Building Bridges, Tending Soul

Essay #1: Introduction

My hands are soil—

earth, water, Sun.

Your heart is the root

from which the universe

springs. 

---

I am hiking through the Columbia River Gorge. Sunlight is streaming through leaves onto water, flowing down on its long journey to the sea. The rocks hold my feet steady upon the Earth; though I have walked this path many times, somehow it always feels new. I am new, the world is new, and everything is constantly flowing. 

Holding this knowledge is a sacred task. It is to see that all is interdependent—all is unknown—and this mystery contains and creates more than all our knowledge could ever hope to craft.

Indeed, mystery is creation, in its fullest and most generative sense. 

In our age of artificial intelligence and growing technological prowess, it is necessary to remember how mysterious life is. Without consciously tending to the mystery (that is also ourselves), we grow evermore disconnected from community; from living in harmony with each other and the earth. 

Meaning fades like a dream; we wake confused, wondering how we got here, and we keep trying to fix the world instead of recognizing the mystery that we are—the only real path to healing. As the Tao Te Ching states, “Subtle wonder within mysterious darkness: this is the gateway to all understanding.”

This is the current problem in society: disconnection from the archetypal mystery of our fundamental interdependence with all of existence. This essay series will explore how quantum physics, depth psychology, ecology, and spiritual practice can weave together and help explain the root cause of our collective malaise and potentially offer a path forward, or at the very least questions that will help guide those who read to their own insights around their unique path forward. Only such an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach can meet the complexity of our times. 

Some of my questions are: How are our psyche and consciousness related to the insights of quantum mechanics? Is it merely a useful metaphor, or is there a deeper correlation? How can the principles of interdependence and the observer effect relate to the work that happens in therapy and healing environments? What can Hakomi and other somatic modalities offer a world in ecological crisis? Can the principles of quantum physics be a bridge for people to enter into a new paradigm of aliveness?

That is what I want to map.

Part of that mapping must start from not-knowing and seeing how our inability to be certain is the first step towards wisdom. In Zen Buddhism (which I am quite shaped by), “beginner’s mind” is the foundation of all spiritual practice. Every moment we meet afresh, as if embracing a spirit of not-knowing for the first time. There is a koan in the Soto school of Zen that speaks to this:

Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?”  Fayan answered, “Around on pilgrimage.” Dizang then asked, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?” Fayan replied, “I don’t know.”  Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

Science is slowly approaching a similar kind of understanding; its tentative steps growing more assured. Though to be certain, it still wants to know, and I must be careful not to equate the scientific endeavor entirely with the mystical stance of Zen. The realm of quantum physics, however, does pose the possibility that there is only possibility; that uncertainty is a fundamental, universal logic. 

As Stefano Calzati and Derrick de Kerckhove write in their 2022 book Quantum Ecology: Why and How New Information Technologies Will Reshape Societies, “humanity lives in uncertainty… it is constitutive of life, ontological. This… is what throws humanity—especially secularized humanity—into disbelief… ‘Doubt, in this alternative register, is felt, lived, and sensed as embodied reality.’ [(Amoore, 2019, 149)]. Doubt then becomes a grounding principle that permeates experience.” (p. 182)

Put simply, doubt is not human error; it is the very fabric of our universe.

Indeed, this “epistemological disposition” is necessary to make progress. Concurrent with this emergent scientific understanding of mystical realities is the related truth of interdependence. “Life erupts and it is entangled: it connects by implication, it subsumes, reverberates through, and reflects the whole of which it is an instantiation.” (Calzati & de Kerckhove, 2022, p. 183). 

As in Indra’s Net of Jewels, each part reflects and is the other. We are a beautiful facet and instantiation of a web that glistens in the light of dawn. Webs are incomplete without the unity of individual threads. What arises from seeing this is responsibility—the recognition of the necessity to tend to the world. Indeed, as one’s self and the universe are inseparable, genuinely caring for oneself is to tend to the erupting life of which one is an intimate part. Care of the world is care of the self, and vice versa.

“An ecology of care is one in which subjects—individuals and collectives—freely orient their own quest within and through the world, rather than being taken care for. And they do so consciously. Freedom requires responsibility precisely because it implies a degree of uncertainty” (Calzati & de Kerckhove, 2022, p. 183). 

Recognition of our connection with the web of life, of our entanglement in complex and constantly emergent systems, allows us to let radical freedom guide us toward responsibility, not away from it. And, if you’re anything like me, it can be easy to feel a pull for everyone in the world to have this recognition, so that we can move forward together. This is where science does not offer us much value since wisdom is not a principle of observation, and patience is not encouraged (though many find it) in scientific endeavors.

Coming to this embodied recognition takes patience, acceptance, and letting go of the self. This is where the world of mysticism, therapy, and healing can help guide us.

In the book The Quantum and the Lotus, Matthieu Ricard, a molecular biologist turned Tibetan Buddhist monk, says, “There are many signs of success in the contemplative life. But the most important is that after a few months or years, your egoism has lessened and your altruism has increased. If attachments, hatred, pride, and jealousy still remain as strong as before, then you have wasted your time, gone down a blind alley and fooled other people.” (p. 11). 

