Unlearning what we learned in school

I woke up yesterday morning to find my daughter sitting at the kitchen, reading her biology textbook. She had a test and was trying to cram all sorts of information into her head. While I made coffee, she sat there sighing.

Luca has talked a lot about how sucky her biology class is; how uninteresting and confusing. This morning, as she was hating on it, I asked her if I could look over what she's learning and tell it to her like a story instead of like facts. A measure of how frustrated she was: she said yes.

When I looked at the chapters she was learning, I wanted to weep. Forty pages on the cell, turning something magical into something that is dry as dirt. I looked throughout her textbook and remembered for the five millionth time: western science at the high school level turns the glory of life into something burdensome. It's part of the training ground that serves isolated individualism, as though any cell can experience itself outside the context of connection to the other.

After we had a fifteen minute conversation about the cell (which did NOT call the cell a factory like the textbook does), she asked if she could bring some of her classmates home every other week to just relearn what they are learning so that it's interesting. My mama-heart and Leo-heart and I LOVE BIOLOGY heart purred.

All life is connected. All life. Whether you believe in evolution or creation, whether you were raised with a traditional origin story or not, all life is connected. Trauma, from individual acts to collective systems passed down through history, is disconnection. The fact that disconnection exists does not contradict the fact that connection is here, too.

As I was leafing through Luca's textbook, I noticed that the chapters were arranged with an introductory chapter about life and protein followed by a small section on animals and then breaking the rest of the chapters into cellular life, cellular growth, cellular energy, reproduction, ecosystems, interdependence and then health and disease. How totally apocalyptic: the entirety of human life concluding with how we get sick. This is the conditioning that makes diagnosis and the drug industry possible.

If it really happens that Luca pulls together a group of school mates for mini-biology conversations in our house, this is how I am going to start: all life is connected. When you are reading chapters in your book about the differences between animals and plants and humans, you are reading more about the interests of the different mostly men and some women who are defined as "discovering" the principals of life. When your textbook says that cells were not discovered until after the microscope was invented in the 1500s and not really named as true until the 1800s, you are not learning the full story. You are not learning that traditions across the globe did not need to see through a microscope to have a felt sense or a sacred awareness of the billions of personalities that organize themselves into organs and systems and energy tides and balances. Life is not invented or discovered. It is lived.

I am going to say to them, let's not learn this as cold hard facts with little walls around them. Instead, let's learn about this as poetry, something you feel, something that emerges insight and connection without having to trudge through it. And then let's listen to the life inside us while we are learning about the same life. Did you know that you have the capacity to feel/sense every single cell in your body? And that, like any other relationship, you can have conversations with them? Become aware of the communication that is happening all of the time and even ask questions to deepen your understanding of your own life? Right now, close your eyes or keep them open but bring yourself to whatever stillness feels possible right now. Imagine your ears are turning direction and rather than listening to your outside body, you are listening to your inside body. And then just ask, whisper to yourself, hey liver, show me yourself. Hey left femur, make yourself known. Hey energy of my blood, rise up and warm me. And then notice what happens. You might have feelings/thoughts about getting this right, a kind of conditioned anxiety that keeps you separate from yourself. If you do, try and ignore them. You can't get this wrong. Just say, hey stomach, I'm listening. Communication can happen in so many ways. You might feel a presence, a sense of something-ness around the area where your liver or femur or stomach are. You might feel a presence somewhere totally different. You might feel a temperature change, get an image, feel the urge to move, so many different ways of life expression. Don't worry about understanding, not right now. This is just a gentle touch in, like meeting that person you've heard about for years over social media but haven't actually met yet. Hello, I feel like I know you but I don't yet. Eye contact. Smile. And then comes the time for relationship to emerge.

The words don't matter, it's the intent behind them. Every aspect of your body that you whisper to is an aspect of yourself. This is the basic destruction of western science: life is taught of as something separate, an object, a mechanism. Your cell is not a factory, it is a living breathing intelligence. It is you, 52 trillion times over for 52 trillion cells. This is you. Each cell carries the same kind of complexity as each organ, as your body as a whole, as the planet that we live upon, as the galaxy we are part of. Adrienne Maree Brown and others are talking about fractals as a way to experience organizing and change. This is what our life is: one element of an infinite fractal.

Your body, every single cell, has stories to tell you. Just like the person who lives next door and tells their family stories about your parking habits, habits that you've never noticed yourself.  Or the person who used to serve your school lunch when you were in third grade, who remembers you vividly even though you will never know their name. And then hundreds of stories that are not directly about you but they cross your life, the woman who works as a parking attendant in the garage that you pass when you are walking to work. The two people who work for the park near you, keeping the grass cut and the sidewalk shoveled in winter, you don't know them and yet their life is directly connected to yours, every time you cross the street and step on that grass. It's a wide mass of complexity and connection that is more than you can track, whether you're talking about the people who are all of the aspects of your outside life, visibly and invisibly, or the cells that are all the aspects of your inside life, visibly and invisibly. Everything is connected.

