All bodies are imminently affected by the psycho-socio-political fields within which they must navigate.

Various modern human-engendered systems—patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, etc.—have had devastating implications on our relations with our enfleshed existence (i.e., disconnection, distortion, etc.). Embodimenting holds promise as a means to, arguably, problematize and disrupt their denaturalizing, dehumanizing, and dispiriting effects. Having studied Hakomi body-centered psychotherapy, I am drawn to the spirit behind the namesake of the model. Hakomi is a Hopi word, approximately translating to, "Where do I stand in relation to these many realms?"; succinctly, "Who am I?" (Hakomi Institute, 2025).

In Hakomi therapy, our embodied beliefs shape our experience. In this inquiry, I am abundantly curious how beliefs about two particular relations, nature—including our more-than-human counterparts, i.e., plant and animal bodies—and cosmos, inform my embodiment. Stretching my perspectival awareness through the progressive developments of science and its evolving understandings of these vital intelligences may be balm to a world on fire. Shift one’s worldview, shift one’s embodiment.

Throughout this treatise, prompted by the following symbol, the reader is invited in moments to pause and presence the primacy of their embodiment, inviting their embodied experience into the foreground:

]…*…[

Problematizing Embodiment and

“Dehumanizing” the Field

Within the domain of popular psychology, it is common for notions of embodiment to lend themselves to thin platitudes. Difficulty navigating “diversity,” notions of normative embodiment insinuate themselves implicitly making some bodies, particular embodiments, wrong; positioned at the margins, insulating “normal” with an inherent allergy towards reflexivity and relativity. The field of somatic psychology has also been challenged to disrupt and problematize racialized and ableist narratives of embodiment. Caldwell and Leighton’s (2018) “somaticism” and Totton’s (2023) “normal fragility” foreground the need to advocate for the fecundity of embodiment. I am testing the position that it is also our anthropocentrism that makes the embodiment frame vulnerable to all manner of problematic metastasis of disconnections and distortions: limited worldviews, species solipsism, societal inequities, tribal politics, environmental degradation, impoverished or patina-level spiritualities. Totton’s (2023) admirable efforts to “decolonize” and trouble the field of somatic psychotherapy through exalting difference orients to “human” difference. Our more-than-human counterparts afford us an opportunity to reflect on difference more fundamentally. I imagine the more one cultivates an embrace of our anthropocentric and anthropomorphic limitations, the more one may be afforded a deep embodiment in the already extant body of the animal kingdom, the womb of the earth, and the peri-natal cosmos. Truly, this an ongoing dialogue with the question, where do I stand in relation to the many realms? 

Dear Mother,

open, fur-soft heart

connected to animals

embraced all with love

Star-crossed Philosophers: Rousseau and Sartre

When I was five years old, I organized an avid appeal—in an otherwise dog-reverent household—to have a cat. In kindergarten, one day, I was exposed to the existence of “cat” via a set of developmentally appropriate cartoon-imaged flashcards. Intuitively, I grokked an opportune connection via this seeming nonconsequential passing. With the unrelenting persistence and consistence that only the uncluttered one-track mind and heart a five-year-old may so sagely embody, with the help of my mother, two weeks later my first teacher and consistent secure attachment figure was brought home. Enter Rousseau: a wily rambunctious male Thai Seal Point Siamese kitten. Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), popular French political philosopher of the Renaissance. In my adolescence, I would later discover how one of my own namesakes, Jean-Paul Sartre (1904-1980), happened to be another force of French political philosophy—also, playwright—who wrote extensively on existentialism. As I write this and unfold the passionate exploration of my current endeavor, I am struck by the synchronicities: Rousseau and Jean-Paul. To my budding self, I shared an undeniable kinship and generative bond with Rousseau. A transcendental connection, dialogue and embodied exchange now continues to unfold in this work.

Descartes

René Descartes (1596-1650), famously known to be responsible for mind-body dualism, thought of animals as “automatons, lacking in feeling and self-awareness and operated unconsciously” (Braitman, 2014, p. 10). Soulless automatons, it is but a small step to reflect on how this way of thinking informed treatment of bodies in nature: with little care or empathy. My human body in nature was only spared, ostensibly, by a convenient concept:

exceptionalism.

