The Jellyfish Chronicles

My Own Hunter/Gatherer Idealization of Connection

I am excited to announce that this is the first collaborative post I’ve written with my life partner. We’ve been throwing the idea around for years to somehow combine my way of writing about reality and his way of teaching, as we are both philosophers of the real and students of an embodied life. Dear husband, here’s to seeing what new platforms we can create together.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own idealization of the nomadic hunter/gatherer life. I love the idea of having to be so connected to everything around myself that my survival would literally depend on that connection.

When I consider a reality of necessity based living, I fantasize that anything happening in the now would be everything. Somehow my own ability to be present would be different. I wouldn’t have the bandwidth to consider my reality beyond my own immediate needs. Would that make life simpler? Would something inherent about me as a person be different?

From my days of teaching Primitive Skills Camp.

In our modern world, we have all of this privilege (time, material resources, abundant food sources, etc) and what do we tend to do with what we have? Scroll, binge, attack, fixate, seek. In other words, we distract…distract…and distract some more. I’m not saying there is no meaning to my life and no ability to be present. I’m just hypothesizing that I’d be a lot better at it if I needed connection to survive.

I find myself taking this thought process one step further. I imagine that for a hunter/gatherer distraction equals dead. Funny how in our resource rich and privileged reality I don’t really associate distraction as having a life or death connotation most of the time. Distraction feels like a choice to engage in when I want to let go or turn off. This line of thought points to a similarity between our nomadic roots and the present day. From the perspective of our bodies distraction definitely still equals dead(ening). We distract ourselves away from connection. We distract ourselves away from listening and presence. We distract ourselves away from the physical reality of who we are.

Anyone can choose to use the privilege of the life you have to connect instead of distract. Anyone can choose to be interested in what makes you come alive instead of consistently choosing to die in slow increments.

Today I am offering myself up as a sort of case study. I am using a recent experience of physical pain to get clearer on my own methodology for deepening into a connected and non distracted relationship with my own body. I am offering myself as a support to your potential embodiment. By being witnessed in the process of transformation as it happens, I am hoping to touch something inside you that is beyond a thought construct. Hope this next series of posts that I have entitled “The Jellyfish Chronicles” reaches more than your mind. I hope the words you read help you find a deeper connection to your ever evolving body.

Your Paramount Reason To Distract

Inside you is a place that you do not have any interest in. This is a place you are terrified to explore, avoid like it is torture, and perform mental feats of athleticism to rationalize away from.

In your relationships, there is a place you also have no interest in. There is something you never want to talk about, will break your heart to avoid, and will fight like a cornered animal to make sure that you never have to face what is there.

There is zero difference between what you avoid in relationships and what you avoid in yourself. They are both the same. The simple difference is that you rationalize yourself into a problem when you are alone and project yourself out of a relationship when you are with others. In both cases the purpose is to avoid this thing you fear above all else.

The Unacknowledged Victim Of Your Distraction

Your body is your most attuned teacher. It absolutely does not lie to you, try to trick you, or deceive you. Your body remembers everything you have ever experienced and holds recordings for you from more than just this lifetime. Your body communicates through body sensations. When you don’t listen to your body and form a relationship to how it communicates with you, these body sensations become pain, uncontrollable emotion, or disease.

Please make sure you are not reading the word “brain” instead of the word “body” above. I am most definitely talking about your entire body. Your body is smarter than your brain, holds more memories, and has deeper and clearer wisdom to offer you. Connected information comes through body sensations. Without allowing the body to communicate itself to you, any conclusions you make about yourself and the way the world works are not your truth. They are a rationalization of something you do not want to admit or an avoidance of what you fear.

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To help you philosophize around the connection between your body and your brain, here’s a short story from An Alchemical Life.

A very long time ago in a primordial sea, lived creatures that might have resembled a modern day jellyfish. These creatures were without any kind of bones or shells. Over time, some of them started to develop harder membranes. Some on the outside of their bodies - shells. Some on the inside - bones.

Photo Credit: dr.joe.rothstein

Apparently these structures were not detrimental to survival. If you consider evolution, it’s more than likely that these structures eventually evolved into an advantage. As time went on, creatures were appearing that not only had these hard structures but also muscles (or bladders because, we don’t want to forget the jellyfish) that could be utilized to create movement.

A control mechanism for these softer structures were needed to create choice (movement). This connection point between membrane and movement is the origin story of the nervous system.

Now, fast forward to life as we now know it. We humans walk around believing the brain is supreme. We believe our thinking mind must be the primary, if not the only, intelligence that our bodies contain.

Do we even consider what happened to that primordial jellyfish that still exists inside us?

Remember that the muscles (and bladders) were originally here to move the bones (or shells for the crabs among us) and that the nervous system (including the mind) developed to control the muscles.

