Episode 14: Attuning to our Ecological Identity

Join me for this dive into ecosomatics – an emerging field of research and practice that explores the living relationship between our bodies and the wider ecological world. 

I talk about how ecosomatics reframes the body as Nature, expressing locally through us, and how this perspective can heal the existential alienation caused by modern life. 

Some key principles of ecosomatics are discussed, including their potential to expand our sense of Self and belonging – and I share a short, simple exercise to awaken peripheral vision.

We also look at ecosomatics' roots in animist traditions, how it intersects with Jungian depth psychology, and its key role in trauma recovery. This episode is a call to remember our ecological identity and to restore the felt-sense connection to this.

For those of you who are interested in deepening into ecosomatics through exploring the living relationship between body, land & creativity, you're invited to join me for an in-person experience, Writing the Body, Writing the Land, in the Mojave high desert wilderness on the weekend of April 4th, at the gorgeous RESET Hotel. Find out more here: rohiniwalker.com/writingthebody

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Transcript

Hi, friends. Thanks for joining me for this episode of root and rise this space where we drop into the slower, deeper and vaster rhythms that govern life.

I'm Rohini Walker, and today I'm talking about attuning to our larger ecological identity, specifically through the emerging field of practice and research known as ecosomatics, and how it explores the living relationship between the body and the wider ecological world.

So let's start with the word itself, which combines two routes eco, which is, of course, from ecology, the study of relationships between living systems and somatics. From the Greek Soma somatic means the living felt body experienced from within, subjectively, usually through the language of sensation.

At its core, ecosomatics asks a simple and practical question that I find is also quite transformative.

What happens when we understand the body, not as separate from nature, but as an expression of her?

In my own practice, as I began to deepen into trauma, informed Somatic Experiencing work, and before I was aware of ecosomatics as an actual modality, I started to quite naturally feel the relationship between the body and the living world that this body is a part of, I started to experience sensation as the language of the earth moving through this body that I inhabit, which I also started to experience more and more As an expression and an extension of the earth and of nature, the expanded capacity and awareness to understand and work with the nuances of my own somatic experiences naturally started to open me up and transition me into this felt sense experience of a larger identity, my ecological identity, and a larger belonging before I was ever aware that ecosomatics was the thing, and it's quite common that as we become more settled into relating to the body as a being, which is what somatic practice opens us up to.

This awareness of having a larger ecological identity naturally and gradually opens up for us as well, our consciousness starts to become calibrated to a larger context, all to say that the recent ish emergence of ecosomatics as a modality in itself is a natural and inevitable result of fields Like somatics and somatic experiencing as well as decolonial praxis, spiritual ecology and mythology, among other things.

So ecosomatics, studies and practices, how our bodily awareness, our movement, our perception

and our nervous systems are shaped by and in relationship with the more than human world. The core premise of ecosomatics challenges the dominant culture's worldview, which is a worldview that has been shaped by colonialism and Empire and scientific materialism that treats the body as separate from the natural world, that treats the body like a self contained organism moving through an external landscape that it's disconnected from.

This world view is what enabled lands and peoples to be colonized and dominated and enabled rampant industrialization to pollute the soil, the sea, the sky.

It's the worldview that is the origin of the rupture of a deep existential alienation that has become a normalized part of our collective lived experience in modern society.

Ecosomatics repairs this rupture by challenging that worldview and by showing through subjectively experienced practice that the body is ecologically embedded and is perceiving as part of an unbroken continuity with her natural surroundings, and that the body is regulated and kept in balance through relationship With land, with climate, with seasons and with other beings.

Or in other words, the body is not in nature. The body is nature expressing herself locally, just like a sparrow's body or a jack Rabbit's body is just like the spring wild flowers are here in the Mojave High Desert at the moment, it's all one continuum and one conversation, which includes our human bodies, breath, exchanges with Trees, skin. Can sense wind and dryness, humidity sunlight, nervous systems co regulate with bird song, with the land, with water, with other human and more than human bodies.

In fact, there was an interesting study done by the Salk Institute for biological studies that showed that cycles of darkness and sunlight actively modulate and influence the expression of 80% of our genes via our circadian rhythms.