Rousseau

Interestingly, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, coming to the stage a century later, is considered a significant figure in the development of animal ethics, recognizing a degree of intelligence and consciousness in animals. Since they possessed sensitivity and the capacity to experience pain and suffering, the difference between them and humans is largely a matter of degree. For Rousseau (2006), “Every animal has ideas, since it has senses; it even combines those ideas in a certain degree; and it is only in degree that man differs, in this respect, from the brute” (p. 18).

Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) furthered this with a more merciful worldview in his argument that emotions existed independent of culture; that some animal species may experience emotions (Sachser, 2022). In despite of this, nearly four centuries after Descartes, our human world is still largely shaped by Cartesian thinking. Pollan (2007) reminds us that our “modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is … a world that for all its technological sophistication … still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: animals are … ‘production units’ … incapable of feeling pain” (p. 317). Is it such a reach to consider our human bodies as the same production units within the factory structures of capitalism? Quickly, views of animal bodies cross a seeming chasm, informing treatment of our human bodies and thus embodiment.

Embodiment & Somatic Psychology

As a child in the 1980s, with my own personal Rousseau, it was still questionable to science to what degree animals possessed thought or emotion, to what degree they were “intelligent.” Sadly, at this time, even human babies were not even believed to be capable of feeling physical pain (Karr-Morse & Wiley, 2012, p. 54). Such mistaken belief shaped medical practice, allowing major surgeries to be performed without anesthesia. All this is puzzling. Yet, my child self knew the deep connection I felt towards Rousseau and his deep sentience of me in return. 

Body-mind centering (BMC) (Cohen, 2018), acknowledging evolutionary animal movement patterning subsumed into our human movement repertoires, makes striking contributions to extend notions of embodiment into neuro-cellular patterns of consciousness. BMC affords an experience of deep subtly in one’s capacity to track embodied experience and its associated perceptual stances. Yet, BMC seems to cultivate awareness and critical praxis on embodiment as localized more or less within the boundaries of the skin (i.e., our physicality); with one exception, Cohen’s exploration of pattern of “vibration,” a pre-vertebrate and pre-life pattern. Other seminal thinkers also stretch conventional notions of embodiment and consciousness:

• Emilie Conrad’s primordial fluid anatomy (Continuum Movement, 2013).
• Antonio Damasio’s recognition of billions of years of living beings without nervous systems and brain functions that have produced incredible feats of behavioral control and sociality (BrainMind Summit, 2020, 5:37).

Nonetheless, the field of somatic psychology presently has become a little stuck with its pedagogical gaze on the nervous system (T. Silow, personal communication, January 17, 2024). I wonder about the possible limitations of only exploring the ways we have subsumed evolutionary movement patterning into our personal embodiments. While unmistakably fruitful endeavors of cultivation, I am curious how one might extend the possibilities of such subtly into non-local embodiments. What is the potential of non-local embodiment via investigating the radical alterity of diverse phenomenologies and evolving cosmologies? Mezzenzana and Peluso (2023) deconstruct notions of empathy, i.e., human-human, human-animal, human-plant—arguably, delimited by our embodiments—to afford greater freedom from our self-imposed ontologies regarding being. Can one curate embodiment to extend non-locally and empathically to animals, plants, and even the cosmos in generative ways, interrogating our implicit anthropocentrism, in a call back to a deeply interconnected animistic universe?

A seeming nod to the vulnerabilities of anthropocentrism, Wolinsky (1991) notes, “We think we are no more than a bundle of sensations currently capturing our field of attention” (p. 8). My stepfather used to say, “everybody is just driving around in their people aquariums.” He meant cars; I took it to be far more existential. Perhaps a better term is the German, Umwelt, or sensory bubble—popularized by German zoologist Jacob von Uexküll—"the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience - it's perceptual [emphasis added] world” (Yong, 2023, p. 5). I am reminded of similarities in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Plato’s allegory of the cave, both exploring the entrapment of our subjectivities, the inherent difficulty grasping “reality,” and conveying either to another consciousness (Bloom, 1991; Sartre, 1955).