The humble jellyfish is still here. Each of us has one living in our bodies. It lives on. Until the last few decades this jellyfish was completely ignored by biological science.

Where do you find the jellyfish now? It is in your connective tissue. Your ligaments, fascia, blood vessels. It is in the sacs and coverings of your organs and muscles, the coatings on your bones.

Now, I want you to imagine that your nervous system, muscles, and bones are in fact more like a thinking machine - let’s say a smart, self driving car. The fascia that is made up of that ever present and still adapting jellyfish can be imagined as the passenger in this car. Without these adaptions towards a means of movement, change and evolution would still be stuck floating in that original primordial sea. But maybe you lost something too.

This Jellyfish is inside you, sending you messages. How can you learn to listen to them? If you can listen, how do you translate them? The answers always lie in the body. Here is a beautiful language of sensation, pleasure, and pain.

When you can turn to the body as teacher and informer in any situation, you live in a sacred relationship with the evolution of the self.

Of course, the beauty of unconscious and shadow means that no matter how much you form a relationship to listening to your body, it is too complex and sensational(!) to ever stop teaching you how to listen, how to become, and how to engage. You are absolutely going to miss something that your body is trying to awaken you to. This is partially because of that thing you fear and avoid that I wrote about in the first paragraph. It is also because blindspots are a human reality.

Fallacy and the unknown also point to the need to be in a constant state of evolution as a human. No matter how mindful of a practice you have with your body, sometimes you are going to have intense emotions, physical pain, disease, or painful experiences come into your life. The difference lies in trusting what is unfolding instead of suffering from it or avoiding it.

Sometimes your body, your pain, your life experience, or your emotions fill you with something that is too strong or too overwhelming. This is the body attempting to call you into it. This is your jellyfish wanting to evolve. This is the body talking to you loudly because you didn’t listen to it when it was talking quietly. When this happens, you may feel called to enter into a deep forgetting and disconnect from the sacred vessel of knowing at your disposal. You will either feel the call and gather the tools needed to listen to your body or not. The choice is yours.

I am a firm believer, as someone who does healing work in service to the divine and the human soul, that I cannot be a channel to anyone else’s awakening without meeting every nuanced frequency of human suffering and alignment in my own body. I can not work with shadow if I am not familiar with all the nuances of shadow itself. I have spent decades cultivating an embodied relationship to the complex facets of my own shadow and shadow as a global consciousness. I can hold nuanced core emotions in my being and, as my shadow enlightens me to more, I continue to grow my own healing capabilities. Through my comfort with these frequencies I can embody, transmute, and ultimately heal.

My own body lately has been asking for a healing transformation. Ah pain - what an amazing awakener. It would be too easy to rationalize the pain and tell myself in a Louise Hay kind of way (sorry but she listened to her body, not mine) that the pain is about my ability to trust my ground, to walk my own path, to follow my authentic self forward in life. While all those rationalizations may be true, they are not at all what my unique body is teaching me this time around. My body is needing me to release something more layered than a rationalized description of my pain. My body is waking me up to multiple lifetimes of torture and my compulsion to hide myself. There is much deeper work for me to do than simply one in which I come to conclusions based on what I don’t want to feel.

Your Own Story Can Always Change

I tell this story because I believe many people who engage in transformational work forget that the process of becoming alive is constant and ever evolving. There is no mastery, only a deeper level of understanding and learning that spirals through life over and over and over. While there may be plateaus reached, there is always more to awaken to, more lessons to learn, a body to remember, a jellyfish to find.

I will never have a handbook to write that is complete for my own body. I cannot tell others how to heal by saying healing like me is THE WAY. I have found my own way to a tuned in body thanks to many teachers and an array of tools that work for me. My fulfilled life is not the way you are going to find fulfillment. Your own path will show itself when you are willing to engage with your body, not just your mind.

The process of embodying is so personal that only your body, your choices, and your life experiences can guide you into it.

While I can absolutely support guiding people through the process of learning the signs to pay attention to and the signals that something is being avoided, there is no textbook to be written here. My work is not about answers. It is about creating an ability to enjoy questions and questing into the unknown universe that is your body and your life.

Over the course of the next few months, the work I do here on Substack is going to shift. I am going to be focusing more on teaching targeted embodiment practices and less on the mind. The Jellyfish Chronicle posts, along with others, are going to help answer the question, “why?” Why embody? Why listen? Why connect? Why go deeper? As I enter this new phase of my own work, I seek to awaken you to your own unique and terrifying potential. Together, let us become who we are meant to be, not who we get distracted into thinking we are.

I’d love it if you could give me feedback on how you struggle with embodiment, what connection feels missing to you in your own body mind, and where you want to explore more inside yourself to feel awakened. Writing to a silent audience has a tendency to create it’s own kind of deadening. Come alive with me by supporting me with your feedback.