A fragmented self | Embodied imagination, abstracted realities and regenerative futures
The art of noticing. The art of weaving our senses and imaginations into life. The art of being spirited away by the world. The art of being enlivened and entangled.
This is probably my most meandering Substack yet. I wrote it in my usual style of thought-wandering, and true to it, it wandered. It also feels, somehow, my most revealing. I find myself dancing around and weaving together intriguing topics without taking a strong position on any, which in itself feels quite vulnerable because it feels as though writing should occupy the space of thought leadership, the conventional paradigm of which is authority, clarity and consistency in ideas. I can’t promise you’ll find any of this.
I lay on the beach in the late afternoon heat. Saltwater evaporates from my skin leaving a silty residue. I’m still revelling in the contrast of cold and hot, having plunged my warm body into cool Atlantic waters, which was sensorially invigorating in ways that tingle the soul and make me feel alive.
Calmly content, I watch romantic scenes: a group of adults with a young child playing hide and seek behind one another’s bodies; couples curled up into one another on beach blankets like cats; groups of teenage friends joking and playing in the backwash, excited to be together.
This is summer here. This has become my normal for these months of the year. It’s idyllic.
I reflect on this in an almost abstract way, as if to remind myself how fucking good my life is. I note that my normality resembles what others pay decent money to do for a week or so a year. I remind myself how fortunate I am.
I continue to lay contently in this gratitude.
Extraordinary becomes normal
It’s interesting how things that were once so extraordinary can become so normal. When I first moved here, there was a rapturous joy for everything: the outdoor culture, the warm days, the beach revelling, the slow pace, the steady contentness of others here. I guess it is a game of contrasts. This life here contrasted dramatically with my previous one, and for this reason, I could really feel into the differences in all their subtlety and find deep appreciation in them.
I no longer walk around in quite the same daze of awe and wonder. Certainly, I find pockets of it in and out, but it’s no longer such a constant. This isn’t to say that there isn’t gratitude; there is. Like how romantic love evolves from fiery lust into deep trust and companionship, this love too has changed. It has seasoned. It’s comfortable and comforting in ways that enable me to meet my life with a calmness that I certainly didn’t possess in the giddy early days.
I want to flag that my privilege is not lost on me.
The self and I
A book I’m reading at the moment, The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent, speaks about the fragmentation of the “self” and “I”. I find it interesting that I’ve never given this too much thought before. But the more I considered it, the more it made sense.
Laying on the beach, content in gratitude, there was a conversation happening within me, as if between two in dialogue. There was the part of me experiencing the situation for what it was, contently. And there was the part of me reminding myself to be grateful.
Even in that sentence, “…reminding myself” – am I simply being reflexive, or am I speaking as if I were talking to another? As Lent would ask, who is doing the reminding? And to whom?
Lent explores this fragmentation of “I” and “self” from a number of angles: from an evolutionary biological angle, discussing the social intelligence that arose in groups and how this bestowed on pre-humans and humans self-awareness; from anthropological and historical angles, exploring how in different cultures the “I” and “self” and the relationship between them conceptually and ideologically differ. Broadly though, he says, the “self” is considered more primal and fleeting; and “I” is the story we tell about ourselves, which is intellectually constructed and culturally influenced.
“I” moves from a place of self-awareness and abstraction, as if we are observing ourselves and creating a narrative about that self that transcends past, present and future. As I understand it, this self awareness enables us to observe ourselves in social groups as if we were another and then create behaviours accordingly. It also allows us to put ourselves in others’ shoes.
In relationship
Despite having never really consciously considered this relationship between “self” and “I” before, I do relate to myself as two; I wrote about it in my Substack The Indivisible, speaking about not wanting to disassociate or collapse into notions of the mind and body as separate. Even pointing this out signals that I do, in some ways, consider them separate, and this, I believe, is thanks to my Western conditioning.
Because this separation is a product of Western thought: to consider the mind as higher, and the body as lesser. The body is animal. It is nature. And, according to the Western worldview (though I caution this use of “worldview” in the singular), humans are superior to nature.