To the degree it would be a boon to trouble notions of embodiment by intentionally incorporating non-conventional more-than-human counterparts (e.g., spiders, plant, etc.) as a means to blow up anthropocentric—even anthropomorphic views—I have learned much from Yong (2023) and Abram (2011) and their deep dive into the phenomenological perspective on various species. Alongside the entire spectrum of embodiment, our human bandwidths pale in comparison.

Empathy’s Egocentric and Anthropomorphic “Slippery Slopes” 

It is a curious fact that our notions of empathy, mere decades ago, were lit a fire in animal studies and the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys. Scientific views on animal consciousness have evolved tremendously since Descartes’ time, with notable strides and contributions to the field since the late 90s (Braitman, 2014; Yong, 2023). Animals, including insects, do not have the same sensorial apparatuses as their human counterparts, but arguably they make better use of them. Animals in many ways are like us and also totally not like us. Paradoxically, we can and cannot possibly understand their view or experience of the world, on a purely sense level, nonetheless, emotional one. According to Braitman (2014) while we should avoid anthropocentrism, the challenge remains to anthropomorphize well. Animals experience the world in wildly unique ways, be it the echo-locating bat or dolphin, or the ultra-violet light sensitive bee. This has the potential to transmute human-centric discourses on neurodiversity and affective neuroscience. Studies by famous affective neuroscientist and rat-tickler Jaak Panksepp show cats have larger capacities for rage and aggression as predator animals (Weintraub, 2012). Yet, what really is the “bee emotion associated with seeing a particularly pleasing ultraviolet pattern inside a flower? What does the dolphin emotion for sensing a sonar ping from a long-lost companion feel like?” (Braitman, 2014, p. 27). Various animals play, but what sense does one make of apparent play behavior (for its own sake) in insects, i.e. bumble bees (Galpayage Dona, 2022)? How does the value of such inquiries inform or transform my own sense of self, my sense of embodiment-in-relation? Sitting with these questions that attempt to grasp such vast spectrums of umwelts, a thundering warmth begins to bellow in my chest seemingly sensing the voluminous presence of a reality—its deep abundance—beyond my sensory reach.

Sense and Sight: Yong’s Spiders, Ducks, and Bats

I turn to the peculiar breath-taking brilliance of spiders, ducks, and bats. They all have wildly different umwelts. The “mallard duck’s visual field is completely panoramic, with no blind spot either above or behind it” (Yong, 2023, p. 69).

]…*…[

Then, there’s bat. While possessing some sight, even in the darkest of spaces a bat can move like a trapeze artist surfing a world of echoes. A bat can accomplish seemingly amazing challenges of perception through echolocation alone: gauging distance from prey, matching and making sense of each call and echo, while in motion, at speed, not deafening themselves, and flying with other bats (Yong, 2023, pp. 248-255).

]…*…[

Lastly, spider. More commonly known, spider’s world is more or less delimited to the vibrations coursing through its web, its sensory extension system. The tiger wandering spider, on the other hand, who builds no webs has hundreds of thousands of hairs covering its legs allowing it to perceive the imperceptible air movement of passing prey, “moving at just an inch [emphasis added] per minute” (Yong, 2023, p. 185).

]…*…[

I close my eyes and meditate for a moment on each of these wild and unique umwelts, on having any of these abilities, and a subtle indescribable shift occurs within me.

My relationship to, my sense of, space ebbs and yawns. Something about my place in the room, within the many realms of reality, seems to refine itself. The world literally feels more alive.   

Interlude: The Shadow and the Bee

Abram’s exploration of shadow has a similar effect on me. A significant influence, David Abram (2011) stretches the boundaries of my umwelt, my felt sense of being in the world. Exploring something so basic as a shadow evokes wonder. To the casual oblivious observer, a shadow, for example, is a two-dimensional flattened shape; the outline of our body on the ground as the light of the sun is obstructed. Yet, as the sunlit bee, however, crosses my shadow’s penumbra a full three-dimensional space is revealed. “The actual shadow does not reside primarily on the ground; it is a voluminous being of thickness in depth, a mostly unseen presence that dwells in the air between my body and that ground” (Abram, 2011, p. 16).

