Waking to the Living World
Eco Somatic Cybernetics and remembering our place in the family of life.
I’m writing this from bed, watching the patterns of sunlight filtered through the leaves outside my window. The way it dances across my headboard, the gentle shift of shadows. It’s only this way for a short time of the year, and I got to know it intimately in the tender weeks after giving birth to my son two years ago.
There’s something about those early postpartum days that opens you up to the rawness of life. I remember lying in bed, cradling new life in my arms, feeling overwhelming waves of wonder and vulnerability. I was suddenly aware of the intricate, fragile beauty of the living world in a way I hadn’t been before. Bringing life into the world deepened my awareness of my place within all that is so much larger than myself. It was from that place that I felt called to create this substack and return to the creative work of giving voice to the life that moves through me– something I’d honestly neglected in the high pressures of the consulting, strategic advising, creative production, and leadership training work I was eyeballs deep in in the two years leading up to the birth of my son.
The tender, unknowable vulnerability of motherhood called me back to my creative expression as a lifeline of remembrance of who I truly am, and I am so grateful to those of you who have come to join me in my exploration of the living wisdom of the living world over the last two years. I’m even more grateful to those who have expressed their resonance with financial support. Those few paid subscriptions each have gone farther than the dollar amount ever could; they’ve affirmed that my work connected to deep relationship with The Living World is valuable, which has helped me regenerate my own self-concept to recommit to the work I have known for a decade is mine to do, supporting the leaders healing the earth in the subtle dimensions of shaping change. That work is taking off in ways I could have hardly imagined even months ago, and it’s all in service to the integrity of this biosphere we call home, and the integrity of we humans as living, agentive, powerful lifeforms whose power and place within the living world, we are urgently called to remember.
And here I am again, feeling that same light, that same connection—a reminder that we are not separate from the living world. We are contributors, participants in its continual process of creation, growth, and regeneration. Becoming a parent was one of the most powerful reminders of that truth for me: I was in a contributing relationship with the life of the world, part of the web and the family of this earth in a new way, a way that required greater presence, maturity, and willingness to feel.
This reflection, this sense of interconnectedness, is at the heart of what I’ve been wanting to explore here; the meaning behind this title. When I speak about the living world, it’s an active choice to move away from the language of “nature.” The idea of nature often creates a false sense of separation. Nature is out there, a realm separate from us which we must visit and protect and fight for, but it isn’t us. The living world on the other hand, is everything—the air we breathe, the light that filters through the trees, the children we bring into the world, and even the technologies we create. All of it is part of an intricate, interconnected system, and nothing in the human experience is separate from it.
Welcome to The Living World, where we explore the living wisdom of the living world and seek to understand our place within it. I am your host, Ganga Devi Braun, and I work as a developmental partner and advisor to the leaders, visionaries, and nurturer’s shaping regenerative futures. To learn more about me and my work, please visit gangadevibraun.com.
Early this morning, I saw a note from
that elegantly summarizes something that’s always on my mind: “You’re constantly, and mostly unconsciously, proving your myth of the world to yourself.”This simple idea cuts to the core of what we’re going to explore here. The way we see ourselves in relation to the world—our self-concept—is not only shaping our individual lives but is also deeply influencing how we interact with everything around us. Whether we realize it or not, we’re continually reinforcing whatever dominant (often unconscious) worldview we’re operating from. Our worldviews become self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s essential we choose them mindfully, with hearts and eyes open to the world we long for for ourselves and all of life to come.
Ecosomatic Cybernetics
Recently with Gray Area, a San Francisco based based antidisciplinary cultural incubator, I’ve been delving into the histories of cybernetic countercultures, studying its evolution from Norbert Wiener who coined the term from the greek word to steer, to seeing how industry, history, and culture diverged into multiple branches of this discipline, including machine cognition and intelligence, but also including the study of Gaian cognition and intelligence.
What many people who study cybernetics in tech don’t know is that the animal body’s system, particularly the nervous system, was present at the roots of the earliest stages of cybernetic inquiry.
This was most famously developed within Psycho-Cybernetics, a book which has changed the course of the world. In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz showed us how our self-concept determines the course of our lives. This book, written in 1960, is at the root of most self-development work, the human potential movement, and so many forms of leadership, manifestation, and self-help that have emerged from there.
Maltz’s work emphasized that our internal image of ourselves—the stories we hold about who we are—shape our actions, our limitations, and our potential. Th potentials that are unlocked with this work are profound, but the limitations of are becoming more and more obvious; the limitations of solely focusing on the power of your mind to affect change in your life.
My husband
has been experimenting on an expansion of this framework through methods he calls Psycho Somatic Cybernetics—which explores how our bodies carry and shape our beliefs, influencing the way we live and move in the world. The body remembers, the body stores, and the body participates in creating reality. This more embodied approach, integrates what scientific studies and the larger community of somatic practitioners are continuously discovering: the role of trauma in limiting what we believe is possible for ourselves, and the role of pleasure in expanding it.On the trauma side, this includes inherited traumas, collective traumas, and often very subtle traumas that we may not even take seriously within ourselves, but which, when resolved, free us from the patterns of self-sabotage that we as individuals, as families, and as a collective humanity have been stuck in for far too long.
On the pleasure side, this includes sensual and sexual pleasure, the pleasure of good conversation, the pleasure of intellectual stimulation, the pleasure of time spent in nature and within community, the pleasure of intergenerational relationships, the pleasure of ritual, the pleasure of meaningful accomplishments, the pleasure of rest.