But I am indeed nature.
I am actively unlearning to exalt the mind logic above body intelligence. But to listen to one’s body intelligence, one’s gut, heart and intuition, is no small feat in the modern world. In fact, it’s illogical. Literally.
The story I tell myself
I’ve spent a lot of my life learning to shut off from my body intelligence. “Mind over matter”, I was taught. I could “champion” situations so long as I “stayed focussed” and fought against what my body – my being – was saying or asking of me.
Because, frankly, the body doesn’t know how to make it in this world.
This is a fair statement by many measures.
I feel perpetual tension between listening to my body intelligence and obeying my mind logic. I try to bring them into alignment, but I question if this is even possible under the conditions of modernity. My mind wants me to make “smart” decisions, to be an adult, to plan for the future in today’s world. My self wants to move with the rhythms that run through me.
But I am cursed with a mind that creates abstractions in the image of modernity. Sometimes, my natural rhythms ask that I move slower than modernity would have me, and that makes me anxious and feel inadequate because the story of modernity’s productivity sits so strongly in me that, despite actively trying to retire it, my mind will carry me off into a future in which I’m destitute and alone.
Modernity thrives on this, of course. This mindset keeps the great gears turning. I question, is it worth the gamble? Are those slower days worth the risk? The risk of the worst that my mind can imagine in a modern world of violent, oppressive systems that readily leave vulnerable people to the wolves.
Pulled between
This seeming dichotomy (though I caution this as potentially an oversimplified binary) of body intelligence and mind logic perhaps reflects a deeper conundrum. In my area of work, life, ideology, we talk about propelling a paradigm shift. I could speak at length about this, but I won’t now. But what I want to say is that I believe the paradigm shift is happening, but I feel that our systems are still stuck in the old ways of modernity.
I spoke about this on a work call the other day while discussing “regenerative communications” and its role in the world. People repeatedly say that the polycrisis has a communications issue. Though largely true, what I’m noticing is that many people are now ideologically shifting paradigms but, as a result, feel deep discontent in their cognitive dissonance as they feel stuck in old systems that they don’t know how to “get out of” or change, or are too scared to do so.
And I feel them. I completely empathise. I utterly relate.
I believe that this is making many people sick; the misalignment of ideology and how we live our lives creates bodies coursing with cortisol and adrenaline and bereft of the good stuff that gives us purpose, satisfaction and motivation. There’s chronic stress, anxiety, depression, inflammation, burnout and degeneration of our bodily systems.
Or maybe I am projecting.
The future lingers like a carrot on a stick
I feel as though ideologically I’m trying to dig my heels into a “regenerative paradigm”, one that knows and honours the world as complex, emergent, interconnected living systems. But modernity keeps grabbing me and dragging me back in – into my doubt, my fear, my worry, my scarcity mindset, into knowing I need to pay my rent and bills, into planning for a future, that I recognise is so uncertain and unknown, but I feel I should be planning for nonetheless.
At times, abstractions of the future pull at me so ferociously that I’m no longer in the present, which is a deep shame because in the present, I am content and grateful. But my mind drifts into planning, plotting and scheming mode… to try to ensure that I don’t end up destitute and alone.
The self and I feel fragmented. More than that, mind logic, rooted in modernity’s future, occupies me.
I look around at the others on the beach. Many of the people around me are no doubt on holiday. When they are tired, they will nap. When they are hungry, they will bring out their picnics or head to the beach café. When they are hot, they will go for a dip. When they are ready, they will head home. In these moments, life is that simple.
I think this is why so many people enjoy going away. Extraordinary experiences, no matter how simple, can hold us in the present, and we give ourselves permission to tend to our “selves” in ways we just can’t – or don’t – in our normal lives. And because of this, we find some temporary alignment between self and I. Perhaps.