]…*…[

Many things that can be said about animals that are patently obvious, yet they continually slip from my awareness at the level of daily phenomenological embodied praxis. One, our other-than-human counterparts do not experience reality as we do; they experience it with deep embeddedness and sensitivity. Not only do I feel the domestication of my own wild self when I meditate on animal perception and consciousness, I sense something further; my entrapments in human-engendered systems and consensus realities that exacerbate the Platonian cave and Sartrean no exit of my existence. Cultivating awareness in this way, while I cannot possibly fully ascertain an animal’s phenomenology, I am at least afforded an opportunity to unfetter from my species-cultural solipsisms. Such de-centering offers itself as a generous and unusual ally to embodimenting; ripe, like Baker’s (2021) notion of waking up the body that was “replaced by a ‘body’ formed of concepts” (p. 2).

Interlude: A Discourse with Rousseau and Satre

EBERLE: “Welcome, Jean-Paul Sartre. Welcome, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is such an honor to have you both here to today. Perhaps you can both speak, albeit briefly, on this puzzling matter of animal consciousness and embodiment.”

ROUSSEAU: “Monsieur Sartre (a nods in acknowledgement). To put it quite succinctly, my fellow-creatures are sentient beings similar to man.”

SARTRE: “‘Rousseau (a nod). Sentience? I fear its conflation with consciousness, inextricably intertwined with freedom, intentionality, authenticity, being-for-itself. Man is called to grapple with his facticity in this way. Are animals really such?”

ROUSSEAU: “They do seem to possess a consciousness; a resulting wisdom, wholeness, and profound embodiment. To deny consciousness seems to justify our dominion over them, exacerbating our own lack of integration with environment, which we have lost.”  

SARTRE: “Curious. Yes, I’d say an animal is a being largely in-itself. We’re encountering the nature of being. In all its forms, being is persistent. For man, however, being is becoming, unsettling, fraught with anxiety. Our existence precedes essence.”

ROUSSEAU: “I am not sure we can glibly discriminate between the two.”

EBERLE: “Thank you, gentlemen. It seems we are grappling with a tension between embodied existence and reflective consciousness. Not easily resolved. I admit, in my youth, freedom of existence resulted in searing anguish, whether I was graced any essence at all. Over time, attending to my animal nature has proven a balm to my spirit.”

Dear Father,

Fertile connections

grounds from which not you unfurled

desert gardener

Prophetic Dream, Primordial Spider: Opus Circulatorium

When I was in my late twenties, I asked one night, amidst an earnest practice of dream incubation, about the purpose of a significant other’s presence in my life. A powerful dream of a spider was gifted to me. In the dream, I am moving apprehensively down dusty limestone steps into what feels like the lower chamber of an ancient pyramid. Torch in hand, I cross through a doorway to the left and walk through the pitch dark of a vast empty room. The flickering light of my torch touches nothing but darkness for some time. Suddenly, the torch’s light meets a wall at the other end of the space. A large black obsidian spider recessed in the wall—the size of an adult torso and at eye-level—proclaims itself, bedazzled with rubies for its eyes and joints. A meeting of two consciousnesses: mine and spider. Spider’s consciousness is primordial, cosmic, an awesome power. Spider felt me before I felt it. I startle awake in terror. In the months that followed, various spider dreams would persistently and consistently haunt me.

Lengthy formal investigation and reflections on the mythopoetic significance of the spider revealed many threads of traditional lore regarding spider symbolism: feminine energies, creativity, transformation, and fate (Andrews, 2002; Sams & Carson, 1999). Spider spins its web as an act of faith, its first strand taken by the wind to catch what it will. Spider is patient and trusts that the bounty of existence will provide and nourish. I pondered over whether the symbolism reflected the other or an alchemical call to integrate archetypal energies into myself. Decades later, it remains alive and certainly seems the latter given a family legacy wrought in male depression. In the womb of the earth, I have always been and will always be. To me, the feminine, creative and more, is expressed through the earth. Yet, my father did not raise either my brother or me to be present with the earth, nor the rich garden of inner life and our bodies.

