omniharmonicAwakening the Earth Dharma (Part II)
This is Part II of a two part series on Awakening the Earth Dharma. If you haven’t yet read the first essay, I recommend you start there.
This series represents ideas that are not my own, synthesized from my own positionality, in service of what’s emerging. I owe all of the ideas in this essay to my friend and mentor Samantha Sweetwater whose book, True Human, articulates most of them far more thoroughly than I do here. I strongly encourage my readers to purchase her book and participate in her courses to go deeper on this subject. I am also indebted to my dear friend, Charles Eisenstein, for laying the foundations that make this essay possible. I also extend my profound gratitude to elders and wayshowers across history for their contributions to the awakening of the earth dharma: Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hahn, Martin Luther King Jr, Vandana Shiva, Chief Oren Lyons, John Churchill, John Trudell, Teilhard De Chardin, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Winona LaDuke, Bill Plotkin, Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, Wendell Berry, Casey Camp, Daniel Schmachtenberger, John Vervaeke, and others.
Blood Memory and the Return to the Cycles
What happens on the other side of our planetary initiation is difficult to describe, because this language was built inside the story of separation and the grammar of subjects and objects bends toward its assumptions. But I will try, imperfectly, to give it a shape with words.
Out of the process of reparenting ourselves, returning to Life in and through the body, we begin the long slow journey of decolonization. This journey can be too challenging and disheartening for many to see through. The conditioning is so deep and the reinforcement so strong that it can feel like an almost impossible burden to carry. But that burden is an offering, a sacred gift that we give forward to future generations with the prayer that they inherit a more coherent story about reality than we did. It’s a prayer for a bioregional civilization, a world organized around our embedded relationships instead of the Westphalian notion of sovereignty imposed from above.
As you start to strip away the conditioning of how our current institutions and economic structures have taught us to relate to reality, you begin to experience yourself as embedded within the wholeness of your ecology and your relationships. The abstract, context-free individual of liberal modernity, the rational economic agent maximizing utility in a vacuum, begins to dissolve. In its place, a relational self starts to emerge. A self defined not by what it owns or what it knows but by what it belongs to.
When the masks drop, when the blinders fall away, when enough of the conditioning has been composted that you can actually see, there is an abiding presence of love that is the animating force of this web of relationships that we are embedded within. It is not a feeling you generate. It is a feeling that was always there, obscured by the very defenses that were supposed to protect you from the pain of its absence. It is what mystics across every tradition have described as awakening: not the arrival of something new, but the recognition of something that was never missing.
Part of what this looks like, in practice, is recovering our own blood memory of our own indigeneity to earth. Whoever we are, from whatever background, if we go back far enough, we have ancestors whose worldview understood reality as an intact loop. A circle. A great hoop. Every lineage, if you trace it back far enough, had ceremonial traditions that were all about ritual recognition of the cycles within which they were embedded and their responsibility to steward those cycles with care. This is not cultural appropriation to say. It is a recognition that before any of our lineages were colonizers or colonized, we were all people of place. We were all indigenous to Earth. The blood is encoded water, passed down between generations, containing the memory of every being that came before you.
Re-indigenization must not mean appropriating from living indigenous traditions. It is doing the deep inner work of remembering that all of us come from people who knew how to live in reciprocity with the more-than-human world. And one of the most direct ways this remembering happens is through entraining to the natural cycles. The day and the night. The lunar month. The solar seasons. The longer rhythms of local ecology: when the cottonwoods flower along the creek, when the migratory birds return, when the rivers swell with snowmelt, when the soil rests under frost.
These cycles have been reduced to the cycle of products sold in Big Box retailers for Christmas, Easter, Summer holidays, and Halloween. More fundamentally, life’s cycles are the base-code of existence itself. They are patterns we can entrain to that keep us in a relational way of being. They are, like the earth and the sun, literal metaphors. They point to transpersonal patterns, and they are simultaneously those patterns themselves. Learning the cycles of your place does something to your perception of time. It replaces the linear, deadline-driven, consumptive temporality of the separated self with a cyclical temporality that is nested and recursive. And that shift in time-perception shifts your perception of self. It quietly undoes a tremendous amount of the conditioning that keeps the story of separation in place. You stop experiencing yourself as a point moving through dead space and start experiencing yourself as a pattern within patterns.
