstrating our supremacy, encouraged to compete, lauded for ambition, selected for our certainty, instilled with an entitlement to “get ahead”. When you begin to recognise the ubiquity of this orientation to the world, you start to feel sick at just how entrenched it is, and how we’ve been acculturated to strive for it over generations.

Is it any wonder that we have the global leadership we do? They are really just the full expression of this pure worldview taken to its logical conclusion. Think about yourself as an individual alone. Decontextualise. Compartmentalise. Objectify. Put aside feelings. Climb the ladder. Get ahead at all costs. Be number one. And do everything you can to stay there.

The patterns that are playing out at a planetary scale are mirrored in our own internal landscapes. It will not be until we can recognise that the issues facing us are not actually “out there,” but within us, that we may finally have a chance of a liveable future.

Until you can see yourself as part of the problem you cannot be part of the solution.

It is the relational realm, from micro to macro, that we need to start attending to. And we need to begin with ourselves—not as isolated individuals but as nodes in networks of relationships—to start to restore the capacity for relational accountability that we have lost touch with, but that indigenous worldviews have maintained for us all. Without that capacity, we will continue to perpetuate the traumatic wounds of separation over and over again, while blaming everyone else for the predicament in which we find ourselves.

This may seem like an enormous ask, given where we are culturally. Yet many in Western societies have retained the cellular memories of this relational orientation, as even the Western world would not function without it (despite what its patriarchally-wired leaders believe and what its economic models represent). It is just not valued, and does not register in the narratives of conquest and progress and economic growth (you can’t manage what you can’t measure!). It is the realm of the indigenous, of the feminine, of the non-binary, of the divergent, of the sensitive, of the spiritual, of the strange, of the artists, of the gardeners, and the dreamers of all kinds. We need to reconnect with those parts of ourselves that have been exiled, diminished and shamed if we are to heal the violent tears in the fabric of our beautiful living world.

Complexity, healing, and relational accountability

The work is not trying to force everyone else to change, using ever more controlling behavioural modification techniques, or the competitive (and violent) logic of winning, but to shift your own paradigm towards the logics of relationality. We need to move from the primitive tunnel vision of a ‘laser-focus’ on tightly-defined goals to a much more diffuse awareness that includes full context and also ourselves—an ecological awareness, where “me” and “my view” are no longer the central feature. It is not about educating more superior beings in superior fields to superior their way to the top and superior the fuck out of the world in order to “fix” it. It is a different way of being entirely.

Relationality, in space and time, is the basis for indigenous worldviews. In te ao Māori, values such as whakapapa, whanaungatanga, manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga, wairua, mauri, kotahitanga, rangatiratanga, utu, attend to multidimensional dynamic and reciprocal relationality. This is where the deficit in te ao Pākehā lies. In our obliviousness to the in-between realm. Because it does not register, we feel it as an emptiness that must be filled, a boundary that must be drawn, or an inconvenience that must be overcome to get (as fast as possible) to the next ‘thing’.

This thing-oriented logic, with its blindness to what seems intangible, takes us on misleading paths. It teaches us to value clearly identifiable ‘outcomes’ over the process that makes them possible (spoiler alert: treating these as separate is part of the problem). It is spectacularly myopic—drawing boundaries too narrowly and forgetting that life does not respect the categories humans have dreamed up. This logic leaves us unable to imagine the multivariate causes and consequences of our actions and inventions, unfolding across space and time.

Such narrowing of vision feeds the fantasy that we can engineer our way to a better world. We mistakenly believe that replacing more and more human activities with technology—making things simpler, faster and easier—can only be a good thing. Progress! Growth! Innovation! And now our collective intelligence, outsourced and uploaded to the immaterial cloud, is ebbing away with every keystroke.

You don’t need to plot every data point to understand complexity. In fact that diminishes your ability to meet it. You become so obsessed with pinpointing every single tree, with measuring and testing every aspect that is measurable and testable, with uploading the data into a worldview of grids and boxes and quantification, and modelling the data in endless ways, that you no longer remember how to lie down and love the experience of being in the forest. And you forget your relationship to it—what you owe.