And of course, we all know about how the health of soil microbiome affects the health of the microbiome in our guts and in our digestive systems.

Ecosomatics explores the felt sense experience of this reciprocal exchange and interdependence between bodies and lands and waters. As we deepen into this, we start to feel and sense the continuity of life and life force, how it moves in one relational sequence between bodies and lands and waters.

In this sense, while ecosomatics is a relatively new and emerging field of research and practice with more and more contemporary pioneers publishing work around it.

It is actually much more ancient. It has its roots in global indigenous worldviews, especially in animist perspectives, which I talk about in more detail in episode two, and these universal indigenous qualities is also why ecosomatics is inherently decolonial.

Okay, so let's talk about somatics briefly, because to understand ecosomatics, it helps to understand somatics, which I know is a term I use a lot in this podcast, but I don't think I've offered a sort of working definition for it yet. So somatics as a discipline and a therapeutic modality first came on the scene in the 1970s

it's about cultivating that first person, subjective awareness of the body from within the body, including the subtler sensory perceptions of the body and how she moves and feels and organizes herself.

Somatics started to shift the cultural perspective of the body as mechanical, towards felt self experience and neuroplasticity and self regulation, and

eventually towards being in relationship with the body as A being.

Somatic practices are diverse, but they can often involve things like subtle movement, exploration, attention to sensation, nervous system regulation, breath, awareness and embodied perception. The goal is to restore agency and sensitivity and coherence in the living body and her ecosystems, and in our experience of inhabiting this living body, somatics, and especially somatic experiencing from Peter Levine's body of work, is a very powerful tool for human healing, because it can take us straight to the root.

So ecosomatics organically expands somatic practice beyond simply the individual's subjective experience and locates it back inside the ecological field, which I've come to understand as our larger field of belonging.

It helps us feel more resourced, more held and supported.

The existential alienation starts to dissolve because we're participating in an inherently relational, interdependent experience.

So instead of only asking what's happening in my body, ecosomatics asks, How is my body participating in this conversation with my larger body, with the living natural world, this could look like exploring how the body organizes herself in relation to things like gravity and terrain and Weather, soundscapes and plants and animals, seasonal rhythms, landscape forms, the focus takes on this relational perception, which is key.

So let's look at some of the core principles of ecosomatics, starting with the framework that the body is ecological and our nervous systems evolved within ecosystems, which include the ecosystems that our ancestors. Nervous systems also evolved in research in fields like eco psychology and embodied cognition and environmental psychology and spiritual ecology all suggests that human holistic well being is deeply influenced by restoring our felt sense connection and belonging to the natural world and ecosomatics approaches this not just intellectually but experientially.

So another key principle is that perception is participatory.

Ecosomatics draws on philosophies that suggest perception is not simply passive observation.

Instead, perception is a mutual exchange between organism and environment, between observer and observed, and this corresponds to things like the observer effect in quantum mechanics. So for example, within the Ecosomatics framework, this could mean the land shapes how you move, and your attention, especially the quality of your attention, shapes what appears, what makes itself known on the land. And this dynamic relationship is called affordance in ecological psychology, another important principle in Ecosomatics is that the nervous system regulates through landscape, that certain environments naturally regulate the nervous system. For example, flowing water slows the breathing and expansive horizons widen attention and perception. Bird song signals safety in nailing brains and triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our restorative, repairing, rest and digest state.

Ecosomatics studies how landscapes co regulate physiology, and this also overlaps with research in polyvagal theory, which is a therapeutic body of work studying the key functional aspects of the nervous system.

Another principle of ecosomatics is that movement is a dialog with place. So movement practices in Ecosomatics might involve walking with heightened sensory awareness, exploring how movement is shaped by terrain, tuning into surrounding soundscapes while moving, mirroring natural patterns like wind and water and animal motion, which is less about mimicking and more about A subtler attunement and resonance, which requires deep listening and attention.

The goal is not exercise or getting our daily steps in. It's about slowness and presence and re sensitizing the body to ecological participation.

