The Body of Sustainability

This past weekend I launched a new graduate level Integral Coaching course at New Ventures West called Deepening the Somatic Stream. In Integral Coaching, we recognize that people develop in different ways. We call these ways "streams of development" adopting Ken Wilber's lingo.  The streams of development we work with are somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, spiritual, and integrating.  This course is on deepening development in the somatic stream.

I posed a question to the group as a project over the 5-month duration of the course.  The question is ...

What is the body of sustainability?

Here's my premise ... and I need to start waaay back at the beginning.

When we were born, each of us was born (dare I say thrown) into a cultural narrative not of our own design or choosing. As we grew up in our family, we began to learn and embody our culture.  We learned how to speak the language, how to attend to customs, how to behave, how to relate to others, what is forbidden, what is valuable, etc. We learned how to be a Jewish-American from New York or an Amish farmer from Pennsylvania or a Native American from New Mexico or whatever. And we learned this as simply who we are - as a way of being.

And our way of being is self-sealing. What I mean by this is that the ways we act bring forth the world we live in.  And the world we live in brings forth who we are.  Have you ever talked to a fundamentalist and realized how their worldview has lots of self-consistency.  And anything that doesn't fit, they reject in order to maintain the self-consistency of their worldview.  Well, that's the way we hold worldviews even if we aren't fundamentalist.

Here's the key part of this. In the beginning we didn't have a narrative. Then as we lived and interacted with first our parents and siblings, and then others in our extended family and neighbors and friends and teachers, we embodied a narrative. I say embodied a narrative because that's how it works.  Our culture lives in our bodies. And we express our culture through our speech and behavior and relationships. We express our culture through our actions. And if there are little tikes around, they pick up the culture from us and embody it themselves. This isn't something that we were conscious of, it simply occurs.  This is one of the wonderful inventions of "who knows what or whom" that has supported our evolution thus far.

But our future evolution isn't something that we can take for granted. Today we find ourselves in a "wicked mess" of crises. In this post, I'm going to focus on our sustainability crisis. 

The way we are currently living isn't sustainable.  I'm not going to ground this assessment here. Others have and can do a much better job of that than I can.  But let me say that this is an assessment that I accept.

So where did our unsustainable way of living come from?  Well, I hate to point fingers but it came from our parents and grandparents and the culture that they embodied and passed onto us. We (and by we here I am mainly talking about the Western world) have an unsustainable culture. And it lives in our bodies and is expressed, reinforced, and passed onto our little tikes through our actions.  In short, we have a body of unsustainability. As as the rest of the world (such as China and India and perhaps some day Africa) adopts our Western ways in order to become competitive and stake their own claims on prosperity we in the Western world are getting to see the unsustainability of our ways in stark relief.

So it seems to me a natural question to ask what is a body of sustainability? And how does one go about building one? And how to you "undo" the body of unsustainability?

These are big questions but maybe y'all would like to join me and my students over the next five months in being with these questions.

Disembodied Selves Leads to Over-consumption

Here's a starting place ... from my observation, the very heart of our unsustainable culture is the interpretation that we are separate from our bodies. And because we are separate from our bodies we abuse our bodies. We overeat, we work 80-hour workweeks, and we pop sleeping pills so we get enough rest to keep pushing ourselves. If we do pay attention to our bodies it is some sort of home improvement project like building a six pack or liposuction.  I saw a brochure for a spa the other day in my local organic grocery store that advertised "body management" services. It is as if our bodies are unruly and need to be disciplined.

In the West we have antipathy for our bodies thanks to Calvin and St. Augustine who had difficulties with their own bodies and their own sexuality. We blame our bodies for being sick, for being too weak, for not looking good enough, for falling in love with the wrong people, for being addicted, for being clumsy.  It is as if we didn't get the life we wanted because of the body we have.  We have our bodies like a cage we live in. It is no wonder that we seem to either deny our embodied life or try to take it on as a home improvement project.

This split between ourselves and our bodies creates a disembodied sense of self, lack of true contact with others, detachment from the world, disintegration of our life, meaninglessness, resignation, stagnation, and suffering. In short, our lives seem deficient and empty in some essential way.  It is as if there is a giant abyss in the middle of our lives that we must fill in order to bring significance and fulfillment to our lives. So what do we throw into the abyss to fill it up?  We throw in new cars, iPhones, fancy food, fast food, lots of sex, new shoes, alcohol and other state altering substances, etc. This abyss that's smack in the middle of our lives isn't really a secret. Marketers know all about this and use it as leverage to sell us the latest stuff. But in all these years of consumption, how many of us have managed to fill the abyss? No one.

So my first notion of the body of sustainability is a healing of this split between ourselves and our bodies. As human beings we are embodied beings. We are not disembodied selves in possession of a body. We are bodied selves. And perhaps in this recognition comes the true resolution of the deficiency we feel. Perhaps it is not new cars and phones and other consumables that we need to fill the abyss but it is ourselves, our conscious bodies, that will fill the abyss from the inside out instead of from the outside in.