Nothing presences me more to the earth than the diverse assortment of plant beings that inhabit her. Interestingly, plant science has tussled with the same Descartian impositions and Rousseau-Sartrean tensions which the field of animal studies has had to contend. Early caution marked scientific discourse and literature with allergies against anything associating plants with “intelligence,” “consciousness,” “intentionality,” or “personality” (Schlanger, 2024). Nevertheless, as plant research continues to evolve, more and more these terms persistently seep into the literature. A growing contingent of botanists, even, identify themselves as “plant neurobiologists,” calling for more inclusive definitions of a “nervous system” (Miguel-Tomé & Llinás, 2021). According to Schlanger (2024), the essence of all plant intelligence is, “How does something without a brain coordinate a response to any stimuli at all?” (p. 92).

Schlanger (2024) and Wohlleben (2017) speak to numerous studies that evidence remarkable intelligence. Recent literature clearly evidences plants communicating across distance—affecting other plants and even animals—acting with seeming intention and discernment in processes of reproduction and defense.

• DEFENSE: Trees can change the chemical composition of their leaves to sicken and starve caterpillars. Acacias can kill African kudu by elevating their tannins to toxic levels (Schlanger, 2024, pp. 58-62).

]…*…[

• COMMUNICATION: Goldenrods and sagebrush communicate threat—when threat is mild—through airborne chemical alarm calls so specific that they are meant to be heard and decipherable only by close kin. Goldenrods seem to also intentionally choose other calls of distress to be more generally understood when the threat is high and the need greater (Schlanger, 2024, pp. 65-66). Other trees, rather than communicating by air, may warn one another with chemical signals through fungal networks in their root tips (Wohlleben, 2017, pp. 12-13).

]…*…[

• MEMORY: Starburst-shaped flowers seem to predict the pollination patterns of bumblebees through individual and situational memory, offering their pollen when it would be most advantageous to do so (Schlanger, 2024, pp. 120-121).

]…*…[

• INDIVIDUALITY/PERSONALITY: Individuals of the same plant species are said to demonstrate differential sensitivities in response to threat, like their hypo- and hyper-vigilant human counterparts (Schlanger, 2024, p. 68).

]…*…[

Striking demonstrations of intentionality and interconnectedness. The strange sense of fertile vibrating aliveness returns when I ponder such nuanced behavior and dynamic exchanges; all happening literally right beneath the boundaries of my umwelt, even the umwelts of other species. I have visions of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. 

Despite the anthropomorphic “slippery slope” of this plant discussion—on “consciousness,” “memory,” “intentionality,” “personality,” and all the potential human-tinged assumptions that may surreptitiously sneak in—there is yet the aliveness of being. Long (2005) reminds us of the Chibemba peoples, a tribe associated with Lake Mweru in Africa, and their term, chumfo, to indicate the deep communication and supersense of animals and plants in the wild; evidenced in swarm behavior, as well as the undulating hypnotic 3-dimensional movements of flocks of birds or schools of fish. As science edges closer and closer to what feels more like Rousseau’s sentience writ large, how can it inform our embodimenting? Hall (2022) earnestly advocates for fostering plant empathy: learning their communication, behaviors, and individualities.  

Fox (2009), reviewed in a previous writing endeavor, considers the deep interconnectivity and sensitivity innate in this earth's fertile womb, in a way that touches the very cosmos. Fox (2009) referring to an 807-years-old juniper tree states, “Trees are like ‘cosmic antennae’ and radiation from supernovas—… explosions marking the death of a star—has been shown to influence tree growth. Thus… every star that dies in our galaxy is perceived by trees” (p. 21). Wohlleben (2017) awes with the oldest known tree: “a spruce in Sweden… more than 9,500 years old… 115 times longer than the average human lifetime” (p. xxi). Where do I stand in relation to the many realms? Where do we stand? Can such undertakings of fostering empathy revitalize a more harmonious place in the order of things, a sense of awe and of the sacred?

Dear Brother,

shock, you crossed over

gone, only to return in

ladybug prayers

Synchronicity and Ladybugs: Unexpected Visits

When I was in my mid-thirties, my only full sibling and eldest brother passed suddenly. In the aftershock, my body remained in a frozen stasis—a suffocating and numb depression—for the better part of a month. It was not until I found myself sitting aimlessly in an alleyway outside my aunt’s home in Chico, California, that something in me started to shift, like the slow calving of an iceshelf. I muttered aloud, as if channeling a higher Self that knew I needed to hear these first words of reassurance since the loss:

“I think… one day,

it’s all going to be better.”