So let's take a few moments to drop into a very simple ecosomatic practice of awakening the peripheral vision, because our busy tech dominated lives, narrow our attention into like a tunnel vision with screens and reading and tasks and worst of all, scrolling, this impacts our nervous systems and creates a sort of underlying hum of cortisol producing dysregulation that is becoming more and more normalized in our physiology and our biochemistry, and meanwhile, in natural environments, mammals rely heavily on wide peripheral awareness, which create a wider frame of context.

So don't do this practice. If you're driving, if you're outside, that's great. If you're indoors and have access to a window you can look out of. That's great. And if you're indoors without access to a window, just practice along anyway and try it when you're outdoors.

So before we drop in, I encourage you to approach this as play, as experimenting and noticing, rather than as a serious thing, as a serious practice which automatically narrows vision.

So let's playfully try this, relax your eyes instead of focusing on an object, soften your gaze

and expand your awareness to the edges of your visual field.

See if you can notice movement, light, any subtle changes around you,

and What do you notice internally, somatically in the body?

Often, the breath deepens and the nervous system shifts towards calm, the hearing can sometimes become sharper.

And equally, people have their own very diverse experiences.

I'd love to hear what yours was.

So

this super simple practice creates a sense of expansion and safety in the nervous system.

It's a good one to do to repair some of the rupture from too much screen time and scrolling.

If you're listening to this, you don't need me to tell you why ecosomatics matters so much today, and I think it's worth reminding ourselves why anyway, ecological collapse, endemic burnout and existential alienation are largely caused from the loss of our felt relationship with our felt kinship with The Living natural world.

Disciplines like ecosomatics start to restore that relationship, not through theory and intellectualizing, but through direct somatic experience. It invites a shift from nature as scenery to nature as relationship, and takes us even further from nature as relationship to nature as self expression, ecosomatics matters because it's the practice of experiencing the body as an ecological process, continuously shaped by and participating in nature and in the living world, this invites in a radical and necessary evolutionary leap in both our individual and collective consciousness. States and ecosomatic practices matter because they help to calm and regulate the nervous system. They give us a lived experience of our ecological belonging, which, among other things, support our mental health, enhance our creativity and our spiritual capacities.

And most of all, in my experience, ecosomatic practices matter because they develop our sensory literacy.

The majority of us living in this post industrialized, globally technocratic society are capable of perceiving only a fraction of what our bodies and senses are truly capable of attuning to and tuning into.

In fact, what I found is that the more we can re sensitize ourselves to the subtler layers of our physical senses which ecosomatics naturally attunes us to the more we're able to access our non physical senses, our spiritual sense perceptions, if you like.

And this also flies in the face of more traditional spiritual perspectives that ask us to deny our bodies and negate our physical sense perceptions in order to access our spiritual senses.

Instead, what I found is that when we slow down and unplug from the noise and drop into our bodies and our somatic awareness and through that, deepen into our felt sense experience of nature, into our connection to her and our participation with her.

What I've found is that through this deepening, we enliven the subtler layers of our physical senses, which become a sort of portal into our non physical senses, rooting down and rising up. No spiritual bypassing required.

And why is it necessary to access our non physical senses. Well, that's worth dedicating a whole podcast episode to which I shall probably do sometime soon. But to put it briefly, attuning to our non physical senses gives us access to a larger context of reality and experience, and I'll just leave it at that for now. More soon on that topic.

Another thing I want to mention is how ecosomatics benefits and supports trauma recovery.

I found that it intersects strongly with nervous system work and to things like polyvagal theory, and it's also very complementary to trauma informed somatic experiencing.

So one of the findings in polyvagal theory and its study of the nuances of the nervous system and of the vagus nerve shows that the vagus nerve, amongst all of the amazing functions that it performs, acts as a sort of biological break, a slowing down to bring about a necessary calm after danger, A repair after rupture. And this is just one aspect of the functioning of the nervous system that shows that it's designed for the slower rhythms of the natural world, not the relentless speed of our technology dominated modern urban lives this slowing down allows for excess cortisol and adrenaline to be processed, and the culturally normalized condition of not slowing down shows why we're such a hyper, stressed, burned out society, and why the chronic issues caused by unprocessed cortisol and adrenaline have become endemic in our modern tech dominated bodies and lives with ecosomatic praxis, we're bringing our nervous systems back into attunement with nature's rhythms we're co regulating with the natural world. There's actual research that shows that doing this brings our nervous systems back to homeostasis. So tree hugging doesn't seem so weird and so quote, woo. Woo, after all, this is because there are certain signals in nature that automatically regulate our physiology, because our physiology is a part of nature in mammalian evolution environments with bird song like I mentioned Earlier, and rustling leaves and flowing water and visible horizons indicate relative safety, and when those signals are present, the nervous system shifts towards a parasympathetic regulation, and This can bring about slower breathing, decreased cortisol, improved emotional processing, increased vagal tone in the vagus nerve, which means that we're more resilient to stress and have more capacity to repair and recover from stress.