In her book Getting Our Bodies Back, Christine Caldwell makes the point that addiction is dissociation from our body. This seems right to me. And as a culture we are addicted to eating, drinking, sugar, oil, and shopping malls.  What if our bodies really don't need all that? If we were integral with our bodies instead of dissociated from them, would our way of living be more sustainable?  I believe the answer is a definite YES. 

Earlier I pointed to how our worldviews are self-sealing. It often takes a big breakdown or crisis in order to break the seal. And when such a break happens, we can either choose to re-examine our cherished beliefs about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our world and develop a new worldview that resolves the breakdown ... or we can ignore the breakdown and pretend things are business as usual.  So here we are, on the precipice of a planet-wide breakdown. What will we do?

So this is my first notion of building a body of sustainability - heal the split between ourselves and our bodies. We haven't looked at the separation from each other and from the planet. For sure they have a big role to play here too. More on that later.

So ... please help me distinguish the body of unsustainability from the body of sustainability. What new interpretations are needed? What interpretations do we need to drop?  What new practices are needed? What old practices do we need to stop?

Take care,

-Steve

Comments

[Primitivo]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for sharing that generative question of what is the body of sustainability.

I would like to here back what the insights, discoveries and the development of best practices in cultivating and embodying an answer to the questions.

Here are some of my reflections:

1) What do the biological, ecological, cultural (indigenous) models say about sustainability and how can those inform this question?

2) I would think it's also useful to think about the group, family, community and societal practices that could be additonal determinants of the body of sustainability.

I look forward to additonal postings.

Tivo

[Steve]

Tivo,

Yes, I think you are pointing in a good direction to deepen the inquiry. I talked a lot about Western culture in my post and there are many other cultures out there that we can learn from.

And I completely agree that this crisis has to be tackled from multiple directions - family, community, society, etc. For example, what is the body of community sustainability?

Great ideas!

-Steve

[Lisa Christie]

Steve, Excellent article -- a real contribution!

I agree with everything said, and thank you for raising the question about the body of sustainability.

I find Riane Eisler's model of patterns of human organization to be very helpful, both in terms of understanding where we are now and some possibilities for our future... She uses the terms "dominator" and "Partnership" to indicate cultures organized by force and fear on one hand, and by an ethic of mutual flourishing on the other.

Interestingly, and very much in keeping with the point you made (drawing on Christine Caldwell's observation that addiction is dissociation from our body), there tends to be a lot of trauma in Dominator cultures. And, at least in part due to that trauma and the way that it is held culturally/somatically, there tends to be both a sense of estrangement from the larger environmental context (which is experienced as dangerous and threatening) and the human body which, from the perspective of the rational ego, is the part of nature that we experience most intimately.

The experience of trauma (and the chronic stress the results) damages the limbic brain, and I heard recently, that this damage is physiologically similar or identical to the damage caused by addiction.

So there a neurophysiology of bodily and ecological estrangement...

Thankfully, the human brain is adaptive and it is possible to heal some of the damage, through developing different ways of thinking and being and through practices such as meditation. Therefore, I think it, in relation to the body of sustainability it might be helpful to incorporate the metaphor of healing.

Thank you again for your insightful development of the question and introducing it for a broader discussion!

[Amiel Handelsman]

Steve,

I like the notion of healing the split between ourselves and our bodies. It reminds me of Ken Wilber's distinction between differentiating and dissociating. Part of the modern malaise you describe is that in the process of differentiating body and mind (a necessary and important step in evolution), we have dissociated it. The task now is to reintegrate or, as you put it, heal.

Now, one small quibble: you write about sleeping pills in a way I would assess as pejorative. Some people use these to work 80 hour weeks. Some get addicted to them. A lot of people, including me, occasionally use sleeping pills as (a Quadrant 2 or pharmacological) part of an approach to sleep disorders.

Finally, while I find myself nodding my head in reading what you write, I also notice my mood has declined. I have less positive energy and hope than before I started reading. So I pose a challenge to you: how might you re-write this in a way that acknowledges the "good news" of our times. Even a paragraph like this can make a difference.

[Amiel Handelsman]

Steve,

I like the notion of healing the split between ourselves and our bodies. It reminds me of Ken Wilber's distinction between differentiating and dissociating. Part of the modern malaise you describe is that in the process of differentiating body and mind (a necessary and important step in evolution), we have dissociated it. The task now is to reintegrate or, as you put it, heal.

Now, one small quibble: you write about sleeping pills in a way I would assess as pejorative. Some people use these to work 80 hour weeks. Some get addicted to them. A lot of people, including me, occasionally use sleeping pills as (a Quadrant 2 or pharmacological) part of an approach to sleep disorders.

Finally, while I find myself nodding my head in reading what you write, I also notice my mood has declined. I have less positive energy and hope than before I started reading. So I pose a challenge to you: how might you re-write this in a way that acknowledges the "good news" of our times. Even a paragraph like this can make a difference.

