Rewilding Ourselves – Reclaiming Our Wild and Tender Hearts from the Noise of the World

At a time when every aspect of our lives seems to be being hemmed in and commoditised, labelled, claimed, and sold back to us bent out of shape, it feels more necessary than ever to find and reclaim the wild spaces. Not only the wild spaces out there but our inner wild spaces, those quiet corners of our soul that can be so difficult to preserve or access when faced with the noise of a world seemingly in chaos. A chaos magnified to a deafening din by the always-on stream of news and opinion we get from social media and our ubiquitous devices.

This idea of rewilding has been explored in the context of nature extensively, especially in the great George Monbiot’s book ‘Feral.’ But even where the concept has been applied to us as people, from the inside out, it has been largely focused on nature connection.

“Rewilding is not about abandoning civilization but about enhancing it. It is to ‘love not man the less, but Nature more’.” - George Monbiot

I want to share with you other forms of rewilding ourselves that I have explored, not because nature connection isn’t essential, but because it has been explored and expressed eloquently by others.

Like many people reading this, I am also at least partly city-creature: because of what I enjoy and because of my work; so I want to share some of the ways I think we might all be well served by peeling away the layers of domestication and re-finding our wild and tender hearts, out in nature but also in city life.

There are four big themes that follow:

· Embodiment

· Dialogue

· Imagination

· Spiritual connection

And I will end with an invitation. I believe that reclaiming the wild spaces in the world and within ourselves is essential to creating a better world.

Rewilding our bodies – Embodiment as gateway to emotional flow

Domestication is an important word in that introduction. I have worked in the field of embodiment for many years. Embodiment could be described as the exploration of our subjective experience of our body as self, rather than the objective experience of the body as a hunk of meat or ‘brain taxi.’

When you work with the body in-depth, you often come across trauma. There seems to be a way that even for those who don’t have major trauma histories, what trauma we have experienced surfaces when we start working with the body.

“In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.” - Bessel A. van der Kolk, Author, The Body Keeps the Score

There’s lots I could say on this subject, but I don’t want to fall too far down this particular rabbit-hole for now. There’s something specific here.

Some years ago, I was having regular conversations with someone I had got to know who did trauma work with military veterans with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). He used a technique called EMDR which, as I understand it, as part of the method, uses bilateral stimulation to help the body and mind integrate experience. One way of doing this is by tapping on either side of the body.

Now, he and I had both read work (such as Peter Levine’s ‘Waking the Tiger’) exploring the fact that wild animals don’t seem to store trauma in their musculature in the way humans do. After escaping the threat, they naturally stand and shake, and this shaking helps them to release the deep muscular tension and other physiological triggering which takes place during a distress response.

As an experiment one day, my friend had tried tapping the ears of his cat in the way he might create bilateral stimulation with a client with PTSD (he wouldn’t tap their ears, but you probably get what I mean!). He expected to see no real response from his cat but it went quiet and shivered in a way which seemed similar to the shaking which is often experienced during a release of trauma. Intrigued, he tried a similar experiment with a friend’s horse and got a similar response which looked like a trauma release.

Now, this is by no means a clinical study, but when he described it, I started to wonder about something. What if the process of domestication, where animals become progressively removed from their natural environments and increasingly dependent on human intervention to survive, might also distance those animals from their natural instincts? Maybe a version of this is true for the human animal as well, as we have become more ‘civilised’ has there been a cost in terms of our connection to our instincts and capacity for self-healing?

That friend and I had originally connected, partly because I had discovered that certain old martial arts practices seemed to stimulate the natural shaking in the body which helps to release the physiologically stored charge of trauma.

Maybe this is part of how we rewild our bodies, or rewild ourselves in relationship with our bodies: The reclaiming of these natural instincts that help us to heal ourselves and allow emotional flow rather than the more typical emotional stuck-ness of the human condition.

More broadly, I would say that the full inhabiting of our experience as embodied beings (rather than disembodied thinking units with meaty vehicles we have all-too-often been unconsciously taught to either neglect, optimise like a machine, or beautify like a fashion-item) is essential to the rewilding of ourselves.