The circular pattern of the seasons reflects what many indigenous cultures refer to as The Great Hoop of Creation or the Medicine Wheel. This circle, intersected by two perpendicular lines in the shape of a cross, offers us a map for the larger patterns we’re embedded within. It is both a symbol and a tool, a practice for recognizing where we are by recognizing what we’re in relationship with. Practicing with the Medicine Wheel involves acknowledging the four cardinal directions and the fundamental characteristics they represent. East, the rising sun, the place of new beginnings. South, the heat of the full day, the joy of youth. West, the setting sun, the place of rest and dreams and adulthood. North, the cold winter, the place of wisdom and purification and ancestors. By placing ourselves at the center of these larger patterns, we are entraining ourselves as participants within the rhythm of life’s song. We are locating ourselves as a unique coordinate within the web of life, fractally woven and braided in the one Great Hoop of Creation.
This quality of relationship is where a more plural relationship to sentience becomes available, not even necessarily as panpsychism but simply as a more plural way of relating to the beingness of other aspects of creation. This is what could be called sacred ecology. Even for people coming out of or still within a materialist or rationalist point of view, there is a way in which we could agree that the tree has sentience without making any metaphysical claims. The same phenomena that constitute your own life: the processes of metabolism, the dynamic sensing and responding to environment, are present in it. Its sentience is a very different form from our own, but it is there. It has a quality of beingness that we can actually connect to. The same is true of the watershed, the soil community, the forest as an organism. The web of relationship is not an abstraction. It is a living reality that you can perceive, if you slow down enough.
A practice: Find a sit spot. Somewhere in nature, somewhere you can return to regularly. Go there, maybe just with yourself. And sit in silence, surrounded by the living processes around you. Don’t try to do anything. Don’t try to meditate. Don’t try to have an insight. Just be there.
If you slow down enough, you can actually begin to perceive the patterns of interaction between the water and the soil, and the insects, and the plants and the trees, and the birds. You start to notice how the wind moves through the canopy and how the birds respond to it. How the light changes through the afternoon. How the whole system is in continuous, responsive conversation with itself.
And at some point, if you keep going, you will notice your own empathic capacity extending beyond the boundary of your individualized self. You can start to feel the interbeing, the co-arising of yourself with these other forms of sentience. You stop being an observer. You start being a participant. You realize that you were never not a participant, you just couldn’t feel it, because the armor was in the way.
That is the dawning of planetary consciousness. Not as a concept. Not as a belief. As a lived extension of yourself into the more-than-human world. And once you experience it, even once, the story of separation becomes difficult to maintain. Not because you have disproven it intellectually, but because you have outgrown it experientially.
The Sacred Wound Between Us
This extension of empathic capacity into the more-than-human world transforms our relationship between self and world. I strongly suggest we start there. Harder still is re-patterning our relationship between self and other. Because the story of separation cuts deepest where its healing is most personal and intimate: our sexuality.
Sexuality is the most intimate form of interbeing available to us as embodied beings. It is the domain where we are literally merging with another person, where the boundary of the individualized self, if we are truly present, dissolves enough that we can feel ourselves inside the experience of another. And that requires exactly what the protective self was built to prevent: a dissolution of the defended boundary, a letting-go of the armor, a willingness to be fully seen and fully felt by someone who is not you. It requires empathically extending yourself into the world of the other, meeting them not as an object to be consumed but as a subject to be encountered. And that encounter, when it is real, when both people are actually present rather than performing, is one of the most profound experiences of interbeing available to us as humans.
