Kindness has been following me in my footsteps, showing up through dream figures, and waking encounters.

As I was collecting notes and doing some research on what kindness might be, where its roots come from, I realized, what it might have been wanting from me. It wanted me to see I was longing for some kindness from myself.

Kindness is this energetic imprint of caring without wanting anything in return, at least in the moment. Caring as an expression of human (or universal?) fabric of life. Caring that is there simply because you have this capacity.

I see kindness as open outstretched hands. The gesture, between an invitation and offering is sincere, transparent and non-binding. The one, the hands are outstretched towards, is granted agency in their response. There are no expectations or need for reciprocation or explaining. It says: “This comes from somewhere deep inside of me for no other reason but to be offered to you.“

Here is another image that carries an imprint of kindness for me. A photo from a recent trip to Dolomites. Expanses of unyielding rocks creating space and holding endless varieties of sensuous fragile beauties.

I’ve received kindness from others recently that felt like that. Through some simple and deeply moving gestures. But am I able to grant it to myself, I wondered. As a form of care. Care that is not aimed at getting some kind of output or benefit out of myself. Be it more or better of anything - creativity, productivity, patience, or discipline.

And expectations of benefits are to a certain extent built into my relationship with myself, I realized. In the manner I care about myself, through things big and small, and seemingly selfless. Like meditating to have clarity on this pressing question. Or making time to go to the forest for some writing inspiration. And such a natural one - making sure to get a good night’s sleep to be at my best tomorrow. Which sounds so natural, doesn’t it? Almost strange to question this basic intention.

And yet, there is something in me that is almost demanding that I revisit these familiar ways and natural agreements. The acts of kindness I received, gave me an incredibly nourishing and satisfying taste of something I had been thirsty for. With a caveat - the thirst can be satisfied if I am able to receive some of that elixir from myself.

My draft on giving and receiving kindness remains unfinished. But a kindness experiment has emerged. How do I cook up, serve and drink this elixir? How do I stretch those hands towards myself? Why does it feel so pressing?

And this is where I want to end my today’s note. With those questions, which I am taking as an invitation for some experiments during the next few weeks, as I take time off and travel to see my family.

If you were inclined to join me in this exploration, would be a great delight. We could also find a way to exchange, if that’s something you are open to.

Meanwhile I will be taking a break from formal Substack posts for the next few weeks. I will be back around August 23d and looking forward to re-connecting then.

Wishing you kindness within and without ❤️

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

PS here are a few earlier posts that are especially dear to me, in case any of them speak to you

How this Substack came to be.

A guided 10 minute practice: Breathing with trees. Bringing this experience of breathing with trees into the world as a way of relating to trees and beyond has been an obsession, waiting to fully come into being.

A cool and memorable collaboration exploring Darkness and its gifts and mysteries.

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Beyond-the-visible Lab

Beyond the Visible Lab is a playful experiential session for accessing the knowing that thinking alone cannot afford.

In Beyond the Visible Lab, we explore what comes before thought: sensations, perceptions, feelings, images. This sensory information as the underwater part of the iceberg. Through engaging with it, we can access a richness of ideas beyond one peak.

Through guided practices at the level of breath, sensing, movement, and image, we play with perception. We bring what surfaces into awareness and then, through reflection, into the context of the questions, projects, or directions we are holding.

It is a space for exploring what is not yet visible, keeping curiosity alive, and intentional re-energizing. Relevant for impact founders, accelerators, and teams working with complexity and emergence.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

I wonder whether you have ever thought of yourself as other, weird, or different. Chances are you have. Because one could say, it is simply part of being human.

The second question is whether that difference felt like a liability. A burden you had to carry, hide, mask, or perhaps even be ashamed of. That part, I would argue, is not built into being human. But it does seem to be built into much of Western culture.

And yes, there is a lot of talk about the importance of difference. About neurodivergence. About inviting different opinions and different backgrounds. Yet, in my experience of being part of communities which might be categorized as fringe, the invitation is often quite cosmetic.

It comes from a place of already knowing what is right. From establishing a baseline for what is acceptable or useful in society. One distinction I heard about this approach stayed with me: the starting point we are presented with and taught is sameness. Look, we are all the same.

It sounds good until we take a few steps further and see what it affords us and where it leads. Because the next step is: We are the same, but look, you are different. Let us single you out.

And I find that it is often from this position that we speak about difference. Be it ADHD, autism, or simply a different way of seeing without a clearly identifiable label, the general response is often caution and suspicion toward significant difference. A temptation to prescribe “truths“ and “protocols“ that we’ve stuck by.

Kind of: “please, be different as long as you still fit the main frameworks. Or be different outside of them, and we will let you be, but please do not contaminate our collective values or our protocols for making sense of the world.”

Which so misses the point, doesn’t it? Richness and variety of worlds, perceptions, views, and practices would need to be the foundation from which we create. If we are genuinely after something new and not more of the same in slightly different form.

Being and navigating other and different is one of the themes of today’s conversation with Dr. Scott Mills. What does it mean to experience yourself as other, and how do you navigate the world when that difference has felt like a burden?

We speak about labels, neurodiversity, and the idea of an interest-based nervous system, driven by curiosity, urgency, novelty, rather than importance. About belonging as a verb.

We also explore the larger context of being other: the times we are living in. Times that seem to be saying to us: change is the only constant; what worked yesterday may not work today. We are living off the familiar map, in a kind of collective cocoon, where familiar structures are dissolving before new ones have fully taken shape.

And perhaps these times require precisely those ways of sensing and thinking that have been treated as strange, inconvenient, or excessive. Of people singing in wildly different notes, than the one we know well. The people whose nervous systems, perceptions, and imaginations are tuned into strange and emergent.

It is perhaps the time when the qualities that once made someone feel other may be the very qualities a changing world needs and is even demanding of us.

About the guest

Dr. is an independent thought leader, writer, systems thinker, and strategic advisor. As he puts it, he thinks “in constellations. In systems. In spirals.” His work is centered on seeing what is trying to happen in people’s lives and work before they can name it themselves.

Scott holds a Ph.D. in Religion and Psychology and has worked as a teacher, coach, and advisor to authors, founders, and thought leaders.

His work has reached hundreds of thousands of people through Mindvalley, The Shift Network, and his own writing, teaching, and coaching. Along the way, he has been a business partner to Ken Honda, Japan’s bestselling personal-development author; served as CEO of SARK’s business and as a teaching partner to bestselling author and creativity teacher Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy; and worked as a strategic advisor to people whose work has changed how others think about their lives and work.

Today, from his home in Guadalajara, Mexico, Scott works with people at moments of transition, helping them see larger patterns, navigate complexity, and create lives and work that fit how they actually think.

You can find out more about Scott’s work here and join his Substack here.

And here are some of the quotes that have stayed with me:

On being named, and otherness

Scott Mills

“I have spent my life being really resistant to labels and categories. I like to say I think in constellations because I see so many pieces. The older I get, I’m finding this very interesting paradox around otherness.

On one hand, I was labeled very, very early as gifted. And all of those things, even when somebody says gifted and it’s a compliment, it separates you. There’s this sense like, ‘You’re sort of interesting, but I don’t understand you.’ You almost feel like you’re an animal at the zoo that they find beautiful and intriguing. But there’s not a real relationship because the folks often don’t stop and breathe and connect and see you.

At the same time, what I’m also finding is sometimes when we name ourselves well, when we name ourselves, not when other people name us, sometimes there’s such beauty in the discovery. I’ve discovered as an adult that I’m actually much more closely connected to ADHD, without the executive function problems that sometimes happen with that. And it’s been liberating to get that understanding, to start to say, ‘I do belong to this community, and here are some of the reasons why my brain works differently, and the ways I can accommodate life to that.’

I think about this often as somebody who’s a left-hander and their whole life has been given right-handed scissors and told, ‘Yeah, you can use these. Everybody knows how to use these. Look how good we cut paper.’ And then all of a sudden you discover, ‘I’m actually left-handed, and I’ve been using the wrong tool my whole life.’

I have this creative tension that I’m in deep relationship with: the beauty of naming ourselves well so that we can really see ourselves in a mirror. To me, the beauty of coaching is not fixing people, it’s seeing them.”

Interest-based nervous system

Scott Mills:

“One of the distinctions is between an interest-based nervous system, which means I am not motivated by money. I am not motivated by other people’s gold stars, whatever they might be, whether it’s a title or an award.

In an interest-based nervous system, you basically run on dopamine. You run on the things that are curious to you, the things that are interesting to you. And so for about twenty percent of the global population, we share this commonality of an interest-based nervous system.

Other folks can do the checklists and can follow the straight lines. And those of us who are interest-based usually get hung up somewhere on the straight lines saying, ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ or, ‘This is fascinating. Can you tell me more?’

What’s really interesting to me is that weirdness is hidden for most people and has only started to become visible globally. And what’s been beautiful is when you recognize your flavor of weird. For me, to notice I have an interest-based nervous system meant that all of these ways that I’ve been told to do things, whether it’s how to run my business, I’ve been told by so many coaches for twenty-plus years that I should do X, Y, and Z, and I’m always like, ‘That feels unethical or weird or out of relationship. I can’t do any of that.’

You would think my business would die, but in fact it doesn’t. People keep saying, ‘This is really fascinating. We’re interested in what you’re doing.’

So there’s one level of my weirdness meeting the weirdness of other people. When I say, ‘I’m an interest-based nervous system,’ folks start to say, ‘You too?’ We start to notice each other. We start to find each other.”

The one-note society and becoming a chorus

Scott Mills:

“What gets more interesting to me is the permission to ask the questions. I used to go to classes where maybe there were ten or twelve of us who were all working on our doctorates and had different areas of expertise. We were bringing in all these different things, and we could hold one question in the room and look at it in different ways and have radically different answers, but be held by the permission to ask the questions and the permission to be in relationship while we do that. And to also be messy in the process.

When we get permission to ask questions from all different angles, to be able to say, ‘What would a Buddhist say about this? What would a Muslim say about this? What would a firefighter say about this? What would an ecologist say about this?’ then things get really fascinating because we create a chorus of weird, more or less.

And in a chorus, it’s not a problem if you’re singing a different note. Sometimes the notes come together and create beautiful harmonies, and we discover layers of depth. Sometimes we create discord, and notes rub up against each other or fight each other. And there’s a part of us that feels a little uncomfortable, but, ‘I haven’t experienced that. That’s some discomfort. That’s kind of fascinating. What does that mean?’

If we can stay present to it, we can stay in the conversation. We can ask ourselves questions. That’s when our chorus of weird gets really interesting.

The folks who are claiming sameness, that’s a song with one note. It’s not interesting to listen to. If you were just listening to one note of a whole song, you would be so bored in twenty seconds because your brain would go, ‘There’s no novelty, there’s no interest, there’s no movement, there’s no play.’

This is, to me, what being human is about: asking these big questions in compassionate ways. We didn’t sign up to sing one note. We signed up to be part of the chorus.”

The in-between times and the discomfort of not knowing

Scott Mills

“I think about this in-between time as being a time off the map. We had an old map that told us how the world worked. It was very binary in some ways, and honestly way more complex than anybody will give it credit for, because we have this illusion that we could always get back to the good old days and things were better.

If we imagine this as going from Berlin to London, we’re in the plane. We’re not anywhere with any anchors right now. We’re up in the air. We’re in transition.

If we took this to another level, we might even say we’re in the chrysalis stage of a butterfly, where everything is dissolving. All of these ways we’ve understood ourselves are dissolving. So much of that is disintegrating, in ways that whatever comes out the other side is required to be something so different that we can’t even imagine it yet.

In my mind, this in-between period is uncomfortable. And we have to start by acknowledging that. This is not going to be a comfortable stage of human experience.

We’ve built, in so much of Western culture, what I see as this tyranny of comfort. The way I exit conversations is I say, ‘You’re making me uncomfortable. I’m not comfortable with that conversation.’

I’m talking about the moments where you bring an idea to the table or your experience to the table, and your experience makes me uncomfortable because it’s different from my experience. In those places, our habit lately has been to exit the conversation.

It’s uncomfortable sometimes to have new information come into our experience that challenges how we’ve thought about the world. The less willing we are to be a little uncomfortable in those spaces, the harder it’s going to be to create any kind of real solutions for the global problems we’re facing.”

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I facilitate two participatory experiences, which are at a pilot stage. If you are part of a group, community or organization that might benefit from one of those, let us chat and see if there is an opportunity for collaboration there.

Collaborative Creativity Lab

Experiential and embodied practice for sensing and shaping new ideas together.

Collaborative Creativity Lab is a playful experiential session for teams who want to find fresh ways into familiar questions and shape new ideas together.

It is based on understanding creativity as a relational and worldly process: not something that happens inside one mind, but rather through bodies, environments, relationships, tools, and the more-than-human world.

We explore through experience: a game, a somatic or guided imagination practice, nature-based learning, or a mix of these. We then unpack the experience together through perceptions, images, collective engagement, and reflection.

This helps bring genuinely new ideas into the context of projects, messages, or ways of working. It supports teams to expand creativity beyond thinking, listen deeply, build on each other’s ideas, and co-create.

The session draws on my study with Emergent Futures Lab, alongside nature-based learning, improv comedy principles, somatic work, and group flow facilitation.

You will walk away with a more open creative state, a few practical ways to approach questions differently, and possibly new ideas in the context of your projects.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

First let me say I would not have written this even a month ago. Too revealing. Personal. And risky. Yet here I am.

Something surprising and inappropriate found me a couple weeks ago. Obsessive desire to flicker my tongue.

“Wow, how well do I know this someone I refer to as me?”

It happened during a recent group experience I was part of: Fishing for Shadow, where we were guided in exploring and unearthing parts of us that we have disowned and pushed away from our conscious selves.

It certainly makes sense that I had pushed away the idea of myself as the one tongue-flickering. But what is it about?

The larger “about” was unfolding at the same time. In dream-like explorations we were guided in, I saw an ocean of coiled and entangled snakes, an ocean which I eagerly jumped into. Questioning my own sanity as I was doing so, yet following, or rather being moved by a strong impulse, I chose not to resist.

Photo by Badal Kumar on Unsplash

Snaky appeal

Tinkering with this vision in real life by dancing like a snake, reflecting on snakes, unearthing memories related to snakes, brought to light this sense of strong affinity I felt with them. Like I was of them in some ways.

It came through my obsession with spiralling and slithering patterns of movement. Through feeling the pull to be on and with the ground. Through a felt sense of carrying something that could easily be venomous to others.

How come I had not engaged with snakes before? Even by learning about them.

And then while I was exploring snakiness and what it means to me, out in the forest, almost without my permission my tongue wanted to flicker. Wow, it felt good. It felt emotional as well because the tongue was a place where, for a long time, I have been carrying tension. I know how stressed I am just by sensing my tongue and what it’s doing in my mouth. Is it able to rest or is it restless?

The tongue flickering connected me to one of the central themes in my attraction to snakes: their strong eroticism. Eroticism that confronts you once the initial feeling of fear or even disgust is allowed to pass through you. Those undulating movements, the softness and elasticity of the shiny scaly body, the flickering tongue, the effortless elegance and beauty of it all.

I could see how one could easily be pulled towards this mix of sensuality, beauty, ease, coherence, and honesty of desire. Isn’t it what we also carry in us? Even if hidden and disowned.

My experience in that group concluded with a public acknowledgement of snakiness in me, through an undulating dance and a flickering tongue. The act of revealing this part of myself, allowing it to be seen, was radical and deeply altering.

It was a kind of seeing very different from the dominating human context of eroticism, where it becomes sexual, human-to-human, charged, boxed, morally and otherwise regulated.

What I was fortunate to experience was a Life-force-herself-within-me kind of seeing. That allowed something in me that wanted to be hidden to be transformed into a legitimate, even welcome, part of me. And made it possible to be writing this piece.

Another aftereffect was this feeling of my own multi-dimensional wholeness, to which I felt I now had more access than I remember ever having before. It’s a feeling of effortless flow with life. Slithering, one can say. With its demands and gifts and pains, and surprises. You can take it all with a sense of beauty, ease and coherence. Even stumbling takes on this luxurious elegant vibe.

Something we are of

Once this part was seen, it afforded a different vision of the world around me.

Swarming and brimming with erotic.

As I was back in Berlin, feeling welcomed by the neighbourhood forest and its inhabitants, their eroticism was so in my face. Something that I must have been filtering out before. Or didn’t allow myself to interpret as such.

Birdsong spoke of erotic longing. From the ecstatic serenades of nightingales that I was blessed to go to bed with and wake up to this spring, to the shameless loud desire calls of jays and magpies.

Hibiscus flowers were flashing their unapologetic, bloody bodies at me, long stigmas demanding my gaze.

A tiny fish found me as I was about to swim in a lake, undulating by my feet, in a fluid, impeccably coordinated dance of its shiny body and every single fin.

I was aware how with every breath I was taking into me what had been inside other creatures’ bodies. How with every mouthful I was devouring other life: fungi, bacteria and viruses.

Holding this snaky slithering experience fills me with sadness. Sadness about you and me having to camouflage this universal life force. Which depletes our energy, robs us of animalistic ecstasy and creative desire. That we have locked into the context of courting and sex, hidden in closed rooms, smeared with shame and judgement.

How much richness has it robbed us of?

How much did it distance us from the very fabric of life? From a dance that, just by virtue of being of this earth, we too have always been meant to dance.

Erotic is not for someone or something. It’s something we are of. As creatures of this earth that crawl, slither, flicker, suck, lick, rot, penetrate, devour.

And how liberating it is to see and be seen by each other in the grip of living creative desire. To encounter each other in our animal inappropriateness.

Foxglove Encounter

I want to finish this off with a small piece that wrote itself on that first forest wander after the Bulgarian experience. In an encounter with an evocative foxglove.

I am sitting by a foxglove flower that is extending its tongue at me. Tiny hairs, soft and piercing, are lining its tongue. The tongue becomes a mouth, a cave, seducing and devouring, which bees, wasps, and ants are exploring as I stare.

My hand is also seduced: into a touch. My finger and the tongue of the foxglove join in an exploratory dance. Which demands my full sensual attention, thus it asks me to close my eyes. We are getting attuned to each other. Saturated with curiosity, desire to intimately connect, and a commitment to be with each other.

After a while my hand lets go and returns carrying in it the tender bites of the hairs, the ever noticeable flickers of the foxglove tongue. When my eyes open and we re-connect with a gaze, there is intimacy and nakedness that hasn’t been there before. Both opened and penetrated by the encounter, my tongue goes into flickering in an act of reciprocity.

Sweet seeping love is in the air, very distant from shame, or the need to control, mask, regulate. Uniting us in the sensual fabric of existence, on this carnal plane and planet. Swarming with tongues, naked bodies, slithering, undulating, penetrating, and through that offering themselves to life.

sssssss 🐍

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Beyond-the-visible Lab

Beyond the Visible Lab is a playful experiential session for accessing the knowing that thinking alone cannot afford.

In Beyond the Visible Lab, we explore what comes before thought: sensations, perceptions, feelings, images. This sensory information as the underwater part of the iceberg. Through engaging with it, we can access a richness of ideas beyond one peak.

Through guided practices at the level of breath, sensing, movement, and image, we play with perception. We bring what surfaces into awareness and then, through reflection, into the context of the questions, projects, or directions we are holding.

It is a space for exploring what is not yet visible, keeping curiosity alive, and intentional re-energizing. Relevant for impact founders, accelerators, and teams working with complexity and emergence.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

This one is a special conversation. I am talking to two friends and partners in a project: Irina Mishina and Polina Khodova. We also share a country of origin, Russia, something that played a role in bringing us together.

For over two years we have been playing with the concept of flow, as it gets expressed in an altered creative collective state, also known as group flow, and as it shows up in life.

By flow, we came to understand this state of attunement in an interconnected world. A world that is alive and breathing. A world where everything and everyone has agency. The three of us as we explore. But also our environment, the stories that arise, the birds that chirp outside our windows, possible fields of collective intelligence, the conversation itself, and even the questions we are exploring.

What happens when, while exploring questions, we are able to attune at different levels — with ourselves, with each other, and with the larger world? What does it do to the inquiry? What might emerge that creates shifts in the group field, and in each of us?

And in this context, what does it take to flow with ourselves, with other humans, and with the world? And what does a life in flow look like?

A year ago, our inquiry was shaped into a podcast we are co-hosting: Life in Flow. You might have seen it among my links.

The project has been quite unique for the three of us because we decided to go into it without predetermined goals or fixed roles. Kind of a practical experiment around our Life in Flow inquiry. We knew we wanted to explore life’s big questions in a way different from what the three of us had experienced before. Wow, it was unnerving at times.

Putting our time and energy into something that we did not fully know what it was. To be honest, we still do not have a clear path or a fixed definition of where we are going. Which fills us with occasional nervousness, but more often with curiosity and excitement about exploring uncharted territory. About emergence and mystery, which have become part of all of our conversations.

There is so much, it seems, to discover — or maybe rediscover and remember — in this world that we have been taking for granted. Things are not what we think they are. And thinking alone isn’t enough to explore, learn, or live.

So I wanted to invite Irina and Polina to share about the project: what it has been for us, why we have continued pursuing it through the ups and downs, what it takes to flow with others, and why we would want to flow.

Three most listened-to episodes

If you are curious to get a feel for these conversations, here are our three most listened-to episodes:

• How Trance Shapes Our Lives

• What Is Loneliness About?

• What To Do With the Ego?

About the guests

Irina Mishina is a creative in a permanent state of transition, exploring creativity, emergence, and human development through writing, art, entrepreneurship, and interdisciplinary inquiry.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imablumm/

Polina Khodova is a coach, pattern decoder, and guide in the art of inner alignment. Her work brings together neuroscience, Internal Family Systems, somatic awareness, energy leadership, and embodiment to help people navigate transitions, develop self-leadership, and create change not only in how they think, but in how they relate to themselves moment to moment.

