Our Story

Catalyzing and Scaling human and more-than-human flourishing

We invite you to reconsider our cultural stories of separation and to embody and awaken an ancient innate sense about the interconnectedness of all life; of belonging. The call is to embrace relationship with the entire community of life and the cosmos; to inter-be. Together, we can support our ecological selves, awaken the aliveness within and around us, of which we are a part, and rekindle our internal flame and spirit. It is time to come alive.

Background

The Aliveness Initiative

Western culture is built on a model of separation in which all life has become commodified and objectified; the mystery of life largely extinguished. As a species we have lost our right relationship with the truth of what it means to be ecological beings on a living planet and living in relationship with all life, with the land, in the mystery of birth, life, death and decay, within the cosmos in a relationship of reciprocity. The symptoms of our dispirited cultural operating system abound, evident in the human crisis of discontent, loneliness, burnout and unhappiness and in the global extinctions of more-than-human species.

Aliveness has the potential to catalyze the movement towards a life-sustaining society and unleash human and more-than-human flourishing and deepen right relationships. Imagine Aliveness as the intersubjective space, love, or spirit of which we are all belong, in our uniqueness, in a reciprocal relationship, with all life.

Interbeing and Unity with All Life

When held with integrity, chanting, drumming, dialogic processes, meditation, breathwork and plant medicines can occasion mystical experiences and a sense of unity and kinship with all life. We can appreciate these practices and teacher medicines as sacred for they invite us into interbeing — the experience of coherence with spirit, or life energy, of the universe.

This belonging does not require adherence to any one existential belief system, but holds space for a complex array of human cultural commitments to kinship and reciprocity. Centering our kinship and planetary belonging, interbeing no longer places humanity at the top of a hierarchy of importance.

We imagine interbeing as the continual unfolding and flow of the mystery of existence. Like a river, it is a natural force in which all life, humans and the more-than-human world, are immersed in a web of kinship. It is the space between and within us—a boundless ocean in which we all swim as we travel through the cosmos.

“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” Albert Einstein

These practices can also help quiet the ego and associated sense of self-importance, comparison to others, thoughts of lack, and other ruminations. Ego dissolution becomes a revealed truth of wholeness driving self-compassion, openness, and decreased materialism.

Together, belonging and interbeing open a profound embodied awareness of the interconnectedness of all life and in this sensing into life’s interdependence. And, as all life is interconnected, all life senses back, charting a path toward personal and planetary healing. Belonging necessitates new language and mysteriocentrism, a centering of spirit, or interbeing in human consciousness, ethical communities and well-being.

From Ego to Eco

The truth of interdependence is all around us. As ecological beings, we are interwoven with the web of life. Our species depends on nature's gifts — food, pollinators, clean air and water, healthy soil, etc. — for our very survival, and our bodies have more non-human cells than human. We are not isolated beings, and our bodies co-regulate with the community of life, through processes of synchrony, coherence, and communitas.

Yet, so much of what Western culture teaches and reinforces is at odds with this reality. Our disconnection from our true selves, other humans, and the more-than-human world has facilitated a human-caused ecological calamity that threatens the fate of all life.

We can understand this existential crisis as a conflict between the story of what it means to be alive on a living planet — in an intimate interdependent relationship with the community of life and mystery — and a dominant cultural narrative that reinforces ego, human exceptionalism, permanence, independence, and disconnection. This dissonance is contributing to existential distress, ecological grief, and an ecological mental health crisis.

It is time to awaken our relational selves.