But from within the story of separation, this kind of union is structurally foreclosed. When two people meet each other from behind their defenses, from within their adaptive strategies, their unprocessed wounds, their desperate need to feel safe, sexuality becomes yet another zero-sum game. Two fragments grasping at each other in the dark, hoping the other will fill the void, complete the circuit, provide the belonging they cannot source from within. And when the other inevitably fails to do this, because no other person can heal a wound that belongs to you, the result is disappointment, resentment, withdrawal, or worse.
We see this everywhere. We see it in hookup culture, where sex has been fully evacuated of relational depth and reduced to the mutual consumption of bodies. We see it in the epidemic of loneliness among people who are so isolated in their own experiences, they’ve given up on the possibility of genuine intimacy. And we see it in its most devastating expression: in the culture of sexual assault and rape and abuse and the systematic objectification of women, the place where the story of separation begins and ends. A system of extraction depends on a culture in which the other is fundamentally understood as an object, a resource to be extracted from.
This is why patriarchy has been so destructive, not just to women and the Earth. Patriarchy did not just oppress women. It severed men from their own capacity for relational presence, from the feminine intelligence within themselves that would allow them to actually meet another being in the vulnerability that genuine intimacy requires. It made masculine sexuality inherently violent: not just in the obvious sense of assault, but in the subtler sense that the masculine, cut off from the feminine, can only approach the other as conquest. As territory to be claimed. As a body to be entered rather than a being to be met.
When we cut ourselves off from the feminine, we cut ourselves off from the earth. We cut ourselves off from our own bodies. We cut ourselves off from the cyclical nature of reality itself, from the very rhythms and tides and seasons that the previous section invited you to entrain to. And this is reflected concretely in one of the most revealing symptoms of our civilizational pathology: the deep cultural shame around menstruation.
Menstruation is the body’s direct participation in the cycles of the earth and moon. It is the primal connection that people with wombs have to the rhythmic, generative nature of reality, their bodies literally cycling with the same forces that cycle the tides and the seasons, their capacity to bring life into the world a direct expression of the same creative union between earth and sun at the center of the natural order. And our culture’s response to this has been, for centuries, shame. Disgust. Concealment. The menstrual cycle treated as dirty, embarrassing, something to be managed and hidden, a medical problem to be solved rather than a sacred rhythm to be honored.
A culture that is afraid of menstruation is a culture afraid of the cyclical nature of reality. It is afraid of the feminine. It is afraid of the body. It is afraid, at its deepest level, of the earth. Because menstruation is a reminder, an inconvenient, inescapable, monthly reminder, that we are not machines. That we are not linear. That we are not the abstract, context-free rational agents the story of separation needs us to be. We are organisms embedded in cycles. We are bodies that wax and wane. And for a civilization built on the premise that nature is a resource to be mastered, that the body is a vehicle to be optimized, that cyclical time is inferior to linear progress, this is intolerable.
The imperial Christian church was one of the primary drivers of this deep ecological, cultural, social, and political misogyny and domination. The Gnostic traditions offer an insight into the specific mechanisms through which the Christianity of Empire systematically erased and attempted to subdue the feminine. In the canonical texts, Mary Magdalene appears as a repentant sinner, subordinate and grateful. But in the Gnostic gospels, she is something else entirely: a primary apostle, a spiritual teacher in her own right, and according to some traditions, Jesus’s equal partner and consort. The Gnostic term Christosophia describes the literal metaphor of the marriage of Christ, the active penetrating principle, and Sophia, the receptive relational principle. Neither alone is complete. Through the Christosophia, sexuality becomes sacred practice. When two beings merge in love, something of the original wholeness is recreated. The boundary between self and other dissolves. The illusion of separation temporarily lifts. This is why some traditions describe Jesus and Mary Magdalene as practitioners of sacred sexuality, trained in the temple traditions of Isis, where union was understood not as sin but as a doorway to divine experience.