Website: https://coachingbypolina.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/polinakhodova/

And here are some of the quotes that have stayed with me:

Attuning to the field

Irina Mishina:

“I think the first thing that comes to my mind is the thing that many highly creative people say about creativity in a group. For it to work, and for the group to be able to get all the benefits of the richness of the right point of view that the group can provide to the creative process, one condition needs to be fulfilled, and this is each person needs to leave their egos at the door.

So I think it’s one of the primary conditions for the group flow to emerge. It should not be about me, but about what is happening in the relational field between us.

If I am to analyze my perception of our group process in the podcast, the first thing I think that helps a lot is our tuning in, like all the warm-up exercises that we do in the beginning. Tuning into each other, into ourselves, and at least what happens to me is I start deliberately turning my attention into what is happening in this field that unites us.

So then during conversation it’s always about this divided attention between what is emerging for me, what thoughts are coming to my mind as the conversation flows. And as the thoughts are coming to my mind, they are perceived like this is something that I want to say. But at the same time, part of my attention always goes into, okay, how do I feel this expanded field? So my attention goes to you two and what is going on beyond myself.

This divided attention, holding the attention on several objects at the same time, is what helps me to hold the trance state. And in this trance state, whatever emerges, it stops being just like this is what I want to say. It always comes into, okay, this thing that it seems that I want to say, how it flows into the whole.”

Words, body, and energetics

Polina Khodova:

“If anything, I’ve started asking people in conversation to show me what they mean. And I mean show me energetically. Go into your body. Touch the energetics of what you’re trying to verbalize and then verbalize from that space, because then I will actually have so much more access to what you are actually pointing to energetically.

Rather than your words, which, if they’re disconnected from the field, I actually don’t quite know what you mean. I know you’re using these words, but if they’re disconnected from the field and from the field between us, I can only, in an analytical sense, try to piece things together as to what you might mean.

We’re always talking about words can mean a thousand things. But if you’re actually touching it energetically and you’re showing it to me, meaning you’re open enough for our fields to be touching one another and communicating, then I get an actual sense in my system of what you’re talking about, which is so much richer and yet sometimes less precise in terms of words and how the mind processes, but it feels more real and true.”

Conversation obtaining its own body

Irina Mishina:

“I think when flow happens, it’s like the conversation itself obtains its own body. So it’s not just the three of us. It’s the three of us and the conversation that is the equal participant of the process.

And of course, in this case, it’s not about being in agreement or having resistance. In my experience, I had the experience that actually even when we had this moment of resistance, the whole process was flowing because this is just what was emerging and we were allowing it to emerge and treating it as an equal participant of the process.

Emergence is something that wants to be made space for.

I think, as you were asking about signs, what are the signs for me that I feel like we’re in flow. For me, it is this sense of belonging. I really feel that I am part of something bigger that has the life of its own.”

Whole body experience

Polina Khodova:

“When I experience it just at the mental level, I get tired faster. It’s a lot more. This came up right now. I kind of mapped it as both of you were talking. I was mapping it in my system and I realized that if it’s only mental, that means that I’m using only the resources in this space, in my mind.

And so it’s such a concentrated use of very densely packed resources that it fries the network, because I’m no longer using all of the resources that I have available. Just like Dan Siegel talks about the mind is not just in your brain. So the full mind throughout the nervous system, which is more of a generative experience, meaning I’m not frying just one portion of the network. It’s distributed throughout my system, what I’m using to be engaged and receive.

That’s literally the experience I have when someone is so in their head. I actually have a sensation of being cut off from something. That’s my sensation internally. Like my God, we’re stuck here. This is where we’re stuck and we cannot go anywhere.

That actually creates, even though there could still be flow in terms of thoughts being exchanged, that’s true. But I always, in the pit of my stomach, feel like we’re stuck at this level. The elevator is not available to go up and down in whatever direction it needs to go, to collect whatever resources and data points and energies that actually could be available.

Sense of Aliveness

Irina Mishina:

“For me, flow is always connected with a sense of aliveness. There is this feeling that something is alive, something is moving. It is not me trying to make something happen. It’s more that I become part of something that is already happening.

And I think this is why I love these conversations so much. We come with questions, but we don’t come with answers. We genuinely don’t know where we are going. There is something very vulnerable about that because we don’t have certainty, we don’t have a script, and we don’t know whether anything meaningful will emerge.

But when we stay with the question long enough, when we keep listening to each other and to what is happening between us, there comes a moment when something shifts. It feels like the conversation starts carrying itself. At that point, I’m no longer thinking about what I should say next. I’m listening to where the conversation wants to go.

That’s probably the strongest feeling of flow for me — when it stops being my conversation or your conversation, and it becomes the conversation.”

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I facilitate two participatory experiences, which are at a pilot stage. If you are part of a group, community or organization that might benefit from one of those, let us chat and see whether something wants to be co-created.

Beyond-the-visible Lab

Beyond the Visible Lab is a playful experiential session for accessing the knowing that thinking alone cannot afford.

In Beyond the Visible Lab, we explore what comes before thought: sensations, perceptions, feelings, images. This sensory information as the underwater part of the iceberg. Through engaging with it, we can access a richness of ideas beyond one peak.

Through guided practices at the level of breath, sensing, movement, and image, we play with perception. We bring what surfaces into awareness and then, through reflection, into the context of the questions, projects, or directions we are holding.

It is a space for exploring what is not yet visible, keeping curiosity alive, and intentional re-energizing. Relevant for impact founders, accelerators, and teams working with complexity and emergence.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

It’s hot. Very hot in fact. We are in for 40C this Sunday (Farenheit). I envision myself spending some time in the basement. And I keep in my awareness creatures, plants and humans who.

It makes me think about an incredibly insightful interview with Marius Müller, an educator and initiator of projects focused on Nature-Based Regeneration including the Cool Cities game. Cool because they recognise and respect the power of water in keeping the Earth livable, shaping local weather as much as global climate.

As Marius puts it, water is not for having and controlling. To restore healthy water circulation, we need to build a relationship with water: learn how it behaves, what it needs in order to stay, move, cool and nourish, and create the conditions that invite it back into our ecosystems and our lives. Give it a listen if it sparks your curiosity (btw, it’s the first episode of the Breath of Life podcast).

If you are in for some extreme weather conditions as well, pls take care of yourself and maybe of others if there is a chance. Such a high time for accessing our inherent kindness. “Just because we live together on this planet” type of kindness.

And now on to the paradoxical nature of change.

Mistaking a taster for the main dish

I’ve been reflecting and holding with me the paradoxical nature of change lately. In the context of my personal development, in fact, that got a “boost” or “plummet”, hard to say which, recently as I went through an Animas Valley Institute programs with an evocative name: “Fishing for Shadow”.

No fish there and the bait is you. The bait was me, and 19 more people who were brave enough to come. Shadow refers to parts of us that we do not recognize as our own, and even adamantly insist on as “other”, as having nothing to do with us.

So here you are, as a bait for something in you that you don’t believe exists. Something that, when unearthed, is almost bound to shake things up in your psyche and life. To bring parts of them to an end in their current shape. To have you cry, grieve, despair, be gripped by fear.

So why were we there, right? Why learn something about yourself that will put you in big trouble? Which is a question for another time perhaps. Or it might not even need an answer for a lot of you.

What happens after those experiences, is what I am curious about today. When we go for those programs, experiences, or they just find us, we often see those as “change“, move through a threshold, lasting shift.

And looking back at over 20 years of experimenting and making myself available for experimenting with, that was never the case. It was never a changed me who came back. It often did feel like it in the moment. Being deeply seen, realizing something novel - exciting or terrifying.

But how mistaken I had been to take them for a shift or change. Because those were such fleeting moments. Glimpses of what might become. Amuse-bouche-type appetizers ("mouth-amuser" in French) to get me wanting more or be disgusted and want none of it. Openings in my current psycho-spiritual structure. Potentialities for becoming. Or not.

“Or not” is the default here to me. The reasons for which are many.

Ripples of change

One of them is that we tend to underestimate its relational nature and rippling effects. When something in me meaningfully shifts, it brings in motion a lot of different things, including my relationship with family, partner, children, friends, work, hobbies, the land.

I love how put it at the closing of a vision quest in Anza-Borrego desert that I participated in a couple months ago. Very loosely his words:

Imagine you are a puzzle piece as you go through life and inhabit the many relationships and commitments in your life. You go through an experience that changes you = your puzzle piece shape. And then you come home to the old shape that is waiting for you. The old shape is so warmly and wickedly extending its arms.

It does, doesn’t it?

“Come, precious. What you experienced was a dream. Not even a good one at that. Let us be good, even if things are bad. You know me for what I am, and that thing you think you want to become, it hasn’t even shown its shape. What if it’s ugly and brings even more suffering your way. Precioussss.”

Realness of change

Another curse of deep change, the one where you cross a threshold, is that it messes with your perception of realness. As real as that opening was, and as beautiful as that experience might have been, oftentimes it happened in another world. A world that lives by different rules. Among people who agree to play by those rules within that container. Or without people, as nature-based experiences are, but still rooted elsewhere.

And then you come home with a firm intention of holding on to that shift. As the world that change came from retreats and wanes, here you are in the warm and wicked embraces of the familiar. That treats you just as it did before your experience.

“Hey love, good to have you back. Things have piled up while you were away. You know things you have committed to do. Things we expect of you. And let me remind you, people are relying on you. Our family does. Bigger still: the world. We are all in it together. Remember what we believe.”

So what is real, you legitimately ask yourself. An experience I had with strangers and trees, as magical as it was and answering your deepest longings perhaps, or this, my “real” life. With voices that I can hear. Nudges or kicks in the butt that I receive. News programs that I watch.

And you know where it can go from there.

In the context of all the complexity that change brings, it’s even weird to me that we would be consciously pursuing it. Or maybe it’s more like change pursues us. Cursing us with longings that defy rationality, by making us restless and on the road, looking for we don’t even know what exactly, showing up in our dreams that fill us with desire to be carry on the seeking.

Gestating change - a prayer

So what gives in this gestational space?

There are practical things of course. Ways to practice, to navigate relationships, to receive support, to hold on to the whys - the longings and desires that had us go for all those intense experiences.

But what I want to finish with is more of a prayer. An act of kindness towards myself, ourselves. Saying: “yep, I see me, I bear with this process.”

Gestating change feels like holding an egg in my hands. The one inside of which new life is growing and is about to emerge. Yet for now, the life, whatever it is, will not be able to sustain itself if I drop the egg.

As I was entrusted the egg, I was told: there is no guarantee for what will emerge. The magic egg is suited to holding all types of creatures, from cute tiniest wren chicks to spiders and snakes, including venomous.

And there I am, holding the precious egg, in a dance between:

Creating enough openness and space in my hands,
and retaining some structure for protection.

Giving it my full attention in the moment,
and attending to the demands of life as it is.

Having a desire for the shape of change,
and staying open to whatever may emerge.

Purposeful action,
and surrender.

Care,
and healthy distance.

Hope,
and despair.

Feeling the ground,
and falling into the abyss.

Collapsing,
and stiffness.

Singing,
and crying.

Oh, Mother! Let me go through with the dance. Give me the wisdom of the Sage, the mischief of the Sacred Fool, the steady hands of the Nurturing Generative Adult, the animal instinct of the Wild Indigenous One, the song of the Muse-Beloved. (characters invoked based on the Wild Mind Guide to the Human Psyche)

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Beyond-the-visible Lab

Beyond the Visible Lab is a playful experiential session for accessing the knowing that thinking alone cannot afford.

In Beyond the Visible Lab, we explore what comes before thought: sensations, perceptions, feelings, images. This sensory information as the underwater part of the iceberg. Through engaging with it, we can access a richness of ideas beyond one peak.

Through guided practices at the level of breath, sensing, movement, and image, we play with perception. We bring what surfaces into awareness and then, through reflection, into the context of the questions, projects, or directions we are holding.

It is a space for exploring what is not yet visible, keeping curiosity alive, and intentional re-energizing. Relevant for impact founders, accelerators, and teams working with complexity and emergence.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

This episode speaks deeply to what I’ve been up to lately. Navigating the world, and myself, through the lens of maturing and adulting. Can I discover and allow myself to be worked by my soul gifts that in the work of Animas Valley Institute are about our ecological place in the world? (you’ll hear more on that later).

As a kind of provocation, the first question I ask Sara McFarland, my guest is whether, when I call myself a mature adult, I truly am so.

And yes, in many ways I am and we are, as Sara rightly notices. We have been living our lives, attending to many things in our worlds, navigating challenges, solving problems, raising children, taking care of other humans.

And yet, a few of my experiences with Animas had me reflect on how much I even knew about maturing and adulting, and whether I had ever been in the company of truly mature adults before. Many of us, perhaps including you, have this sense that our caretakers, or partners, or colleagues, or ourselves are perhaps not as psychologically mature as we might expect or wish.

And it became more than that as I was guided by Animas guides on a two-week vision quest, and on a recent program, Fishing for Shadow. The adults guiding me were different from most, if not all, helping professionals I’d worked with or known before. So of their place, at ease, peace and love with themselves, so rooted in the world of dreams and poetry, and at the same time in this world of clarity, logistics, timing,.

For the first time perhaps in my life I had a feeling: those were people I could deeply trust. And those were people who, through knowing and holding themselves, and applying their gifts in this world, were able to hold me in the most twisted and weird shape or form.

Those experiences had me ask a lot of questions. Could it be that I have not been as mature as I imagined myself to be? Could my longtime agitation in searching for something have been, to a great extent, a calling to become an adult in the fuller sense of this word?

What if, as rooted in the over 40 years of work of Animas, I myself have been, and lived in, a society of adults who in psycho-spiritual ways are adolescents?

Who, being in the psycho-spiritual stage they are, are bound to be conforming and rebelling, trying to prove themselves, defending identity, performing themselves, getting trapped in endless ego concerns. Facing the turbulence of early adolescence as life itself. Not fun at all.

And it’s not for lack of trying that we get stuck in this stage. Rather because the structures and views on maturity have changed dramatically in the last couple thousand and even hundred years. As processes of maturing, supported by rites of passage and initiation, were deemed obsolete, primitive or simply forgotten.

Zooming out on ourselves as a species through this lens affords an interesting view on the state of the world as it is. Full of anxiety, distraction, mistrust towards each other. Could this be seen as psycho-spiritual adolescence at the level of humanity?

And then what an interesting question that Sara poses, and you will see it in Animas and Bill Plotkin’s work: might the current crisis be a species-wide initiation? An invitation to get to the next stage. To learn to inhabit a kind of maturing that would allow us to access our soul gifts, something only a mature ego is capable of doing.

Soul, which in the context of Animas work is:

“a felt-sense about our ecological place or niche in the world. This knowledge exists only within the deeper realm of consciousness that all species share, knowledge that is not linguistic but imaginal, knowledge that an immature, egocentric human Ego cannot access.”

Or the way Sara puts it: soul is not purpose, role, vocation, or what we do. Soul is “who we be.” More like “a poem or an image. Or a melody or a dream that can’t be made sense of by the strategic mind.”

Uncovering the special gifts, seeing the soul, and one’s unique way in the world may be what the longing many of us feel, or the agitation and emptiness that we try to fill with consumption or addictions, is about. So how do we go about that?

How do we approach that adulting that leads us to our unique gifts, to loving the world and being loved and seen in return? How do we move from self-development into soul initiation? From eGocentric to eCocentric. To Earth-centric.

This is what the conversation is about.

And before we move into the conversation, let me introduce Sara.

Sara McFarland, Hologram Heart, is an improvisational nature-based singer, storyteller and ritual performance artist, a wilderness guide and mentor. Sara is a Soul Initiation Guide with Animas Valley Institute and collaborator at Starter Culture, as well as dreaming in their own creative offerings in Europe and the United States.

Sara travels the Hologram of the Golden Web of Life in many ways. Through listening to the melodies that Earth and the Ancestors sing through them. Through Somatic Gnosis, catching the wisdom of their ancestors and the land. Through ritual performance and trance storytelling. Through collective rituals of paradigm transformation.

They bridge the ancient ritual practices of being in conversation with the wild Earth and the More-than-Humans with the present world. Their work is to help hospice the current culture as a Death Doula for the Great Dying, supporting the species-wide Soul Initiation, in order to create the fertile ground needed to birth a future human culture which embodies the Dreaming of Earth. One which we who are alive now will most likely never see, but for which we pray, for their thriving in 500 years’ time.

And here are some of the quotes that have stayed with me:

Adulting from the perspective of soul

Sara McFarland

“We talk about, at Animas, the work that we do around soul initiation guiding, supporting people to move from the stages of late adolescence into adulthood.

We’re talking about: do you know who you really are? And so that’s an adulthood on a soul level, on a level that’s about your place in the web of life.

Oftentimes, with all of the adulting that we’re doing in our culture and our society, we don’t have time to ask the deeper questions, to go on the journey, to listen in for what mystery is dreaming through us, what Earth is calling us to.

We don’t have the capacity to remember who we are. And of course, in these days and times, it’s a privilege to have the space and time and support to do that.

So then we start talking about: okay, what does that mean? What is soul? What is adulting from the perspective of soul and how do we become that one?

And then we have to start talking about the mystical and we have to start talking about magic and we have to start talking about wilderness and we have to start talking about the arc of a life in which the first part of the life is about soul supporting us.

We don’t know that soul is doing that. The world is supporting us, it’s feeding us, we’re consuming like a caterpillar, we’re eating and eating and eating. Or we’re busy working and taking care of things.

And when we move through this strange passage of initiation into adulthood, which is a psychological, spiritual, emotional, somatic, and soul level experience, we begin to become soul. We remember who we are and we begin to serve life.”

Soul is not what we do

Sara McFarland

“What I understand as the underworld is the place where the essence of all things lives and is in interrelationship with one another, conversation with one another, which is where our souls live, our soul being.

The place, the ecological spiritual place that you inhabit, that I inhabit. So it’s not about what’s my purpose or my role or my vocation or what I’m going to do in the world.

Oftentimes people think that that’s my soul purpose, like what I’m meant to be is what I do. Such a modernity mistake to think that our soul is what we do.

Soul purpose is in fact who we be. And it’s who we be in a way that is not commodifiable, that is not understandable through a job description or a role or any way that would fit into our society.

Soul is actually more like a poem or an image. Or a melody or a dream that can’t be made sense of by the strategic mind.”

An adult is one who has remembered

Sara McFarland

“This comes after the crisis of identity. I don’t know who I am anymore and I can’t live the life I’ve been living.

There’s this crisis of identity and it cracks us open. And then there’s this yearning, this longing for mystery, for soul, for the beloved.

The longing, this yearning, the crisis cracks us open, and we pass through this portal of our longing into the mysteries of psyche, into the mysteries of the wild, into the underworld where the essence of all beings lives, including our own soul.

When we are blessed and ready, prepared by the dying of our old life, by healing and wholeness, by numinous holy encounters, sacred encounters in the wild, when we are lucky, we will receive a dream or an image or a vision of who we be, who we are, that then will shape us, shapeshift us from adolescent to adult.

We will be cellularly, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually changed at a fundamental level. And our entire worldview will be shifted.

That’s what we’re talking about as the passage from adolescent to adult, this worldview shift, this becoming that is a way of being in relationship in the world that is different than we’ve ever known before.

It’s one who’s remembered. An adult is one who’s remembered.”

The great forgetting

Sara McFarland

“One of the things I find really essential is to remember that we all come from that in our ancestry. We all come from earth-cherishing peoples who have had ways of being in ritual remembering ceremony with Earth, with the holy, which was not separate from the wild world, which was not separate from the human community.

We all come from this way of being in relationship with the world. For 99% of our existence, that’s our human inheritance. That’s our way of being in conversation.

So I think a lot of the pain and grief that we’re feeling now is we’re waking up to the depth of separation. That is enculturated. That is civilization trauma. The trauma of having been separated, of forgetting, of having been taken from.

We can see the ways that colonization and civilization have moved across the human world in the last hundreds of years, thousands of years, a couple of thousands of years, and have focused themselves on forcing separation from language, from ceremony, from traditional ways of being in that conversation.

Which include rituals, which are ways of remembering our relationship. We stop engaging in those sacred ways of relationship. We forget. Humans are forgetters, bless us.”

Eco-awakening and species-wide initiation

Sara McFarland

“To remember ourselves into the body of Earth, what we at Animas call eco-awakening, ecological awakening to the embodied emotional, psychological knowing of ourselves as Earth, as embedded in the web of life, returning to an earth-cherishing way of living, is not particular to becoming an adult. It’s actually a prerequisite for becoming an adult. That we remember ourselves in this way. Because then we can first ask the question: well, I know that I’m part of this web, but where is my particular place in it?

Modernity is absolutely committed to continuing the separation, continuing the trauma, continuing the ways of forgetting again and again. The distraction, the dissociation, these screens and all of the drugs that we take in order to numb ourselves from the pain of separation from the world, the loneliness, the lack of feeling that we belong.

When in fact there’s an essential belonging. We are never alone. We are always in relationship with the entire world.

My personal call, about the metacrisis and response, is: what is the species-wide initiation that is possible through this crisis? What if this crisis were co-dreamed by Earth? Because we are Earth.

What if this crisis, as awful and terrible and painful and grief-soaked and unjust as it is, were an opportunity for a species-wide initiation? That we as a species might awaken to our place in the web of life, our particular and unique way of being with the wider web.

That’s about the biggest question I can ask right now. And it’s how I’m approaching what’s happening in the world.”

Initiation is a long journey

Sara McFarland

“In the developmental wheel of Animas, which is one lens, one context of understanding human development, initiation happens at the end of the journey. We call it the journey of soul initiation. It’s an entire stage of development that can take years. It’s not: I’m going to go out on one vision fast and then I’m initiated.

It’s a journey for which we prepare, that we have enough psycho-spiritual wholeness and resource. And we descend into the underworld in that the old life, the old way of being alive, our old identity, our attachment to how we’ve been in the world is stripped from us, is taken from us, or we offer it on the sacred altar.