Just this morning Seth published his Sunday Substack exploring this idea in the context of grounded expansion.
In my experience of motherhood meeting my return to the deeper regenerative work that moves through me, there’s a piece I’ve been longing to express that is ecosystemic in nature. Last night I began thinking of framing it as Eco Somatic Cybernetics, which we are seeing as a larger whole that can and must contain the nested frameworks of Psycho Somatic Cybernetics and Psycho Cybernetics and the Cybernetics of mainstream computational development in the machines that we, living humans, have created and which now belong to the living world.
The essence of what is emerging with Eco Somatic Cybernetics is remembrance that we belong to the living family of the living world. And when we shift our self-concept to remember that, the potential of our lives and what we can accomplish from a place of embodiment, love, deep listening, and profound care is immense.
Just as the work Seth is bringing forward with Psycho Somatic Cybernetics helps us understand the feedback loops between our mind and body, Eco Somatic Cybernetics invites us to see how those loops extend beyond the individual—into the ecosystems and living networks we belong to.
Becoming a parent awakened this understanding for me in a visceral way. Holding new life in my arms, I could feel my place in the ongoing dance of creation, the way my body and actions were part of a larger system of care and continuity. The light coming through the window, the trees outside, the child in my arms—we are all part of the same process.
Healing Ourselves, Healing the Living World
It’s no coincidence that so many of our physical, personal, and societal struggles stem from disconnection—from ourselves, from one another, and from the living world. And it’s no coincidence that restoring connection is key to healing, whether we’re looking at poisoned soil that heals through mycoremediation, or injury in the body that heals through the many ways we can restore connection to the body.
Fascia is essential for the body’s coherence—it’s an interstitial network that keeps everything functioning as a whole. Fascia connects and coordinates within our bodies, allowing communication between muscles and organs, we are connected to and constantly in conversation with the living world. Similarly, mycelium in forests forms an underground web that connects all plants and all decaying matter, facilitating the transfer of nutrients, information, and energy, ensuring that the entire ecosystem thrives together.
Both fascia and mycelium remind us of the importance of interconnectedness. They show us that nothing functions in isolation—not our bodies, and not the ecosystems we live in.
But here’s the critical piece: the way we conceptualize ourselves in relation to these networks determines how we interact with them. If we hold a worldview where we see ourselves as separate from the living world, we disconnect from these essential networks. Our choices and actions, whether conscious or unconscious, reinforce that disconnection. And just like a body with damaged fascia or a forest without a healthy mycelial network, we begin to see breakdowns—dis-ease, imbalance, and fragmentation.
On the other hand, when we shift our self-concept to remember that we are an integral part of the living world, everything changes. Just as fascia allows for the body to move as a coherent whole, our sense of belonging to the earth allows us to act in ways that regenerate and restore the interstitial connections between ourselves and the living systems we depend on. We move from disconnection to participation.
The mental models we hold—whether we view ourselves as connected or separate—create profound feedback loops. These feedback loops are cybernetic by nature, constantly shaping and reshaping our actions, which then ripple out into the ecosystems around us. When we embrace a self-concept rooted in interconnectedness, our actions begin to heal and restore the webs of life that sustain us. We no longer see nature as something “other,” but as a family of life that we are actively contributing to.
Just as fascia can regenerate and repair itself through movement and care, and just as mycelium can re-knit the forest after disruption, we too can regenerate our connection to the living world. By continuously attending to our self-concept, we can begin to participate in this ongoing process of creation and regeneration—both within ourselves and within the larger ecosystems of the earth.
Motherhood taught me this in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. In nurturing new life, I was not just caring for my child—I was participating in a larger movement of life itself. And that’s what each of us is called to do, whether we’re parents or not: to recognize that in healing ourselves, in tending to our bodies and our hearts, we are also tending to the living world. And that when we remember ourselves as belonging to the living world, our bodies, hearts, minds, and relationships begin to naturally heal as well.
When we live from this place, we are no longer just individuals seeking self-actualization. We are agents of change within the larger systems of the earth, participating in its healing and growth.
Listening to the Living World
So how do we live this truth? How do we move from seeing ourselves as separate to experiencing ourselves as integral to the living world? It starts with simple practices of reconnection.
One of these practices is what my friend
, The Story Doula, teaches as a Listening Walk. It’s a way to move through the world with attention, listening not just with our ears but with our whole selves. As we walk, we notice the light filtering through the trees, the way the earth feels under our feet, the sounds of birds and wind. We allow ourselves to be present, to listen for the messages that the living world is constantly offering.Another practice is to sit with the land. Whether it’s by a tree, a river, or a simple patch of grass, we can sit and let ourselves sink into the natural rhythms around us. These moments remind us that we are part of a longer, ongoing story of life, one that stretches back long before us and will continue long after us.
And finally, we can start to pay attention to the natural cycles that pulse through the living world—the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, the cycles of growth and decay, and how these cycles show up within our own bodies. When we align ourselves with these rhythms, we begin to see that our personal healing is inseparable from the healing of the world.
At the core of Eco Somatic Cybernetics is the simple remembrance: we are the living world. Our bodies, our actions, our choices are all part of a larger system of life. When we remember this, we stop seeing ourselves as isolated individuals and begin to understand that every action we take ripples out into the ecosystems around us.
Whether we are nurturing new life as parents or simply walking through the forest, we are participating in the continual process of creation, healing, and regeneration. The living world is not separate from us. We are its agents, its participants, and its caretakers. And when we live from this understanding, we participate in our collective healing—one moment, one breath, one action at a time.