What I will tell my daughter and her friends is that, in order to understand this complexity, western science has broken it down to a never ending table of parts. That is how we come up with the word for cell and for the aspects of the cell: the organelles, mitochondria and Golgi apparatus. Sexy words, huh? Listening to the different notes of music within a complex composition is not a bad thing. It's one way of experiencing and appreciating what happens when it all comes together. The problem is when all of the parts aren't ever, on their own terms, experienced all together. That is not how most science began. Science that is indigenous to this planet, that is native to the land upon which you now live, is the science of connection and relationship, not the science of parts. It's the science that quantum physicists and evolutionary biologists and ecologists are in the process of "rediscovering." It doesn't need to be rediscovered. It just needs to be lived.

Healers or people doing their work with a healing justice lens are creating the conditions for new stories to emerge. Or for old stories to be remembered: the whisper of a muscle fiber that carries the strain of bracing against the endless stream of police cars that slow down as they pass. The open and closedness of a cellular membrane that has figured out how to operate within the toxic soup of the nearby chemical plant. The hold on the bottom of the heart from a loss that hasn't yet been heard. This is what I will tell Luca and her friends when they come to talk about biology: it's all connected. All life is always connected. This is why it is not possible to heal alone as an isolated individual, we heal together. That's basic biology, even if it isn't how it's taught in high school.


The image above is the representation of a cell, a eukaryotic cell which means a cell that has a nucleus around its DNA. Every cell, like every individual body, has a way to digest food, to poop out waste, to turn food into energy, to pump blood, and to learn in response to new information. This representation shows some of the parts of the cell. You can think of it in the same way you would see an image of human anatomy or of the anatomy of our planet.

Gravity

From the minute sperm and egg meet, we are becoming. Each cellular shift is a kind of unfolding, an emerging within the fluid of the womb. For these first nine months, this is all we know. Fluid, in the beginning without clear boundary and, as we get closer to birth, fluid that is contained on all sides by a wall we can't yet cross.

Our first and earliest becoming is in the space of infinite possibility. That's what it means to grow within water. Every single direction is possible, all at the same time. We can lengthen and widen without coming against a boundary. And yet, because it is fluid, we also get the constant reassurance, light pressure against our emerging skin, that we are not alone. We are contained. Supported. Infinite space and complete containment, all at the same time.

Because this is all that we know, once we are born, the first reflex that kicks in* is the reflex that helps our body build a relationship with gravity. Try to think of it! No matter how we get out of the body, down through the birth canal or lifted up out of the abdomen, our tissues go from only knowing fluid to suddenly feeling the heavy relentless pull of gravity. Whether you believe in evolution or loving creation, it's the same thing: the first reflex that kicks in is one that helps our heart and lungs, blood vessels and lymph, and eventually intestines, muscles and bones, find their way to move against the demanding heaviness of a gravitational pull.

Reflexes are like those teachers that used to pop up on microsoft word when you first downloaded a new program. Remember the little paper clip with the startled expression that suddenly popped in to the lower right hand of your screen, asking you if you wanted help on formatting a document? Well, reflexes are like that, only less annoying. They pop up in the body at the appropriate time, giving a nudge to nerve endings which nudge muscles which means that suddenly, without being taught, the baby rolls over, lifts their head, starts doing the back and forth swimming movement that leads to crawling, reaches for the table and pulls themselves up, takes that first unsteady step that resolves into walking, and then learns to jump away from the gravity that holds its body down. Reflexes are made up of thousands of tiny concrete details that, over time, most often although not always come together in a body that, in jumping up to grab an apple off the highest branches, finds out how to move against gravity even as gravity continues supporting it.

As we develop and age, our bodies don't forget those reflexes. They are always there, ready to support a reboot, ready to remind the map of cells and awareness how it was that we started. To share with us again that first experience of coming into our own life, as something physically separate from the body that grew us within their womb.

I have never studied yoga. I do not know enough about the rich and complex history of its lineage, its teachings to explain why any particular pose or asana exists. But the first time I was invited to do shivasana, I immediately thought, look! It's the first reflex! Lying on the ground or sitting/leaning against any surface, soft and open, and being with our cells as they fall into and push against gravity.

Alright, in a second I'm going to ask you to put this down. To seriously put this blog down, even if your mind pops in and says, sure, sure, I'll do that after I finish reading this thing.  Seriously, I want you to put your phone, laptop, tablet, whatever you got down on the table or the floor. I want you to bring your body to gravity and listen. If you are able, lie on your back on the floor, arms and legs relaxed and open, head supported and mouth gently open. If the floor is not an option for your body, then stay in our chair or lean your back against a wall, letting gravity support as much of you as you are physically able, and then just listen.