This offering is my reaching out to the world, hoping to bridge the gap between our hearts and our heads. I don’t have answers, only questions and ideas. 

Because mystery is not solvable, it is sacred. In honoring its sacredness, we enter into a relationship with it. Only in this relationship will it reveal its truths. 

So, from here, I will explore:

• The Embodied State of Not Knowing in the world and how this not-knowing leads us to a deep sense of responsibility and interconnectedness. How does this show up in our lives? How does it show up in working with clients? What exactly about this way of relating to the world and others is useful? 

• Then, ideas of Entanglement, attachment work, and healing trauma. This will hopefully lead us, through some of Donald Kalsched’s work, into the archetypal realm and potential view of this as being a harmonic space with levels of energy we can access in different ways. Part of the question here will be somatics, and how these subtle energies live in the body. The metaphor of the observer-effect and wavefunction collapse may become useful here. 

Importantly, the final two parts of this are Ethics and Ritual. 

• Ethics is the grounded stance of responsibility, explored more explicitly than when discussing the embodied not-knowing stance. This is crucial for humanity to have a sense of, and essential for my work as a therapist. 

• Rituals and Integration. How rituals have disappeared, what they are, and what they mean for our Psyche—individual and collective. What would a restoration of ritual look like in our modern era? How does this integrative orientation help? 

In conclusion, I hope to offer a holistic framework that people can start to work from, helping to bridge gaps between seemingly disparate fields of human being and experience. Only this transdisciplinary approach can honor the complexity of the times we are entering as a collective. 

You’re invited to join me on this journey; to contribute, challenge, and reflect.

Such acts are the first steps toward this soul-ecology of care. 

Post-Reading Invitations:

1. Take a few deep breaths right now, feeling the pull of gravity on your body. Feel yourself alive in the world. Then, ask yourself gently: “What is the nature of my experience right now?” Notice what, if anything, this does to your felt experience. Do you know what the nature is? If not, what is that like? If you do, how do you know?

2. Ground again into your body, paying attention to your breath and sounds. After some silence, gently ask, “Do I really know who/what I am?” Notice any narratives that come up around this question. Notice any feelings it evokes. You can then ask of these narratives and/or feelings, “Is this me?” or, conversely, gently recognize, “This is not me.” How does this shift you? Play around with this for as long as you like. 

3. Write a few sentences about places in your life where you feel you could soften your stance on knowing in the world, and that you would benefit from doing so. If you can’t find anything, how does your knowledge help you? What about it helps?

---

The Sun is breathing, but,

only for a moment. 

The Mystery of Life

has no solution. 

It is alive in the way

wind moves the clouds. 

In how your heart

opens

to the vast, intimate 

World.

- A Desert Wind

---

• Research Notes

  Ricard, M., & Xuan Thuan, T. (2004). The quantum and the lotus: A journey to the frontiers where buddhism and science meet. Crown.

  Calzati, S., & de Kerckhove, D. (2022). Quantum ecology: Why and how new information technologies will reshape societies. MIT Press.

Singing at the Edge of Water and Darkness

Standing on the edge of what we do not know, we call it darkness.

Before the raging river, without a bridge, we call it dangerous.

And if we stand before the rapids in the dark of night,

we may find we call it wisdom.

*****

My voice is not devoid of self, though I long to, as much as possible, listen and receive what wants to come through me. And so, this is a practice in sharing a voice that has received something from the world that it wants to share. In some ways, it scares me. Because I don’t always know what this voice is or where it will take me, and yet its pull upon my heart moves me forward.

What we do not know, we often fear. We are afraid of the dark that lies beyond the mind. Still, a part of us knows that we cannot grow without the sightless holding of Earth and womb. Though it seems we are afraid of what lies beyond darkness, we are really afraid of the unknown journey towards it. The current of the journey runs beneath our knowing, and we inevitably find ourselves pulled along—in the flow of a river—whose destination we have only ever heard by name: the Sea.

But what happens in that moment before you enter the stream? The anxiety, profound. Your heart: racing. And yet, and yet.

Something pulls you along.

You could call it a deeper knowing—a knowledge beyond knowledge, one that transcends fear with a deeper, truer known. It is this—when listened to deeply—that we call wisdom.

Mind you, I am not advocating that we blindly jump into raging rivers at night.

I am advocating for myself, and for all of us, to listen to that deeper knowing. As a society, we are standing at the edge of water and darkness, and we know that we do not know, and we fear what lies ahead. But we have heard of the Sea, and our hearts pull us forward. If we could, I would invite us to stand exactly where we are, and sing to the night and the waters, and the stars up above. To sing our not-knowing and cry out with longing. Even if it is only in your heart.

It seems to me that only this can move us forward: to be attuned to ourselves, receiving the waters of our own soul, standing firm upon the Earth even within darkness. This is trust, and it is where every endeavor must begin.

So I have received.

I am to journey forth, at the edge of water and darkness.

Come, join me.

I have sung here the first note, and I will be here singing for a while.

-A Desert Wind