Ecology of the body ~ Our dance with gravity
reflections on Earth Day, AI & Artemis II gifting us wonder
I used to think I had to choose: save the Earth or work with human bodies.
In college, my two best friends were passionate about human health while I was the ecology major convinced environmental work was more important. I laugh at myself now ~ I’ve spent decades immersed in the ecology of the body, and it turns out they’re inseparable.
The work feels microscopic sometimes. One person, one body, one movement pattern at a time. And yet it’s profoundly fundamental.
In a rapidly changing world, resilience isn’t an abstract concept ~ it’s about what’s tangible.
There’s a growing awareness of the need for individual nervous system regulation ~ and our human superpower of co-regulation. This trend points to a growing collective need for individual and collective resilience in our world.
It seems trite, but true: it all begins in the body.
The body is where we regulate with a deep breath, tune into instinctual sensory signals, and resource our nervous system in the heat of the moment. It's where we express and read signals of co-regulation in relationship with others.
Our ability to stay present under pressure, digest intense experiences, navigate uncertainty ~ this is the ground of our capacity to adapt, and it lives in the body.
Obvious benefits of embodied practice include greater sensitivity to somatic signals of stress, our ability to interrupt stress cycles and know how to resource ourselves through sensation, grounding touch, slow breathing, sound, etc.
There are other, important yet less obvious, benefits of embodied practices: when we move well, our tissues are fluid and responsive rather than rigid and held. The physical tissue tone and tension translates directly to our nervous system tone and tension, as neuromyofascia is one system.
When our tissues are fluid and our nervous systems aren’t locked in chronic stress patterns ~ we become more flexible and adaptable in every aspect of life. We show up differently. We relate differently. We’re more able to respond rather than react.
Embodied practice matters so much right now, as a fundamental resource and anchor to being in good relationship with reality itself.
Yet here we are, living in a time where so many forces pull us away from embodied connection to tangible reality.
Life interactions are increasingly mediated by screens, abstracted from direct experience, happening in 2D and our minds, rather than experienced in and through our senses of being in a living body.
We’re starting to see more impacts of outsourcing our thinking to AI systems that promise efficiency while eroding our attention, presence, capacity for intellectual inquiry and clear-sightedness about reality itself.
When we let AI do our intellectual work, we risk losing not just cognitive skills but the embodied intelligence that is innately human, based in our felt senses, in our soma itself, and rooted in relationship.
A new documentary just came out ~AI Doc: How I Became an Apocaloptimist~ and it brings crucial, timely awareness to many more issues brought up by AI.
I’ve been fascinated with these conversations as AI brings us face to face with fundamental questions:
What does it mean to be human?
What are our values as one human family?
How does our society relate to Earth’s resources and webs of life?
The race dynamics around AI development carry both infinite negative potential and infinite positive potential (but only for a very, very few). Increased public awareness and clear seeing about these issues matters so much.
AI is a species-level rite of passage, forcing humanity to confront its own maturity and capacity for collective action.
“To have power that is this powerful, you have to have the most humility that you have ever had. You have to have the most restraint and care that you have ever had.” ~ Tristan Harris
I hope you go see the film, or tune into this conversation with Tristan Harris, (one of my favorite communicators in any domain), or read this piece about the film by my friend Samantha Sweetwater for a look at deeper questions AI brings to our awareness, because:
AI is a gateway issue to everything else.
“If we want to get out of the mess we’re in - the mess where perverse incentives are an underlying cause of all of our most intractable problems including democratic backsliding, ecological decimation, ubiquitous surveillance, and war - we’ll need to become educated about incentives.” ~ Samantha Sweetwater
Clarity builds agency and the common ground needed to choose a pro-human future. The story isn’t over and we can help write it. Join the Human Movement.
We must stay connected to what’s real, what’s tangible, what matters most.
Embodied practice is a crucial tool of remaining in touch with and choosing our humanity.
It may sound trite but it’s truth: the body is how we stay connected to what makes us human ~ curiosity, empathy, courage, the capacity for genuine connection. This body is where we resource ourselves to stay regulated when everything feels chaotic, to choose real life connection over isolation even when the algorithms want us scrolling alone.
While tech billionaires engage in an extremely dangerous AI arms race, our embodied presence becomes a form of resistance. We choose to feel, to connect within ourselves as well as to the tangible real world around us. Embodied presence supports tending real life relationships with other humans, ecologies, more than human life, and the flow of resources that support our lives.