In that very moment, a ladybug materialized out of nowhere and gently landed onto my right shoe. Shock immediately melted into sobs, and waves of grief let loose. Somehow, I knew beyond a doubt it was my brother visiting from beyond in affirmation of this reassurance. “Hey brother,” I said, as I reached down with my finger and the ladybug unabashedly hopped on for a ride. For the next two years, defying logic, ladybugs would consistently visit in the uncanniest of places: a locked car, a third-floor office with no windows. These encounters brought nothing short of a sense of the numinous. Somehow, everything is alive, mysterious, connected, even beyond death.

13,700,000,000 ÷ 100,013,700,000,000 = 0.00013698

74 * 365 * 0.000137 = 3.69986312

Peri-natal Cosmos

Science estimates that the cosmos is approximately 13.7 billion years old, with forecasts that the last lights of the universe will die out in approximately 100 trillion years (Stacey et al., 2018; Sutter, 2023). Scaled to a human existence, this places us squarely within a peri-natal cosmos. If the average human lifespan is 74 years old, then the universe, by comparison, could be said to be less than four days old. Looking up at the stars at night, I imagine the immensity of our “four-day old” existence, and by “our,” I include myself, my body, as part of the universe continuing its “four-day old” unfolding.

]…*…[

The evolution of science’s understanding of the nature of the universe is truly a marvel, an awe-inspiring feat far too complex to capture in a few pages. What follows, however, is an incredibly abbreviated review of Stacey et al. (2018) who traces our scientific understanding of the universe: the shape, size, and origins of all there is.

For well over a millennium, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, geocentrism was the prevailing model of the universe and our place within it:

earth at the center of concentric celestial spheres; contained.

]…*…[

Nicolaus Copernicus, around 1543, disrupted this view with his heliocentric view, placing the sun at the center. The celestial stars, however, continued to remain static in an outermost immobile sphere:

sun at the center, a finite universe.

]…*…[

Decades later in 1573, Thomas Digges, in response to a supernova phenomenon that made another “sun” visible in the day sky afforded a radical new view of our night sky:

stars scattered into infinite static space.

]…*…[

Scientists, by this time, still had no way of accurately measuring distances in space beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Some scientists argued the Milky Way was the only galaxy (slippery anthropocentrism) while others argued certain visible objects, like nebulae, were unimaginably distant galaxies themselves. Nearly four centuries later, in 1924, Thomas Hubble—with the help of unsung hero Henrietta Swan Leavitt who found a method to measure the distance of stars far beyond the Milky Way—blew the one-galaxy model out of the water, revealing a universe a billion times larger than ever before imagined and expanding.

infinite galaxies, infinitely expanding

]…*…[

With the introduction of the James Webb telescope (JWT) onto the cosmic stage in December 2021, abundant access to imaging of the cosmos is now allowing us to peer deeper into the universe’s origins, scale, and structures than ever before. Where does my “four-day-old self” stand in relation to the many realms?

]…*…[

It’s a marvel that the universe can give birth to us and we can now think of the universe. Like a grain of sand grokking the existence of humans, I daydream and imagine fractal selves standing in the liminal space of threshold moments in our historical understanding of the known universe; with each, our place in all that is permanently shifts. My imaginal embodied self feels these implicit shifts: the geocentric celestial spheres universe, the heliocentric still finite universe, the infinite universe, the expanding universe, and the JWT universe which is fueling an explosion of discoveries of planets in habitable zones. Curiously, I initially feel a diminishing sense of self-significance, an increasing anxiety around the meaninglessness of my relation to the many realms. Superego intrusions abound, “what do I matter? what does it matter? what’s lost without me?” The unbearable immensity. The experience is almost like one of being snuffed out in the primordial abyss: ego death.

