The Body is a Doorway: Deep Ecology and Deep Healing with Sophie Strand

We live in an age of loss and pain: personal and ecological, human and more than human. But our wounds don’t just show up in our bodies. They show up in our ecosystems. When we feel pain, we can ask ourselves where that pain is pointing us. What plant, landscape, ocean, mountain, or fungus resonates with our particular plight? How can we let chornic illness, disability, and grief galvanize us into greater connection with our more than human kin? What if the bodies of the disabled, survivors of violence and abuse, the neurodivergent, and the chronically ill were not broken and in need of constant fixing?

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What if, alienated from normalcy, they were able to glimpse adjacent possibles - alternative ways of living and becoming together? What if our pain was a compass that directed us out of anthropocentric narratives? In an age of mass extinction and ecological crisis, coming back to our bodies will not necessarily be pleasurable.

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We need to normalize and alchemize our discomfort. But those people that live with conditions that give them non-normative physical experiences may have much to teach us about how our pain is a portal into greater participation with the “flesh of the world”. Let us help each other become differently, become together, and salvage something from our uncomfortable entanglements.

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Sophie Strand walks us through personal practices, stories, and somatic meditations that help us understand our what we think are our greatest pains, may be portals into greater kinship with a wild, generous world.