The Weathering Body in a Burning World

At Life’s Edge

Lesley

When I sit beside people as they take their final breaths and hold their hands, I feel their body softening, their pulses fading. When they recede from the world, I can feel the veil between life and death thin to mist. To lose someone, to grieve their absence, often feels unbearably heavy, yet in the moment of their passing, there is such all-encompassing lightness, a cloudy peacefulness saturating the room and stilling time. As they go, something in their surrender, their relinquishing, permeates the air, washes over both of us. I feel my body soften too.

As a humanist palliative chaplain and teacher, spending time with people in some of their most vulnerable moments has made palpable to me how responsive our bodies are to each other, exchanging information by continuously, almost imperceptibly, swapping neurological signals. When I push wheelchairs along bumpy forest paths, guide meditations or interfaith gatherings, and crochet as trembling, time-worn hands guide my own, I can feel my body monitoring, mirroring, anchoring, responding. Our nervous systems quiver, like tuning forks, toward the same frequency.

Writer and mythologist Sophie Strand offers a way to make sense of this porosity in her work on biological interconnection. She describes how fungal networks confound standard ideas of where one being ends and another begins, blurring the boundaries between what we’d conventionally perceive as distinct entities. In mycelium networks, nuclei flow freely through opening and closing pores, creating a “supracellular state.” Hyphae share nutrients and information across the forest floor, just as we share breath, microbiomes and maybe even consciousness itself.

From this perspective, instead of thinking of our emotions and nervous system states as separate phenomena, we can instead conceive of them as weather patterns in a shared atmosphere. Perhaps consciousness can reach through webs of relation that are threaded between patients and doctors, teachers and students, the dying and everyone they love who loves them back. And what could this mean as we confront the political, social and ecological crises of our time – which threaten our very existence and collectively set our nervous systems teetering on edge? What can we do together when we do not turn away from the sharedness of our anxiety, our grief, our fear? What if the fractures in our collective well-being are symptoms of disconnections that can only be healed together?

Staying the Storm

Dr. Christy Gibson

These past summers, I have been chasing clear skies, trying to avoid the smoke that has seasoned our air. Something we took for granted, growing up in Alberta, has now become a new season of haze and ash. The air is dangerous – something my body needs every second of the day. I’m cognizant of how frail air, water, food and shelter are to modern-day humans; these foundational necessities we take for granted are more precarious than they’ve ever been in my lifetime.

As a physician, I know how often our bodies mirror the world around us. It’s no wonder to me that many of us feel restless, numb or exhausted when we are responding to an ecosystem in distress. What we call “climate anxiety” is really a collective trauma response where our nervous systems are caught in a feedback loop of alarm, even if we aren’t consciously aware of the roots. When our safety feels threatened, whether by a sudden loss or the slow ache of an unravelling planet, the body does what it was built to do and activates its ancient defenses. Our amygdala fires, our pulse quickens. Muscles brace, and our minds rush toward escape routes, deciphering whether to fight, flight or freeze.

But there’s no way to flee a burning world (where else would we go?), and fighting these realities seems futile to many. So, we’re left with freeze.

And so, we might dissociate. We scroll through reel after reel, we binge-watch another episode of a TV show we’re only half-watching, we pour another drink, and we go numb. This state of shutdown can look deceptively like apathy. But it’s not that we don’t care, and it’s not that we don’t wish we were doing more. Our systems are just overloaded. In this state, our first task can’t be to talk, make plans or take action, because we can’t convince our bodies to force their way out of a freeze state. We have to start simply, by cultivating safety, reminding ourselves what that feels like.

In my book, “The Modern Trauma Toolkit,” I teach the somatic practices that accomplish this. We can begin very simply by feeling the weight of a chair beneath us, the firmness of the floor beneath our feet, smells in the air. We may notice the rhythm of our breath in the rise and fall of our chest, the relaxation from moving our eyes side-to-side, or a long sigh. Though these actions seem incredibly small, we must start small to remind ourselves, gently and patiently, that we are still here, still functioning, still safe enough to begin. These gentle sensory acts call the vagus nerve back to baseline, like turning a volume dial down.

Once safety is remembered, the mind can be more flexible. Ideas can start to flicker back, perspective can widen. We can begin to imagine new possibilities, new futures. We can have hope again. Noticing leads to shifting and shifting leads to reconnection. Reconnection can be to people, but also to animals, music, or the natural world. It’s what I feel when I walk through the mountains and hear leaves rustle against the wind, the sound of busy bees, or see the glimmer of the sun on a stream.

Healing takes time. But every gesture of care, whether toward ourselves, toward one another, or toward the earth itself, rewires us just a tiny bit, gearing us toward resilience. So much hope lies in neuroplasticity – the body’s capacity to restructure our brains through new neural pathways. The more we practice safety and connection, the more our internal circuitry lends itself to the parts of the world that can still be calming. 