Cosmos, Embodiment & the Sacred in Somatic Psychology

Almaas (2000) describes self-image as the structurization of space, and the process of dissolving boundaries is very likely to evoke anxiety and defenses against anxiety. “The process of ego development is a process of bounding space, of building frozen boundaries in the openness of the mind” (Almaas, 2000, p. 36). In the work of the Diamond Approach, bounding space is a somatic experience. I reflect how my brief brush with this quasi-ego-death echoes and reflects also a deep modern societal malaise of disconnection. When ladybug first visited me, amidst the incredible weight of my longing for meaning amidst tragedy, I felt the distinctive sense that not only my brother but, oddly, the cosmos was reaching out and contacting me.

Ray (2014) advances this, declaring the importance of coming into relation with our “cosmic body” and that our contemporary worldview suffers a “lack of genuine initiation into the living cosmos… the single and most fundamental cause of the rampant increase of psychological sickness in modern people” (p. 312). Are these bodyful meanderings on the cosmos telling me something again, rather than ego death, about the preciousness of this life that calls for the ongoing continual cultivation of embodimenting? When I intentionally brings my awareness to a “cosmic body” in this moment, I get an odd sense of contact with my brother again well over a decade later.

Embodying the Cosmos, by Extension, the Sacred

If Abram (2011; 1997) could be said to be the phenomenological wizard who presences one to the animal realms, Brian Thomas Swimme (2023) is the wizard of the cosmic. Swimme (2023) offers compelling portrayals and perspectival shifts that presence wonder and awe of the universe in the palm of our hands, weaving subjective experience with the dynamic fabric, ceaseless interbeing and unfurling creativity of the cosmos. The cosmos literally pours itself into the manifestation of my being and my body, as well as all other bodies, in this very moment. Digesting Swimme, I get the sense that things are sacred if you hold them sacred, that we give value to existence through our awareness of our deep interconnectedness to it.  

“The universe does not ask for permission when it decides to invade you and use you for its creative purposes.”

— Swimme, 2023, p. 262

Intuitive Ethics Surrounding the Sun’s Last Breath

Just to be clear, the universe may die out in 100 trillion years, but our sun has about 1 billion years before it explodes, .27 days (roughly, 6 hours) in “human time.” We are already in our last “day” of existence on this planet. Climate change further accelerates that timeline, it seems, within the reach of “minutes,” nervously drawing nearer the potential end to our habitable world.    

Goldin and Posner (2024) pose a sobering question for our age to this mass accelerated othering of our cosmos, our more-than-human counterparts, and one another: “how do we break through that wall of dissociation that seems to be a design flaw of our large scale civilization and really see one another, really see what we're doing to one another and to ourselves?” (56:10). Psychoanalyst Bob Stolorow, who lived in horror as a child discovering that the sun will die, asks us to reflect and account for this mass projected evasiveness of othering of our times (Goldin & Posner, 2024).

Reality extends beyond our sensory bubble, our umwelt.

Yet, if we are to acknowledge the primacy of embodiment as an a priori and a fortiori basis for our experience of the world, can we afford ourselves also the notion of relativity as a lens for liberation from our anthropocentric addictions that have elevated us above the natural world? This inquiry is not intended as another embodiment regiment. It is an invitation to deconstruct and offer an exploded view of what it means to be situated in a body that assumes any stake in “reality.” 

McGilchrist (2019) explores how the neuropsychology of attention and the type of attention we pay to things determines what we see and what we come into relationship with. “For the right hemisphere, we live the body; for the left, we live in it… different ways of being in the world” (McGilchrist, pp. 21, 23). The left hemisphere is, fundamentally, the emissary to the right, its master, whether we believe it or not.

McGilchrist (2019) explores how the neuropsychology of attention and the type of attention we pay to things determines what we see and what we come into relationship with. “For the right hemisphere, we live the body; for the left, we live in it… different ways of being in the world” (McGilchrist, pp. 21, 23)., The left hemisphere is, fundamentally, the emissary to the right, its master, whether we believe it or not.