There’s a dying. I don’t know who I am. And in order to step into the mysteries, I have to let go of so many myths.

Thinking of Inanna, where she’s taking off layers and layers of her ceremonial clothing and emblems of her role and her responsibility and her way of being in the world, until she’s naked. And that’s a beautiful image of what’s asked of us: to strip ourselves again and again of all the ways we’ve understood ourselves to be in the world.

At some point, as we’re hanging there on the meat hook or laying on the altar or in the not knowing, the terror of groundlessness, of not knowing, we will be given the blessing of a vision of who we are in the world.”

Wholeness and why self-development can hurt

Sara McFarland

“This obsession with personal development is kind of a misplaced idea that we have to get somewhere and do something and be better.

That is the twisted, hurt, wounded way of this incredible natural impulse, this organic life impulse to evolve.

And when we can do that from wholeness, wow. Then we have the capacity to bring such beauty and gift into the world.

Every single human stage of development has an incredible gift for the world. It is not like only when I’m an adult, then I have gifts for the world. No, children have gifts for the world. The wonder and the innocence and the amazing beauty that children gift to the world.

Each stage of human development is gifting their human community, other-than-human community, more-than-human community. It’s not just about the adult.

If we do not have the wholeness, if we still are moving through the world as an open wound and utilizing these protective strategies foremost in our relationships to get our needs met, these immature ones, it will be destructive because we don’t have the resources to actually go on the journey. It will be destructive psychologically, physically.

Because something is dying. Something needs to die. The old life, our attachment to our old identity, has got to die.

But the little ones of us, the hurt ones of us, they’re not the ones who should go on that journey. And all of our protectors, bless them, will fight tooth and nail for our survival, because that’s what they’ve been doing our whole lives, keeping us alive.

So you can see how we need this amount of wholeness and resource to even say: okay, I’m willing and able to go on the psycho-spiritual death journey. I’m willing to answer the call and move through the passage and let go of everything I’ve known.

Yes, mystery. Take me, I’m yours.

There’s a level of psycho-spiritual emotional maturity and resource that is required before we can go on that journey.”

Experience Sara’s Work:

Sara McFarland / Hologram Heart
www.saramcfarland.com
Explore Sara’s mentoring, guiding, storytelling, singing, ritual performance, and upcoming creative offerings.

Animas Valley Institute
www.animas.org
Learn more about nature-based soul initiation, Bill Plotkin’s work, and Animas programs in the wild world.

Starter Culture
www.starterculture.net
Discover collective work around culture change, transition, and tending the fertile ground for a more life-serving future.

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Beyond-the-visible Lab

Beyond the Visible Lab is a playful experiential session for accessing the knowing that thinking alone cannot afford.

In Beyond the Visible Lab, we explore what comes before thought: sensations, perceptions, feelings, images. This sensory information as the underwater part of the iceberg. Through engaging with it, we can access a richness of ideas beyond one peak.

Through guided practices at the level of breath, sensing, movement, and image, we play with perception. We bring what surfaces into awareness and then, through reflection, into the context of the questions, projects, or directions we are holding.

It is a space for exploring what is not yet visible, keeping curiosity alive, and intentional re-energizing. Relevant for impact founders, accelerators, and teams working with complexity and emergence.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

What is your relationship to surrender? I’ve been wishing for a long time that we become better acquainted.

Which for me meant finding a better way to let go, allowing myself to be guided rather than forcing my way through, tuning into answers for big questions rather than coming up with them on my own. And just more fully inhabiting the pause and stillness of not being in charge. Of anything.

So it started to feel urgent recently that I get better at all of that. Haha, isn’t it ironic: feeling the urgency of surrender. The urgency was brought about by a realization that my desire to help things move along faster than they do, whether by keeping my mind fixated on them, or starting experiments without letting the previous ones mature, was taking a lot of my energy. Making me feel tired from all the continuous fuss, even if invisible by usual standards.

Here is how I put it in a journal entry a few weeks ago:

“..surrender, why is it so hard for me? Scary in that it feels like not being in control. And ironically, perpetuating the illusion that I am. Perhaps what this constant asserting of will does is support the very stabilization point I try so hard to tip.”

“I just don’t have it in me at this point to surrender at will,” I lamented at a mentoring session.

My mentor Sara didn’t dispute my claim. But through her presence and questions rooted in the world of mythopoetics we came to a point where it became evident to me: not only did I know how to surrender, I was also practicing it on a regular basis. Almost daily.

And the key that opened the door to the realization was my dancing practice. Daa… I’ve been into dancing for a couple of years, especially enjoying this invitation to myself: to be danced.

Isn’t it interesting and so human, being blind to things about ourselves when they are perfectly visible to others.

“But it’s not the real one. The Surrender with capital S. The Surrender that knocks one off their feet, because it seems to be the only option left. Gimme the big stuff.” might have been playing through me. “Because I am the frog (from a) Russian story that falls into milk and keeps kicking until the milk turns into butter.”

And yet, honestly, how tired I have been of big heroic stuff and how not quite aware I have been of precious teeny tiny shifts. The kind that take tuning in to notice and are on my humble human plane of things available for practice.

Grateful to Sara for this unfolding she guided. The realization then took me on an exploration that almost got me to the opposite side of the spectrum in how good I was with surrender. From “Why is it so hard for me“ to “Am I not the master of surrender? Aren’t we all?”

So, if a surrender question has been on your mind, here is how you might step into your existing mastery. Because like me, you already are of it.

You’ve Been Doing it

Let me invite you into an experiment, best done when sitting:

Would you raise your arm for me and hold it in the air for a minute or so?

And now, if you would, allow it to go down and find a place to rest. After some moving and wiggling perhaps. To rest in contentment and relief, perhaps, after having been held in the air for a while.

What did you do?

Surrendered, right? To this vast force that keeps you and me on this spinning planet Earth: Gravity. Something you and I are doing daily, don’t we? Yet rarely, if ever, take into our awareness as such. What would happen if we did?

What if you were to zoom out and see yourself going through this earthly life as the body you are. Alongside other bodies: of other creatures, plants, rocks. All held by the Earth, at the Earth, at all times.

What if you were to fully inhabit this continuous offer of surrender? As you sit your butt down, or allow one foot after another to find the ground when walking, or let your hand go down and rest after an effort of holding it up.

If you are still not sure how to relate to gravity, let me tempt you further with a beautiful slightly different take on it from David Abram.

“Gravity, we think, is a drag upon our aspirations; it pulls us down, holds us back, makes life a weight and a burden. Yet this gravitational draw that holds us to the ground was once known as Eros—as Desire!—the lovelorn yearning of our body for the larger Body of Earth, and of the earth for us.

The old affinity between gravity and desire remains evident, perhaps, when we say that we have fallen in love—as though we were off-balance and tumbling through air, as though it was the steady pull of the planet that somehow lay behind the eros we feel toward another person.

In this sense, gravity—the mutual attraction between our body and the earth—is the deep source of that more conscious delirium that draws us toward the presence of another person. Like the felt magnetism between two lovers, or between a mother and her child, the powerful attraction between the body and the earth offers sustenance and physical replenishment when it is consummated in contact.”

— Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, David Abram

“Gifting Yourself Down”

Going to the etymology of surrender added something precious to practice. I decided to go with surrender in Russian, my native tongue: “сдаваться”. The root of it is “дать”, to give. And in the same old family of giving there is “дар”, gift, that it shares with Sanskrit da. With the reflexive suffix and the prefix “с”, meanings of off, down, away, together, it came together as gifting oneself down. To the Earth, a metro ride, a conversation.

Seeing surrender as gifting myself has eased my earlier resistance, which was always debating how much agency I have in surrender. The resistance was able to relax seeing I was the one presenting myself as a gift.

So coming back to gravity, how does it sound now: offering yourself down to the Earth as a gift. A lover even perhaps. Gravity: not as mundane anymore, isn’t it?

Engaging with surrender as the core of gravity opens a door into other sensuous experiences which, by their nature, seem to contain an invitation to surrender:

∿ ∿ ∿ Giving ourselves to being breathed, as opposed to being the one breathing (stay tuned for a deeper exploration of that coming in a few weeks)

∿ ∿ ∿ Allowing ourselves to be permeated and vibrated by sound, as opposed to being the one listening.

∿ ∿ ∿ Opening ourselves to a visual stream, allowing the sight of a flower or another human to enter our perception.

The list is endless, almost anything we do can have a distinct somatic flavour of surrender to it. Some of mundane and not at all poetic things that also lent themselves well to surrender were:

∿ ∿ ∿ Entrusting myself to the metro to be carried to my destination gave this really peaceful and chill vibe to a recent trip. Very rejuvenating.

∿ ∿ ∿ Becoming available to a meeting. Gives me a feeling like I don’t need to strive for anything. There is this lightness and fluidity as if I am being held by the meeting itself. Which may sound strange, I know.

One of the things emerging from these surrender experiments has been this sense of rejuvenation and regeneration that happens faster than trying to relax through the intention of a body scan, focus on breath, or curiosity.

The gifting yourself down somehow almost immediately has me sighing out, my fleshy self dropping down. Which takes this “carrying-this-whole-world“ weight off my shoulders.

I am no longer in charge, even if for a couple of moments. Breathed, heart-beated, held on Earth, carried by the U3 line of the Berlin metro. How liberating is that.

These experiences do not supply me with wise answers or guiding messages. And yet perhaps they do, because I find it much easier lately to settle into not knowing and doing nothing about it. haha, sounds preposterous to some parts of me.

I’ve also been sensing more and more into this difference that had been evading me for a long while - between giving up the directive impulse, yet staying engaged, and inhabiting my agency.

And no less important - I’ve been so enjoying “gravitational games”. Gifting my feet to the ground one at a time as I walk, giving myself over as a vessel to sounds, sights, tastes, and even thoughts that seem to lose their cyclical curse through the act of surrender.

How would it be to gift yourself down to a chill weekend?

Would be a great pleasure to hear where you are with surrender, if it has a place in your inquiries.

Thank you for being here.

In love,

Yulya

∿ ∿ ∿

P.S. I’m refining two participatory formats (below) and looking for communities, teams, or organizations who might want to pilot them with me. If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Beyond-the-visible Lab

For groups working with complexity, early ideas, or questions that are not yet clear.

Beyond-the-visible Lab is a playful experiential session for teams, communities, and organizations that need to think and sense beyond their usual frames.

We work with perception, sensing, movement, and imagination. An abstract question or idea becomes something the group can explore through felt experience, before it finds its expression through words.

The session helps people notice assumptions, open new angles, and become more attentive to what is emerging before it is fully visible.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

I bet money has been on your mind recently. It has certainly been on mine. Yet, what is money about? What invisible assumptions does money instill into our lives? What does it ask us to believe about value, exchange, contribution, and ourselves?

And are there ways, especially in the times we are living through, to partially decouple ourselves from money and its grip on our decisions, our relationships, and how we see ourselves?

The guest of today’s episode, Will Ruddick of Grassroots Economics, puts it into one question beautifully:

“We’re in that water, money water. What does the world look like otherwise? Even just one percent different. What would it look like if you could exchange resources with other people in your life without money being involved?” – Will Ruddick

I am excited to be diving into this topic of money that so belongs with the inquiry into our Earth-centric becoming I’ve been engaged with. Because doesn’t so much change converge on money?

The money question showed up in a few places recently. First in the WorldMakers community, in a member presentation on how challenging it is to fund projects that are genuinely about new ways of seeing and doing.

There were also conversations with artists in Berlin who shared how with grant applications they cannot really count on explanations of the answers. How it’s an acrobatic act to adapt the project to the pharmacy-like precision of goals, configurations, and outcomes attached to a grant.

It also took me back to my fundraising days at Greenpeace, coordinating the major donor fundraising program at Greenpeace Russia. Not only was it a challenge to engage with potential private donors in Russia, where environmentalism almost belongs to politics, but it was also challenging to have conversations about money inside the organization itself. For most people, talking about money felt uncomfortable. Almost at odds with who they were and why they do what they do.

And where does this bring us?

On the one hand, we are all living in one spidery money embrace. One that keeps track even of our facial expressions. Our economies and lives are organized around it, and many of the changes we hope for, surely as the start of a new day, run into questions of money. Who has it, who doesn’t, where it flows, and who gets to decide.

On the other hand, many of the people at the forefront of change - artists, activists, community builders, caregivers often find themselves at the margins of the financial system. They may be creating enormous value, yet that value often remains invisible, or doesn’t fully enter the collective space, because it is being measured through money.

And as a cherry on top, through its spidery embrace, money is so good at seeping into our psyches and becoming the measure of our self-worth. Our income and our wealth become quantifiable metrics of how well we are doing at this project called human life.

All these questions cannot, by far, be answered in one episode. So stay tuned for more on money and its alternatives. And today I am excited to start this conversation with on ways of expressing and exchanging value in communities with less dependence on money.

Will Ruddick is the founder of , an organization working with communities in Kenya and beyond on practical ways of sharing resources, coordinating support, and strengthening local economies.

Will spent the last two decades exploring what economics looks like when it begins not with money, but with the resources, skills, relationships, debts, commitments, and visions already present in a community. His work draws from traditional resource-sharing practices, community currencies, ecological systems, and the study of how communities have organized care, exchange, and resilience across cultures and throughout history.

Will emphasizes how money is a specific tradition of circulating resources, which means it’s not exclusive, there are others.

Today, Grassroots Economics works with villages, community groups, universities, and organizations to make local abundance more visible, legible, and easier to mobilize. Increasingly, Will’s work explores economics through the lens of living systems, asking how communities, like ecosystems, can circulate resources in ways that build resilience, reciprocity, safety, and collective wellbeing.

And here are some of the quotes that have stayed with me:

Communities already hold abundance

Will Ruddick:

“We do a lot of resource mapping, asset mapping. And that includes everything from social resources, like belonging to different group memberships, to skills and time, sense of purpose, environmental resources that people have, leadership, voice in the community, infrastructure like tools and buildings and houses, and looking at financial assets as well, like money available, how much debt they’re in.

And really looking at relationality between people. So we do a lot of games. We do a lot of string games where we’re looking at who has debt with who, or who has services that other people need in the community, and just exposing or bringing legibility into all of that. What are all these resources?

You have twenty people in a room and you say, we’ve got at least twenty times more resources than any one person has here collectively. And then we do a lot of visionary work. Every single farm or household has at least a one-year plan of what they’re trying to do. We have community action plans as well.

There’s a tension between where they want to be, and the resources they have, and the resources we all have collectively. The idea is that the resources they have are sort of locked. There’s no way to move them unless you have money. But people have time. People have all kinds of stuff.

There’s a lot of resources, a huge abundance in the world. I’ve never been in any community, even the poorest refugee camps we’ve ever been in, where people didn’t have a huge amount of resources compared to any one individual person there. Generally there’s a sense of abundance. So how do you unlock that?”

What economics should be about

Will Ruddick:

“The basic question is: how do we coordinate all of our resources to achieve our visions together? That’s the economics question. Or should be anyways. It’s not how do we get money. We’ve basically put economics under the box of monetary theory. That’s our goggles.

If you broaden out to: we want to coordinate our resources. What resources do we have? Let’s list them down. Let’s talk about it. Here’s a whole bunch of resources. Can we make clear commitments to offering those resources?

Like Yulia, you’re giving your half hour or hour right now in terms of interviewing, and I’m giving an hour right now in terms of talking to you. We’ve articulated that. We made an agreement. We made a calendar invite. We did this. How do we do that generally?

How do we do that with all kinds of resources that we have between lots of people? I would say that generally we have no idea what that looks like if you did not grow up in a society that did that.

All you know is that I get this money object thing, the dollar, and I buy stuff. That’s kind of all we know. We’re just trying to be like, okay, yes, that’s the fish we’ve been in the money water. What does the world look like otherwise? Even just one percent different.”

The bee and borrowing

Will Ruddick:

“A bee was the Celtic word for these traditions. To call a bee meant to call your neighbors to come help you with something. There were sewing bees, quilting bees. Women would come together and quilt together. Maybe they would do it at someone’s house. She would be the host of it and they would have rotating hosts. The quilting bee is going to be at your place next week.

This whole concept of people having resources, having skills, willing to share those with each other, willing to talk with each other, and having turns where you’re borrowing those resources and that’s moving around. That’s a very simple way to think about this.

We work with universities where students are taking out student loans. The students can put into a marketplace the services they can offer. If they don’t pay back the student loan, they won’t graduate. But in the meantime there are these offers there. If the university can sell those services to local businesses or anyone who needs them, they can help pay off that student loan.

What’s happening is that you’ve benefited. You’ve borrowed from the community. There’s some way in which that debt can move through the network. It’s creating safety around borrowing. It’s all borrowing.

We can think about bees borrowing pollen from plants. We’re borrowing every breath we take. There’s a sense of it.”

Relaxing the financial system

Will Ruddick:

“If the dollar were to collapse tomorrow, it would be very dangerous for a lot of people. So if you go and try to attack the dollar or try to replace it, you’re dealing with a very reflexive organ. We’re in that organ right now. It’s a very jittery, reflexive, warlike organ that’s supposed to be protecting everything at the same time.

What we’re trying to do is get that organ to relax. We’re trying to say, look, let’s design a safety mechanism where everybody’s safe. What does safety really look like?

Right now, if a bank gives you a loan, is the bank safe from you defaulting on the loan? Maybe not. So it needs the protection of the government and the police to freeze your assets or arrest you if you don’t pay it back.

What if that bank instead could look at all the resources that you could offer and help you move those around the community in order to pay your debt back? What if it could help move those resources around in a very safe way?

Let’s make sure anyone holding anyone’s debts is helped to move those debts through the system. Let’s make sure anyone who’s looking for services gets guarantees for those services.

Let’s make sure people who have borrowed have ways to pay back in kind. That’s what a mycorrhizal fungi does. It’s looking through the system and helping resources move around. Let’s make sure everyone can relax a little bit. There’s abundance there.”

We are part of a social organ

Will Ruddick:

“We’re starting from an oasis. In gardens, you don’t start gardening in the desert. You start where there’s something already alive, and you grow from that. So it’s like, where’s the trust currently? And how do you connect and expand that out?

Alcoholics Anonymous groups, church groups, we work with all kinds of mosques, we work with LGBT groups who get together. Ideally there’s already some trust in that group. And then they’re starting very small in that group. What can you borrow from there? Maybe it’s five dollars worth of services. Maybe that’s your limit. You’re not going to borrow more than five dollars. And then they’re seeing if you pay back there, and they’re helping you to pay that back in kind by offering your own services into the group.

If you’re a bank and you’re lending stuff, the win-win for you is that Yulia wants a loan. Okay, we’re going to give her a five-thousand-dollar loan. We’re pretty sure she’s going to pay it back. But in the meantime we’re going to market all the services that you do, your trainings and your writing and everything. So you win because ideally it helps you pay back your loan fast. They win by that as well. And the public wins by that because there was a curation of your work. That’s a service that was done.

So there’s this organ. We’re part of that organ. It’s a social organ. The next book my partner and I are working on is called Social Soil. What is the soil? What is holding the space for that social organism to thrive, to breathe? What does that look like? What is a social breath? What is that borrowing? It’s like a metabolism.

Right now we’re stuck in the money system. But if whatever is holding your debt is enabling people to see that you’re valuable and helping to move that value, well, it’s doing a really beautiful service. It’s actually a really nice thing to do. It’s good for the bank, it’s good for you, and it’s good for everybody else.

I feel like my work is a lot of just doing the math, doing the video game, doing the book, showing examples, showing where it works well and stays strong, even with national currency, and also showing where it’s missing and how it can come back. What’s this regenerative element? How does it regenerate that social organ?

Because I think it’s there. It’s in us. It’s in every cell of us. It’s everywhere. I think it’s in nature as well. And it’s always trying to regenerate.”

About Will Ruddick:

I want to respect this introduction that Will shared, in response to my question on how he wants to be introduced:

Will: “Will Ruddick is some person that has done some things and continues to learn and breathe. Some things include raising a daughter, trying to be a good neighbor and to figure out how sharing works.”

Please, do explore Will’s work through:

The Grassroots Economics Institute
Play and spread the Social Soil Game

Grassroots Economics describes its work as supporting communities with community currencies, ecosystem restoration, and commitment pooling, and Social Soil is the game Will mentioned in the conversation.

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Beyond-the-visible Lab

Beyond the Visible Lab is a playful experiential session for accessing the knowing that thinking alone cannot afford.

In Beyond the Visible Lab, we explore what comes before thought: sensations, perceptions, feelings, images. This sensory information as the underwater part of the iceberg. Through engaging with it, we can access a richness of ideas beyond one peak.

Through guided practices at the level of breath, sensing, movement, and image, we play with perception. We bring what surfaces into awareness and then, through reflection, into the context of the questions, projects, or directions we are holding.

It is a space for exploring what is not yet visible, keeping curiosity alive, and intentional re-energizing. Relevant for impact founders, accelerators, and teams working with complexity and emergence.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

I’ve felt growing tension in engaging with self-development lately. Whether embarking on another course, or wishing I could be better at this and that. I was finding resistance creeping in where there had been enthusiasm and a “let’s do it” vibe.

And as the title says it, the cruelty of self-development has been revealing itself to me. Cruelty in that it had ruled me for as long as I can remember, impossible to satisfy.

“Do, be more and better” has been revealing itself as the sneaky and cruel core of self-development. But is that what my urge to change and transform has really been about? Or has something older and less familiar been captured by a familiar answer: improve yourself?

So hear me out as I do some untangling of that. This letter is another work-in-progress piece, and it would fill me with joy to hear how it lands and what your experience has been with self-development.

Let me start with a very fresh story. With some fairy undertones.