Humanism at the Bedside: The Fractal Witness

Lesley

Humanist practices are rooted in the beliefs that every human being holds inherent dignity and that we are not separate from nature, but embedded within it. In my mind, this recognition has never been more urgent.

Capitalist frameworks direct us to maintain our well-being all on our own. We are instructed to optimize our workflows, improve our time management, act with urgency now so we can relax later. Even though later never seems to come, we don’t tend to doubt what we’re being told. Instead, we doubt ourselves.

We hear terms like “self-care” and “self-discipline” all around us. This is the aspirational language of our time. As scientist and community organizer Ayesha Khan writes, the wellness industry has “glorified independence and reliance on the self,” convincing us we are the problem in order to divert our attention away from what truly needs confronting: the systems that isolate us, so that we’ll keep buying and subscribing to stave off the yearn and the ache, the grief and the loneliness.

Research into polyvagal theory and interpersonal neurobiology now affirms what Indigenous and traditional cultures have always known and communally retained, namely, that emotion is relational. Overwhelming sadness or anxiety are symptoms of isolation, not failures of self-control. With this in mind, Dr. Gibson reminds us that we can—and must—co-regulate. Our nervous systems are built to find the safety we so desperately need through other nervous systems, in community. We nourish and sustain our joy and our hope, our sense of possibility and our creativity, in connection with one another.

Astrida Neimanis, whose ideas echo Strand’s but with a focus on human porosity in relation to water, calls us “weather bodies.” The cortisol in my bloodstream when I see another news alert isn’t separate from but rather prompted by my awareness of carbon in the atmosphere. The inflammation in communities under chronic stress mirrors the inflammation of the planet. Someone in India is breathing in water vapor that comes from rain that once fell in Malawi. The human and the ecological mirror each other in a continuous, sometimes invisible, exchange, even if we aren’t always alive to it.

As a chaplain, I think of this phenomenon through what I would call fractal witnessing. When I sit beside a dying person, I’m not only attending to this soul but to all the people connected to them. I am attending to the ancestral, cultural and ecological losses that we feel in our bones. Our grief is a repeating pattern that scales from our cells to the stars.

Humanism requires us to meet these patterns with a careful combination of intellect and empathy. Although reason can help us understand and reflect on these systems, we cannot think our way back to safety. It’s only through what we feel, through compassion and connection, that we’ll manage to stay present and find the footholds of safety that will allow us to tend to a world on fire.

Ecologies of Care

Dr. Christy Gibson

As a doctor, I was trained in the biomedical model to see bodies as machines requiring repair on an individual, physical level. I was taught how to diagnose and cure. That model doesn’t account for the way trauma roots itself in the body, or the way we cannot uproot trauma with scalpels or pills. That model doesn’t acknowledge how one person’s dysregulation can seep into another person’s state, how a body starts to ache because we’ve suppressed our emotions and the brain amplifies a different signal instead, or the innate vulnerability in having been told throughout our lives by parents, teachers, racism and other systemic oppressions that we aren’t deserving.

The Western mind-body split is alive and well in our medicinal approaches, but that split is a fiction. Our interdependence is not a metaphor but a mechanism. Forests communicate through root and fungal networks, and human beings do the same through nervous systems and social bonds. I’ve attended to patients carrying trauma that has become embedded in their neurohormonal environment, with painful memories that cause unresolved tension in their muscles. This is loss, displacement and colonial violence written on the body. Our medical systems label these conditions PTSD or depression, and the implication is that their distress is disordered.

We need new frameworks that refuse the Western subject’s fantasy of autonomy, instead acknowledging our bodies and minds as fundamentally relational. Buddhist philosophy insists that we are interconnected beings, the modern world brings the imagery of our shared humanity to our cell phones, and we are aware of human and non-human suffering. Perhaps we may begin to see how depression and PTSD are not deviant conditions, but sane responses to the pain and sadness of a world in crisis.

The biomedical model urges me to treat individuals, prescribe medications and teach coping, but people don’t need better regulation for intolerable realities. They need collective safety and a way forward, rooted in communities of care, justice and accountability. Healing isn’t built on individual acts of resilience alone. Healing is relational.

The Cost of Isolation

Lesley

I’ve written elsewhere about how, in Calgary classrooms like the one I teach in, our collective dysregulation is clear. Students are in class, their phones buzzing with news of another school or political shooting in the U.S., while a thick haze of wildfire smoke seeps through the windows. Hypervigilance and fear have become the baseline such that, when I see a student shut down or staring blankly after being given a new deadline, I know I’m seeing a nervous system accurately registering overwhelm, not individuals with pathologies. These raw, untended wounds are caused by the same colonial systems that severed Canada’s Indigenous peoples from their land and lineage.

