Welcome to Root and Rise, the space where we remember that we are participating in a larger unfolding, and start to become curious about how that wants to move through each of us. I'm Rohini Walker, and I'm so happy you're tuning in.
Before we dive in, I just want to say that it's the absolute hottest time of the year here in the California High Desert, so being in the soundproofed studio space that I'm normally in when I record this podcast is not a good idea because it's just way too hot. So I'm recording this in our house, so the sound quality will be different, and you might hear some ambient household sounds, and our dog Bodhi walking around and making doggy sounds that the mastering might not fully remove. And if so, I hope those audible textures of my life bring some added enjoyment.
So, what I want to talk about today is interdependent individuation, which is going to be a defining quality of the new emerging paradigm that we are so palpably on the precipice of. Global politics has, at least since the start of the 20th century, if not longer. I don't want to get into too much chronological nitpicking. So let's say at least since the start of the 20th century, global politics has been divided into the hyper individualism, rabid self interest, and the extractive capitalism of the right, and the hyper collectivism and loss of individual agency and autonomy of the left. I don't know about you, but for me, definitely, since 2020, it's become glaringly obvious that neither side works, and really has ever worked, largely because each side exists as a reaction against the other, which means that each one needs the other to survive. Each side needs the other to give it meaning and purpose and definition. Which means that the hyperpolarized divisive state of the world is a necessary condition for both sides to continue to survive. If we were to suddenly start operating from our shared humanity and our interbeing, which simultaneously respects and values our differences and diversity, where we have open dialog and listen to each other's opposing views instead of fighting with each other. Both sides of the political spectrum would become obsolete and cease to exist, which means that the architecture of global politics is built on conflict and war, and us versus them, and dehumanizing each other, which means that it's not sustainable, which is why it is collapsing. It's become glaringly obvious that, pushed to its extremes, both sides end up in authoritarianism, so ultimately they're both matching the same energy, which is ultimately that of domination and control. Personally, I always identified with the left, but like I said, over the last several years, that was no longer a viable perspective for me, and I certainly was not going to defect to the right just because I found myself politically rudderless. I know I'm not the only one who's been moving through this and who has decided to become a little bit feral and step into the middle ground of neither left nor right, because honestly, we all deserve way better, and the lesser evil approach is clearly not working. I guess you could call this a centrist perspective, but really, it's more than that. The space where many of us find ourselves now is more than the sum of left and right. It's more than a curation of the reasonable bits of liberal and conservative political ideologies, because it goes beyond externally defined ideologies altogether, and this is what's key here: going beyond externally defined ideologies, and consequently going beyond externally defined authorities, which is the maturation that comes from the process of individuation. So let's talk about individuation, which is absolutely not the same thing as individualism and the hyper-rabid individualism that I mentioned earlier. Individualism is based on the I, me, mine toxic self-interest and a loss of connection from the whole, which is where we get things like extractive capitalism, empire, monarchies, and systemic economic inequity, and ecological destruction, and all the rest of it. Individuation, which is a term that was coined by Carl Jung, is quite different. Individuation is essentially the soul's journey towards wholeness and integration. I use the word soul as interchangeable with psyche because psyche is the Greek word for soul.
This journey of individuation involves not only the integration of our conscious and unconscious aspects, and the integration of the anima and the animus within our individual psyches. It also involves coming into the somatic felt sense, knowing that we are inseparable from nature and from the cosmos, so the process of individuation is deeply paradoxical. As we become more authentically ourself with a capital S through the embodied integration of our fragmented and exiled aspects, we also come into a deep experiential understanding of ourselves as inseparable from nature, and we come to understand ourselves as expressions of her. The process of individuation allows us to contextualize and root our individual, differentiated selves in the whole, in the bigger picture that we're participating in, and through all this, we can start to feel and experience the truth of interdependence that underpins all life and all existence. Now, interdependence is not synonymous with codependence, which is a dysfunctional expression of relating, and one that arguably has been, to a large extent, culturally codified into our ways of relating, our ways of showing and expressing love and care. It's so commonplace that we don't often realize that it's an issue. Codependence is rooted in trauma. It shows up when we say that our happiness and well-being depends on another person; that they are responsible for our happiness. Codependence is needing to be needed by another person or other people, in order to feel worthy and valuable, and simultaneously needing to control our loved ones and their agency, in order for us to feel safe and okay. It lacks boundaries, and it sets up unhealthy dynamics of rescuing and saving, and identity enmeshment, and a sense of ownership over our loved ones, who stop becoming people in their own right and exist only to make us feel happy and needed and safe, Etc. This is not what interdependence is. Interdependence is that life-affirming sweet spot between codependence and hyper individualism and quote-unquote independence. Nothing is independent in nature. Interdependence is how ecosystems operate, not as individual, independent, and unrelated parts, which is how the Western scientific materialist view has cut up and divided nature, including our bodies, and not as unhealthy draining codependent dynamics either. Interdependence is the understanding that as expressions of nature, we're all participating in a web of interconnection and influence. It's based on reciprocity and whole systems thinking that takes into account our differences and diversity as necessary aspects of the whole, which is why biodiversity is a necessary condition for thriving ecosystems. So interdependence is not about homogeneity. Interdependence is the understanding that by tending to my own trauma and breaking a pattern in the wider world, and in the ways I relate and show up for others, including for future generations. It's the understanding that if I pump toxic chemicals into the soil and on crops, it's going to impact not only the health of the soil, the plants, and the animals, but two, it's going to impact my own body's health too when I consume food grown in poisoned soil. Interdependence connects us to our human and more than human communities, as well as our human and more than human ancestors, and to the stories of the lives that they lived, many indigenous shamanic cultures acknowledge the living interdependence of ancestral lines through the understanding that what we resolve and bring to wholeness in ourselves ripples forward and backwards seven generations. So interdependence arises from the lived experience of interbeing, a term that I first heard from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk who said, "If you look deeply into the yellow flower, you will see that the flower is full of sunshine, clouds, minerals, earth, and everything in the cosmos. It cannot exist by itself alone. It has to interbe with the sunshine, the rain, the earth. To be is to interbe. And if we want to go deeper still, the flower, the sunshine, the clouds, the earth, the minerals, are not separate from each other, but diverse tones and expressions of one participatory conversation or one song, if you will. It's from this place of interbeing and interdependence that the flower individuates and blooms and expresses its true nature, its true self. I imagine, if the flower could speak, it would not say, "I bloomed all by myself. I manifested my flowerness.