Being Swamp-ed

A few days ago I found myself in a spot in my local forest where I hadn’t been before. Not once in the eight years that I’ve been visiting it. I was lured to that spot by the shamelessly colorful outliers that, upon some research, turned out to be “chicken of the woods” mushrooms. After years of mushroom foraging, this was our first encounter - good to know you, chicken of the woods.

So, this is how I made my way to the other side of the canal I had walked along multiple times. Through abundant thorny blackberry bushes, ample deadwood and understory. It was something. That place, hidden just steps away from a big public path, and the otherworldly chicken of the woods - they got me high.

After more chicken of the woods, more blackberry bushes, and meandering, it hit me that I was there. Where I was supposed to be. Facing an expansive marshland area to my left, that just steps from me expressed itself as a swamp. Just look at that.

Do you see how many heroes must have perished there? The ones who didn’t bow to the power of the place and didn’t engage powerful allies to help them? All those logs sticking out, might they be the memories of those heroes?

As I was daydreaming in the land of perished heroes, I realized I was sitting on a fallen tree trunk. One that went all the way to the other side. In some spots barely surfacing over the unknown murky waters.

A wave of fear mixed with excitement flew over me. Can I balance my way to the other side? The unusualness of this idea was striking. Considering that for the last fifteen years or so, I would be arrested by disproportionate fear in places not gated from height or depth.

“For the wild one”, a persistent voice in me insisted. Refusing to get quiet. Overriding the pictures of me becoming one of those perished heroes. What kind of a log would I be?

Anyway, I made it to the other side, and back, as you can guess, since you are reading this. Wow. That simple act had my whole being buzzing with electricity. It felt like something in me, immobilized for many years, suddenly moved.

Almost immediately after that I got into quite a heated familiar discussion that this time ended in a different way for me. There wasn’t losing myself in anger, grief, and questions of legitimacy. I was able to stand up for something important I hadn’t been able to before.

And isn’t that a major self-development outcome? Sadly, this one had not been available to me despite years of self-development “work”. And now, just like that, in a flow of events which I was not initiating, a huge globe of my psychic ice shifted.

Before I share more about the how and why, let us turn to self-development. What is it exactly?

What is self-development about

Personal development or self-improvement consists of activities that develop a person’s capabilities and potential, enhance quality of life, and facilitate the realization of dreams and aspirations. Wikipedia.

I won’t tire you with a lot of definitions, which are out there. The Wikipedia one is fairly representative. Here are some things they all have in common, which you may recognise from your own experience.

∿ ∿ ∿

It is driven by self.

∿ ∿ ∿

It is a strictly human process. Even if other players are involved, the responsibility and agency rest with the one who develops self.

∿ ∿ ∿

Self-development is often referred to as self-improvement, which points to the underlying idea of a defect that needs to be fixed, or something primitive that needs to advance and grow in complexity.

∿ ∿ ∿

All of the declared goals are contained by human society - be it realizing your own “potential” or finding a way of relating to and navigating human-created structures.

∿ ∿ ∿

A strong feel of directedness and hardship is embedded in self-development. We expect to pick up new habits after persevering with them for 90 days. We force ourselves to feel gratitude because it’s good for us. We purposefully trick ourselves into overriding negative and inconvenient emotions.

∿ ∿ ∿

So, welcome to the gentle embrace of self-development as we, moderns, have come to see it nowadays: a process of vigorously applying various (chemical?) solutions to ourselves in the hope of giving ourselves a cuter, less primitive, more attractive and convenient shape and look.

I also got curious about the etymology of self-development. As the history of language can be truly revealing in how our human worlds have shifted.

The word “develop” comes from Old French desveloper, desvoleper, desvoloper “unwrap, unfurl, unveil; reveal the meaning of, explain”. - Etymonline

Now, as we did with the modern definition of self-development, let’s look at this older one. What does the earlier “development“ afford?

∿ ∿ ∿

You are assisting something in becoming, and the agency is distributed.

∿ ∿ ∿

That something is granted legitimacy as whole and good enough.

∿ ∿ ∿

The process is more about tending conditions than directly acting on something.

∿ ∿ ∿

One can sense the presence of mystery in that process. What’s being revealed can only be known when it’s revealed.

∿ ∿ ∿

The vibe of something unfurling, like with a flower, is that it is a beautiful non-linear process which cannot be forced.

∿ ∿ ∿

And it was the earlier kind of develop, the desveloper of unfurling and unfolding, that I experienced in the forest. I see it - there was something in me that had been wanting to express. Waiting for the allies and conditions through which it could reveal itself. And there they were: the chicken of the woods and the marsh. Who kindly and firmly assisted me in an unfolding.

How did the unfurling, unwrapping and unfolding get lost? Here is how Etymonline describes the shift in meaning:

The modern uses are figurative and emerged in English 18c. and after: Transitive meaning “unfold more fully, bring out the potential in” is by 1750; intransitive sense of “come gradually into existence or operation” is by 1793; that of “advance from one stage to another toward a finished state” is by 1843.

The photographic sense “induce the chemical changes necessary to cause a latent picture or image to become visible” is from 1845; the real estate sense of “convert land to practical or profitable use” is by 1865. Related: Developed; developing. Developing as an adjective in reference to poor or primitive countries or nations that are advancing in economic, industrial, and social conditions is by 1960.

So, what we know as “develop” has come a long way from unfolding and unveiling and got shapeshifted into “inducing chemical changes that cause a latent picture to become visible”.

I am going to make a hypothesis now: that this shift, a giant one at that, has been largely facilitated by the emergence of modern technology. Which made it possible to “induce chemical changes” as a proxy for bending the world by our will. Which from technology extended to land, countries, and humans.

From bending the will of the world we got to bending our own will, haven’t we?

I see this shift in the nature of develop as one ingredient of cruelty. Which is about bringing the world of technology with its logic onto ourselves. Onto the living world. Which, in more ways than we can be aware of, holds us in the grip of imitating and competing with the film that becomes a visible beautiful photograph when chemicals are applied. If only we were capable of the same.

But there is something else, another ingredient. That has to do with the nature of the urge self-development answers.

The nature of the urge

What is that urge that many of us have been told to satisfy through self-development? Where does it belong? Where might it be calling us?

Let us think about that from a place of curiosity, like we are not of this time and have never heard about the concept of self-improvement before.

We humans, in some shape, have been on this planet for around two million years. In that we were actually newcomers as anthropologist Paul Shepard refers to us. Most of the animals were already there, the plants had a long history behind them. As a species, one can say we were kind of babies, who in their becoming were assisted by others: animals and plants that made us human, as Paul Shepard argues. The learning was very hands-on, and happened through intimate participation in the lives of others - imitating, observing, touching, smelling, eating and being eaten.

From yet a different angle we were another creative experiment of the earth, a human animal. Which had continuity to it, en-volving from what had been. To put that in a precarious technological language, we were “assembled” from different solutions and shapes - those of plants, animals, fungi. The bronchial TREE, fractal shapes, voice box from birds, water making up 99 percent of us by molecule count. And for God’s sake, our bones are made from stardust. Which is scientifically confirmed and poetic at the same time.

What does that make us? Would you agree that we are children of the Earth? Not less, and who knows, perhaps even more, than children of our human mothers?

We have distanced ourselves from these roots. Yes. Many of us don’t know what it means to inhabit the human animal in us, the one that was of this living world as much as a wolf and an oak tree are of it. Yet, it doesn’t mean the connection was severed. It is there to unfold. Expressed as this urge to change and transform.

So with Paul Shepard, ecopsychology, and deep ecology at my side, I am going to say that the urge is coming from our more ancient belonging. The urge to be of the Earth, and of the older family. Somewhere close to what Theodore Roszak called the ecological unconscious.

Coming back to Paul Shepard’s suggestion that it’s others - animals and plants - that made us human, they then would be the ones that keep us human. And their assistance is still key, and irreplaceable in our human unfolding and unveiling and unfurling. In becoming what our other Mother intended us toward.

So, it’s ironic and also cruel, how we are invited to answer that call through self-development.

“You want some spring water? Here is XXtra Flamin’ Hot bag of Cheetos for you.”

“Hey, you earthly-cosmic bundle. We hold you responsible for proving to us that you are optimized enough to fit our social and financial structures.”

Isn’t that a quest that has many of us perish? Just as the log-heros in that marsh.

Escape

To be true to the name of this letter I want to speak to escaping the cruelty, which I myself am still in the process of.

First, a disclosure. I am not calling for self-development to be abandoned. We are children of this time as well and have lots to learn from other humans, skills to develop, and goals in our demanding waking lives to accomplish.

What I am saying is, there are lots of ways to learn, transform, and live a human life that reflect the pluriverse parts we carry in us. Which to me hadn’t been obvious for a long painful time. And getting a felt sense and realness of that already allowed me to sigh it out. “I am not that weird one, an outcast that can not seem to get it right.“ I might just be more sensitive to older human memories.

Getting a felt sense came through various practices and experiments. Which I would very roughly divide into direct engagement with more than human and practicing the language through which that learning from the other seeps through us.

Direct engagement to me in many ways about changing a perceptual stance with “nature“ around us that’s always there. The tree has been there, at the doorstep all along, as well as the crow ingeniously foraging at the local supermarket square. As well as the wind and the clouds. It’s about noticing them with genuine curiosity and openness to their agency. Which will one day get you guided by your chicken of the woods.

I’ve shared some direct practices here before:

• The Art of Messy Walks - on turning your walks into wonder for wander

• Breathing with Trees - a 10 minute guided breathing practice

• Connecting to Trees - ways of engaging with trees

• Letting the Mind Out of the Box - a sit spot routine

The core of learning the language is really well expressed by what Heidegger refers to as poetic attunement. It really landed for me recently introduced by Iain Kerr of the Worldmakers community.

In his essay The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger talks about a way of engaging with life that becomes natural with the development, here is that word again, of modern technology. It makes us see the world as standing reserve, waiting to be used by us. It’s how, according to him, we come to see the river as there to provide something to us. Be it water, free swimming opportunity, or beauty. To me it’s how we have arrived at self-development.

As a counter-stance to that, Heidegger points toward poetry and art. As a way of being with the world where things are allowed to reveal themselves, rather than being expected to be useful. So, he is suggesting art and poetry as a path to revealing, unfurling, unfolding that I mentioned before. Changing our consciousness stance kind of. Reaching those deeper wilder parts of ourselves through art and poetry and also becoming better at discerning the code as the language spoken to us by the more-than human.

Reading, listening to, writing poetry has been a great joy lately. How did I live without it for so long? I was also called to pick up Russian folk singing. And wow. It has been so rich for learning about and connecting to my roots and the land and those innocent ways of being.

Let me finish with an example of a poem that emerged in response to Le Musée des Erreurs / Museum of Mistakes, which we recently created in the Game of Life Community as a collection of images capturing life’s “mistakes”.

I was going forward
For isn’t that what life was asking of me?
My jaws carrying the weight of my travels
up to deep time.
Until I was stopped by a sign,
unresponsive to my urgent questions.
A snake came to lie by my feet,
telling spiralling stories
of worlds in and through me.
Where was I going?
To this very moment, perhaps.

∿ ∿ ∿

And that’s it for today. My personal escape from cruelty of self-development has picked up some momentum and grew more body through sharing it with you today. And I want to acknowledge my co-creators - the chicken of the woods, the marsh and the perished log-heroes. They are behind this writing. And all of writing here actually.

Would be a joy and a pleasure to hear from you.

Thank you for being here.

In love,

Yulya

∿ ∿ ∿

P.S. I’m refining two participatory formats (below) and looking for communities, teams, or organizations who might want to pilot them with me. If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Beyond-the-visible Lab

For groups working with complexity, early ideas, or questions that are not yet clear.

Beyond-the-visible Lab is a playful experiential session for teams, communities, and organizations that need to think and sense beyond their usual frames.

We work with perception, sensing, movement, and imagination. An abstract question or idea becomes something the group can explore through felt experience, before it finds its expression through words.

The session helps people notice assumptions, open new angles, and become more attentive to what is emerging before it is fully visible.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Iain Kerr of the Worldmakers community that I mention regularly quoted something that gave another angle to this slugs-and-me-entanglement:

“We have common interests, but not the same.” — Isabelle Stengers

Oh, yes. We both love tender greens and flowers. Basil and calendula hold a special place in our hearts.

Me, I want to tend them longer. To stare, smell, and devour some of them later - adding them to salads and teas and tinctures.

Slugs, they are of the “seize the moment” philosophy. They have me wake up to thoroughly gnawed bare stems. Stirs things up for me big time.

There is no straightforward way of making this relationship go my way. And I have no solution to share with you. And through that it becomes an interesting space. Slugs are in no rush for a resolution, so we are giving each other the time and space to flow with it. How often do we get that?

On this philosophical note, I’m excited to introduce this week’s Breath of Life conversation with - a beautiful mind-shifting invitation on engaging with our bodies. Or rather on engaging with ourselves as bodies.

Isn’t it a paradox that we go through life as bodies — bodying, one might say and yet have such a difficult relationship with our bodies.

Even the phrase “having a relationship with the body” is telling of the conflict. It implies there is me, and there is this body. Mind and body. Brain and body. Soul and body. Spirit and body.

I see how division can be helpful, because we might need to see the parts before we can sense the whole. Yet wouldn’t it be great to speak to the whole of us? To the place where all those parts mix, merge and dissolve, and we sense the body as an integrated experience of being alive. I love how Beverley puts it.

And it’s what this conversation is about. At the level of ideas, but even more importantly at the level of practices, that can get us closer to this evasive sense of wholeness. Wholeness as individuated beings. Wholeness as being of and belonging with the bigger world. With human communities, places, landscapes and all the way to the cosmos. And maybe Life herself.

I believe this sense starts in us as bodies. And love how Beverley approaches it through listening, giving voice, taking perspectives of body parts, systems and tissues. Through moving, sensing, seeing and connecting to universal patterns.

What happens if we give voice and hear the stories of fat, bones, lymph, breath? If we attune to their unique ways of caring for us and holding our stories? Some stories of protection - like that of fat. Some of cosmic connection and deep time like the one of bones. Kind of parts work (of Internal Family Systems) at the body level.

You will find links to some practical guides by Beverley below that make these concepts accessible for practice. The one I personally have spent quite some time with is the fat tissue that as Beverley shares often stores our experience of being an exile.

And isn’t that story - of being outside, not seen, not legitimized in our experiences one of the biggest drivers of our being in this world? What if we were to speak to exile stories of us where your body is very likely to store them…

Here are some quotes that have stayed with me.

Body as something I am

Beverley:

“What is the body? That could take an eternity to unpack. To unravel that takes me back into philosophy as well as anatomy. I can say what the body is in terms of physical structures. My felt presence in the world has a body shape most of the time.

But this question rattled me quite a lot when I first entered things like yoga practice and somatic practices. What is this thing that I’m moving around? And I came to realize that it wasn’t something I actually had. It was more something I was.

When I began to approach this concept of a mind-body or a body-mind, that seemed to make a lot more sense to me, because I couldn’t separate my experience of the body from the body itself. My body is an integrated experience of being alive.

Body being objectified, body being something to be controlled, something to perfect, to measure, to track, to change. Body being always perhaps imperfect in so many different ways — that feels like a sad place to be, really, because it’s really quite miraculous.

To objectify and measure it, and always be feeling like it’s almost an adversary in life, feels like the wrong perspective to take. There’s something about reclaiming this body, getting to know it, and making it an ally rather than an adversary.”

Listening into the whisper of fat

Beverley:

“For a long time, fat hasn’t had its own voice. Very often something else is speaking for fat, and it’s the silent tissue. Linda Hartley once called it an exile tissue. It’s a tissue that we know is there, but we don’t really want to give it attention. So it’s kind of exiled in our embodiment processes, for many, not for all.

When we can turn our attention to it, or open our ears to it — if visually turning attention as a metaphor feels too much — just listening into the whisper of fat is going to be a step forward into integrating that tissue a little bit more completely.

What we might find is that fat is the repository for stories about our own feelings of being exiled or marginalized or unseen or unheard. If we talk about somatic psychology — where are our stories? Are there certain stories in different tissues? Fat, I think, can be the place where, when we start to examine it through movement, journaling, or bodywork, we might tap into stories that are more shadowy, maybe more challenging.

In exploring fat, we just go gently and kindly with ourselves. For me, it was a very tender journey. I needed to take little steps rather than run at it and go, yes, I’m going to embody my fat. It was much more about, okay, let’s just learn about it, get to know it.”

Made of stardust

Beverley:

“Coming to bones, for example, it’s not a poetic idea that they’re made of stardust. When we hear bones are made of stardust, it sounds poetic, which it is — it’s beautiful — but it’s actually very factual as well.

There’s something about this integrated experience of being alive that connects me to the deep past, the deep human past, the ancestral past, but also the cosmological past. Which is completely mind-blowing, that parts of my body have been around for millennia. What does that say about anti-aging?

Bones in particular connect us to deep time, to the beginning of time, if there is such a thing as the beginning of time. There was a starting point way, way back when, and that’s here right now as we’re talking. Deep time is right here, right now. We do embody stardust. I love the poetry of that, but I love the science of that too. I think they coexist beautifully.”

Purposeful lymph

Beverley:

Once I found my way into the lymph system, I found a different kind of power. There’s a real purposefulness in lymph. If I want to get things done, I’m less likely to think about my muscles and fat. I’m more likely to think, where’s my lymph? Because lymph is very directional, very focused, and it has very specific purposes.

One of the striking things about lymph and its vascular network is that it’s an open-ended network of vessels, and they run alongside the blood vessel system, which is a closed-loop system. There’s something really interesting when you start to embody the sense of the outward reach of the vessels that simultaneously has an inward flow of fluid.

So there’s this bi-directional quality. If you imagine putting on a glove, you push your hand into the glove, but pull the glove up at the same time. There’s an outward reach as you put the glove on, but you’re pulling the fabric of the glove inward. So there’s an outward-inward flow happening.

If you find that in your body, it creates this interesting friction, almost like a rubbing, but it’s a really purposeful dynamic. It’s very supportive, very linear, a got-a-job-to-do kind of feeling.”

Special kind of grounding

Beverley:

“If you’re able to walk, just walking and knowing that you’re walking on layers of the earth, and connecting through layers of the earth, is really nice. When we speak about grounding, it feels like grounding onto the earth. But if I realize that actually I’m grounding into the earth, then I have roots that go about 6,000 kilometres down to the centre of the earth.

There’s something more enriching for me if I start to think that I’m not on the surface, but walking through or on the layers. I find something really nourishing about going beyond the surface of the earth.

And the other practice that connects us in other ways is, if you’ve got a familiar way of walking through the town or through the park, knowing who walked there before you, and who walked before them, and going back in time. We’ve got the echoes of those footprints and footsteps, and we’re adding to that resonance with our own pathways.

There are lots of everyday ways that we can start to have these inquiries, and they’re just as enriching as being in the studio and doing specific practices.”

About Beverley Nolan

has spent more than 35 years exploring the conversation between body, mind, and self — first through yoga, then deepening into experiential anatomy, developmental movement, and Authentic Movement.

Her workshops and courses are for yoga teachers wanting to bring more nuance to their work, somatic coaches and therapists exploring embodied approaches, and curious practitioners reconnecting with their own embodied wisdom. She creates space to slow down, pay attention, and find new ways to think, feel, and move through the body.

She is also the author of Bodyscapes, forthcoming from North Atlantic Books in autumn 2026 — an experiential journey through ten body terrains for somatic practitioners, movement teachers, and anyone seeking a deeper relationship with their own anatomy. The book will come with an online companion library of video practices, audio explorations, and curated resources, organized chapter by chapter.

Beverley also writes on Substack, where she explores themes of embodiment and somatic practice, with a free monthly edition and follow-up resources for paid subscribers. Scroll down for the links we mention in the episode.

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Imagination Lab

For groups working with complexity, early ideas, or questions that are not yet clear

Imagination Lab is a playful experiential session for teams, communities, and organizations that need to think beyond their usual frames.

We work with perception, sensing, movement, and imagination. An abstract question or idea becomes something the group can explore through felt experience, before it finds its expression through words.

The session helps people notice assumptions, open new angles, and become more attentive to what is emerging before it is fully formed.

Living World Lab

For groups working with ecological learning and nature connection

Living World Lab is a guided experiential session for organizations, educators, communities, and cultural spaces that want people to relate to the living world in a more direct and felt way.

We work with breath, sensing, imagination, and the body to explore our connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes.

The session creates a direct experience of connection with the living world — something many people understand intellectually and rarely get to practice.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Links from the episode

• Beverley’s Website

• Substack — Field Notes from the Body

• Field Notes — Fat: The Unsung Sister to Your Fascia

• Companion Notes — Fat: The Unsung Tissue

• Field Notes — Deep Time: Bones, Mountains and Memories

• Companion Notes — The Embodiment of Exploding Stars

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Hmm… Better, faster… I caught myself engaging with the garden the way I had been with myself for as long as I can remember. As if picking up on something meaningful emerging in me, a snail appeared on my path. Being perfectly content with itself and its speed. Not in the least moved by agitation snails bring up in us gardeners.

The encounter gave me a long enough pause to return to last spring, to an experience that I think about as apprenticeship by the garden and plants.

Apprenticeship because looking back it feels like I was recruited into a learning experience that I didn’t plan myself. Neither the initiative nor the design came from me. I was open and maybe wise enough to sense and accept the invitation. And to surrender along the way. What followed was weird, transformative, and intense. Intense to the degree that I didn’t want any more of it by August. And that was still the case by the time of this encounter.

The more I stayed with the encounter and the trip to the nursery where most of the plants that captured my attention were wildlings that were now (slowly) making a life for themselves in my garden, the more it felt like it was time to get back.

Come, we’ll be easy on you this time. Or maybe you be easy on you this time? The snail was saying.

So taking this space to recount some of my gardening apprenticeship learnings from last year and reflect on how that cross-species learning format worked me into changes that I didn’t see coming.