[Steve]

Amiel,

I like your challenge. One of the things I've been noticing as I write this series of posts on the body of sustainability is my own mood and the tone of my writing. And I notice that my own mood wavers between indignation, frustration, and optimism.

And my comment on sleeping pills wasn't so much aimed at any use of them but instead abuse of them. I read an article within the last 6 months is some magazine (sorry I forget which one) that talked about the use of sleeping pills to fuel our overdriven lifestyle. People are using sleeping pills in order to work longer hours to get promotions and higher pay. According to what I remember from the article, sleeping pills are at an all-time high in sales.

Thanks for the challenge. I'll take it up in future posts.

Take care,

-Steve

[Ken Homer]

Excellent post Steve!

You say you "don't want to point fingers but, it is from our parents and grandparents that we learned to be unsustainable." I have to take exception to that, though it may be simply a generational thing... Prior to WWII life in most parts of the world was sustainable - pesticide use was nearly unheard of, people lived within their means, eating mostly locally grown food in season. Forestry was for the most part sustainable, etc. Not that there weren't signs of trouble mind you. However, many baby boomers grew up with parents who lived through the Great Depression and WWII and inherited a cultural narrative that was highly supportive of sustainability.

But since the rise of the baby boomers we have become very unsustainable - so I will point a finger at my own generation and say that we bear primary responsibility for the wicked mess we now find ourselves in. It is in the years following WWII and most especially in the period from the 1970s until now that we have witnessed the worst damage being done.

As you point out it is the worldview of contemporary Western culture that is fueling our disassociation from our bodies. At some point in the last few hundred years a group of us began treating Earth as dead and inert, something seen as "resources" for our use rather than an living dance of very complex patterns that interact and maintain themselves over time - of which our bodies are an intricate part. This kind of thinking is blind to the fact that when we create the conditions in Q4 that do not support life, it has a direct, though sometimes delayed, effect on Q2. Over time this worldview has achieved dominance in terms of organizing human behavior at the level of societies, nations and cultures. It is not that this worldview is wrong or the people practicing it are evil, so much as it is harmful to our continued bodily integrity.

A recent example of the kinds of challenges this kind of thinking produces is the report a few months ago on the amount of prescription medicines found in the water supplies in major cities in the US. Many people were startled by this news. The basics of biology have yet to be grasped by most manufacturers and by nearly all of the public. If medicine, or vitamins for that matter, are water soluble then any amount not absorbed by the body will be excreted as a waste product. And since post-modern life includes a design where human beings dump our bodily waste into our water circulation system, we get build ups of medicines and vitamins in our water - not to mention all the other contaminants like pesticides, PCBs, heavy metals, and photo-degrading plastics, etc. These are in turn taken back into our bodies with our next glass of water, cuppa coffee or mug of beer - repeating in an endless cycle. What happens when our bodies become toxified due to poisoned water supplies? We lose the sustainability of our body. This is a direct Q2 consequence of an unconscious Q3 design. What happens when the toxicity of poisoned water supplies affects millions or even billions of people? Hard to think about, but not hard to conceive, unless your model of life in Earth is one where your body is separate from it, in which case it is easy to keep inventing creative ways to deny reality until it catches up with you - Q4 reality always trumps Q3 conceptions when it comes to sustainability.

I suggest that one way to begin to build the body of sustainability is to conceptualize our bodies as "Earth Walking As People." Our bones are formed of Earth, our blood is astonishingly close in chemical composition to seawater, our breath is shared with all other land creatures, refreshed and renewed by the ocean and the world's forest ecosystems. Our minds illuminated by the fire of the Sun. Water and air are the seamless circulating systems that connect us with ourselves, each other and the world around us. With such a concept working our minds we may begin to notice and create our worlds a bit differently. I suggest as a practice that we find some time each day or at least a few days per week to lay on the ground and allow ourselves to open. This simple practice is among the most profound I have discovered.

"We Are The World", was not just a sappy song from the last century, it is a profound truth - human beings are found nowhere else in the vastness of the Universe, we arose here in Earth and, in the words of Chief Seattle, whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the children of the Earth. If we want sustainable bodies we need to be thinking in much longer terms than next quarter and we need to be recognizing that in a world of closed loop systems there is no "away" in which to throw our wastes.

Human beings will always generate waste products, how do we design our large-scale systems to produce waste that is biologically useful, i.e., food, for other biological entities? That seems to be a good Q3/Q4 question to complement your Q1/Q2 inquiry around how to build the body of sustainability.

[Steve]

Ken,

Thanks so much for your comments.

I love your distinction of us as "earth walking as people". And your practice of laying on the earth regularly.

What was the big shift, I wonder, between the boomers and the generations that preceded them? Why did their lifestyle suddenly become unsustainable?

-Steve

[Ken Homer]

See Meadows et al for a pretty good example of Q3 culturally dominant thinking overruling Q4 assessment and feedback that suggested corrective measures were in order. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_to_Growth) - In this case it was the generation before the boomers who pretty much made the fateful choices.