I imagine that it would probably give us a vivid, poetic illustration of its felt sense, belonging, and participation in a larger unfolding that gave rise to its individuated blooming as a beautiful flower. Because individuation, as a process of capital S self actualization, is our soul's journey of becoming more integrated and embodied, while simultaneously feeling and knowing ourselves as inseparable from nature and cosmos. As we deepen into this journey, this journey of individuation, we become more and more attuned to taking our guidance from our inner authority, our intuition, which is not the unintegrated ego, but the capital S self, the true self, the self that viscerally experiences itself as nature and cosmos, which to me are synonymous with the divine, the self that viscerally experiences itself in an interdependent interbeing with the whole. So the inner authority that we start to become attuned to and established in is really nature's intelligence moving us and moving through us as we become more individuated, more fully who we really are, more fully in our purpose, and naturally, when this happens, we simultaneously become less and less susceptible to external artificial authorities And ideologies, we become less prone to getting swept away with the hypnotizing effects of groupthink and the false belonging that that offers. We start to withdraw from those ways of being and living in the world that require us to be dehumanizing each other in order to find a sense of identity and belonging in the world, and it can at times feel a little bit lonely, but we find that it's much much lonelier to abandon ourselves in order to be accepted into a group or a system or an ideology that we no longer feel an affinity with, and besides, as our nervous system calibrates to interdependence, that initial experience of loneliness soon transforms into a deep sense of belonging to earth and sky, to nature and cosmos, and to a larger conversation that we're also participating in. This is interdependent individuation, and this is what humanity's consciousness is collectively maturing into, and I use the word mature on purpose, because as Jung observed, individuation usually starts to take place in the second half of a person's life, when they're compelled to start questioning things and how they live and what they do with their life, they start to think about things like purpose and values. They start to question the previously unquestioned authorities and structures in their life. Collectively, this maturation is what's happening to humanity's consciousness state, specifically within the realm of power dynamics. This maturation is evolving us from dynamics of power over to the dynamics of power with collaboration and cooperation, which again is the way of nature's ecosystems, and I know it doesn't feel that way right now. There are many, especially those currently in power, who are still clinging on for dear life to the expiring ways of being, just like a person who refuses to mature and clings onto the consciousness state of an adolescent or a teenager or a young adult who is still exploring life through the immature perspective of "I, me, mine" consciousness, or of going along with the crowd to fit in. Our collective human consciousness state has been moving through the profound immaturity of experiencing itself as separate from nature, and we have also arrived at an evolutionary tipping point, which means that if you're listening to this and identifying with being in the process of interdependent individuation, you're serving as an agent of evolutionary change at this time. Keep going, even when you feel despair at what's going on in the world, feel it. Let your heart be broken open by it, transmute it, and deepen into your process, into becoming more and more familiar with your nature-aligned true self, your inner authority, and taking your guidance from there. Take time away from the noise to become available to that world-building guidance, because as we cycle into this new emerging paradigm, and the maturation and flowering of our collective consciousness state, and the dissolution of authoritarian hierarchical structures, because we're no longer adolescents. Things like gurus and experts and whatnot, those figures whom we have pedestalized and projected our power and our wisdom onto. They're also going to start becoming irrelevant. They're already starting to become irrelevant, as we're seeing.
Instead, we're going to be seeking out people who are passionate about facilitating us stepping into our own mature, individuated agency, rooted in interdependence, and it's this embodied, integrated experience of our interdependence and interbeing that will organically keep us accountable and ensure that we wield our gifts and powers with care and responsibility. This is the potential of this emerging paradigm. But we can't get complacent or apathetic. As potential, it requires us to engage with it to make it manifest. It requires our energy and imagination and attention to be directed towards it, and our words and actions to be in alignment with it. Which, if we are following the guidance of our inner authority while engaging in the spiraling process of individuation, they will be. This is the process of world building and stewarding in the emergent paradigm. It's not going to be about one person, one hero, one savior. It's going to be about us collectively participating in the process of evolution from a place of interdependent individuation, and that's all from me for today. I would love to hear how this episode landed for you. I'd love to hear your thoughts and reflections and questions. Ways to connect with me are in the show notes. And until next time, stay rooted in your nature-aligned truth.