First, just to give you some background, I am a village girl. Coming from the land. Raised in a village 200 km southeast of Moscow. Which, when I was growing up, meant — you garden to grow your own food.

You grow your own food so you’ve got something on the table when you are hungry. And in that it wasn’t in the least romantic. Or recreational. It was a necessity, and a survival activity. Which, on a warm May day, would mean you wake up with sunrise and for 6-8 hours you would be digging dirt and putting potatoes in. And attending to a few family plots of a quarter of an acre would continue till early September, when it would culminate in digging loads of potatoes out.

As that kind of a land girl, I wanted out of it. I wanted my encounter with the land to happen at a distance. No more waking at sunrise to dig, and weed, and drown potato-devouring Colorado beetles in kerosene. I upheld that distance for over thirty years. Taking on the identity of someone in whose presence nothing grows, not even aloe vera, that gets its water literary from thin air.

And it’s against that background that I was apprenticed by my small Berlin garden and its “would-be” inhabitants last year.

I started by scouring Berlin and collecting some used pots and flower beds and in March I planted nine types of herbs in three flower beds from parsley and dill to lavender.

They would then go outside to become beautiful blooming herbs, some I would eat, some drink and some wonder at. And that was pretty much the description of my project. My big and very concise plan.

What happened was, I was swept by a compulsive need to be planting, watering, observing, digging, planting again, and watering. I would find myself in the garden at midnight, and then the first thing in the morning. And then on Saturday and Sunday almost from dawn to dusk.

As some plants would grow and then die, get devoured by slugs, or an unexplainable malaise I would find myself going through an emotional rollercoaster. By mid July I wished winter was there. By August I disengaged. By March of this year I didn’t know if I was willing to stay a gardener. My kids were doing some gardening errands. And then the garden nursery came and the snail. And now you have the context.

Here are some learnings from that garden mania that feel especially meaningful.

Faster, bigger, better

Seems so obvious looking back how in many ways my gardening obsession was about the ubiquitous urge to improve. Improve the garden? Or through the garden continue the never-ending self improvement project. It had to be both.

This is not to say self-improvement is bad. I think change and transformation is the nature of life, including human life. But what I would like to be more discerning of is the why behind my incessant improvement urge.

Am I treating myself as a project that refuses to turn out as well as I expect it to? And looking for ways to convince myself how I can be worthy. “Look, maybe I suck at project management, but I can create an oasis in a couple of months.”

It was a big theme looking back. Still is. It’s through becoming aware of this urge that this reflection came about. And one of the intentions for this gardening season is to keep it in awareness. And to see what this visibility and kindness does to it.

Seeing and realness

The three flower beds in my living room by the window wall turned out to be a magnet. The first place I would go upon waking to find …nothing. Nothing with an intoxicatingly strong vibe of something. That I am not seeing yet.

I think it’s that experience that highlighted for me just how much my perception of the world was guided by my vision and eyes. And in that not seeing something, while at the same time seeing — as in sensing — it felt like a wonder.

It started me off on my inquiry of vision as the default sense of sense-making, which I’ve been experimenting with since.

My life-assisting essence

Those seeds, some of them, most of them — did accept my invitation and started showing up as sprouts. That moment, possibly mundane for lots of gardeners, reached deep into me.

From someone in whose presence no plants would grow, I was becoming someone who is perfectly able to assist new life in its unfolding. Unfolding of parsley and dill, I know. Yet, that felt like an initiation. Into the life-supporting, generative part of me:

“I am the one on the side of life, assisting it in its becoming.”

It turned out not to be an easy thing to hold, that sensitivity to assisting and stewarding versus not. Because life in a city, with a family rooted in “normal” is full of invitations, and even requirements of consuming, travelling, and decision-making, which all of a sudden have this “doesn’t feel right” vibe to them. This one is big, maybe a topic for another reflection.

How far does my agency go

Did I have some surprises coming my way in how I saw my agency. I saw myself as a gardener. Assisting life, and by all measures having more agency or the main agency to shape it the way I saw it. Right?

How many of the herbs that I planted in those beds made it in the open as grown-up plants? Lots of lavender, some thyme and a bush of oregano. Which went against all my expectations.

“Of course, parsley and dill are no-brainers, and I better really take care of the lavender that so many YouTube videos share a multitude of tips and hacks for.”

The “me-was-not-the-one-making-decisions-here“ feeling is even stronger this year as most of what I see - which plants and where have matured. Was I really involved? it makes me wonder.

At that time living and sensing the interconnectedness was big in my life, but it hadn’t yet made its way into the realm of: this is true in that I can feel it in my bones. And it’s that feeling that seeped into me through all those adventures and surprises.

True nature of mistakes

The whole process as I see it now was about making tons of mistakes. And although for all intents and purposes I was approaching it as experiments, it didn’t feel very good when things didn’t go my way.

∿ ∿ ∿

“I am going to plant this here because it feels like a good place” — well, it’s not a fit by any means and no one cares that you have planted everything you could lay your hands on under the cherry tree. They don’t like it there.

∿ ∿ ∿

“This is going to be my flower bed for herbs and flowers that I like.” — well, you are not the only one liking them. Slugs are very familiar with this area and share your love for basil and calendula, and parsley, and coriander.

∿ ∿ ∿

“These sunflower seeds that have been lying there for a year — let me add them to the soil as organic material.” Sunflower seeds a few weeks later from all over the garden: “We are not organic material, we are going to make a beautiful life here. And so you know we’ll make your life beautiful.”

There was lots more. I was worked by something and someone. I was put into experiences that created very embodied knowing for things that I had been struggling with for as long as I can remember.

What it takes for something to grow — for myself as a human, for projects that I have a history of rushing and dropping. What is efficient? Who is the boss? How much do I know?

And who am I as a human???

What made the learning possible

It feels like a learning experience like no other. And I’ve been curious to distill some things that made it possible. After all, I live in a neighbourhood where everyone has a garden yet, from what I know about my neighbors, their experiences are nothing like mine. And my mom, my dad, they’ve stayed in and with their gardens. Having no problem whatsoever growing parsley where they want it. That agency of parsley and co-creating thing — they are not buying it for the most part.

∿ ∿ ∿

It was an experiment that my life and menu didn’t depend on. And there was my personal nature of not following rules, which is my default. So I was almost bound to an ocean of mistakes, which in this setting didn’t come with high stakes.

∿ ∿ ∿

I came into that experience with curiosity about agency — mine, and the world’s. So, I held as possible the agency of other beings, even though at that point my inner and outer life and worlds were not built on recognition of diverse agency, even more so in a literal sense, of plants and my garden.

∿ ∿ ∿

Somewhere in the process surrender to this experiment became the natural thing to do. After so many things going “wrong” what else could happen? I was also getting tired of initiating, and making things like growing parsley succeed through more trials, and letting go felt like the thing to do.

Those settings, it seemed, were required to step into the apprenticeship and start accepting its unique learnings that changed my idea about life, change, and myself. Fast, weird and non-linear Nothing like the many human learning experiences I’ve been through.

Learning through repetition of life cycles

In one of the recent Breath of Life podcast interviews, on flowers and experiencing them in a relationship, said something that has stayed with me.

“Our own life cycle might be 80 years, but with flowers we get to experience renewal every single year. What a gift it is to witness that over and over again.”

Yes, what a gift. But also, how much richness is there for our learning. With plants and beings who have a shorter life cycle than we do, we get to witness and experience various life stages over and over again. Until we get it.

More human through non-human

As I have been mentioning in the last few essays, we humans have been living in a sensorial deficit. A deficit of otherness, as in other species, beings, and landscapes being perceived as alive with agency, and capable of working us.

This has contracted our world to the human one, where learning happens almost exclusively within the human sphere. Humans passing knowledge along. Humans aiding each other in transformation and change. Humans facilitating human development.

Yet, it was not like that for most of our human history. We learned from otherness. And this is what the apprenticeship has been for me — learning by touching otherness. “This is different from me, and through that it allows me to become more aware of myself as an individual and a human.”

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities.

Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate Earth. Our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese.

To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity and to rob our minds of their coherence.

We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human.

— David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

Transgressing the world we are of

Change is hard because we think about ourselves and the options we have through the logic of the world we inhabit. Which makes sense. “I can’t quit the job because I will have no income to pay the rent and to eat.” It’s how a lot of us find ourselves living by the rules of the Western world we no longer fully support or believe in. But are tied to in so many ways.

As Iain Kerr describes in the context of the Worldmakers:

“A world is not just a worldview in our heads. It is an apparatus of histories, places, infrastructures, habits, practices, and ways of sensing, feeling, knowing, and doing that hold reality together in a particular way. We are not outside of it looking in. We are of it. Entangled before we are individual.”

How exactly are we entangled and tied to it? What are the many things we are taking for granted that we are not even aware of? And what other ways and worlds are possible and, in fact, may be within the reach of our senses and imagination?

All of that is difficult to fathom because being of a world feels like being of water to fish. You have to get out to grasp what water is. One way of getting out of the water is studying and experiencing cultures and traditions that have preserved their differences, like Indigenous cultures.

Another one, which I believe is complementary and has to happen on top of experiencing other human worlds, is this type of apprenticeship by the more-than-human. The many invisible rules and lenses that hold together the world we want to transgress start becoming visible. Through which other ways of being, doing emerge.

In that sense, the apprenticeship made visible to me some of the walls and the ceiling that had been there all along.

I’ll finish here. If you are reading this on Sunday, I am winking at you from the garden. I didn’t plant any herbs from seeds this time. And it took until a couple of weeks ago to renew my commitment to active engagement. Because last season felt like several lives that I got to live through the many coming and going inhabitants of the garden. Weird, I know. But I am grateful to be back. To be seen and greeted. To still be pulled and pushed, but this time to respond with more grace and less impulse. We are in for some good times and more shared lives.

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Sense-making Lab

For people and groups exploring how to make sense in more emergent, non-linear ways. We playfully engage with sensing, feeling, and imagination to transmute abstract concepts into felt experiences and become more attuned to what is new or not yet fully formed.

Living World Lab

For those wanting to deepen felt connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes. These sessions experiment with sensory and empathetic capacities, inspired by the idea: if you want to save the forest, be the forest.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

In this episode, I’m talking to Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca of Worldmakers, a community devoted to creativity that I’ve been part of for about a year now. The time spent learning about Iain’s and Jason’s work, and having conversations with other WorldMakers, has changed me in profound ways.

Their work has shifted how I make sense of and engage with creativity.

When you think of creativity, I wonder what comes to mind? Do you see yourself as a creative person? How do you access inspiration or what some call the Muse? Where does creativity live?

And in whatever ideas or answers come to you, I wonder if there is a thread of creativity being a human activity, creativity originating in our minds, creativity as a sign of our human ingenuity.

It’s how I had seen creativity for most of my life. Something unique to humans. In adults, a special talent, quite a rare one. So we better appreciate the creative genius and reward it in major ways.

Which sounds rather mundane. Far from something that makes or breaks worlds. Yet, is it? Because one could say that human civilization is built on what it sees as uniquely human creative powers. Our imagination, that makes corporations, money, and stocks real to us.

Then our understanding of and agreements on creativity become quite meaningful.

When we see creativity as a unique process of human ingenuity, it easily translates into the world of individual ownership and intellectual property by virtue of one’s genius. Something that can be protected, scaled, monetized. The bigger world naturally becomes the backdrop that we humans creatively transform. A resource or at best, inspiration.

But what if creativity is something else entirely? Which is what this conversation is about.

What Iain and Jason have been showing through over three decades of research and practice is that creativity is not unique to humans, and doesn’t live in our heads or minds. It is rather a process of life itself that takes shape from within relationships and ecologies that it cannot be separated from.

“Our work is organized around two questions:

What is creativity?
And how do you innovate?

For over three decades, these questions have driven research, workshops, and experiments across contexts as varied as the high Arctic and urban centers, academia and product design, ecology and organizational systems.

What that sustained inquiry has surfaced is that creativity is an emergent worldly process — emerging from the middle of doing, from the relationships between processes, agents, tools, materials, and environments. It is complex, rich, surprising, and always more-than-human.” – Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca

Engaging with creativity through the lens of an emergent worldly process didn’t only change my creative process, it changed the way I engage with life. If I am in the midst of a creative process that spans species, elements, and includes technology, and such mundane things as chairs, a lot of weight drops off my shoulders, the weight we carry as individual responsibility. And at the same time, so many opportunities to cooperate and see my agency in multiple ongoing relationships show up.

Would love to hear how it lands for you.

And as usual here are some quotes to give you a sense of what’s to come:

What Is Creativity

Iain Kerr

“I think the really big difference is that creativity is everywhere and ongoing. Creativity isn’t a thing that’s in your head, but it’s a quality of reality. It’s that everything moves into newness, that the new is emerging everywhere.

From the Big Bang to the evolution of species to plate tectonics to plants growing to the political ramifications of today — it’s all ongoing, it’s all creative. And we as humans aren’t the engine of creativity, or the sole engine, but we join these ongoing processes and we experiment within them.

It’s an ecological thing, which is to say it’s because of processes and how they relate to each other that things come about.

What’s really important about this is that in the West we have skewed into this highly human-centered worldview and a highly individualistic one. We’ve put creativity inside the head as a thing that some people possess — highly creative people, geniuses.

So it becomes an individual quality of humans. And in doing that, I think the radical thing is we’ve divorced ourselves from reality, from the world, from collaboration, from engagement, from attunement.

We’ve also made it entirely subjective, something I want to share that only I have. This possessive idea of creativity.

And I think you can see the consequences of that. A human-centric, possessive model has had great consequences for how we approach others, environments, economies.

There’s a need to move to a much more ecological, relational, emergent, outside-of-us-centered approach to changemaking in general.”

Surrender and not knowing

Iain Kerr

“I think the concept of surrender is critical, that you’re letting go deliberately of what you believe should happen, what you believe you are.

For us, we’re really interested in developing that as a practice, where you experimentally look at the context of what you’re interested in and think of what are its underlying logics, what part of that could we block, which is to say, let go of, and then what could we follow? What unintended possibilities could we follow?

And to put a type of loose rigor to that, so there’s a focus that then you trust that as a process and allow through iteration, repetition.

You don’t know how many times you have to keep doing it, this kind of blocking, following, attending, attuning. But it’s trusting and surrendering that things will emerge. You don’t know what they are.

But in a process, you can attune to the new and the odd. And you can learn ways to sense them that often show up as the ways you would push things away. Like, that’s not right. That’s disgusting. That’s weird. That makes no sense.

Those are often cues that something new is emerging and that there’s a reason to experimentally surrender to them. For the sake of this, let’s see what happens if.”

How tools shape us

Iain Kerr

“If you reduce creativity to your head, you become like a little god who imagines that the meaning of everything’s coming from you. And it’s all found inside yourself.

And so you never attune to the fact that your environment, your habits, your practices, your tools are co-shaping you profoundly and in some type of loop that has no real beginning or end.

The chair, that’s such a great example of that, where if a chair is just about supporting your body so you don’t have to use your muscles as much to do something, then it could be pretty much anything. You could just lean against a rock, you could be sunk inside mud, you could be hanging from a tree, any number of things. But why do we come to a chair? And then what does it do?

The chair, first of all, it makes you an individual. If you think of, say, a bench or even sitting on the ground, the chair says, I should be alone and I should be in control of this thing, this little spot.

The second thing it really does is that the chair helps remove your body. So you become more of a mind. It’s very supportive of your whole skeletal system such that your hands just need to move a little bit, say for writing or typing or drawing.

And the chair is also separating you from your environment. It raises you off and it makes these subtle value judgments: individual versus connected, separate versus joined, disembodied versus embodied.

And then it loops into things like the clothes we wear. You wear clothes that now make it hard to even cross your legs, to sit on the floor well, to get up.

When we think about things like: we’re so removed from the environment, we’re so disembodied, we’re so individualistic, those concepts are not just ideological, floating in space, they’re continuously co-produced by our environment. Our tools are shaping us.”

Affordances of technology

Jason Frasca

“The easy way to describe it to others is flight. We always use the example: where is flight? If you cut open the wing, you will not find flight.

So where is flight?

Flight is in the mountains and in the lunar cycles and in the waves and in the wind and in the thermals. It’s in the bones of the bird and it’s in the feathers and many other elements of the assemblage that make flight possible.

It’s the kind of creating the potentialities of possibility. Flight is emerging from those potentials where the feather evolves.

And I think that connects to how our experience is being mediated by the screens and how we feel. Some of us were feeling quite disconnected. It was hard to sense each other’s perspectives and points of view and how we’re disembodied from one another through this medium in which we are conversing and collaborating.

And at the same time, without it, this conversation would never be possible. This tool of internet, which is strong enough to support video from New Jersey to Berlin in this moment, allows us to be sitting at different times of our day, coming together.

It affords us so much more than what we’re losing, perhaps, through that disembodied relationship that we’re experiencing together in this moment.

All of these technologies are all a part of our everyday lives. Humans have always been tool users. Everything was once a technology. Even the chair was once the leading edge, newness.

We take it for granted. It’s funny how it’s no longer a technology when it becomes ubiquitous. It’s only technology as it’s in its newer stage. Is a knife not technology? Or a hammer? Or a stone even? Our language, our letters, punctuation.

The labels that we assign, the judgment that we apply — if we can remove the labels, refrain from applying judgment, good or bad, and sit with possibility, that opens up that emerging creativity.”

Blocking as a creative practice

Iain Kerr

“The simplest really beautiful practice that relates to sense-making and attuning is just the idea of blocking.

In your daily life, look at some underlying things you do all the time and just as an experiment say: I’m not going to do them.

They shouldn’t be very big things, but maybe how you cook a meal. Maybe there’s some part you’re going to block. Let’s not use heat. How would I make pasta without heat?

Or maybe you block how you get to work. Something that forces you to reconfigure and make a new assemblage and attune to it and sense it.

Don’t think of it as good or bad, but follow what’s emerging now. What happens now? And see how your senses change, where they become alive. You’re feeling your way into the new.

At first it might feel frustrating or annoying, but then other things will emerge. Then maybe you add another blockage. And then you keep pushing into what’s interesting, new, or odd.

Don’t treat it as: I’m going to do this for a week and then I’ll go back to normal. Imagine that this could lead you on a type of journey. The useful word here is adventure. The path is made in the walking.

You block something, it leads you somewhere, then you do the next thing and it leads you somewhere else. It’s not one-and-done. It’s to push yourself into becoming different, where you don’t know what that is.”

Thank you for being here,

In love, Yulya

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Sensemaking Lab

For people and groups exploring how to make sense in more emergent, non-linear ways. We playfully engage with sensing, feeling, and imagination to transmute abstract concepts into felt experiences and become more attuned to what is new or not yet fully formed.

Living World Lab

For those wanting to deepen felt connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes. These sessions experiment with sensory and empathetic capacities, inspired by the idea: if you want to save the forest, be the forest.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Subscribe now

About The Guests

Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca are the authors of The Innovation Design Approach and the co-hosts of the WorldMakers community — where this inquiry continues through live conversations, weekly podcasts, and the slow collaborative work of building a different approach to creativity alongside practitioners from five continents.

Iain Kerr is a designer and innovation researcher working at the intersection of creativity, ecology, and emergent systems, with decades of experimentation across industry, the arts, and ecological practice. He co-directs the MIXLab at Montclair State University and is a founding partner of Emergent Futures Lab.

Jason Frasca is the co-founder of Emergent Futures Lab and an Associate Teaching Professor and co-director of the MIXLab at Montclair State University. His work has moved across health, law, publishing, education, and emerging technologies — with a consistent thread of innovation, systematization, and meaningful social transformation.

WorldMakers is our global community of practice where the newsletter and book work comes alive — in dialogue, in shared experiments, in the slow collaborative making of a different approach to creativity. Facilitators, educators, consultants, researchers, academics, and leaders from five continents, testing embodied practices, pushing on the concepts of emergence, and developing a living relationship to the creative process. A place to find your peers working in similar ways.

Find EFL’s work at:

• Newsletter (Emerging Futures): https://emergentfutureslab.com/newsletter

• Book (The Innovation Design Approach): https://emergentfutureslab.com/innovating-emergent-futures

• WorldMakers community: https://emergentfutureslab.com/worldmakers

Share The Breath of Life

Subscribe now

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

First, just want to acknowledge this reflection is getting out a day later. Reminding me that it’s what life does. Takes us in directions we didn’t see coming.

With that let me start with another flash story-poem. Just as I was writing today’s reflections behind a glass door leading into the garden, my friend helped herself to some breakfast leftovers on the table outside that we got to use for the first time this season today. “I got your back. I know everything you are up to“ she seemed to be saying.

A magpie friend tends to me

Scanning the premises from the edge of the balcony overhang

Acrobatting through yielding lilac branches

Enjoying a drink from the weathered fire bowl

Kheck-kheck-kheck she announces later,

unconcerned by how loud or disagreeable she might sound.

Sense-making question

A question that has been engaging with me lately is how do we make sense in ways that we haven’t before? Of entanglements, challenges and predicaments whether at personal or planetary scale?

Because “different but same” has lots of gravity. It holds the promise of change within the comfort of still operating in a familiar territory, however perilous it might be.

Yet, if there is anything striking I’ve learnt during the last few years it’s – things are never what they seem. Or rather much more than they seem. A question can be viewed from multiple angles, take a multitude of shapes and interpretations, and offer unexpected ways of engaging with it.

One of the caveats is that those novel shapes and angles don’t easily reveal themselves. Encounters with them are unlikely through our go-to mode of cognition - thinking, modelling, analyzing.

Because if an inkling, a concept or an idea we are after doesn’t yet exist, the path of rational knowing that works with what can be named, defined, and compared is unlikely to help us.

And in this context I see the allure of expanding and shifting our sensemaking as an invitation to honor and re-inhabit other ways of knowing. Including sensing — the one I am reflecting on today.

After all, it’s hardly an accident that we refer to the process of discerning emergent patterns as SENSE-making.