Descartes, in one sense, was grappling with the limits of our umwelt, the reliability of our senses as relates to true knowledge, he addressed the problem of sensory delusion through a sort of sensory nihilism, attempting to resolve it in the hermitage of pure thought and reason. According to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), though, nihilism is a danger not only in the realm of pure thought, “Nihilism means the devastation of the earth” (Levin, 1991, p. 283). Paradoxically, the very elevation of thought, especially through our gaze on the world and other, presupposes our unique corporeality (i.e., the privileging of our human umwelts) and risks anthropocentric terrorism on the family of things (i.e., our animal and other-than-human counterparts). Yong (2022) describes the desecration of sensory environments through light and noise, a detriment to other species. “Our blinding, blaring world becomes normal, and pristine wilderness feels more distant” (Yong, 2022, p. 74).

It may be time to soundly foreground and recognize the mind-body-Body schism for what it is and what is truly at stake. According to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) nihilism is a danger not only in the realm of pure thought, “Nihilism means the devastation of the earth” (Levin, 1991, p. 283). Paradoxically, the very elevation of thought, especially through our gaze on the world and “other,” must presuppose our unique corporeality (i.e., the privileging of our human umwelts). Without recognition of the mind-body-Body schism, the risk is anthropocentric terrorism on the family of things. Yong (2022) describes the desecration of the natural world through the erection of aberrant sensory environments of light and noise catering to human existence much to the detriment of other species. The rippling consequence of advancing human comfort and convenience is further disconnection as, “Our blinding, blaring world becomes normal, and pristine wilderness feels more distant” (Yong, 2022, p. 74).

Such anthropocentric positionality further reveals its vulnerability and shadow aspects in identity politics and a tendency to polarize identities, exacerbate our isolations, through “denying recognition to the other based on difference” (Goldin & Posner, 2024). What if our deep mutuality and interconnectedness to our more-than-human counterparts, the body of the earth and cosmos, was re-established a fortiori as the “master” to displace our human-propagated disharmonies? What we truly asked ourselves, where do we stand in relation to the many realms?

Closing Thoughts

French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, popularized the notion of embodied subjectivity and intercorporeality, and Abram (1988) asserts that “only by recognizing the full presence of other animals will we find our own place within Merleau-Ponty's ontology” (p. 14). The wisdom of cat, spider and ladybug have all been differentiating and integrating relations for me on the path of embodimenting. In this short treatise, feeling calls to disrupt conventional notions of embodiment I reached to embrace notions of radical alterity, non-local embodiments, via contemplations on the unfurling wisdom of scientific developments in the fields of animal and plant consciousness, as well as our understanding of the cosmos. Like the now known-to-be expanding universe, it seems our awareness of the nature of animal and plant consciousness, even understandings of pre- and peri-natal consciousness, is expanding in all directions.  

What might be afforded by playing with “dehumanizing” the field of somatic psychology and foregrounding a mind-body-Body split? What if concepts like neurodiversity, embodiment, and polyvagal social engagement theory were cast beyond the normative circumference of our human relations and rooted in our ontological relations (i.e., with animal, plants, and cosmos)? Embodiment is, arguably, an ontologically ontic transpersonal process tying us into our deep belongings versus a solely ontically ontological one that tethers to human-centric egoic projects (Levin, 1983, p. 114).

Many further inquiries remain; too many to explore in this paper. How can such endeavors in non-local embodiment inform more embodied and harmonious socio-political governance structures? Mechanistic views of the natural world and cosmos a fortiori propagate the potential for othering, oppressive systems and worldviews. An alternative, more animistic view, offers a position of sacred consciousness and interconnectedness that may fertilize a space for a more heart-centered world.

I would also like to explicitly herald into discourses in the field of somatic psychology and on embodiment a potential recovery of awe, wonder, and humility. Animals, plants, earth, cosmos — each, in their own way, bring a special gift of non-local embodiment. May our more-than-human counterparts be so generous as to allow us to “borrow gravity” from them in this process so we can squarely take our place in the vastness of existence (M. Feil, personal communication, May 18, 2025).

And, lastly, I wonder about the reification of oral-aural traditions as a tool for ushering us back into our deep relations with animal, plant, earth and cosmos — many ontologically ontic realms — something I feel I am clumsily and humbly attempting to explore along with whatever reader graciously crosses the path of this writing.

Where do I stand in relation to the many realms?

Where do we stand?

“The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. ... You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place.”

— Plotkin, 2003, p. 13

 

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