We are animal
My personal philosophy understands us humans as entirely integrated into the living world, into the entire universe. As such, I believe we must more deeply recognise ourselves as living beings woven into all else. We are physical, material beings – complex body-systems, body-ecologies, body-biomes. We are far from only minds carried around in fleshy vessels.
Listening to body intelligence is acknowledging and accepting that we are animal. Every time I champion only my mind logic, do I live into a paradigm that holds us back from creating a regenerative future? Do I deny our entanglement with all else? Do I deny wisdoms beyond my own cognition? Do I uphold notions of human superiority because I deny that I am animal?
Or perhaps thinking in this way risks overswinging to champion only body intelligence, which equally could deny what it is to be human: to be self-aware beings that have the incredible gift of imagination, of creating abstracted realities in intangible spaces.
Embodying imagination
Modernity seeps into my imagination. Its stories are strong – they are what drag me into my doubt, my fear, my worry, my scarcity mindset. They are why I create abstracted futures of my destitution and aloneness.
So perhaps to live into a regenerative paradigm is not about the tension or (mis)alignment between body intelligence and mind logic but rather the stories that our whole selves occupy. Because these stories – which are nested in narratives and worldviews – collectively form the frames through which we know and meet the world.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I know Rob Hopkins speaks of this in his book From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. To create regenerative futures, we have to be able to imagine them.
I believe that we are all inherently creative. Co-evolution bestowed upon our species the incredible capacity to imagine – which isn’t to say that it is unique to humans, but it is to acknowledge that we can imagine beyond what is and creatively express those imaginings in the tangible now. This is a collective ability. This is a collective responsibility. To embody our imaginations (of a regenerative future). To climb out of cognitive dissonance.
I think many of us are taught to believe that our imaginations live within our minds. Perhaps they do. Or perhaps they live in a great collective plain where we can be creative together in a process of emergence.
Beyond me
I constantly have to remind myself that “I, myself” is an abstraction too. It is a story. Yes, I am whole – I am an organism, a living system. But I must be cautious of how “I” – in my mind logic, in my own self-awareness – may conceptually harden the edges of me and make me feel separated from an utterly entangled world.
So perhaps I must become porous and relational and ready to enter that great collective plain. We belong to a storied world – a world comprised of story ecologies. Stories are alive and relational. They are felt and experiential. They ripple through us, involve us, and evolve with us. They weave together to frame all that we know, sense and feel. When we create shared stories, cultures are formed.
Relational becoming
To occupy a shifting paradigm, to occupy imaginings of a regenerative future, feels far from a fixed thing. I find myself constantly confused, constantly questioning, constantly falling into the stories of modernity. Oftentimes, I feel uncertain. Oftentimes, I cannot explain how I feel or why I feel the way I do. Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps if I really trust in my whole self and the wisdoms that arise from our relational becoming with the universe, I must embrace that my mind logic won’t be able to explain or make sense of everything. And because of this, there may be doubt – because not everything will be based on rationale and logic but instead rooted in an embodied imagining of a regenerative future that ripples through me and involves me with all else.
This is a thought-wandering (or thought-yarning, appreciating that my most intriguing inquiries arise through conversations with peers and friends and through engaging with the world and sources of inspiration). In this style, I write in a stream of consciousness, giving myself permission to channel what arises as I write into the flow without the usual process of over-editing and censoring myself. I must say, this feels quite vulnerable. Likely, I will get things “wrong”, change my opinion and/or deepen my understanding. I write from my own perspective, framed by my experience as a White woman who grew up in the UK, between the city and the countryside, and now lives on the Atlantic Coast of Portugal. Learn more here.
Recommendation
In each Substack, I want to share «something» that has nourished me, shaped me and/or has become tangled up in my way of seeing and being in the world.
“Come Together” by Nox Vahn & Marsh, ft. Alan Watts
It seems my MO is to recommend books, but that feels a tad reductive when so many art forms nourish and shape me. I had just finished writing this Substack and went for a trail run with Spotify on Discover Weekly and kicking up tracks, and then this came on, and it felt tantalising and so fitting to the ideas and themes. So, it felt right to share it.