Sensing has been an underdog in the collective sense-making. Shadowed and discredited by a dystopian obsession with being rational, logical, objective. This has presented our sensing nature as an inconvenience and disappointment. And something to indulge in behind the doors of our private lives.

It feels like the tide has been turning. But I find as we have been out of touch and out of practice with sensing for a while, it takes time to re-acquaint ourselves with this alluring and edgy facet of ourselves and make some sense of sensing.

Sensing has been the preferred or most accessible way of knowing to me: both to my benefit and detriment. Hence, today’s reflections on sensing. As usual, this is a work in progress, and I would be delighted to exchange on it.

First, let us sense into our sensing nature and how it shapes our every moment, including moments of “rational” and “objective” reasoning.

Let us start with a small experiment.

Find your feet and take a couple of moments to inhabit them. Bring each toe in turn into the awareness, then the balls of the feet, then the heel. Now trace the contour of each foot. And allow the feet to settle. Into a position on and with the floor that feels just right at the moment.

What did you notice about your feet when you found them? (brought into your awareness)

Were they warm, cold, tingly, positioned in a certain way? Was any of that surprising as in “I didn’t realize that”?

Did you feel any impulses to somehow adjust, or tend to something - be it by changing position or by tending to a need that emerged, e.g. getting a glass of water?

Let’s give sensing its rightful place

If you are like me or people I’ve worked with, you were in for some surprises. Whether small ones, like realizing your feet were in an odd cramped position, or something bigger, like being overcome by a wave of tiredness or suddenly feeling back pain.

In my practice, there were a few times when people fell asleep right in front of me (on screen) or got so close to it that the session had to end right there. Not because the practice was magically relaxing but because it opened a doorway to an army of sensing signals that hadn’t been allowed in. Blocked from the awareness they still inhabit and shift our internal landscape. The land on which thinking emerges and grows.

So, whether we take it in or not, our human-animal bodies are engaged in sensing at all times.

They monitor and take note of the external landscape of people, trees, office furniture or fluorescent lights as well as the myriad of internal happenings that can come into our awareness through a change in breath, heartbeat, a heavy chest and so on.

And it’s this ocean of sensual “material,” the material that is critical for our human-animal survival, which is steering, pushing and pulling us in all kinds of directions — through feelings, moods, and thoughts. And wait, there is more. Our revered Mr. All-powerful, the Brain is but one contractor of our fifty-four senses as proposed by ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen.

“The brain exists only because there is sensory information to process. The dominant role played by the brain in perception means we might envisage it as the conductor of our sensory orchestra, coordinating and integrating separate inputs into a coherent rich single experience. But without an orchestra, there is no point to a conductor.”

“Sensational: A New Story of Our Senses” by Ashley Ward

Let us please take a moment and allow that to sink in. Orchestra. How well do we know our orchestra? What’s important for the players? What kind of instruments do they have for the conductor to work with?

Shifts in Sensing Capacities and Landscapes

One of my favourite books that helped me start to better understand my orchestra is “The Others: How Animals Made Us Human” by anthropologist Paul Shepard.

The human mind developed in a world of animals and plants, and it cannot be fully at home in a world devoid of them." — The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, by Paul Shepard

For Shepard, animals (and plants, which he also mentions) made us human by training our senses. It’s through observing, sniffing, mimicking, listening, tasting and otherwise probing and tinkering with creatures and environments that we became the brainy humans that we are so proud to be.

In Shepard’s chain from sensory encounter to symbolic culture, animals are first encountered, then embodied, imaged, told, and thought. Seen, touched, devoured, and imitated — this is what helped bring thinking and sense-making into being.

There are a few implications of having separated from that landscape.

One is that we have been separated from a sensory landscape that had been shaping us for the vast majority of our existence from our toes to literally the crowns of our heads, and our brains. That in terms of our sense-making capacity and quality must still be a highly disorienting occurrence. Some of the oldest players in the orchestra are no longer there. Their unique seats are empty.

Another one, as Shepard describes in his book, is that we are acutely sensing the absence of what used to be home. A void that nothing can fill except those beings who, from the beginning, have been integral parts of us. Whether allowed into awareness or not, the void is part of the landscape, much like those signals of exhaustion that, once let in, knock you down into sleep.

Something else had to fill our sensorial worlds that were separated from our ancestral landscapes. And that something became a concentrated human and human-made world, from homes and offices to almost exclusively human encounters to life via screens. Which in some ways feels like an endless sensorial loop of selves. Kind of like with AI models regurgitating with less and less success what’s been made available.

Re-entering sensorial worlds

As we re-enter sensorial worlds, making space for ourselves as human-animal sensing beings and the sensorial oceans that have given birth to our cognition, it’s worth keeping in mind that those worlds, as well as we ourselves, have shapeshifted. And re-entering them may not feel as natural or effortless as it was for those who sensed rather than thought through their lives. Here are a few things we might want to keep in mind.

The human world

As I’ve written a couple weeks ago, we humans have not been in the best of states. We’ve been oscillating (for a good reason) between numbness and hypersensitivity with few role models in between. Often picking up signals of danger that our herd-animals selves are highly attuned to.

And as important as it is to be sensing together, I’ve come to a realization for myself that if I am to sharpen and attune my natural senses, I can not do that spending the time among humans. I can not do that on a regular human schedule. Because the noise overpowers the subtleness of whatever is trying to get through.

I am not saying switch the apartment for a cave. What an adventure that would be though. For a while at least. It’s to say touching other worlds can not be done by spending all our time in the human world. That holds a lot of gravity through rules, protocols, and, importantly through the loop of human reasoning and logic that contains all other modes of knowing, sensing included.

So, it’s a juggling act - even if not quite in a cave, but creatively and steadily making ourselves available to more-than-human environments, and creatures as if we were there.

Sensing is not passive

Re-inhabiting our senses is a process. And a way of life. And it will take time and experiments to settle into your practices. The ones that will speak to your sensuous body.

And meanwhile as we sit or stand by a tree, and the time ticks, and “nothing” is happening, it can feel boring or better yet not a good enough investment of our time, which there are so many claims over. And one angles to that — being with slowness is in itself is a precious gift.

There is something else though. Sensing is by no means a passive process. It’s not about standing there under a tree until something happens to you. It’s about establishing what David Abram describes as the sensuous reciprocity between the human body and the more-than-human world.

Reciprocity means engaging in respectful exchanges with others. It means getting to know the other through the sense channels at your disposal, be it touching, or tasting, or jumping over, or dancing around. It also means moving your body. Moving and exercising in ways to make it softer and thus more skillful at listening. Moving it from a lilac bush to a puddle and further to make oneself available to encounters that want to find and shift you.

The world as invitation

Getting back to my original question about sense-making, there might also be an expectation of something specific happening. Solving a problem, finding an innovative solution, seeing that nonlinear angle in the relationship. And those insights can and will be there, but one of the biggest ways this sharpened ecological sensing shifts us is through opening multiple possibilities in our bodily selves.

In James J. Gibson’s language, we might say that the living world begins to disclose its affordances again, potentials for action as specific felt invitations for movement, attention, orientation, and relation.

By observing endless patterns of water moving, taking in the multitude of bark shapes and textures, finding a way outside of a path through understory entanglements, we allow ourselves to be penetrated and changed. We begin to observe how our sharpened sensing reveals itself through more expanded nonlinear thinking and being in all walks of life.

P.S. I’m developing and testing two participatory formats that grow out of this reflection.

Sensemaking Labs
For people and groups exploring how to make sense in more emergent, non-linear ways. We playfully engage with sensing, feeling, and imagination to transmute abstract concepts into felt experiences and become more attuned to what is new or not yet fully formed.

More-than-human sensing sessions
For those wanting to deepen felt connection with plants, animals, elements, and landscapes. These sessions experiment with sensory and empathetic capacities, inspired by the idea: if you want to save the forest, be the forest.

Both are playful, experiential, and still evolving. I’m looking for more communities, teams, or curious individuals to test them with.

If either speaks to you, drop me a note via Substack or email yulia(at)natureflowlab

∿ ∿ ∿

Thank you for being part of my sense-making for making it to the end. I’d be curious whether/what touched you or stirred your curiosity. Also not sure whether I was preaching to the choir by saying something obvious that doesn’t need repeating. It felt like something I want to put in writing as reference for my work and passion for the sensing body. The sensing whole us that have been longing for flying with birds again, for breathing with trees, for flowing with water. And through that for co-creating with this living planet and other humans another path. That thinking will not discern.

∿ ∿ ∿

In love,

Yulya

To dive deeper:

54 senses https://www.ecopsych.com/insight53senses.html#list

Abram, D. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.

Shepard, P. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human.

Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin !

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALK for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

It feels like I was speaking with a part of me in today’s episode, as I was in conversation with Mark Henderson of Natural Intelligence. You’ll find some quotes by Mark describing what he means by natural intelligence and what “partnering with nature” looks like further.

But I’ll start with a brief story of my own, and my first encounters with natural intelligence. It started around two years ago as I joined a year-long wilderness guiding program just outside of Berlin.

The program was taught in the forest through immersion. As we arrived on the first day of the first module, the program facilitator promised us that in the course of the year, without him explicitly teaching anything to us, we would arrive at universal principles of life that humans, as much as forests, rivers, and mountains, have lived by for millennia.

Come true it did. Not as a big striking insight but through so many small things that started to happen to all of us.

The first thing that we became aware of was the magnetic force of the fire. Whenever there was unstructured time, most would gravitate towards the fire and find a place in a circle. Most would also feel an almost compulsive desire to tend to the fire, which felt like offering it respect and acknowledgement of its powerful presence.

As we would sit around the fire, the teaching and sharing would include the fire and also the circle. Things that would be said would mostly be mindful not only of where we were as individuals, but would emerge with and from the circle.

After a few days, as if on its own, there appeared a place where people started bringing things of beauty and curiosity, and spending time with them — an altar. Our habitual instinct of getting answers started to give way to staying with questions and being guided by them. Where there had been a tree before, there would be a being that invited us into a certain type of relating.

And so it went. Through a lightly guided process of (self) discovery we were sensing into principles of interconnectedness, of life’s cycles, and of being part of something larger that reveals itself when we slow down and pay attention.

These principles are well known by the world of naturalists, nature enthusiasts, spiritual community and many others. It feels like being taught and initiated by Mother Nature herself, just like that acorn Mark talks about below. And once initiated we step into a world of respect, reciprocity, receptivity to life around us, which naturally overflow onto work, relationships.

Yet, as many of us experience this type of knowing doesn’t carry a lot of weight in today’s world. In fact, I would say it’s not legitimised as a source of collective sensemaking, seen as something “good“, but on the fringe.

And it just gives me so much joy to talk to people who invite organizations and leaders into this deep knowing and natural intelligence that organically alters decisions, relationships and missions of those organizations.

We wonder during the conversation what happens when, in our work, self-development, and problem-solving, we start to partner with, and to some extent surrender to nature and its intelligence.

Mark shares how being in nature changes how we relate to life and how we see our own purpose, how it helps people connect at a deeper, more meaningful level, and lead from that space.

We also speak about the way we are used to think about work — and how it might be time to reimagine it.

Cheers to Mark’s work and now on to some of my favourite quotes.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes.

Intelligence Within Us

Mark Henderson:

“Natural intelligence — it’s that sense of something bigger, that sense of a guiding intelligence. It’s the intelligence that runs our own bodies, all the processes: the digestion, the blood system, the breathing. We do all these things without having to consciously manage them. So there’s an inherent intelligence within our body. And it’s the same intelligence that is in an acorn — the DNA, the blueprint within that acorn, enough to create a massive oak tree.

So it’s something that we can tune into, be guided by, and feel supported by. And that, for many of us, for the vast majority of us, requires a lot of trust. Dipping in and out of it, and failing, and trying again, and really developing a practice of trust — and letting go of the stories of scarcity, of lack, of limitation — and opening up to curiosity, which is a great driver of this.

Having that self-awareness and aligning ourselves back into curiosity and excitement about the potential of the day ahead. For example: who am I going to meet today? What might happen in that meeting? What am I going to learn? How am I going to develop? What synchronicity might point me in a certain direction along my purpose? That sort of mindset and state is an exciting place to be, and helps to keep us aligned along the path.”

Finding One’s Place

Mark Henderson:

I think absolutely, it’s about stepping back from the doing and what we talked about earlier, coming more into the being, which natural environments are the perfect place for us to do that through our senses.

But when we come to that place of being, we have a better opportunity to connect to our true selves. And that’s really a prerequisite for understanding ourselves enough and understanding our place in the world, our place on Earth.

Because I believe that we all have a unique place here.

And I often think about the likelihood of actually being born a human on earth is so small. There’s a story which describes this — if you imagine that in all the oceans of the world there is only one turtle, and you throw a life buoy into the water, and that one turtle in all the oceans sticks its head up through the life buoy, that is the same probability as you being born a human on earth.

So that really makes life so precious and leads to thinking, maybe it’s not just chance. Maybe I’m actually supposed to be here, and maybe I have a particular role to fulfil.

And it’s not about having a huge purpose. It’s about tuning into whatever fills you with passion, with enjoyment, and that your life has prepared you for. And by following that purpose, there is a kind of intelligence that can keep us active, well, and fulfilled throughout our lives.

Regenerative Leadership

Mark Henderson:

It’s very much a mindset — I would call it a regenerative leadership mindset. And I would describe that as the leader’s role to create, in themselves but also in their team and organization, the conditions for more life to emerge. It requires a humility, an openness, and again, a curiosity — to really explore that, and to see everybody in the team and the organization as a unique, very special being who has something unique to contribute to the common purpose.

So it requires a shift in how we think about culture within an organization. It requires us to really see and hear one another — at a very authentic level — to value everybody’s contribution, and to align each individual’s purpose, or help each individual to find meaning in the collective purpose of the organization.

And then something I recognized personally: even when everything was going really well — our turnover had almost doubled in a year, profitability was great — I remember, despite all that, feeling a sense of emptiness. Something was missing. And I realized it was this: we had just done it in the normal way that everybody does business. Business as usual.

And that’s when I started to realize I was moving away from what gave me meaning. I’m sure there are more and more leaders out there with successful businesses feeling that — yeah, but how can I make a bigger impact? — and not really understanding how. And that’s what I love to facilitate.

The Practice

Mark Henderson:

“It’s almost a process that I’ve identified — really translating that natural intelligence, that wisdom that’s there. The first thing that’s required is an awareness. How we can still our minds, attune to our senses, and land into a theta brainwave state — that open awareness and curiosity about what might be there. And it’s not a forcing. It’s more of a surrender to what is in the moment.

The next stage is really surrender — just letting go of limiting thoughts and beliefs. In our Western society, we’re very self-absorbed, and our culture encourages us to have a very strong identity. But that’s a bit of an illusion, because quantum physics shows us that we’re all connected — we’re all part of this natural intelligence, this bigger whole. So that’s where the practice comes in of letting go of those beliefs around separation, and surrendering to the natural intelligence, the oneness.

And then there’s the presence — being in the here and now, and realizing that I have a special place on Earth. I’m supposed to be here, and I can create my own life, my own reality, and be supported by everything else.

So there’s the awareness, the surrender, the presence — and then there’s the trust. That I understand my place in this bigger context, the instrument that I’m playing in the orchestra of life. I’m enough, and I have everything I need to step into that role.

And then it’s the continual practice — continually trusting the natural intelligence of oneself, and that part of natural intelligence that is us. Those are the five steps: awareness, surrender, presence, trust, and continual practice.”

Thank you for being here. I cherish your presence.

In love,

Yulya

Subscribe now

About Mark Henderson

Mark Henderson is a keynote speaker, mentor, guide and NatureProcess Coach. With a background as a purpose-driven entrepreneur he advises and supports business leaders looking to step beyond ‘business as usual’ into an impactful, regenerative future.

Mark is co-founder of Natural Intelligence which partners with nature to support leaders, teams, and organisations to develop a regenerative mindset and capability—enabling them to lead positive societal and environmental change while creating conditions for people and systems to thrive.

Mark is also co-creator of the nature-inspired, online community for changemakers, Earthaconter. He talks about Natural Alchemy which is an immersive, community-based journey of self-awareness, shaped by nature’s rhythms rather than performance culture.

Natural Intelligence: https://www.naturalintelligence.se

Earthaconter: https://www.earthaconter.org/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmhenderson

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Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

As a personal sharing today, I wanted to start with this flash story from a few days ago that is still spookily alive in me. The geese, the murky marsh waters, and some mystery they carry deeply penetrated my porous being there.

Kgo-kgo-kgo-kgo-kgo-KGO-kgo

Kgo-kgo-kgo-kgo-kgo-KGO

Two trumpeting geese ripple the air

over a hushed, muddy marsh.

My head jerks up, my neck cracking.

How are they so fluent, so fluid in flight,

so direct and flamboyant in their calling?

The murky marsh waters claim my stray gaze.

Life is Porous

Porosity as a central feature of life — including us, the human species — has been on my mind lately. Perhaps it’s what makes life as ugly and as beautiful as it can be.

We are porous at the cellular level — each cell laboriously sorting through what is allowed in and what needs to get out. A cell is never open or closed; it’s in a process of continuous negotiation and fluid relating. Welcoming sugar today and changing the entry lock to block it tomorrow, which we refer to as insulin resistance.

We are porous at the level of our individuated bodies. Taking in the stale air of a basement with its strains of bacteria and fungi. Taking in water that, minutes after ingestion, is no longer simply water but part of blood, lymph, saliva, and the other internal flows within us. Taking in other beings — animals, plants — that merge with us. Excreting all kinds of wetness and solidness.

We are porous at the emotional level — complaining about a toxic friend, or wondering how we feel so soothed and grounded in someone’s presence. Caretakers outsourcing parts of our nervous systems to babies until their own nervous systems mature and come online.

We are porous to the many rhythms surrounding us — synching the breath as we come into a state of porous creativity, also called group flow, slowed down by the rivers and trees, accelerated by the boardrooms and screens. We get caught in group think. Melted by a communal fire. Danced by a drum.

We are porous to the more-than-human world, capable of touching otherness as carried in our tissues and memories. Sensing the kinship of trees through becoming present to the many trees we carry inside of us, bronchial tree among them. Taking in the “outside” weather and making it our own.

We are porous to the many tools. Porous to the chair that shapes our butts and molds the curvature of our spines day in and day out. Porous to the best friend and nemesis, our smartphone — that has us travel to places and engage in far-away heated entanglements without leaving the room.

Porosity as Reciprocity

Porosity and permeability — whether at the cellular level, or the psyche and emotional level (what is referred to as empathy) — allows us to penetrate and be penetrated by others.

To merge in ecstatic entanglements with another is on one side of the spectrum. It’s what makes reciprocity with life in its various forms possible, as when we feel another, our relationship with them shifts in ways that intellectual knowing can’t afford.

And on the other side is to drain and be drained by other humans, by pain, grief, violence, loss or deliberate manipulation, so ripe in the world at the moment.

So what a dance it is to be in at the moment, isn’t it? Between longing for the ecstasy of touching other worlds through our feeling bodies and an urge to protect ourselves to the degree of sealing the walls and numbing.

From Numb to Hyperpermeable

I’ve spent most of my life largely unaware of my porous design. In fact, my highly porous design. Which, at different stages of my life, expressed as opposites on a spectrum. Growing thick skin and expending energy on locking myself inside of myself, with little access to the wonders of the world and other humans — as one extreme. Opting for perceived safety.

Merging and fusing with others as the other extreme. Taking on the sorrows and ailments of clients as a coach and consultant. Taking on the sorrows and grief of the whole world during my times at Greenpeace. Lately blessed by merging with the beings and creatures from the more-than-human world, and having some a-ha moments on why this inconvenient design is there.

So how do we navigate this tricky feature of ourselves and the world? Honoring it as a doorway into other worlds, including the more-than-human. Into other states of consciousness, like dreaming and imaginative states where magic-like non-linear shifts might be waiting for us.

Sharing here some thoughts that have been brewing. And sincerely welcoming anything you are willing to share to keep this inquiry alive.

Awareness is Where it Starts

Just being aware of the highly porous nature of this world — that goes through species and from species to processes and tools — changes the quality and shape of the porousness.

As I write this I am aware of the grounding, slow-paced vibe of the library where I now come a few times per week. I adjust my porosity settings to relaxed and receptive, and fuse with the books and the fellow visitors.

What brings me to the library is also porosity. Some family members are visiting for a month, and I am acutely aware of their presence even when I can not locate them with with my normal senses - not seeing or hearing them.

I also look forward to the time outside for a chance to be stirred by buds, birds, flowers, clouds. Having my body and nervous system penetrated by the calls of thrush and wren, letting my gaze be hypnotized by the shimmering water — this works a powerful meta-level I-am-home effect. As the fractal structures, the water, minerals, the bronchial tree in me encounter their evolutionary kin. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, calls this a grammar of animacy — the felt recognition that we are not apart from the living world but in ongoing exchange with it.

To me the awareness rests on the many mundane experiences where porosity is obvious. As I rush to the bathroom to pee on waking up and then pour myself a glass of water. As I breathe in the air populated by unseen bacterial, viral and other beings and make them my own. As I breathe out and share with the world my own tini-tinies, my fluids and other imprints.

From the space of this in-my-bones knowing it’s easier for me to touch the fusing and merging that I cannot see. To be alert for signs that I am being penetrated, so I can tend to that more consciously.

Porosity is Always There

I’ve entertained the idea over the years that I can close myself off to certain humans, beings, processes. That if only I could learn to be fully grounded in my own state, my psychic borders will not be penetrated. At least not by fellow humans.

There were a few models that I explored and experimented with that were really helpful. One of them by Babette Rothschild, a psychotherapist and author who first opened my eyes to the physical nature of empathy.

In one of her books, Help for the Helper: The Psychophysiology of Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma, she goes in depth on how traumatic states of patients find their way into the therapist they work with through a subtle yet profound process of physical mimicry.

