Relational Magic + Ecologies Of Change
On lived experience, self-expression, and interdependency.
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The other day I was with someone and were mirroring each other. As in, copying each other’s movements. This was someone who I knew experienced chronic pain, like me. It was scarily vulnerable. But perhaps out of a sense of solidarity, perhaps because we felt safe-enough, we fell into a rhythm of speechless dialogue, taking turns following and leading in movement every few seconds, slowly hovering our hands above and around each other’s.
I noticed the space and heat between our palms and was reminded of crown shyness, the phenomenon where the canopies of some tree species don’t directly touch each other, but grow relationally; creating channel-like space between themselves that allows light to reach the forest floor. When my partner moved her feet and we stepped together, I felt and mapped a subtle inner shift as a result; a rupture in my cerebral monologue and a deeper sense of my body in space and the ground. A rooted-togetherness.
These moments of visceral togetherness are rare. Outside of physical intimacy, it can be difficult to experience a truly felt sense of relationality. More often we feel like we’re floating around, alone. However, thinking of it as a preference for flying solo denies the damage of the modern Western ideology that our bodies articulate. And allowing ourselves to stay floating and untethered (perhaps as a trauma response to past un-safe shared experiences) denies the possibilities emergent in our very nature as social, emotional, concomital beings whose very existence relies on one another. Just like everything else in nature.
Psychologist Daniel Stern says that moments of change occur when a “jointly lived experience is mentally shared, in the sense that each person intuitively partakes in the experience of the other … it is grasped without having to be verbalised … the moment enters a special form of consciousness and is encased in memory. And importantly, it rewrites the past.”
This experience of mutual presence—of engaging in a here and now moment, together—can plant an unexpected seed of self-acceptance within one’s lived experiencing. Being seen and seeing someone else in return is all any of us really want. And allowing for these moments, through presence, spaciousness, and vulnerable dialogue, can not only create a powerful form of okay-ness in us, it can crack open our whole cosmology. It can trouble the fiction of alone, the binary of safe and unsafe, even the myth of health.
From “alpha males” in wolf packs, “leaders” in deer herds, or the idea that living off nothing but bone broth—both research and everyday online discourse are bit-by-bit dismantling the lie of the independent hero, the wellness ideal, the free solo agent who pulls up their boot straps and heads west.
Recently, I’ve been playing around with creative expressions based on shells; sea shells, snail shells, seed pods, and so on. At first, I went into psychoanalysis mode [see my newsletter titled “How To Get Out Of Your Own Way”]. What does it say about me that I relate to shell-like, small, hard, and seemingly private little encasings? And then finally, breathing and letting that go, a better question: what else feels present?
I felt the cute-ness of life in a shell. Like Marcel! I considered the nature of crustaceans and molluscs; safely-enough encased that they can travel far and wide. And how, beyond mere self-defense, a hard outer layer provides functions for the greater system; minerals for countless fellow organisms, shore stability, nest-building materials, and more, during and beyond a creature’s lifetime.
In every now-moment, we are in conversation with the wider whole. Whether we like it or not, with every breath, we are sharing air, space, and emotional resonance with the infinite beings—human and non-human all around us. You think you’re alone? You think you don’t need to rely on anyone but yourself? Ask the trillions and trillions of microorganisms on and in your body right now. You yourself are a whole universe of infinite communities and constellations of relationality—working together to survive, adapt, attack, defend, learn, grow, and thrive all at once.
In considering all this, another creature then came forward in my expressions, this time through a 10 minute collage. An octopus, tentacles uncurling across various terrain. Octopus have nine brains; one in their eyes and one in each tentacle. The more one tunes into the sensory body, the more information reveals itself. “Creatures with a protective shell have hardly evolved since millions of years ago,” says the poet Andrea Gibson. And while the hermit crab might represent one legitimate and valuable adaptive mode of being, the octopus reveals another. Gibson continues, “The more exposed we are, the more we have the need to evolve and cooperate. The more vulnerable we are, the more quickly we grow.”
Becoming more attuned to whole networks of experiencing, within and beyond the body, is both intensely vulnerable and alive with possibility. Allowing a depth of presence between ourselves and someone else (or many others) helps us to embrace our authentic modes of experiencing, as they are, which in turn allows us to move beyond any presumptuous “knowing” that might come with that. And instead, sink into further relational dialogue. Through opening into a softer (unassuming and allowing) way of being in the relational present, we can be with what occurs between us and someone else, curiously and courageously.
