Wild knowing: our wise bodies
Our bodies contain untold depths, and the answers to some of today’s most pressing questions
1 October 2026
The body as a deeply rooted system of intelligence that is seeking to bring us into active ongoing relationship with our lives in each moment. Our body systems are in constant dialogue and relationship with the world around us. We receive external stimuli, it travels through the channels of our sensory awareness, our nervous system and through our organs into the deep waters of our bodies, stimulating thought, emotion, memory, action. This dance of energy and matter animates us, gives shape to our flesh and remains part of us for the rest of our lives.
In much the same manner, our dreams, memories, thoughts, desires stir from spaces deep inside of us, and, as beings biologically connected to our ancestors, from spaces deep inside time. They move through the waters of our bodies and then surface out in the world through our facial expressions, words, movements, actions. Our bodies are the landscape where this dialogue between inner and outer, memory and dream, self and other take place. An incredible meeting point between energy and matter that gives shape to our expression as individual bodies inside an interconnected world.
Every word, every gesture, every fall, every sweet touch, lives somewhere inside this vast field of awareness.
Human societies have forever had codes around bodies and self expression. In our contemporary societies we have a litany of strict rules concerning how we are allowed to express ourselves that restrict huge areas of our self expression. These rules are concerned with morality and propriety, which is governed by shame. Our bodies experience shame in exactly the same manner as we experience physical pain. Shame functions as the punishment for deviation from accepted behaviours. As social creatures, this is as deep a threat to our survival as physical violence, and our brain responds with the same force. Being shamed creates the same response in our bodies as getting burned. And much like sending our fingers into a fire, we are unlikely to seek to repeat the experience.
Shame is a coercive mechanism used relentlessly in western societies to give the democratic illusion of non-violence while ensuring that bodies do not disobey. It conditions the body with the mechanics of violence without ever having to lift a finger. Our bodily expression is governed by shame, we do not deviate from expected behaviours lest we appear ‘weird’, ‘odd’, ‘strange’ and become subject to the exclusions reserved for such people. In other words, the natural movement of our bodies is policed by socially encoded violence.
We have more complex social codes, rules and laws than any society in recent history. Our movements are strictly governed and regulated, which means that our bodies are in a constant state of masking and contortion. We adhere to strict edicts as to how our bodies should be covered, with which shapes (S/S25 or 26?), materials, what degree of opacity. Strict rules as to how and where and when we are allowed to touch each other, how we are allowed to move our bodies, where and how we are allowed to sit and stand. We are not allowed to express any spontaneously arising gestures - twitches, wriggles, farts, itches. And in case anyone identify any inappropriate emotion, our facial expressions must also be tightly controlled.
Our inner world is strictly veiled, and our bodies are the means by which we do this.
We live inside an energetic straightjacket with buckles made out of shame, disgust and judgement whenever we are in company. Even those we love have odd, and often idiosyncratic, expectations of how our bodies should move. When we are alone the effect of near constant masking throughout our days makes it hard for our subconscious to switch off. Some of us collapse into a messy heap of relief, others will continue the performance, policing ourselves with no off switch. In this landscape, the wild sprawling wisdom of our bodies is relegated to the margins of our awareness. There is little room for our instinct and body signals to find their way through this dense forest of rules and restriction and into our conscious awareness. The vast majority of our bodily efforts are spent in repression and denial of instinct. This is the opposite of listening. We studiously ignore ourselves, and we are rewarded and celebrated for the skill with which we do this.
Instead of moving with the fluid, dynamic, ever-changing motions of a body in dialogue with the world, we find ourselves inside a static structure. Linear. Fixed. Regulated. We place our bodies into rigid moulds each day so that we will be loved, accepted and allowed to make money to survive. This conflict hurts us, right down to our bones.
It is my belief that our current epidemic of physical and mental illness is the product of this dissonance between our inner nature and our outer realities. This plays out in different ways in different arenas (processed food, rigid living conditions, heightened social judgement, unhealthy working patterns), but the essence is that the life inside us has no pathway to expression in the outside world. The energy moving inside us is blocked in every direction it naturally seeks. We cannot rest, we cannot scream, we cannot claw, we cannot hold, we cannot caress, we cannot wail, we cannot fall to our knees in the street and turn to the skies for a more reasonable answer. All of this repressed energy, all of the silenced words, each unspent gesture bubbles and boils and distorts inside of us, producing illness both in our bodies, and in our psyche.
The pathway out of this state of disembodied distress and into more aligned modes of existence lives inside us (note ‘aligned’ not ‘perfect’, there is no idealised existence, but there are most certainly more and less generative ways of being). Our bodies that ache are also our bodies that know. Rather than objects to be tamed and medicated into submission, they are eternal portals of wisdom screaming to be heard. Our job is to learn how to listen. This act of listening is a personal one. As interconnected beings it also has collective implications. Part of the violence of silencing our bodies is the silencing of our self-awareness. The other part is the silencing of our ability to hear each other, and all of the life that surrounds us.
Our bodies invite us into loving relationship with the world around us. They are finely tuned instruments, and when we listen closely, we begin to notice what they notice. From the depths of our internal awareness to the outer reaches of the cosmos, via the moon, the wind, the foxes and the trees, we hear the subtle whispers of the dreams and the wounds of our neighbours, our friends, the rivers, the birds and our own tender selves. Our relationship with our bodies mirrors our relationship with the earth. And today this relationship sits broken. It is distorted, coercive, extractive and abusive. Healing the earth feels like a pretty enormous task. Taking care of our bodies is a more tangible one, and one with deep, deep ripples if we rise to the task. Healing our relationship with our bodies, heals the earth, one step at a time.