She showed how, before helping professionals become aware of their emotional exhaustion and fatigue, their physical appearance and facial expressions reveal the changes which are underway. Slumping shoulders, fluttering or strained breath, tense jaws. I wrote a post on this a while back.

“We are hardwired, it appears, to feel each other’s happiness and pain more deeply than we ever knew, and that the royal road to empathy is through the body, not the mind. Notwithstanding the river of words that flow through the therapy room, it’s often the sight of a client looking unhappy, tense, relieved, or enraged that gets our sympathetic synapses firing.” — Babette Rothschild, Help for the Helper

Knowing how I am taking in states, emotions and energies of humans and beyond opened me up to new forms of my own agency as I engage with the always-devouring-me world.

Yet, after years of practice I also realized — one way or the other I am still touched by the ones I am trying to protect myself from. As I go into the grounding dance with its ins and outs, my shape shifts. And I cannot help but be changed by this interaction.

In fact, I’ve discovered that I am better off if the wall I am erecting to protect myself from something or someone is slightly porous and elastic. It absorbs the shock much better. To give you a metaphor: by staying slightly porous and elastic I feel like a slightly deflated ball. It easily finds its way back to its original form after some wobbling. And by hardening the walls I risk them getting cracked.

Between Protection and Numbness

In a world that is swimming in grief, loss, and ceaseless life demands, protection of course is critical. It is about preserving the capacity to go against the grain in co-creating your life. As opposed to rolling with the human world that has all kinds of plans for you, including burning you out.

And on the other hand, it may be easy to just cave in to this constant and legitimate protection impulse. Going for protective mode as the default. Directing the energy towards growing thick skin. Keeping the world at a distance at all times.

It’s the strategy of those cells from the beginning that, overwhelmed by too much sugar coming in, outlaw it and block it from entering — referred to as insulin resistance. Which at its core is about closing off their sensitivity to sugar in favour of protection. If not quickly reversed it unleashes a chain of reactions spanning all aspects of our being, not only physical. One of them is that the cells starve while the nourishment they need is right there, knocking on their doors.

It’s also how we starve behind the walls that we create around ourselves. The walls between our human world and the rest of the world, whose aliveness we block from our senses and awareness. Between each other. And inside of us. As it’s all built on the same foundation — loss of the sensing capacity of our animal human bodies. As what we cannot feel, we lose access to. No grief, and no joy. No pain and no ecstasy of communing with another. No other worlds permitted in and thus no capacity to co-create with them and steward them.

Metabolism Test

I’ve come to think about beings, processes, environments, and rules in terms of how easily they can be metabolized by my ancient human capacities.

I picked up this one a long time ago from Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, when as a nutrition consultant I was trying to make sense of endless food debates. Taleb suggested a simple elegant test — a test of time.

How long has this food, technology, belief or rule been there. What has it got to show for itself in the grand scheme of things. In the context of what some call deep time. Which can not be measured by a fleeting term of a human life.

“Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty.” — Nassim Taleb

While following it selectively — tremendously enjoying lots of books and people under forty, I always ask myself how well established is the phenomenon that wants to become part of my consciousness. Apple? Ok. Purple cotton candy? Hmmm… Maybe, yes, occasionally. But I know I am in unfamiliar territory here. And so my alert hat is always on when I am in conversations with human-made “novelty”.

Which is the case at this very moment as I am typing behind this screen. Even though we’ve known each other for years now, I am feeling very cautiously friendly. I can sense a strong pull it has on me. And how we are bound by no reciprocity codes. I also know that it’s too easy for me to lose track of my shrinking attention span, my AI-style writing, my dwindling curiosity and memory the more of me I give to the screens and technologies.

Honestly, now that I think about it, this principle extends to the world of modernity as something to never fully trust and keep at a healthy distance from. “Let us flirt and check each other out, but communing is not on the table.“

People — it’s Complicated

Humans including myself have been at the core of my inquiry. Why are we the way we are? How are we where we are, and how do we walk a different path? And I cherish people and communities with whom I can show up as I am. Play, make no sense, cry, imagine, witness and be witnessed. Deeply grateful to have such people in my life, including some of you who I met here.

Yet, our human-to-human porosity (=empathy) is one of a few still highly developed senses. Which means, I hardly stand a chance of holding my ground, and my truth, and my state if openly join in the ocean of human anxiety. Be it through news outlets, instagram reels or offline encounters. And when knocked off my ground, what am I good for?

So I’ve been making “asocial” a part of my public persona. Yes, I am weird. I am selective. I break some social rules. I may not care about small talk or making appearances. I could live in a forest and not see people for weeks if left to my devices. Which is a test of a kind. Makes social life challenging, yet more deep honest and rewarding.

Human Animal

If I were to choose one core thing to take out of this meandering message it would be about honoring and remembering how to inhabit the human animal within us. The body part, that is even difficult to talk about. As when I talk about the body I am referring to the whole of us. Or maybe our core feature as bodying through this life.

So, it’s our sensing porous bodies that enable interconnectedness. What we can feel as pain or joy or fear or terror is what shapeshifts us. And the capacity to feel largely rests on the fluidity, mobility, elasticity of our animal bodies. It’s what in Becoming Animal David Abram refers to as becoming again “a two-legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world.”

To take it to a practical plain, to be more sensitive and at the same time more aware, to have the capacity to know you are being penetrated and respond by standing the ground, requires very simply a pair of bare feet that connect us to the Earth and the ground. A spine that can move in spirals. Hands that by touching and being touched can have us feel reciprocity in our bones.

I’ve been training in exactly that with Simon Thakur from Ancestral Movement, whom I’ve quoted in this newsletter more times than I can remember. His approach draws on martial arts, including Qi Gong, and movement practices that bring out the inherent fluid, serpentine nature of our animal body. And what a gift it has been. Of increased awareness and sensitivity and also of the grounding capacity.

A Vow to Remember

So, it’s a tricky thing to live and thrive as a porous being in this world. It’s a tricky thing to be sensitive, which you are probably acutely aware of if you are sensitive. Yet, isn’t it how we make a new path?

Inhabiting and cherishing our inherently sensitive and porous nature is how other worlds can touch us. Our own internal worlds, whose forgotten, neglected parts so long to be witnessed and acknowledged in their desire to keep us alive. The worlds of other humans that are not like ours, and want to be seen and granted legitimacy to in their uniqueness. The more-than-human world, whose intelligence and agency we are to recognize and respect if life as we know it is to continue.

And this is why recognition, owning and protecting my porous sensitive nature is featured in today’s writing. I am forever grateful to the more-than-human world for keeping me alive in various meanings of the word. And hope that I can find a way to express my overflowing gratitude and love that was so generously extended to me.

∿ ∿ ∿

I wonder what, if anything, it stirs up for you and how you have been navigating life’s and your own porosity.

To dive deeper:

Rothschild, B. Help for the Helper: The Psychophysiology of Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma. W. W. Norton.

Taleb, N. N. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.

Kimmerer, R. W. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

Abram, D. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.

Ancestral Movement (Simon Thakur): https://ancestralmovement.com/

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin !

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALK for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Where dandelions are merrily crowding my garden and I am making difficult decisions about our relationship and sharing space.

And share space we do. Look at them, blooming on “my” (our? their?) balcony, where I’ve been spending some nights lately. I’ve been drawn to sleep outside – making myself available for the glow and whispers of the moon. Falling asleep under the starry ceiling. Being in the company of dandelions.

And now on to more flowers. Delighted to share today’s conversation with you with from The Flowers are Speaking.

Do you feel mesmerised, hypnotised, or drawn to flowers? Is it one flower that’s been your favourite for a while, or do you easily switch allegiances?

What if it’s not so much your decision, but the choice of flowers? And what if by enchanting you the flowers mean to get something across to you?

I experienced this grip by herbs and flowers last spring and summer, as I was overcome by a gardening urge — planting, watering, foraging, meditating with sprouts,. The pull felt as if it was beyond my free will. It was intense to a degree that sometimes I would find myself planting and watering past midnight.

There were a few flowers and herbs that felt as if they stalked me. Like sunflowers that I would be given by fellow gardeners and then, through a chain of events, ended up sprouting all over my garden. Then there was foxglove that I would see wherever I went and one day had me surrounded . Then there were chamomiles that once took me so far astray that a search party had to be summoned to locate me.

I didn’t have a process at the time for deciphering the messages, and yet I did get the gist of it — associations, emotional responses, links to people and events in my life. And these messages and the reciprocity filled me with so much joy and aliveness.

I am really looking forward to this flowering season for more encounters and siren songs. Now also inspired and equipped by this beautiful conversation with Mary Porter Kearns.

Mary Porter Kearns is a writer and teacher exploring the relationship between humans and flowers. Through her Substack The Flowers Are Speaking, she invites people to connect with flowers as living, sensing beings — drawing from emerging science on plant intelligence and from intuitive and experiential practices. Mary’s book The Flowers Are Speaking is coming out in 2027, and she runs workshops guiding people into a reciprocal relationship with flowers.

Mary shares her personal journey into working with flowers — from receiving a message from a magnolia, to guiding others to rejoin what she calls a million-year love story between humans and flowers.

We move between Western science and what it has to say about plant intelligence, and between imaginative, intuitive, and dream states that allow us to engage with flowers as sentient beings.

Mary shares an accessible process of connecting to flowers. And some stories from her own life and that of her students that created deep shifts in their lives. And deep it is. Being in a reciprocal relationship with a being that in our human psyche stands for beauty. Not just something to observe or enjoy, but something that might be perceiving, responding, and shaping the relationship.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes.

Flowers as Renewal and Hope

Mary Porter Kearns:

“Some flowers take all season to build up their energy and come at the end of the season. And then there are the spring wildflowers — they come out first. They’ve stored their energy all winter long and they just can’t wait to reach for the light and bring their life force up and wake up the world again.

They look delicate, fragile, but they’re really warriors. Some of them even break through the snow. No wonder our ancestors have always revered these first beings that come through, because they bring us hope — the return of life, that cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

It’s such a gift. Our own life cycle might be 80 years, but with flowers we get to experience renewal every single year. What a gift it is to witness that over and over again.”

The Evolutionary Love Story

Mary Porter Kearns:

“I think it’s this long evolutionary love story that we have with them. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the flowers.

They started developing reciprocal relationships with other animals and insects — they fed them, and animals and insects would carry their seeds.

So I see them as not the first collaborative life form on the earth, but they really took it to a whole new level. When the flowers really started to diversify and take off, then all the other insects and animal forms also took off as well, because they provided so much food and energy that hadn’t been in the world before with the fruits that come from the flowers, that it enabled us to all evolve together.

And so we literally evolved looking to flowers. Flowers are the right size for our hands and our visual field, and we have this really intimate relationship with flowers that I talk a lot about in my book. It’s like a million-year love story, literally, that we’ve evolved together.

And so they see us, I think, as this animal that’s really going to take them all over the world. And a lot of them developed really close relationships with us, even more than we developed with them. I think a lot of times they reached out to us first.”

Plant Intelligence and Communication

Mary Porter Kearns:

“The way that the flowers perceive the world and relate to the world is so different than our animal way of being in the world. It’s much easier for us to relate to animals because they have eyes and limbs and act like us in many ways, and the plant world is so very different that it’s hard for us to understand how they might be sentient, how they might actually be relating to other beings, to each other, and to the world around them, because it’s such a different way of being than we are.

But the flowers are that bridge for me. They help me begin to see how we are truly interconnected, not just with ourselves but with everything around us. They broke me out of my human-centric point of view.

The science around plant intelligence helps my mind understand it so that my mind can stop saying, ‘that’s crazy,’ and then it can step aside while my heart starts to open to other ways of communicating and connecting with the world.

There’s a huge body of work now showing how plants respond to sound, how they respond to touch, how they engage with what’s around them in ways that are truly interactive.

One example is that flowers can hear the bees coming toward them, and they start to make more nectar and even make it sweeter when they recognize that it’s the kind of pollinator they want to attract. They don’t put all their energy out all the time — they are aware of what is approaching them.

Plants also respond to light in ways that allow them to sense time and movement around them. They can perceive changes in their environment, they respond to animals and insects moving around them, and they do this without having a brain like we do. The sensing seems to happen through their whole body.

And then there’s the way they communicate. Each plant has thousands and thousands of volatile compounds that they release through their leaves, their flowers, their roots. It’s like a whole language. They are constantly in communication with the world around them.

We can barely grasp the concept of that. We tend to think of it in scientific terms as chemicals, but that word doesn’t really capture what’s happening. It’s their language.

And I think we can feel that in our hearts better than we can understand it with our minds. There are ways of connecting and perceiving that go beyond our logical, rational way of thinking, and the plants invite us into that.”

On Intuition and Sensing

Mary Porter Kearns:

“Along with being taught that plants aren’t intelligent, we’re also taught not to trust our intuition, not to trust our heart, our other ways of sensing. We’re only taught to trust our mind, our eyes, and what we can see with our eyes, and it limits us so much.

When you read about indigenous people, it’s clear that they valued all these different ways of sensing and understanding the world around them, all of them equally, and didn’t dismiss them as imagination.

I wasn’t raised with that encouragement. I had to relearn it all myself. It’s been a long journey.

The biggest thing for me is recognizing the thoughts that come into my mind and not dismissing them. Asking, where did that come from, and trying to follow those trails. And trying to remember my dreams, trying to listen to my body, to my heart. There are so many ways of sensing that we’ve kind of shut down.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy. It takes practice to listen to your heart and to trust what you’re sensing. And even now, even though I teach this, I still feel like I’m learning.

Because when you look at how our ancestors related to the world, they had access to all of this. And we’re just beginning to remember it again.”

Called by Flowers

Mary Porter Kearns:

“It’s not really the right question to ask which flower I should work with. The question is more which flower is calling me.

If I’m walking outside in the forest and there are many flowers, which one is drawing my attention the most that day? Why is that one in particular catching my attention?

It’s like walking into a room full of people you don’t know and scanning the room and thinking, that person looks open and friendly, I’ll go talk to them. It’s similar with flowers.

People ask why I don’t work with a certain flower, and I say I don’t know, they haven’t called me. I don’t feel a connection yet.

There’s no rational explanation for that, just as there’s no rational explanation for why you’re drawn to a particular person.

But when you start to work with them, you realize they had something for you. And all these synchronicities start to appear.

That’s where the magic is — in the connections and the synchronicities. They make me feel so alive. And I think that aliveness is what we live for.”

Thank you for being here. I cherish your presence.

In love,

Yulya

About Mary Porter Kearns

Mary Porter Kerns is an author, amateur naturalist, gardener, artist, weaver and a voice for the flowers. Her upcoming book, The Flowers Are Speaking: Listening to Nature’s Ancient Wisdom, is forthcoming spring of 2027 with Tarcher Penguin Group. It is an intimate journey into the entwined evolution of flowers and human beings—weaving together science, history, and earth-based mysticism to offer a radical vision of how we can best reconnect with the ancient guidance of the earth.. In fall of 2022 she self-published the first edition of her oracle cards, also called The Flowers Are Speaking, that sold out in three months.

Her highly acclaimed Guidance from the Flowers workshops have expanded their scope into five-session long workshops where the participants are empowered to connect with the flowers through their own senses and intuition.

Follow Mary on Substack:

The Flowers Are Speaking

Listen to the wisdom of the Flowers as they guide us back to trusting our intuition and reclaiming our hearts desire.

By Mary Porter Kerns

Share The Breath of Life

Subscribe now

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Spring in many parts of the world has set a firm foot in our moods, conversations, and actions.

Who doesn’t feel the seductive winks of spring? With whispers and promises of new beginnings. Or mirrors of lives lost that are never to bloom again in their previous shapes, but might be in front of us in shapes we don’t yet recognize.

There seems to be and feels like so much that spring can teach us, share with us without words. About new beginnings, blooming, beauty, courage.

Yet, the life and love-making happening in the wild can also make us aware of the distance between us as humans and what we call nature. We’ve left the nest, there is no way back in. Except as observers.

Bystanders, observers, belonging to other webs, with woes, responsibilities and oceans of problems.

Yet, we are of the nest. Always. And our woes, crises and pains are perhaps the many invitations to make ourselves familiar with our eternal home. The wild nest. Giving us an official license to dance. Love. Drink the nectar of joy and ecstasy that’s in the air.

How do we get to join the dance?

To come back to knowing spring’s primordial intelligence? In a way that we are able to enact it.

The same way we get to know anything in this life.

We know chocolate fondant by biting into its gooey, velvety, and full-bodied flesh.

We know lovers by entangling naked bodies and exchanging bodily fluids with them.

We know grief by shedding tears, wailing our chests out, and throbbing with our hearts.

We know everything spring stands for by mish mashing ourselves into its happenings.

Want to join the ecstasy of spring? Devour it with your senses and sensing body.

sip

gaze

graze

sniff

echo

lick

brush

sink into

moan

utter words or better yet “incoherent“ sounds of love.

The Language We Share With The Wild

I remember being in a webinar a couple of years ago. On herbal teas and infusions.

“Ingesting tea is how we get to know the herb.” was a simple idea that felt revolutionary. But, of course. As we sip a cup of mint tea, we are literally penetrated by mint that works an assortment of effects on us.

Those start, even if imperceptibly as I hold a cup of tea in my hands. Through smell, colour, temperature, imagination, personal history, my body and mind are already encountering the mint.

As I take the first sip, the phytochemicals in the tea (which I had once been obsessed with as a nutritionist) enter into a biochemical dialogue with my bloodstream, my cells, my organs, my brain, my breath. Which is another way of saying, with my whole being.

“Slow down, my friend, let me show you how” mint says to some, without causing me to feel annoyed or triggered.

Let me sing you a lullaby
Let me settle your stomach
Here, take in a breath of fresh air.

The exchange 

through specific molecules

through the expansive intelligence of plants, by now also established by science

through what might forever stay a mystery 

is constantly unfolding.

How do we participate in the spring’s unfolding? Get entangled and shapeshifted.

By stretching our senses. By inhabiting the human animal within us. By remembering our porosity. Which makes us available to be touched by the bigger pulse of life. By the wild and wildly animalistic, erotic dance of spring.

It takes fusing with each other in ways beyond measured gazing and smelling. And for the joy of it I’ve done something special in this newsletter. Recorded one of my spring blossom encounters as a meditation of sorts.

I’d be curious to hear from you if you end up listening. Actually, I’d be curious to hear from you whether or not you listen.

Spring Blossom Meditation

From my animal sensuous self to yours,

In the love and beauty of spring,
Yulya

To dive deeper:

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin !

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALK for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

Where birds, buds and all beings really, unabashedly sing, swell, throb, unfurl, waft, whisper in a tangle both of self-indulgent beauty and clear headed urgency. And love is …in the air…

And the episode I am reflecting on today very much carries the sense of spring. Of love as foundational and nourishing to all of us. A special type of love that we know as mothering.

I was in conversation about mothering as a relationship beyond biology and gender with , whose new book Mothers of Magic is coming out this May.

Have you ever longed to be mothered regardless of your relationship with the biological mother?

It’s what happened to me over a year ago. Unfolding “out of nowhere”, from some place so deep that I hadn’t been aware of it.

I was in a forest for a week as part of my Wilderness education program.

And as one thing led to another I found myself one day pierced by a feeling of loneliness, which was also amplifying a list of messages I had been containing. Grief, bitterness, disappointment, and tiredness...

I went for a walk. Guided by instinct, I approached a sprawling beech tree. She felt gentle and yet rooted in her might.

As I bowed my head to her, her body and my forehead touched and it felt so soothing.

I addressed her as Mother and asked her to hold me in my exhaustion and grief, fully trusting her capacity to bear the whole of me, with all the pain I had been holding.

And I stood there, and she held me, and I cried, and I was silent, and cried again, and I talked, and I spoke to her, and I fell silent again.

I came to my waking senses a couple hours later. In deep awe, gratitude and love for her and the living world.

I’ve been invoking other mothers since then — Trees, Water, Darkness, the Moon.

Surrendering into being a child. With no responsibilities, nowhere to be and nothing to do. Just receiving that unconditional love. Being that small adored girl on my mother’s lap.

How nourishing it has been to be mothered. To be mothered beyond the capacity of one human. Beyond the capacity of humans.

Might we all carry a deep longing to be mothered? By more than one woman, by more than just human mothers?

This is what we are talking about with Perdita — about mothering beyond biology, about learning to receive mothering from the wider living world, and about healing the relationship between mothers and daughters.

I loved the depth and the effortless flow of the conversation.

We talked about the pre-civilized concept of mothering, and its evolution to the present day, about the divide between mothers and daughters through Perdita’s personal stories - of her relationship with her mother and her own daughter.

We talked about ancient art likely tracing origins to menstrual blood, about ancestors and how our cosmic worldview is shaping mothers and being mothered.

It was deep and heart-warming. Wholeheartedly recommend giving it a listen.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes.

Mothering Before Civilization

Perdita Finn:

Well, that's a great place to begin because, you know, in the modern era, instead of in our patriarchal end times, the mother has become both a sentimentalized figure, right, and also the scapegoat. And my hope is to look at what it meant to be a mother before patriarchal empire, what it has become within it, and what it might be afterwards.

That understanding of mother before civilization was a very different concept than we have. It wasn't just a different definition of a word. It was an entirely different belief sphere. And to be a mother wasn't a gendered idea. It was something that both men and women could be. Nor was it something that was biologically determinate.

One woman might bear a child, but many women in a community might nurse that child. We see this in hunter-gatherer cultures and indigenous cultures that the responsibility for feeding a child did not belong to one woman the way it does in our culture, nor was the responsibility for raising that child.

That child would experience many mothers, a circle of mothers, if you would have it, and a circle of grandmothers around those mothers tending them. Not to mention that men themselves, frequently in these cultures, think of themselves not as fathers but as mothers. They also are mothers.