In my experience, inhabiting one’s soft animal body does not need to be labelled a pleasant or unpleasant—a well or sick—experience. Rather, by setting aside value judgements in exchange for sharing one’s experience with trust (even if it’s just a knowing smile with a stranger) we can allow for a messy multiplicity of being, seeing, knowing, and coexisting to overlap. Just like the bumper sticker wanted.
This is how I try to imagine the phrase “lived experience”. Not as a fixed identity marker, nor a shorthand for assumed knowledge, or a conversation stopper or starter, or anything else we might bring to the term. But as a descriptor of what it is to be a living, breathing animal, existing as we all do within a multi-directional, overlapping web of listening, presence, and responding—a dialogue of being (with) where our reality as individuals can’t help but be entirely (in)formed by the connective threads of those we “bump into” in engaging with and around.
Meanings cannot be made in a vacuum and lived experience contains relational presence a priori, because we can’t not relationally dialogue with the (seen and magically unseen) entities around and in us. We can’t be alone, no matter how hard we might try. No matter how much external forces might tell us we are.
When we anchor into the values of relationality, as researchers Tuffnell and Crickmay say, boundaries loosen and break. And in expressing something of ourselves in good faith, some of what we are spreads out and changes. We are here to honour, allow, and learn from that change together.
Tarot card of the week: The High Priestess
Do you know why modern Western spirituality is often thought of as gussied up solopsism? Because many of us say “soul” when we mean “personality”. Many of us say “truth” when we mean “opinion”. And because so many, many of us think we want more, when we really need less.
Less questions, less accumulation, less outsourcing, less rules, less fragility, less thinking. What if we could just let it all go? What if sitting and listening was all we had to do? Isn’t that all the people we deem spirituality enlightened did? Buddha, Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad (PBH) and so on all spurned over-thinking and chatter. And instead, observed silence for long periods of time. It’s not that thinking is bad; moralism doesn’t need to exist here. It’s just that sometimes, when we’re too quick to make meaning of an experience or a feeling, that we shut it off from possibility.
In my experience, the more a tarot client seeks to outsource their power and agency when they’re reminded that not everything in life is under their control (“what should I do?!”), the more likely the High Priestess is to show up. Because when we cling to our own fixed agenda, the ultimate witch comes around to give us that look. As they say, when we make plans, Goddess laughs.
It’s a hard pill to swallow. That only by making a tabula rasa of oneself—by going within, through patience and practice—will you reach any insight. People would rather do DMT than learn to meditate. But how can wisdom possibly be procured otherwise? There is no one teacher or healer (or whatever) in the world who can gain insight for you.
And that’s the thing about intuition. It needs fodder. You have to actually act, live, experience joy, and suffer through pain. You have to make hard choices and fuck things up. You even have to die. Spiritual (or any kind of meaningful) insight is wrought through this process of living openly and unassumingly.
Swami Vivenkananda said that “there can be no knowledge but through experience”. That’s not just a generic piece of advice, it’s a spiritual reality. Spiritual knowledge is never gifted or explained into being, it’s just lived into being. Life itself—in its cyclical lessons—is the only spiritual teacher we have.
That means whether things feel confusing, harrowing, resplendent, or joyful, the advice from the High Priestess is always the same. Listen as you live and live as you listen. Follow your gut, make yourself a blank slate, and repeat. Act with the humility and wisdom of someone who truly believes they might actually attain spiritual knowledge, if not in this life than in a future version.
Treat your mind like a temple this week. Revere your silence. Tend to your body as a vehicle for spiritual insight. Make space for sacred silence. And then notice: what do you observe in this void? What thoughts try to drag you out? What feelings do you notice in your body? What do you assume you “know” about silence? What “more” do you crave, the moment you renounce distraction and seek to meet with your own awareness, even for a minute?
Don’t even listen to see what the wise one, the Priestess in you, might say. Just listen. Everything is grist for the mill. Nothingness…even more so.
Thank you for this inspiration today at 4am when I cannot sleep.
I love this and you. Absolutely brilliant.