Accounting for these realities is, therefore, a necessary part of teaching. In my classroom, I get my students to work together collaboratively, striving toward activist and author bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy, or collective healing through education. For hooks, this hinges on the idea that “we learn best when there is an interactive relationship between student and teacher.” Mutual participation and risk-taking must be met with safety, which can only be accomplished when teachers move beyond surface-level engagements with their students, taking the time to get to know them and nourishing the classroom as a community space. This too requires vulnerability; teachers and students alike must risk being changed by the encounter.

In my classroom, I practice engaged pedagogy by teaching Dr. Gibson’s somatic techniques with collaborative practices that honour our interdependence. Students learn to recognize their nervous system responses, how to tend to their emotions, and that their fear makes sense. Through small acts of care, we can make hooks’ classroom real, “a place where teachers and students can share their ‘inner light’” and “a place where wholeness is welcomed and students can be honest.” Checking in with each other, working in supportive groups, sharing our fears openly, all of this is how we practice “love’s place in the classroom,” which helps create the conditions for nervous system safety, integrated acceptance and optimal learning. I try to tell my students, by showing them in whatever small ways I can, that their fear makes sense, that we will carry it together.

The Supracellular Way Forward

Dr. Christy Gibson + Lesley

The climate crisis is a human crisis, though not one experienced equally. In Canada, wildfires, floods and heat domes are the consequences of systems that value profit over people and dismiss ecological knowledge on the grounds that it is not Western enough, not committed to paper and therefore illegitimate. We don’t need to have experienced life-threatening trauma to be dysregulated in a world built to serve these systems. Cascading crises take their toll on the nerves, which in turn mirrors and aggravates the collapse of our outer ecosystems. That’s what causes our restless sleep, our unrelenting vigilance, and the grief that keeps surfacing beneath what we try to repress.

The philosopher Bayo Akomolafe invokes the Yoruba concept of asé, which he calls the force that animates and disrupts to transform. The god Eshu, who guards asé, sits at a crossroads, not on a throne. Akomolafe explains that these transformations happen in what he calls “mangling encounters,” or precarious brushes with dissolving certainties, the familiar giving way to the radical, the entirely fresh and new. Perhaps our current crises can be considered one of these crossroads, or even the monstrous teachers that expose modernity’s promises–that we are separate, controllable and stable–as fictions.

Colonial capitalism has drawn an arbitrary boundary around the individual, insisting we are sealed units rather than porous organisms. Biology and much more ancient knowledge beg to differ. The molecules in our lungs have passed through countless other bodies. The bacteria in our guts influence our thought patterns. We are all ecosystems among ecosystems.

An effective immune system is diverse, decentralized and cooperative. When it turns on itself, we call this an autoimmune disease. In the same way, collectives and resistance movements fracture when rage is misdirected, and turned toward one another instead of toward oppressive systems at the expense of finding safety, regulation, accountability, collaboration and hope in co-regulation. While isolation can lead to despair, interdependence breeds courage. Systems of power know this, and they enforce our separation because collective strength is unruly, threatening, even monstrous to the systems that seek to erode us by keeping us invisible, quiet and hopeless.

We may not know if our fractal networks of care can grow fast enough to find new paradigms to counteract complex crises. Showing up for each other, telling truth, holding grief and joy at once, this is how we stay human in inhuman times, and it’s all the hope we have. To determine the course of history, we have to nurture our collective safety, and we have to find our way out of the trap of colonialism’s wrought terror. We have a duty to fight to believe what Arundhati Roy believes:

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”

The weather is changing into unfamiliar and uncertain conditions. We are weathering bodies, and we are weathering this storm together, not alone. The river flows both ways. The mycelium extends beneath our feet. The web connects and holds us all; we just need to remember what we’ve always known.

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Lessons: For activities integrating nervous system science and trauma awareness with ecological thinking and embodied, art-based practices, see our co-created Living Workbook here.

Works Cited

Akomolafe, Bayo. “Release the Kraken! Why We Need Monsters in These Times of Crises.” Bayo Akomolafe, 2020, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/release-the-kraken-why-we-need-monsters-in-these-times-of-crises.

Gibson, Christy. The Modern Trauma Toolkit. Penguin Random House Canada, 2024.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Khan, Ayesha. “Heavy, Difficult Emotions Are Important to Face & Only Overwhelming When Carried Alone: Feeling in Community—Letting Go of Self-Regulation and Practicing Co-Regulation.” Substack, 18 May 2023, https://ayeshakhanauthor.substack.com.

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Roy, Arundhati. War Talk. South End Press, 2003.

Strand, Sophie. “Supracellular: A Meditation.” Substack, 25 June 2022, https://sophiestrand.substack.com/p/supracellular.