By suppressing Mary Magdalene, by casting her as a redeemed prostitute rather than an equal teacher, by making the godhead exclusively masculine, the imperial church systematically removed the feminine from Christianity. It created a religion of the blade without the chalice, penetrating, conquering, converting, with no internal principle of attunement, no capacity to ask whether its action is in right relationship with the whole. And we have built a civilization in the image of that amputated religion. A civilization of extraction without reciprocity. Of conquest without care. Of endless penetration of the earth’s body without regard for what the earth is feeling. The pattern of rape is foundational to the colonial project. It is the colonial project, extended from women’s bodies to the body of the earth itself.
And so the reparenting work, the work of reconnecting to the earth as mother and the sun as father, of restoring the felt sense of the union between the masculine and the feminine at the cosmological level, has a direct implication for how we show up in our most intimate relationships. When we do this inner work, when we begin to restore the inner marriage between the masculine and feminine within ourselves, we can show up to partnership with our own inner union already intact. We are no longer seeking in the other what we lack in ourselves. We are no longer asking another person to complete us, to be our missing mother, our absent father, our source of belonging. We come with our own cup full. And from that fullness, a different kind of meeting becomes available: two whole beings encountering each other in the vulnerability and wonder of their shared embodiment. Two beings for whom the act of love is not extraction but offering, the offering of one’s wholeness, without attachment or expectation, in the same spirit that the sun offers its light to the earth.
This is what sovereign unity looks like. Not the elimination of desire, not the transcendence of the body, but the full inhabiting of the body in relationship. It is the blade in service of the chalice. It is the resurrection of the sacred marriage that the church buried because it was incompatible with the patriarchal, imperial apparatus that the institution required in order to function as an instrument of colonization.
When this healing begins to take hold, in individuals, in partnerships, in the relational field between people who are learning to meet each other from wholeness rather than from wound, something shifts that goes far beyond the personal. The war between the masculine and the feminine, the war within the self against the self, is the same war that plays out between every self and every other. It is the same war that plays out between humanity and the earth. Heal it at the intimate level, and you are healing it at every level. This is not a metaphor. It is the same pattern, expressed at different scales. And this is precisely why the most personal work becomes the most political.
A Confession
Before landing this plane, it’s incumbent upon me to acknowledge where I regularly and systematically fail to embody these principles. I regularly fail to hold compassion for my partner, friends, and collaborators. I shut myself off when I feel judged or misunderstood. I hold grudges. I judge and reject aspects of others that I haven’t yet come to love in myself. I protect myself from my own fears of worthlessness by reacting to the feedback of others as criticism. None of this undermines the authenticity of the Earth dharma. Rather, it reveals how realizing embeddedness is a process not a destination. Even the process of writing this piece has drawn me closer into the embodiment of interbeing. This essay has provided me with a mirror for where I am still not fully embodying this knowing.
Reflecting on this gap within myself, I’m acutely aware of the exhaustion I’ve come to experience as I’ve done my best to serve the Earth dharma. I’ve been worn down by the long, continuous onslaught of a world still writhing in the illusion of separateness. I am not above or beyond this. Every day, I’m pulled into the gravity of fear, anxiety, and a protected heart. Slowly, I have forgotten something I had forgotten and then remembered and then forgotten again. Perhaps this spiral is the nature of awakening, always deepening through layers of forgetting and remembering. In any case, my failure to live these principles, made even more visible through the mirror this essay provides, are an access point to begin again. Awakening the Earth dharma relies on our willingness to begin again and again and again. The shift I’ve been describing isn’t something anyone, most certainly not myself, achieves in some complete way. It’s a process that gradually works its way into the foundations of who we are even as we continue to live inside our own contradictions.
From Inner Work to Living Infrastructure
Once this shift takes root, once you actually begin to experience yourself as embedded, it inevitably leads to bioregional thinking. It has to, because you can see now, with a clarity that is hard to unsee, that our current institutions are reinforcing the very patterns of separation and domination that this awakening is dissolving. You cannot sustain a consciousness of interbeing inside an economy premised on zero-sum competition for scarce resources and a democracy that only recognizes the agency of corporations.