This is where the political makes itself known. We live in cultures of coercion abuse and domination. We have forgotten how to consensually inhabit life as a co-creative process, something we do together, with each other. Not something that is done to us. The return to the body is also a return to consent. Learning how to listen deeply and respond meaningfully to what we hear is a refusal of coercion and domination. And we find this hard. Really really hard. Everything we have ever been taught tells us that for anything good to happen, people (we) need to be forced, ‘told’, ‘made to’.
We are taught that we are inherently lazy, greedy and selfish. That if no one was forcing us to do anything with a sharp edge nothing would ever get done. Forgetting that the things we are supposed to be doing are soulless mundane and quite often soul-destroying. Of course no one wants to go sit in an airless box for eight hours a day inputting senseless data into little electrical boxes being treated badly by those around them, air full of the stench of other peoples stale lunches. Of course you need to force people to do this. No one in their right mind would choose this existence. But to go from that to saying that no one would ever do anything unless forced denies the entire premise of human society.
We are social animals utterly transfixed and devoted to each other. We dream of each other, talk about each other, fantasise about each other. Constantly. Check your own mind in this past ten minutes (unless you have been totally spellbound by my writing of course), notice how many people have floated in and out of your awareness. We live ourselves through each other and we cannot leave each other alone. We each have our own magnificently strange expression of this desire for contact. Our own uniquely strange set of interests fascinations and disgusts. We all wake up in the morning. We all glisten in the sun. We all surrender to soft touch. Sweet flavours. We are profoundly erotic beings. Forever stirring and stirred. So what if we let that instinctual stirring move us? Drive us. We have been so taught to fear instinct that this seems like an utterly deranged idea that could only lead to the collapse of society. I encourage you to think about why that is. Why should we believe that if you were left to be yourself, and me myself, the world would fall apart. Surely there is some faulty logic up in there?
Colonialism, empire and all the various current bids for global domination require centralised government of millions - billions - of individuals. Human community in its natural state takes place on scales of tens and hundreds of individuals. To keep these sprawling masses in check and responsive to one central point it is necessary to remove agency and spontaneity. It is simply not possible to govern billions of humans from one central structure (legal, cultural, political, linguistic) if these individuals have agency. We are simply too creative, too boisterous, too alive to be able to conform to any singular order of our own accord for any sustained period of time. For us to be tamed predictable and regular our creativity must be squashed. So from the point of view of central global governance, yes, it would be chaos if we were all allowed to feel and express our emotions.
Here the corporeal question becomes a political one - do we want humanity to be run as a singular entity by one central global power (or two, or three)? If your answer is yes, then you must surrender your body to the project. That is indeed the only way. However, if your answer is no. Then you can begin to imagine a world where there is space for your body and all its expression.
On a local scale your individual expression is not dangerous, it is simple, occasionally challenging, and natural. It only becomes dangerous when the local must conform to a singular ‘national’' (and increasingly a singular ‘global’). The irony of our times is that we are told that we live in the era of the individual, when in fact the individual, as a unique expression of the whole, has been entirely decimated in order to ensure collective coherence. Another deft little linguistic trick to keep us confused. We are tiny boxes of limited choice and expression, disembodied and turned into anxious balls of cognitive decision making, entirely disconnected from each other. I will offer that we are not individual at all, simply empty and lonely.
Our bodies are our most incredible allies on the path back into truth, connection, healing and the creative possibility of transformation. Our bodies, albeit animal and violent, are also our most effective tools for honest peace. Our distance from our bodies is how violence is able to persist mindlessly. Our subtle ability to attune, perceive and sense is the most astute diplomatic tool that we have ever forgotten. Entering into right relationship with our bodies requires entering into right relationship with our power. It asks us to know ourselves and to know the world around us with an almost unbearable intimacy. If you feel truly, you cannot ignore the pain you inflict on another. You may still go ahead and do it, for you are animal and you have fleshly desires, but you will not be ignorant of your impact. And you will not be callous with your appetites.
This is not a singular path. Being in right relationship with your body asks you to align intellect and sensation. It asks you to align soul and sensation. We are thinking creatures, we are feeling creatures, and we are creatures that live inside a possible concept of infinity, unaware of where we come from, nor of where we go. A spiritual, existential dimension to our awareness is essential. Our knowledge is, by its very nature (and ours), material, yet it must contain the void in order to be total. We must be able to speak to the unknown, to mystery, to the most essential properties of the universe that have animated us throughout time. Our bodies live at the intersection of our intelligence - the place where matter meets the infinite. Thinking with our bodies is thinking at the scale of existence. I encourage you to try.
The question of the body is a political, philosophical, existential and magical question. It is also the question of our times. The splitting point in our world between mater and spirit. I want to offer an integration. Not disappearing into an etheric world that denies our materiality. Nor a descent into matter that denies our numinous nature. We have spent so long in binary and polarity, it is time to begin integrating our opposing poles so we can make space for new binaries to emerge. New poles. New questions, new shapes and new problems. It is time for new.