So why does this happen? To put it simply, trauma, including unprocessed trauma, narrows perception and locks the nervous system into defensive states and natural environments gently encourage the opposite. They invite things like a wide field perception and slow, rhythmic sensory input, and this helps the nervous system relearn flexibility and responsiveness.

One of the most interesting things about ecosomatics is that it gradually dissolves a familiar and artificial boundary.

At first, you feel like a person practicing awareness in nature, and over time, that experience shifts towards nature, becoming aware of herself through your body.

That shift is why ecosomatics often overlaps with animist perception and contemplative traditions and depth psychology.

But before I go on, let's pause and take a breath together. Let's take a moment together.

Notice where you are,

look around your surroundings.

Notice something pleasant in your environment, and notice where you feel it in your body, how much capacity you have in this moment to feel it in your body, and staying with that sensation for a few

moments, for another breath or two, or for longer, if you feel called to so.

I want to talk a little bit about ecosomatics and animism, because ecosomatics often becomes a gateway into animist perception, even when it's initially framed as a sort of a secular practice, like I said earlier. Episode two of this podcast is all about animism, if you want to go deeper into that. But in its simplest sense, animism is the understanding that the world, the natural world, is alive and relational, that rivers, mountains, winds, animals, forests, land, possess agency and presence and consciousness, and when you engage in ecosomatic practice, you experience this for yourself. The body becomes a bridge to almost perception.

Our modern Western culture tends to define knowledge as abstract and intellectual and indigenous animist cultures tend to recognize knowledge as embodied and relational.

Ecosomatics reactivates that pathway.

I say reactivates because this was a way of knowing and experiencing that was a shared universal experience across cultures around the world, but it has been paved over and marginalized, which in turn, has created a systemic normalization of that corrosive, existential alienation that I keep mentioning when people practice deep, slow sensory awareness in landscapes, often The Environment begins to feel responsive and perception becomes reciprocal rather than just observational.

So for example, instead of watching a tree, you begin to sense a mutual field of presence between you and the tree.

And this is sometimes described as the gaze of the land. And

in his book, The spell of the sensuous. Philosopher David Abram talks about how sensory perception naturally leads humans into animist experience, because our senses evolved in relationship with other more than human living beings.

Animist traditions also often emphasize reciprocity with the land, and again, ecosomatics helps to cultivate this through sensory awareness.

When perception expands, people often begin noticing the land shaping their mood and plants influencing attention, and we start to notice animals altering movement patterns, things like weather, affecting emotional tone and even the way that we move.

This dissolves the idea of a separate observer into the larger contextual frame of a participatory field. In ecosomatic language this is sometimes called ecological selfhood, and relates to the field of study known as deep ecology.

One of the most interesting things I've discovered with ecosomatic praxis is that when people spend enough time in sensory relationship with landscapes, animist perception tends to arise spontaneously, not as belief or idea or as a concept, but as direct embodied experience. So you start to be able to feel and sense the mood of a place or feeling welcomed or unwelcome in certain locations, and even perceiving communication through animals or weather, within ecosomatics, these sorts of things are not typically described as supernatural phenomena, but as expanded ecological perception.

Okay, so I do want to talk about one more thing before I close, which I find so interesting and practical, and this is about how ecosomatics also aligns with Jungian depth psychology.

So Jung wrote extensively about psyche and nature and repeatedly suggested that the psyche is not confined to the brain. Instead, he proposed that psyche participates in a larger field that includes nature, often describing the individual psyche as part of nature herself.