If our current institutions are reinforcing these patterns of domination, then we actually need to reimagine our democracies and our economies from this recognition of interbeing.
The reimagining required here is not reform. I have argued extensively elsewhere that reform gets captured by the dynamics it tries to change, that working within the system to change the system means accepting the system’s premises, and those premises are precisely what need to change. What is needed is parallel infrastructure: economies, democracies, and cultural patterns designed from the ground up from the recognition of mutual embeddedness. Not institutions that try to mitigate the damage of separation, but institutions that are structurally incapable of producing separation because they are built on different foundations.
Economically, this looks like cooperative, resource-based systems in which competition exists but is nested inside cooperation for mutual benefit, rather than the inverse, where cooperation is an exception grudgingly tolerated inside a competitive war of all against all. The zero-sum game of our economy would become something more like a forest: many organisms competing for light and nutrients, but doing so within a cooperative matrix of mycorrhizal exchange, nutrient cycling, and mutual support that makes the competition productive rather than destructive.
Democratically, this means nested, plural, direct democracies from neighborhood to bioregional scale that include the more-than-human world not as a sentimental gesture or a symbolic inclusion, but as a structural recognition that any collective decision-making process has to include the impact on all other forms of beings. A watershed council that does not include the voice of the water is not governing the watershed. It is governing over the watershed, which is a fundamentally different relationship.
And at the level of governance itself, it means recognizing that an ecological model of power is fundamentally different from the Westphalian model we inherited. In living systems, agency is always co-arising. Nothing holds power unilaterally because nothing exists unilaterally. We are in a state of mutual interdependence with all things, and our agency co-arises with the agency of others. A top-down decision-making process that would enforce even a bureaucratically determined collective will is itself incoherent with how power actually operates in the living world. The governance forms appropriate to an earth-dharma civilization are polycentric, many centers of decision-making, like organs in a body. They are nested, neighborhood inside watershed inside bioregion. They are place-based, rooted in the actual living systems they serve. And they are responsive, capable of adapting to what the moment requires rather than enforcing a plan.
The point is not to prescribe the specific forms. The point is that the inner work and the institutional work are not separate projects. They cannot be. The institutions we are capable of building are a function of the consciousness we are capable of holding. And the consciousness we are capable of holding is a function of how deeply we have done the healing work. This is the recursive loop: as we heal, we build different institutions. As we build different institutions, we create conditions where this new story can actually take root, in new incentives, new patterns of interaction between people, so that we can actually embody the new story rather than merely profess it. And as more people embody it, the healing deepens, and the parallel society becomes more regenerative, and the loop accelerates.
Light Through a Prism
At a personal level, I believe we are each carriers of the same universal light, refracted through the unique circumstances of our life and lineage. How the Earth dharma will express itself in your life will be utterly unique to you. But it will ask something radical of you. It will challenge you to lay down stories of incompleteness such that you might participate fully in the imagination and co-creation of a more beautiful world. Ultimately it will be up to you to listen to your own heart, to follow your own path, to offer the gift that is only yours to give. Importantly, this plurality isn’t the same as post-modern relativism. Despite the diversity of expressions, there are still foundational relational ethics that persist. Selling a personal development retreat that keeps people coming back to seek peak experiences is very different from guiding someone through the deep inner work of secure attachment and relational integrity.
The Earth dharma will look different inside each of us as we unravel the particular trauma patterns we inherited and discover the particular gifts they contain, but we can be explicit about our alignment with the broader pattern. Earth dharma is plural and open enough to align our businesses, our non-profits, our community organizations, our places of worship in a larger story by orienting them to their role and responsibility in maintaining the continuity of life. If you work with people’s inner development or healing, refuse the narcissistic elements of our culture and help guide people towards the liberation of belonging to the Earth. If you provide a good or service, consider how you might reorient that good or service to be more relationally accountable, engaging in reciprocal honoring of the labor and living relationships required to create it. If you practice a particular faith or serve your community as a volunteer, consider how you might bring this quality of inter-faith communion with the living world into your participation there. Every moment of our lives, from the most mundane to the most ecstatic, is an opportunity for you to practice being an awake participant in right relationship with the web of life.