By connecting back into your own complexity—the beautiful system of your body and its deep intelligence—you tap into your ability to navigate the complex world too. You begin to realise that the abstract codified knowledge held up as supreme is only one dimension of the collective intelligence we need. Its overwhelming dominance not only blinds us to its flaws and biases, but also devalues everything that sits outside its narrow purview. This in turn bolsters the myth of a particular kind of supremacy, along with the internalised inferiority that convinces people they have no real agency because they are not good enough, not educated enough, not master enough of that way of knowing.

You cannot conquer complexity. You cannot control it. An orientation of dominance only entangles you further in the consequences of your own arrogance. The complex living world is vastly more than we can fathom, because it is constantly evolving, co-adapting, emerging. A different posture entirely is required—a working in and with, not working on. It is relational intelligence we need—the capacity to be with the messiness of it all, including ourselves, and hold it without falling apart.

This is where the healing work comes in; healing is the repair of relational rupture. Without a healing orientation to the world—in all domains—we will perpetuate trauma and its devastating consequences, which even those of us who have been insulated through our privileged situations are now sensing at a planetary scale. Trauma separates us from the flow of life—leaving us isolated in a prison of constrained possibilities and dooming us to re-experience the pain of the past. And many of the ways of life that so-called progress and Modernity have imposed upon us perpetuate that separation, keeping us disembodied and alone, trapped in our thoughts and subject to the reactivity of bodies we barely have a relationship with.

If you will not or cannot feel, you become numb to, or illiterate in, the flow of life. Your life. Others’ lives. The life of everything around you. You exist in a disembodied virtual world where nothing really matters. This is the world where one can debate the semantics of genocide articulately, unmoved by the actual flesh-and-blood human bodies being slaughtered. This is the world where the bank accounts of rich listers mean more than the destruction of ecosystems on which we all depend. This is the world where you can trip over a homeless person and blame them for making the city so unappealing. This is the world where a detached commentariat are so busy asserting their own^TM reckons that they don’t notice the autocracy that is lapping at their lips.

Here in Aotearoa we live in a nation built on the massive trauma of relational rupture. Yet those in power continue blithely to imagine we can just move on without attending to and repairing that rupture, with no understanding of the way trauma lives in individual bodies and in the body politic. In fact there seems to be very little intelligence at all about actual human bodies and how they behave.

Ideological think tanks draft policy that impacts people’s lives without the requisite understanding of living, breathing, intelligent, agential people. You cannot force people to “get over it” or “move on.” Bodies carry trauma. They continue to pass that trauma on unless a process of healing occurs. Laws that declare it is all over because we say so will not change that material reality. The map is not the territory. There is no leaping over this, no short cut, no magic wand. The only way is through.

It is relational repair that is needed, and the humility that entails. Not petulant adolescent refusal to look at yourself. Not sneering at anyone who dares hold you to account. The wounds of colonisation are here, whether we want to see them or not. And they will not go away until they are tended to, with full compassion for the pain and discomfort that will bring, and full openness to what restoration might require. The remarkable thing about truly restorative practice is that it restores the mana and dignity of all involved. It is ecological, not binary.

We need people who can hold this relational work—who understand that healing systemic fractures begins with the humility to recognise our own embeddedness in the systems we critique. Without that, we are just reproducing the same logics with different language. If you cut yourself off from the richness of understanding that lives in your body, your relationships, your environment, you also sever your capacity to sense systemically—to recognise yourself as ecological. Without the ability to intelligently feel, to empathise, to attune, we lose our footing in the world and cannot act from wisdom.

I see and feel my own part in the patterns of dominance that contribute to relational rupture, like stills from a documentary. A sneer here. A hero-worship there. A career in academia here. An entitlement to comfort there. An inflated sense of my own importance here. A self-righteousness there. A la-la-la-ing of who is actually paying for my position on the ladder there. It is definitely in me—the superiority, the intellectualisation, the righteousness, the entitlement.

