Permeable Participation

While our unique identities are the gifts we bring to the intersubjective space, we have to loosen our grip on our separate identity to make room in ourselves for deeper dimensions of who we are.

[video transcript]

I want to say a little about my passion for opening up our awareness of the we. One way I think about this is of feeling into our spaces as spaces of ‘embodied non-duality’. What I mean by that is together we are embodying and relating from the non-dual nature of our experience.

Experiencing our Permeable Aliveness

I want to say a little about the background of this for me. In my most profound meditative experience, it has been very easy at times to access how life is living in us, and how highly permeable, porous and fluid we are. The self is experienced as a process of aliveness that is not controlled by or reducible to an Emma-entity doing her individually distinct life: 'Emma needs to decide this', or 'Emma is a psychotherapist or...' That there is something much more primary, cellular, open and fluid in our experiencing self.

The Loss of Fluidity in Habitual Relating

I used to do a lot of silent meditation retreats, and we would be in these very delicate, open, expanded states, and the retreat would end and we'd began to speak and people would suddenly be talking about whatever that era's version of Brexit was in very habitual ways. Now one of the things that used to make me sad, and stopped that experience of openness being integrated more fully into my life, was how - even when we have these very deep experiences - how habitually we return to a much more culturally normal way of relating. We lose the experience-near quality, we lose the open-system feeling, and we recalibrate to social norms and relate from a more fixed sense of identity.

Relating from our Fluency

So I am really interested in supporting us to live and relate from our more fluent capacities when it’s possible and appropriate to do that. When we do that we are actually – as well as having experiences that align with our spiritual insight or our interior experience – we are also having very fundamentally mammalian experiences; we’re experiencing that we’re creatures, that we are part of a species, that we are naturally very affected by one another, and that it can be good for us to feel our belonging, our resonance, our co-regulation.

Being Creaturely as well as Esoteric

So one of the things that’s very precious in we-space experience is this blend of calling in higher possibilities for consciousness alongside these much more ordinary (but ordinary in the most beautiful sense) primary creaturely qualities. I find that blend very touching, because sometimes the creaturely presence can support us to soar, but more often to integrate and be with parts of ourselves that have been too sequestered in solitary ways.