The marvelous book Sex at Dawn looks at how around the world, within the remnants we have of hunter-gatherer cultures, men imagine their semen not as seed that's planted in a vessel, but that it's mother milk. It's milk that's being given to nourish the child already growing within the woman.

So men think of themselves as also nurturers, feeders, caregivers. And when a child is born, many men may consider themselves the mother of this child. Among the Kogi people of Colombia, for instance, they trace their origins back not to a singular male deity, but to nine primordial mothers. And when someone reaches their highest level of awareness, they call them the mamas.

And, I sometimes say, we're doing better when our adolescent boys dream of becoming mothers. It's a very different definition of mothering than we have today.

The Circularity of Nourishing and Being Nourished

Perdita Finn:

What do mothers do for us, right? They feed us. First they feed us with their blood. Their blood literally feeds the baby. And then milk will feed the baby. And in this indigenous, hunter-gatherer idea, the male body and the female body both feed the growing body of the child.

And in the natural world, an extension of this, you are also experiencing many other beings as your mother. What does it mean? So the grandmother dies, and then the grandmother comes back as a salmon or a reindeer or a bear to feed her grandchildren.

When I talk about a different belief sphere, we live in civilization among a linear idea of time and space—a beginning, a middle, and an end. We have one life to get it right, one life to make meaning, to find our purpose, and then that’s it. And there’s nothing before and nothing after. And it’s a terrible vision.

We see this playing out in the world today—these end-times visions, the kind of suicidality of our leaders, because they can’t imagine a world continuing beyond their own life.

But our ancient ancestors did not see life going in a straight line. They saw it going in a circle. They saw that everything was born, everything died, and everything came back—just like the moon went dark and returned, the sun set and came back, the seasons changed.

They watched the world come and go and return, and they experienced themselves and their own souls as coming and going and returning. When they called themselves the salmon people or the reindeer people or the bear people, that wasn’t just some kind of totemic identification. It was a literal experience that I’m a human being right now eating a salmon, but in my next life I will be a salmon feeding my children.

The Fracturing of Mothering

Perdita Finn:

Let me speak globally about our relationships with our mothers as daughters in patriarchy. They’re fraught. They’re frequently not easy. And that’s by design. Our mothers are set up for failure because no one person is capable of giving us all that we need.

When we had that circle of mothers—when we had 13 mothers surrounding us instead of one, 13 grandmothers surrounding us instead of none, and around them a circle of dead mothers and grandmothers stretching into the depths of time—we got enough mothering, and our mothers had enough mothering.

But what we’ve had in civilization for six or seven thousand years is mothers increasingly not getting the mothering they need, transferring that loss onto their daughters, until we find ourselves all in that state. That’s the kind of global picture.

My particular mother—my particular problems with my mother—she was like many mothers, a piece of work. She was a very talented, brilliant, gorgeous tiger of a woman. She was five foot ten. She looked like Elizabeth Taylor, only more gorgeous. She was just a movie star, and she was trapped being a suburban housewife.

She had had a career—her own mother helped her begin in the 1930s as a costume designer, which was very unlike many of the women of her generation and of her class. And she was very talented. And yet she had babies. My father was a doctor. She had to support him.

Her life got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. This giant woman got pressed ever smaller, until she’s wearing a beige cardigan doing little flower designs. Not that they weren’t beautiful flower designs, but what happens when we don’t allow our mothers to be who they really are? And so my relationship with her was very fraught.

Beyond Psychology

Perdita Finn:

None of the psychoanalysis helped me feel better, because what I was lacking was mothering. I didn’t get enough mothering from my mother, because I couldn’t get enough mothering from my mother, and no one can get enough mothering from a single woman.

Only when I became a mother myself, did I realize, my God, it’s going to start over again. I’ve got a daughter in my hands. I’m about to repeat this whole process. Wait a minute—how do I get the mothering I need?

And that’s when I began to call on the dead. That’s when I began to call on my mother, my grandmothers, and my great-grandmothers, and the mothers of the earth to come and mother me—literally. I was lying in the dark at night holding my children, and I began to call on all the dead as my mothers and say, I need enough mothering if I’m going to be up to doing this.

If I can go back in time in a time mission, this is what I want to give my mother and me. I don’t want to put me in a room on a couch with a male psychoanalyst figuring out how my mother fucked up. I want to bring my mother and I into a room, and I want nine grandmothers to circle us, or thirteen grandmothers to circle us.

One of them is going to feed us. One of them is going to do our tarot reading or astrology. One of them is going to talk about our past lives with us and our connections. One of them is just going to give us a back rub. We’ve got a couple just giving some touch, teaching us how to touch each other again. And then there’s another one who’s going to be very funny and make us laugh a lot about everything.

And we’re going to have this circle of mothers, and we’re going to call in all the mothers and grandmothers. We’re going to call in all the women who were burned as witches. We’re going to call in all the women abused, raped, enslaved, colonized, and tortured in patriarchy. And we’re going to invite them to hold us and heal us.

This is what my daughter and I have done together. It’s why we’re so close. My daughter lives five minutes from me. We write together, we laugh together. We’ve worked hard. She’s 32. It’s taken a lot of fighting and work, but we have healed. And we say that the intimacy of our relationship is our revolution against the patriarchy. I want to heal mothers and daughters together. This is what I wish my mother and I could have had.

Thank you for being here. I cherish your presence.

In love,

About Perdita Finn

Perdita Finn is a writer and teacher whose work explores ancestry, the dead, the living world, and forms of spiritual practice rooted in relationship rather than doctrine. She is the author of Take Back the Magic and Mothers of Magic, co-author of The Way of the Rose, and co-founder of The Way of the Rose with Clark Strand. Through her writing, workshops, and online gatherings, she teaches practices for reconnecting with ancestors, intuition, and the more-than-human world.

Follow Perdita on Substack:

Take Back the Magic

Author and teacher Perdita Finn guides you through conversations with the unseen world.

By Perdita Finn

Share The Breath of Life

Subscribe now

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin!

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALk for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

It’s as if I hear from every corner of my garden and the big street outside:

“See, life always makes a comeback. Smell, touch, taste, stare — to get this imprinted into your psyche for those feeling-like-eternal winter times.”

If you are a Berlin local, come celebrate this new life and love with us on a March Wonder in Grunewald. It’s a journey of discovering wonder in the familiar and sensing into our wild roots.

The world around us is brimming with life and talking to us all the time. Just not in the language of words. It wants us to inhabit and remember the language of senses. Which is what those wanders are about.

Would be a great pleasure to have you. Or maybe you know someone in Berlin who might enjoy it?

Find out more and register here

Subscribe to my Luma calendar for monthly invites

I came back from a lifetime’s adventure just over a week ago — a vision quest in the wild of the mysterious Anza-Borrego desert in California. Two weeks of communing with Anza-Borrego as a sacred place, that has facilitated encounters of many humans with their souls, with a three day solo fast, away from the guides and the group as the culmination of the experience.

What happened during the two weeks has been unfolding and will be for a long time. But below is my account of an important threshold that I’ve clearly seen if not yet fully crossed. An attempt to give space to the vast expanse of the Underworld and unconscious, that had been knocking on my doors for years.

Haunted by the Underworld

My life of the last 5 years — which I distinctly remember — and for years before that in a sort of foggy way, felt like going from one moment of darkness to the next.

Darkness of depressive episodes without a reason I could identify, darkness brought about by grief and loss of a loved one, darkness of not seeing my way.

Haunted by darkness, I would seek out all kinds of experiences to lift myself out of its depths. From breathwork, to plant medicine, to theater, to then discovering how communing with nature was there to hold, soothe and love me.

Looking back, most of the journeys into darkness were not of my free will. At best I went through a lot of resistance; at worst I felt coerced, as if targeted by some forces that didn’t care how much work I had been putting into “self-development”.

I had or rather, I was guided into an aha moment around a year ago, that I now see as an invitation to the Anza-Borrego journey. Through an exchange with here on Substack, who also happened to be one of the guides in Anza-Borrego, I came across a book by Bill Plotkin: Soulcraft.

The darkness is as obvious a symbol and site for the soul as any. The dark is the unknown, the mystery, the medium that holds the unpredictable — the possible. It is the best blank screen upon which to project all that is unsolved and unloved in our hearts. We are afraid of the dark simply because we can’t see what’s there and we naturally assume the worst.

— Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft

So, darkness was not haunting me — it was reaching out. It was speaking to me. I just hadn’t had the language to understand and respond to those calls. And it became very evident that, by that serendipitous exchange, I was being invited on a journey into the underworld.

“Ok, I couldn’t reach you through your dreams and imaginative journeys. So, you should be able to get something spelled out in human verbal language.”

“Yes, thank you, that was very helpful.”

Underworld Creatures

We live in a world where it often feels like we know all there is to know about our psychology and psyche. More and more seeing our bodies, brains and minds as intricate pieces of machinery that we are very close to decoding. Haha, how naive.

Most of the decoding and “self-development” modalities assume we are creature of the waking world, only just inhabiting above the soil layer. Yes, diving enough to be able to soar as spirits in the upper world, circumventing our messy bodily entanglements.

And yet, if we think about it, darkness might be the biggest part of us that is whispering and stirring even in the daylight. We know how the subconscious holds a dossier on who we are, what we are here to do, what it is we are trying to hide from our waking selves at all costs. A dossier we could never collect in our waking state.

Looking through the non-duality lens, the underworld is where we might also get a glimpse into the vast roots and mycelial networks that link us all. Nodes where our many seemingly random interests, encounters and paths come together. And possibly reveal to us our unique place of being in and relating to this world that Bill Plotkin calls the soul.

To uncover the secrets of our souls, we must journey into the unknown, deep into the darkness of ourselves and farther into an outer world of many dangers and uncertainties.

— Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft

Living our life with fear, resistance, or ignorance of the vast Underworld expanses is a major divide on our path to be whole.

My Dark Longing Met

So here I was on an underworld journey. Of my own volition — not only to descend but also to surrender and establish a Darkness base.

On the arrival day Anza-Borrego greeted us with 35°C and an incessant wind. Stirring, swirling, suffusing and disorienting. As if probing us for cracks to exploit, and super-charging our psychic metabolism through its own feverish state.

“The underworld doors are open. You dared to come, there is no way back.”

The only guidance we received on that first day was common sense instructions on catching dreams. Ignoring my scepticism of being someone who had never managed to consciously catch dreams before there it was on that first night: a generous gift from the dreammaker. Two dreams that didn’t mind being caught and written down, one of them almost a personal greeting from Anza-Borrego herself. An invitation to shed my first tears.

And so the journey into the underworld began with a hot welcome. Ravishing and engulfing love-kind-of hot. Holding you in a possessive grip by the scorching sun, intoxicating aura of mountain lavender and white sage, omnipresent vibrating vortexes of humming birds.

Snarled at but not Devoured

With most of my defenses down, the universe, the stars, the moon, the cacti in full bloom, the flirting ravens and even annoying hikers were opening all kinds of doors to me and delivering messages, some of which had given up hope of being received.

I know, the journey I am describing is not what many of us have experienced as the underworld and darkness — which are capable of tearing us apart and claiming our middleworld lives. It was masterfully guided, paved by intimate landscape wanders, dreamwork, poetry, dancing, lots of public tears, and a milky-way adorned ceiling that I would wake up to.

Yet, the tearing-me-apart were clearly there. I could recognize piles of skulls and bones, seductive songs of Sirens inviting me to make my main home there, and my own grotesque forms that would be a perfect fit for a nightmare.

There was however a degree of separation — an elastic, if permeable wall that kept us from blending, kept me from being devoured.

When I reflect on how that degree of separation was there, I go back to the poetry, the dancing, the music-making, and the sticky white sage resin that yelled of its presence from tens of meters away.

Could beauty, art and love be the underworld dress code that I had largely neglected before?

And if I am to maintain my Darkness base, would it be about opening myself to more love and beauty? Singing and dancing away? Reciting poetry at family dinners?

I am being ironic here because I have been drawn into the so-called artistic ways of being. But hey, I am not a creative or an artist — so how would I justify those frivolous romantic behaviours?

But if it’s a universal requirement for all of us humans, from Darkness herself… Well, that changes everything.

The Gifts

Darkness and the Underworld are of course not about pain-inflicting and suffering at their core. They are there test our maturity and readiness for the gifts they can reveal.

And what unique and precious gifts they are. Like encounters with one’s soul that we started with. Those gifts come from inhabiting diverse states of consciousness, different from the waking one.

They are about TRA-versing from our daily reality with its time scale, and rational demands into worlds that throughout their long history humans had inhabited and still do in many parts of the world. Diving into deep imagination, dreams, intuitive spaces, and exchanges that happen across species, beings, eras in ways that don’t make sense to the waking mind.

We cross over - we TRAnsit from the mind of thoughts and agitation into a simple revelatory space in which time collapses, thoughts leave, insights arrive.

— Josh Shrei, The Emerald

I wrote about these states recently in the context of a “consciousness contract” that Western civilization has covertly bound us to, and its far-reaching consequences.

And just having a glimpse into the alleys of Darkness, ruled by the Mystery, that alone can be something to live and die for. I feel so blessed to have had a few of those glimpses into other worlds.

On night one of my three-day solo fast (the culmination of the two weeks of the vision quest), I was woken by an intense, sweat-drenching heatwave — strikingly out of sync with the stubbornly cold feet I had been aware of all night.

As I unzipped my sleeping bag with a dramatic gesture and opened my eyes, I became unmistakably aware of a stare. The stare of Mother Moon herself.

She was exactly in my field of vision, which was contained by some bushes and huge boulders — where I would find her the next two nights, waking me up to this exact position in the sky.

Every time I woke up, I would without an effort swim in a liminal state between sleep and waking. Opening and closing my eyes. Witnessing, for about half an hour, a kaleidoscope of visions and some words, some “random“, some in response to questions I had been seeking answers to.

It also felt so normal and “legitimate” as a source of knowing. Though it didn’t originate in the waking state, it was offering guidance to my middleworld life.

Over the Great Divide

I had come on that journey feeling a great divide — a wall I had been holding up, separating my waking life, with its many responsibilities, questions and demands, from the many calls of the Underworld.

In the forms of signs and premonitions, very special connections to the more-than-human life, imaginative experiences, longings that explicitly were calling me into the depth of myself and the Earth.

And the journey was in many ways a permission to “normalize” my weird parts and experiences held in that dreaming container.

To become more familiar with the communication system used by the underworld parts of me, or maybe not of me but of the Earth’s mind herself.

“What if mind is not ours, but is Earth’s? What if mind, rightly understood, is not a special property of humankind, but is rather property of the Earth itself—a power in which we are carnally immersed?

— Becoming Animal, David Abram

I also greatly appreciated a demo of masterfully inhabiting both worlds, presented by the guides. Coordinating the many logistical parts, feeding us wonderful meals always on the schedule, and at the same time staying in apprenticeship to Mystery, tuning into the dreamy wavelengths with us. Allowing the two words to mingle and inform each other.

Sharing this experience here is my way of expressing my deepest gratitude to the otherworldly Anza-Borrego, to the guides and their unmatched levels of mastery and dedication, and actually to myself as well, as romantic and easy as it may sound, opening the door to this experience took a lot of courage, practice, loads of grief and pain that had to be faced.

Let this piece of writing also be a vow to keep that experience and my new becomings alive. The keeping it alive part, we know, is sometimes a life-long undertaking.

Grateful to have you as my witness.

In humility and awe of Mystery,

Yulia

To dive deeper:

Soulcraft, Crossing into the Mystery of Nature and Psyche

Ways to further explore together:

Listen to the podcast:

The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.

Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with two flow-co-creators.

Join me on monthly Nature Walks in Berlin !

Subscribe to my calendar for monthly invites:

WALK for work with your team!

I facilitate experiences in nature that help teams step out of routines and explore new ways of thinking, relating, and creating together.

DM me for a one-pager Nature Team Walks. yulia(at)natureflowlab.com

I am back in Berlin after a three-week journey to California and a two-week vision quest in the wild of Anza-Borrego Desert. A once-in-a-lifetime experience that I’ll share about next week.

Today let me share just one thing that brings aliveness to the conversation with from a couple of months back, now published as an episode on the Breath of Life podcast.

We talked about problem-solving as a pervasive paradigm by which so many of us feel compelled to live our lives. What might it look like?

• Always on the lookout for problems in ourselves, the world, and others

• Striving for certainty and control by looking at our lives as something to fix and solve

• Tying our identities to the kind and magnitude of problems we consider ourselves capable of solving

I don’t know about you, but as I look back at my life of almost 50 years, I can’t help but see a red, fat thread running through it in the form of a question:

“What problems are you good enough (capable, smart, brave etc) to solve?”

I had been aware of it for a while. Letting go. Becoming someone other than a problem-solver. But honestly, those two weeks in the wild were by far the most true experience of what life could look and feel like when it's not lived through the problem-solution lens. And consequently, through the lens of my own value and worth.

What made the biggest difference?

It’s what the guides referred to as apprenticeship to Mystery.

It was on the one hand a recognition of mystery as a major force in our lives. On the other, an attuning to mystery’s presence in very practical and viscerally experienced ways. Masterfully facilitated by the guides of Animas Valley Institute.

We were being dreamt by the ancient wisdom and mystery of Anza-Borrego. Worked on by mystery through our dreams, encounters, and synchronicities, too many to count. We sensed our lives unfolding as an interplay of multiple forces and relationships.

The bowl of the Anza-Borrego canyons, also being a proxy of the whole Universe was humming with agency, inviting us into dreaming and co-creating together.

What a different quality of self and world inquiry it opens up. What a different way of relating to ourselves, to other humans, and to whatever might be wrong with the world. Humbly and curiously rolling with ourselves, the place, and the universe.

What we had perceived as problems were much more invitations. Exchanges with the bigger pulse of life. Asking us to become present to something.

The experience very much echoes our conversation with Jessica Böhme — questioning our urge and obsession to live by solving problems, and measuring our worth through solutions.

What could it be like to let the mystery in? To acknowledge we don’t know. That there is no certainty. To say there are no solutions to some problems. And that many things are not problems in the first place. To embrace our human experience, or as Jessica calls it, human-ing as a path made by walking.

It is a beautiful episode. Full of the questions and paradoxes that life is made of.

And here are a few of my favourite quotes, including a beautiful human-ing practice by Jessica that offers no solutions and prescriptions:

The Problem-Solving Paradigm

“What I came to is questioning this whole idea of problem-solving in the first place. Especially talking in terms of the meta-crisis — the interconnected crises of climate change, species extinction, social upheavals. Thinking they are problems that we can solve in the typical way we would approach a broken car, where the engine makes problems and we need to find a solution to make it work again. I think there’s something very flawed in this kind of thinking.

When I have a problem, it’s almost holographic. As soon as I dive in and want to understand it better, a thousand other problems open up. I can go down any road and more problems open up again. Maybe problem and solution should almost be one word. It’s problems all the way down, problems all the way up.”

The Drive for Certainty

Jessica Böhme:

“There is a mechanism behind it: once I understand the world in its details, once I know everything about it, I’m able to control it and eventually be safe — because there’s nothing uncontrolled in it. In medicine, for example, where we are over-measured, it’s not a problem in itself. But if this becomes the whole picture, if everything needs to be perfect, if my measurements always need to be perfect, I think there’s something in it that’s actually making us sicker than it’s helping us.

Due to the capacities we’ve developed to measure and control, everything that falls outside that control feels even more threatening. There was a promise in the idea that we can figure everything out through science. And if we haven’t yet, it’s only a matter of time. There’s an assumption that we will be able to figure everything out. And there’s something arrogant about that.”

The Unanswered Core Question

Jessica Böhme:

“One of the core questions I’m still sitting with is how to human well. It used to be how to live a good life, or how should I even live my life because I noticed all the scripts I thought I had until my early twenties completely fell short as soon as I started concerning myself with bigger questions.

I think a lot of us don’t know how to human well. And sometimes we jump to certain offerings this is how you should live your life. It’s always falling short. There will never be a final solution. It’s an ongoing process, a continuous inquiry: how do I human well in these conditions? This drive for certainty might always bring us more trouble than it helps us solve anything.”

A Human-ing Practice

Jessica Böhme:

“One of the things very alive to me right now is making space to listen. And I think this is related to what we were just talking about, this idea of resonance, and how resonance requires something to be unavailable, not fully in our control.

What I’ve been practicing is ten minutes each day focused on a different being. Sometimes it drifts, especially when I’m sitting in the park but I try to guide my attention there, to open myself up to life and see what life is responding from the other side. And when I talk about the more-than-human world, it is animals and plants, but it’s also Life with a capital L. What is life asking of us right now?

I feel there is not much capacity in me to listen to that, or even notice what that is. And I want to open these capacities again. Because I think if I’m in a rush and trying to force it, I can’t go into resonance with what’s around me — it becomes a mute relationship. So this opening, this making of time and space to actually listen, I think it’s essential. Not just to nature, but to whatever wants to come through.

Maybe life will never talk back. I recently read about someone communicating with a fly describing whole conversations, the fly landing on his hand. I thought, this is so strange. And so interesting, if that’s possible. I just want to know if it is. It could be a complete waste of time. It could be absurd. But just having this curiosity for life brings me alive so much more.”

In Owe of Mystery,

From my humble self to yours,
Yulia

About Jessica Böhme

Jessica Böhme is a transformation researcher and philosopher based in Berlin. Her background is in sustainability science, with a focus on how deep transformations happen and what more regenerative futures might look like. Her work began with a search for leverage points — the core interventions that shift complex systems. Over time that search led her somewhere unexpected: to questioning the problem-solution framework itself, and to the realization that separating inner and outer change may be part of the very problem she was investigating.

Her inquiry now sits at the intersection of systems thinking, philosophy of change, and the paradoxes that don’t resolve. She writes about this on her Substack, Human-ing.

Follow Human-ing on Substack:

human-ing

a column about how to be human well in a more-than-human world.

By Jessica Böhme, PhD

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