The Earth Dharma as the New and Ancient Story
Earth dharma is not a religion. It must not become one. The moment it hardens into doctrine, it becomes another ideology competing in the marketplace of ideas, and the whole point is that it is not an idea at all. It is a way of being that emerges once we have realized our mutual interdependence. It is what remains when the conditioning clears. And it is very important that this not decay into yet another performative ideology. It must remain grounded in first principles. It must be accessible to all people across all ideologies and walks of life. It does not require a form of belief. It simply requires an acknowledgment of the reality of our mutual embeddedness. Our interbeing. Interbeing that does not require that we agree on the name of that which is beyond naming. It’s more fundamental than the stories we tell about a transcendent God. It’s a way of being together, undefended, in service of the continuity that created us.
The acknowledgment is simply this: we are embedded in a living whole. Our separateness is a useful fiction the nervous system generates for local navigation, for the practical reality of moving through space and feeding ourselves and not bumping into trees, but it is not the deeper truth. And once this is actually felt, not merely understood intellectually, but felt in the body, felt in the nervous system, felt in the quality of attention you bring to another being, right relationship becomes obvious. There is no one left to defend. Karma becomes dharma. Action becomes stewardship. The question of what to do next collapses into the question of what the moment is asking for.
This story is ancient. It has been carried by every indigenous tradition, by contemplatives in every religion, by mystics and poets and grandmothers and gardeners who never published a word. What I am calling the Earth dharma is not a new teaching. It is the teaching that was here before the colonial rupture buried it. The word dharma captures the essential quality of what happens when awareness matures into right action: when you see the harmonic, cyclical interbeing of things clearly enough, the only choice, the choiceless choice, is to tend to it. To steward it. To participate in its continuity.
And this is different from a traditional religious or metaphysical worldview in an important way. It does not require you to go anywhere else. It has nothing to do with escape, not escape to heaven, not escape to the singularity, not escape to Mars, not escape from the body into the mind or even from the mind into the body. It has to do with our relationship to wholeness, to immanent embeddedness. The fact that we are already here. Already inside it. Already constituted by it. No leap of faith is needed. No transcendent elsewhere. The earth is already holding you. The sun is already giving its light. The web of life is already the substrate of your body, your mind, your breath. You do not need to believe this. You can feel it.
And there is a passage that happens, after the layers of conditioning begin to strip away, where you see this beautiful, harmonic reality clearly enough that the way forward stops being a question. You still have to do the work. You still have to come back into this world, which is so full of pain and hurt and ignorance and cruelty and grief. But you come back with a different nervous system. You come back securely attached to reality. And from that place, the next right action in any given moment becomes sensible rather than agonized. You feel what is called for. You do it. The next moment arrives. You feel what is called for. You do it.
The old story is consolidating because it senses, somewhere beneath its strategies, that it is ending. What we do in the interval will determine what follows. My wager, the wager I am making with my life, is that enough of us are waking up, enough of us are feeling the pain of our Earth and her children, enough of us are finding each other, enough of us are building the institutions and the incentives where this new story can actually take root, so that what comes after this era is not a catastrophe but an emergence.
I cannot prove this. But I can feel the mother holding me up. I can feel the father beaming his love. I can feel the silent center point in my heart where I first remembered that I was never separate from any of this. And I can see it in the eyes of the people I am finding myself beside.
The initiation is real. The door is open. What remains is walking through.
That is the Earth dharma. It is the choiceless choice before you now.
If you’d like to learn more about my process writing with AI, my commitment to you as a reader, and my intention for this publication, please read this essay or my about statement.