He once wrote, the psyche is part of nature, and its Enigma is as limitless. So from the Jungian lens, the psyche is not merely personal. It's connected to collective and archetypal patterns as well, or what's known as the collective unconscious, which I talked about in episode 13,

another really fascinating overlap between Jungian psychology and ecosomatics is the idea that landscapes evoke archetypal imagery because of how different environments often evoke different psychological states. So for example, deserts often evoke archetypes of initiation and emptiness and Revelation and solitude. Forests can evoke mystery and transformation and descent and fertility and mountains bring up transcendence and vision and revelation.

The Jungian analyst James Hillman expanded this idea by suggesting that psyche is inherently ecological. He said that modern psychology mistakenly, and I would add, dangerously, places the psyche inside the individual, rather than recognizing that psyche is distributed throughout the world, and the embodied realization and integration of this is a key aspect of the individuation process, the process of becoming whole Hillman called this larger perspective the Anima Mundi, or the Soul of the World. And he was borrowing from Plato, whose observations pointed to the same thing.

Ecosomatics allows us to have an embodied experience of psychological continuity with the living natural world and the Anima Mundi, and it's worth remembering here that just because this living natural world doesn't communicate verbally through human language, it doesn't mean that it's not communicating.

If you listen to my previous episode, Episode 13, you'll remember that I talked about something called the transcendent function, another Jungian principle that plays a huge part in each of our journeys of individuation, our soul's journey of becoming whole. The transcendent function describes the process through which conscious and unconscious psychological elements interact and unify to produce a new, evolved synthesis of awareness.

So in my own practice, I've noticed an interesting connection between the transcendent function and ecosomatics, and specifically how ecosomatic practices can catalyze the process. So when we enter deep sensory relationship with landscape and the natural world, conscious perception expands and unconscious imagery often begins to surface. It's common to experience things like spontaneous memories and symbolic images, mythic associations and dream like insights.

It's like the psyche begins dialoguing with the environment, and the landscape helps the psyche to co regulate Jungian practices like active imagination also deepen into this where the dialog is happening with the living natural environment. From an ecosomatic perspective, the psyche is not simply projecting onto nature, psyche and nature are already intertwined and interdependent, and the dialog is emerging from this relational field through our capacity for deep Listening and slow attention and somatic awareness when ecosomatics, animism and Jungian psychology intersect, a powerful idea emerges as well as the body, the human psyche can function as a sensing organ of the Earth.

So from this perspective, imagination is ecological, and archetypes are expressions of nature. Perception is relational. Psyche is not isolated from the living world.

And I love this because it's such a powerful, radical reframing of healing and creativity and spiritual practice as processes of restoring relationship with the Animate natural world, we feel less isolated in the process.

So I know I went into some detail in this episode, but this is really just a tip of the iceberg. Exploration of ecosomatic practice allows us to really deepen and experience the multi dimensional qualities of this modality. And for those of you who are curious about that, I have two upcoming things you might be interested in. The first is that spring registration to my online membership space, which is also called root and rise, is now open until midnight Pacific time on April 6, not only do we locate our imagination, psyches, nervous systems and bodies within the larger ecological context as foundational practices we drop into CO creating our soul and values aligned desires from rooting into our larger belonging, which I feel is a necessary antidote to the I me mine, extractive, overriding culture of mainstream quote, manifestation work, which I know a lot of sensitive, creative humans have a justified aversion to. So this is something altogether different, and the link to find out more is in the show notes.

And the second exciting thing I have coming up is an in person weekend experience here in the Mojave High Desert at the gorgeous reset hotel located on the border of Joshua Tree National Park and nestled in 180 acres of beautiful desert wilderness.

The weekend EXPERIENCE IS CALLED writing the body, writing the land. And we're going to practice together and explore the living relationship between body, land and creativity right here in the high desert wilderness in spring, and it's happening over the weekend of April 4. And the link to finding out all about that is also in the show notes, and that is all for me for today. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for making the time and space as always. If there's anything that you didn't resonate with, that you didn't agree with, anything that your nervous system responded to with misalignment, let it be released without any rumination or overthinking. Your systems wisdom knows what's correct for you, and let whatever landed for you slowly integrate into embodiment and Until next time, remember your belonging is unconditional.