But feeling it in myself (sensing the way it orients my inner stories and behaviours) enables me to attend to it in ways that might loosen its habituated grip and make room for something else to emerge in my own ecology. And the key to this is self-compassion. Not punishing myself for the way I’ve been wired in adapting to my cultural habitat, and trying even harder to be pure—that is the very thing that blocks growth. Instead it is an honest recognition of the all of me—the light and the shadow—held with a balance of tenderness and accountability (and a healthy dose of humour). I come back home to myself. And in the process I see that I’m just one small part of this planetary ecosystem, in relationship with other parts (and all their light and shadow), co-adapting with each other. Growing each other through rupture and repair.

Relational accountability is how we heal trauma and come into a sustained practice of right relationship—with ourselves, with each other, and with the more-than-human world.

Slow down. Do less. Try softer.

Feel more.⁸

---

Acknowledgements

My thoughts and ideas are not ‘mine’; they are the emergent outcomes of relationships and encounters between ‘me’ and my social, physical, epistemic, experiential habitat. I’m influenced by so many writers, thinkers, makers, and doers, but also by conversations with friends, received wisdom, my children, stories, food, music, the sea, the stars, trees, animals, passing moments, mistakes, the weather. But this essay is also heavily indebted to Louise Marra and her deep teachings on healing trauma, to Krissi Smith and our galactic conversations that begin with te reo Māori and branch out everywhere, and to the work of Moana Jackson, Vanessa Andreotti, Bayo Akomolafe and Nora Bateson.

1. When I say ‘planet’, I don’t mean only the part made of rocks and minerals and water, but the full ecology of the incredible living system of which each of us is but a miniscule part.

2. Throughout this essay, I use “Western” to mean Western European or Eurocentric. I acknowledge the slipperiness of this term, and the way that it is not a simple bounded category—Western thought and education have of course been influenced by the wider global cultures encountered throughout history. But through imperialism, colonisation, globalisation and capitalism, a Westernised worldview has become the dominant orientation for all. It has become paradigmatic. And this has been imposed, not negotiated. Its invisibility to those of us who have grown up in Eurocentric cultures is what makes it so insidious. We do not see the ways it conditions us to certain ways of seeing and being, and what those ways cause us to dismiss or overlook. Or if we do see it, we believe that it is vastly superior—that its dominance is because it is more sophisticated (and civilised). I also want to note that this worldview is inherently patriarchal, because of the hierarchies of power through which it developed. Western thought has developed predominantly from the ideas, scholarship and writing of those with the institutional power and status to have a voice—men. It explicitly kept women’s voices out (often through violent means). It is only recently that this has begun to be redressed, and the consequences of that perspectival shift (including the backlash) are continuing to play out.

3. Rovelli, Carlo. 2019. The Order of Time. Penguin Books.

4. “We” is of course the we-exclusive of those of us who have only ever known the singular worldview of Western Modernity. Anyone who has grown up with and in a different culture will know this only too well.

5. The limitations of those narrow rules are being exposed again and again in a post-truth world, where rhetoric has become increasingly unmoored from material reality. ‘Free speech’ is an apt term for this phenomenon—speech freed from the material world, allowed to float in a disembodied virtual realm. Here words and ideas battle for rhetorical dominance, with no pesky obligations to ethics or truth—only to winning the debate (whatever the moot, and whatever the means). In absolutist Free Speech Land—the supposed great marketplace of ideas—it is the loudest, most dominant, and most manipulative voices that prevail. When those with the greatest power to speak (whether by virtue of status, platform, or sociopathy—or all three) become the ones defining the reality for all of us, we have a huge problem. Their cognitive bias—untethered from lived experience—shapes the narrative infrastructure we all must navigate. And the cognitive dissonance is felt in our bodies. This is just violence in another form.

6. This is why Te Pāti Māori MPs were given such a disproportionate sentence for their haka in the House of NZ Parliament. Māori ways of being, in their expansiveness and their tendencies to operate outside of the categories that have been drawn to keep us all compliant with status quo power, threaten to show that it is possible to live in a different way.

7. Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing.

8. This essay is written for those who have been culturally disconnected from their feeling self, who have suppressed that aspect of their intelligence. It acknowledges that for some, feeling too much has been overwhelming, especially when they’ve had to do it alone. It is a call for collective feeling, and the relational infrastructure to hold it, not individuals left to experience the intolerable on their own.