Do this now and then, after 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 or 30 depending on what feels right when you are there, come back to this page.

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What did you notice? What did you feel your body, this mix of fluid and membrane, do? Did you sink into the floor, chair or wall? Did your body pull away from the force, staying somewhat suspended, almost hovering just on top of the surface? Did your body sink down so far that you could barely pull yourself up, as though the surface overcame you and you felt like you disappeared? Did you notice emotions, physical sensations, a desire to move get stronger the longer that you stayed there? Was it impossible to notice anything because of how much your mind was chattering?

As you reflect over all of it, are you getting that "oh shit, I didn't do it right!" or some version of how you're not a good enough healer, person, life form because you couldn't still yourself for two minutes? Be wary, systems of supremacy have long ago found the cracks in the self care and mindfulness industries and have already shoved perfectionism and the protestant work ethic right down into its peacefully beating heart. It's managed to make "being present" another item on the to do list, one you can fail and or succeed at, meaning that your struggles are, again, all your fault. If that's coming up in you, then that's information. Notice how that old conditioning that best serves capitalism and not life has got into you.

Healing is about noticing what is here, right now. All of it, whether we like it or not. Sensing in and feeling noticing what is true at this moment. And then building enough space around what is true to be able to shift or change what comes next, if it serves your life or your kin's life better than what you were doing/being before. Bringing your body to gravity, or as close to gravity as you can get, is to intentionally let this first and very early relationship sniff around your life right now and share with you what it's experiencing. It lets this first early relationship with gravity help your cells remember themselves as they are and on their own terms.

Everything is information, including if the felt sense, the physical message that is rising up in you as soon as you bring your weight to gravity, is that it is not safe to rest. There is information here if trying to settle into weight makes every nerve ending in you scream that you have to get up and run. Bringing our body to this first reflex makes even more visible what our lives already know: what happens when we try to rest?

The first part of healing is stopping the violence. Always. That is true whether or not the violence is happening  in the present moment or if the violence is held in the tissues, a moment in the past that hasn't yet settled. Coming to this first reflex lifts up just how much of that present or past violence is impacting our ability to rest. As a healer, I look at violence as a range of things including the US normative conditioning that says your worth is bound up with what you do and not who you are. No single one of us can be healed or free until all are healed and free. It is possible to stop the impact of the violence still held in your tissues by controlling the space you are in and having enough time to let your bodies very slowly and fully feel that space around you, like a scared mammal slowly sniffing its way into someplace new, sniffing to find a corner to curl up in that is hidden and quiet.  It is also possible to stop the impact of that violence in your tissues by being raised with a range of race, class and gender privileges so that your conditioning numbs you and you can't feel the violence even when it is loud and screaming right outside your window. The first is about creating healing spaces. The second is about living your own life at the expense of others. Both of these scenarios are about violence that needs healing.

Coming to our first relationship with gravity, whether we do it by ourselves and for our individual bodies, or we do it as part of a group, it is always about taking a moment to listen, to integrate without thinking, and to notice what is true. Right now. In this moment.

And like all things, this is about practice. (Go ahead, I know you read that and want to lie down again. Go ahead and do it and then come back. This blog piece is almost done.)

We can't build a practice of rest if we don't know how to rest. This is the place of contradiction, the wrapped up tight knot that generations of living within and overriding violence have created. It is very difficult, although not impossible, to bring our body's to gravity's weight if we don't believe we can let go of our weight. That we can rest.

The gift of this is that gravity is not going anywhere. For the rest of your life and beyond, gravity is going to be this living relational thing that is with you, wherever you are. It was there to greet you immediately upon being born and, after you pass, it will help pull your body down and back into your most basic elements. It is always here. Always. And remembering your, our relationship to it is something you can do on your own or, even better, something you can do with others. Nothing I am writing here is new. Instead, this is all ancient and so many healers and teachers across literally thousands of years have practiced what it means to bring a body back into its ability to rest. Rest is how life remembers itself, reflects over what it has learned and slowly remakes itself in response to that learning. All of this is why systems of supremacy hijack the body's survival responses, keeping our nervous systems at the ready for disaster. Unable to rest.

I wish for you the ability to rest. I wish for you, no matter what has happened in your life or is happening now, the space and time, for five seconds or five hours, to remember this first and very loyal relationship.  Right now. As I finish writing this blog, I will practice. My daughter and partner are both still asleep. It is cold enough outside that the windows are shut so this room is quiet and contained. I will practice with and for you, remembering gravity, and wishing its patient steady pull as a kindness that only wants to hold your bones so that you are contained, held still, not falling into space or falling apart.


* This isn't exactly how the study of developmental reflexes names this first reflex. They focus more on what the set of specific reflexes moves towards. I am grateful to my teacher Suzanne River, who has since passed, for how she taught these reflexes as a series of reflexes and movements within the larger reflexes.