To link to nature connection, there is a parallel to be drawn between our bodies, and the big body of Mother Earth. If we objectify ourselves, how much easier is it to objectify others, and objectify the planet as a collection of resources we, at best, need to manage? If we can fully inhabit ourselves as embodied beings, we have a much better chance of seeing the Earth as a living, breathing being which we desperately need to find a healthy relationship with.

Rewilding our bodies matters beyond our personal health or relationship with ourselves, it is the foundation of our relationships.

Rewilding our relationships – Dialogue and creating shared meaning and coherence

I was recently at the second international conference of the Academy of Professional Dialogue (AoPD) and it was something I shared in one of the large group dialogues that nudged me to write this piece.

My paper from last year’s conference has just been published in this new book ‘The World Needs Dialogue!’ along with lots of other brilliant pieces from the field

Dialogue is a carefully chosen term which is used to refer to a range of approaches to facilitating group conversation to create greater connection and coherence.

While there are many methods, ideas and techniques which I think are congruent with the spirit of dialogue, one thinker shaped its modern expression significantly: David Bohm. He worked with Peter Garrett, a masterful practitioner and thinker in this work, to shape many of the ideas and practices which are in use today. But Bohm wasn’t an expert in human relating by background, he was a theoretical physicist.

Where Bohm made the transition from physics to human relationships was in his thinking about what he called ‘the implicate order’ which I might simplify as being about the ultimate interrelatedness of all things. There is an underlying wholeness which is always there, but we can be more or less tuned into it.

One of his key ideas was the difference between parts and fragments, when seeking wholeness. If you take the metaphor of an old-fashioned watch, if you begin with the parts, all the cogs and pieces, then you can bring them together to make a whole watch. If you smash the watch, you have fragments, and you can’t put fragments together to make a whole watch, not one that works anyway!

Bohm contended that our thinking is all too often fragmentary in nature and from fragmentary thinking, we create unintended (and negative) results. Through connection and communion, we have the potential to become more coherent, to be parts that come together to evoke wholeness, and from greater connection to wholeness we can develop more coherent thinking and create better results.

This kind of connection, however it is achieved, is what I experience as a kind of rewilding of our relationships. The potential for connection and wholeness has been there from birth, maybe we were naturally coherent in that way as babies, but whether we were or not, our social structures mostly fail or even inhibit us finding this kind of connection with ourselves or each other.

If anything, I’d say the atomisation of modern society, the increasing entrenchment and social ‘sorting’ that is taking place (dividing and hunkering down in our ideological camps), is making us more fragmented socially.

“The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is at best, unintentional and reflexive; at worst, it's stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready made filing system. It's so handy when we want to quickly characterize people. But, yet we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.” - Brené Brown, Author - Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

I fear the many competing distractions of media bombardment may be making us more fragmented in our consciousness individually too. As such, there is a vital need for us to find more dialogic spaces, places, communities, practices and relationships. We need to re-find and reclaim the potential for shrugging off fragmentary consciousness and relating, and become healthy parts, able to access wholeness and connection, together.

This is the rewilding of our relationships, and here too, the fragmentation of consciousness is arguably a major cause of a disjointed, disembodied, and dysfunctional way of relating not only with ourselves and each other, but with the world as well.

How might we choose differently in how we relate to our beautiful blue-green planet if we learned to rewild our relationships?

I’ve mentioned already the way Dialogue can help to move away from fragmentary thinking, but next I want to explore how we fully reclaim the wild spaces in our minds.

Rewilding our minds – How imagination, meditation and reverie gives us access to vision

In many ways Bohm’s work is about the reclaiming of our minds from their fragmented state, and embodiment helps us to reclaim the body-mind rather than abiding in the fantasy that the mind is purely a function of the brain inside our skulls rather than the full neurophysiological network throughout our whole bodies.

There is another aspect of this for me though: imagination.

Imagination and creativity has been so lost and derided in the age of scientific materialism. The reductive narrative has dismissed our creative spirit with phrases like “It’s just your imagination” from childhood onwards.