Good relationship with the ecology of the body supports more intimate relationship with the physical web of life itself. It’s no coincidence that the lessons of fascia and ecology point to the same wisdom: we’re embedded within a design of diversity within interconnection.
Separation and abstraction are illusions. We’re truly in this together.
Thankfully, we share moments that remind us of this truth.
It’s almost Earth Day ~ a day that has always been sacred to me personally. In fact, over the last 6 years, it was the day I always started deeper trainings on Embodied Resilience, to anchor the bigger value of how we relate to Mother Earth.
I used to celebrate at the largest Earth Day festival in the country at Balboa Park in San Diego. Every year, friends and I would set up on a lawn to connect with others though AcroYoga, partner acrobatics, and hoopance. What vivid memories I have of sharing joy of human connection in celebration of the Earth. We’d build human pyramids, dance with hoops spinning around us, invite strangers to embody curiosity, play and trust… all of us laughing and amazed at what our bodies could do in collaboration.
The work of honoring and tending to the body is inseparable from the work of honoring and tending to the Earth.
I’ve always loved days of shared global attention ~ days when we have an unspoken sense of connection to our shared human family. Shouldn’t Earth Day be the most potent one?
One day to honor, together, how much we depend on Mother Earth, on her bounty, diversity, wisdom and flow of nature as our support system?
This week, we witnessed another shared moment of global attention ~ one that held the much needed medicine of wonder.
The Artemis II mission circled the moon ~ the first astronaut voyage in over half a century. A Reuters poll showed 80% of Americans held favorable views during the mission, bridging political and social divides. The collective awe of watching four humans venture to the far side of the moon united us in wonder. Just looking through this NASA gallery brings me to tears.
These moments of collective wonder remind us we’re part of something bigger.
They call us back to what matters.
“In all this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together…. This is an opportunity to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we gotta get through this together.” ~ Artemis II Pilot, Victor Glover
Watching the splashdown yesterday, it stood out to me how long it took to “extract” each astronaut. It’s hard to imagine being weightless for days, reentry at 3-4 G’s, and then re-acclimating to 1G - gravity, that force that binds us to Earth.
I often describe gravity as a form of love, as indeed it is attraction between the Earth and our bodies. It’s also what informs the intelligence in our tissues in literally shaping and crafting our physical architecture to move ~ to live.
Have you ever pondered how crucial gravity is for human life?
The anatomy we study is, literally, the footprint of the life force figuring out how to move around on two legs, in the volume of space, on a round planet spinning through space, in the primary influence of gravity.
In weightlessness, muscle protein synthesis drops within 24–48 hours, with significant loss in muscle mass (up to 20%) occurring in as little as 5 to 11 days without intervention. Bone loss begins almost immediately. Without the compressive force of gravity, the intervertebral discs expand and the natural curves of the spine decrease and elongate... within the first few days!
Proprioception (sensing where the body is in space) relies on mechanoreceptors in our fascia that sense pressure and force. In weightlessness, there’s less mechanoreceptor signaling, so the brain’s map of where the body is becomes fuzzy and distorted, leading to significant coordination issues (sensorimotor decoupling).
All of this just from removing gravity!
Gravity is the fundamental influence on our structure and function, not just on an immediate basis of how we hold and support ourselves, but on the very functioning of our biology and shaping of our anatomy. Without gravity, the body treats its own structural strength as a metabolic "waste" and begins to dismantle itself.
Embodiment is literally about being connected to the Earth!
When we move and attend to sensation, when embodiment becomes a practice of awareness and being, more than just fitness, we are tuning into our dance with gravity, our relationship to the Earth’s attraction, to Earth’s love.
Embodied practice connects us more intimately with what it means to be human on this shared Earth.
When the world pulls us toward screens and abstraction, when perverse incentives drive races nobody can win, when uncertainty overwhelms ~ we always have the tangible ground of our own aliveness.
This is why embodied practice matters so much right now.
Not as escapism, not as distraction, but as a fundamental path for choosing life, for choosing connection, for choosing to honor the Earth and each other.
We can choose how we respond ~ especially when we stay connected to the wisdom of our bodies.
Move your body with love. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Let gravity remind you: you are held by the Earth. You are loved by the force that shapes your very bones.
Remember you’re part of this beautiful, fragile, interconnected web of life.
You belong here. We belong here.
May we root into our bodies and to the Earth, to rise in solidarity for all life.