Even the domains where creativity is more celebrated, it is all too often elevated as the source of stuff. Innovations, cleverness, marketing campaigns, viral memes. Nothing inherently wrong with any of that, much that can be marvellous. But the imagination, like the planet, is not wonderful because of what it can give us as a resource; it is wonderful because it is essential to who we are. Our imaginations are great gateways to our own inner wilderness, the open plains and dark jungles of our psyche, and I believe the jumping-off point from which we access the realm of spirit too.

Something which I have shared in my work over many years and I teach now in wise fool school are the twin arts of meditation and reverie.

Reverie is the deliberate allowing of the wandering of our minds. It is a way to flex the muscle of our imaginations in its rawest form, pure exploration of the wilderness without any need to make sense or answer to logic. It is also something practiced in some form by many indigenous tribal communities and I think has within it the seeds of shamanic, visionary states of consciousness.

The tricky thing is, that for many of us, if we just let our minds wander, we just end up ruminating on all the other things we should be doing, or mulling over past hurts, or worrying about future concerns. Our minds are busy places. So that can be how meditation can partner with reverie, we can do some mental cleaning to start. Not that meditation will ever give you an empty mind, in fact when you first start it will often feel busier as you notice the million-and-one things banging about in there, but with a little practice, we can start to get skilful at letting go of the things we habitually grab hold of when there isn’t something specific keeping us distracted. From that place of relative quietude, reverie has the potential to give our imaginations wings.

This is the rewilding of our minds.

Commercial media has become increasingly clever and deliberately designed to interrupt, to create compulsive patterns of engagement and hang onto your attention for as long as possible, even when you are not actively looking at it, so that you return as soon as possible.

In this age of distraction, it has never been more important to learn to find sanctuary in our own minds, and from there to wander wild and free through our imaginations.

If we are to free up enough cognitive capacity and creativity to not only care about, but do something about, the great challenges of our time, we must rewild our minds. To be fully resourced and connected, we also need to link in to that which is greater than ourselves…

Rewilding our spirits – Direct connection with the divine

Our relationship with spirit has been another casualty of the materialist world-view. But eve before that it was a territory laid claim to by structures of authority so that our experience of the divine could be mediated and controlled.

I believe that a relationship with spirit, whatever name you give to it, is our birth right. We don’t need priests as intermediaries between us and our gods and goddesses. If we need anything it is wise guides and mentors in cultivating our internal means of navigation, connection and communion.

This mentoring is something I feel very blessed to have experienced through studying martial arts, shamanism, meditation and ministry – and even before that through my training as an actor. And it is something I have sought to offer to others as a facilitator, author, healer, coach, spiritual counsellor and now through my teaching in wise fool school.

Wherever you find it, and many priests are wonderful examples of this spiritual mentoring role too, whatever tradition speaks to you, we need to reclaim our spiritual authority and build a direct relationship with that which is greater than ourselves.

Whether you are spiritually inclined or not, there are manifest examples of ‘that which is greater than ourselves.’ For some it is a greater sense of purpose they choose to serve but to link back to the more common expression of rewilding: our beautiful planet Earth is literally ‘that which is greater than ourselves’ and in a way which I consider no less spiritual. In many traditions nature is described as ‘the visible face of spirit.’

Again, spiritually inclined or not, you can reclaim your authority to have a direct relationship with the planet as a whole living organism. How differently might we relate to the planet if we sought communion on our walks through the world, if we met the planet as a legitimate other, granted it personhood and asked simply “How can I help?”

This is the rewilding of our spirits: The reclaiming of our spiritual authority and the forming of a direct relationship with that which is greater than us.

Rewilding: An invitation to a tapestry of connection

So, I invite you, I invoke your wild and precious soul, to join with me and many others in rewilding ourselves.

Maybe you are on the path already, maybe some parts and not others, but join up the threads, join up the threads in yourself and join up the threads between people and communities so that we may weave a great tapestry of consciousness, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, which can help us all to combat the forces of fragmentation, division and dysfunction.

Let’s conjure coherence and loving connection out of chaos.

If you’d like to get a little gift of connective inspiration every couple of days by email, you can sign up for my Everyday Magic email.

If you are intrigued and would like to learn more ways to stay spiritually connected as well as joining a wonderful community of connected beings, check out wise fool school.

If you’d just ike to stay in touch and hear when I share more things like this article then sign up for my very occasional newsletter.