Spiritual Ecotones

Photo by Tsunami Green on Unsplash

Americans have an increasing desire to believe in something greater than themselves. This marks a major change following decades of secularization. A New York Times Project recently uncovered a variety of reasons for this shift, including COVID-19, a lack of social safety nets, and an overall dissatisfaction with alternatives to religion. In response to a request for comment on the project, renown atheist Richard Dawkins suggested that people fill their spiritual desires “outside of faith” by, for example, “watching David Attenborough films.” While there is certainly something to be said for nature as a source of spirituality, fulfilling spiritual desire with scientific facts is insufficient as such a call is not a desire to be educated, but rather, a deeper yearning for an embodied sense of wholeness.

Not surprisingly, the timing of the shift away from secularization coincides with ongoing planetary deterioration. According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, humans have pushed the Earth beyond the safe operating zone for six out of nine planetary boundaries, including climate, biodiversity loss, land and freshwater use, biogeochemical changes and the introduction of novel entities such as synthetic chemicals and pollutants. This stark reality coupled with social, cultural and economic decline underscores an urgent need for transformative change. What is being called the “polycrisis” clouds our sense of reality and increases existential insecurity. Similar to the way in which plants detect subtle changes in temperature and precipitation, shifts in social, cultural, economic and ecological systems permeate our bodies, despite systematic invalidation of our discomfort by governments and institutions.

Unfortunately, robust efforts in sustainability and conservation have failed to bring our way of being into coherence with healthy living systems. For the most part, human systems, including those derived from conservation science and sustainability, although well intentioned, remain steeped in outdated linear reductionist models of understanding reality that fail to recognize the complexity of human systems interweaving with the global biological ecosystem. Therefore, humanity’s future depends on its ability to bring human systems into coherence with the complexity of living systems. This requires taking an honest look at how our current systems fail to support life. While humanity has benefited greatly from the knowledge and technological advances of Western society, current systems advance the increasing decline in biospheric health. Given our symbiotic relationship with the environment, this has the potential to render human advancements obsolete. Thus, it behooves us to align with healthy living systems.

As an embedded part of the biosphere, it makes sense that we would have the ability to feel disharmony between human and living systems similar to the way in which a child can sense disharmony in the parental relationship. It is this incongruence that is giving rise to increasing existential anxiety, along with other mental and emotional distress. Our daily lived experience invalidates this felt sense of “wrongness,” leading to disembodiment and/or dissociation. When our felt sense is invalidated, we suppress those feelings and lose trust in our inner knowing. As an attachment therapist, I know that increasing a child’s capacity for emotional regulation requires attunement and validation. Dismissing our feelings will not shield us from living on a deteriorating planet; instead, it increases the likelihood of dysregulation and distress. Rather than pausing to look at how our systems are interrupting the flow of life, governments and institutions reinforce degenerative ways of being by telling us to go on with business as usual.

Bringing human systems into coherence with healthy living systems is not without difficulty, but with purpose, intention and the cultivation of an embodied sense of wholeness, it’s possible. An embodied sense of wholeness is born from recognizing the inherent connection we have to all of life and integrating this recognition into our sense of self. Akin to religion and spirituality, an embodied sense of wholeness can provide a belief in something greater than the self, a sense of belonging to a community of earthly kin, and guiding behaviors for a regenerative future. Perhaps spirituality also allows us to recognize our part in something abstract and mysterious -- something not fully known because we are but a small part of a much larger interdependent whole.

Lisa Miller, a professor in the Clinical Psychology program at Teachers College, Columbia University argues that spirituality is an important protective factor against anxiety and depression. In her research on spirituality in adolescence, Miller found that “the magnitude of the protective effect [of spirituality] and its timing in adolescence raises the question of a singular process or shared biological substrate underlying spiritual awakening and onset of depression.” This is a significant finding in terms of the connection between spirituality and wellbeing and supports the notion that spirituality is an essential part of being and feeling whole. Indigenous peoples around the world promote rites of passage in adolescence to facilitate the complex transition to adulthood. According to ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, these often spiritual experiences can ease the experience of liminality. Like adolescence, we are in a time between worlds, with one foot in outdated systems and one foot stepping into the unknown.

Climate psychologist Thomas Doherty advocates for uncovering our environmental identity as a necessary part of human sustainability. But, what if our environmental identity and spiritual self are two sides of the same coin? The failure to recognize and integrate our connection to larger living systems may be at the root of rising existential insecurity. If we use “life” as synonymous with “God” or “spirit,” we capture the connection we have to the ecosystems we’re embedded in (and that are simultaneously embedded in us). This way of approaching spirituality is not incompatible with the world’s major belief systems and allows for a richer experience of being alive. If all life is sacred, we honor and respect all God’s creation, as well as the science of living systems. In this way, science and spirituality are not mutually exclusive; they can coexist on the edge of what we know and what we don’t. The emerging field of spiritual ecology marries what we know about living systems with what we have yet to learn. Spiritual ecology remains fertile ground for planting seeds of regeneration while satisfying our need to believe, belong and behave in ways that support healthy living systems.

In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of “ecotones” as the place where old and new ecosystems come together. According to Kimmerer, ecotones “are among the most diverse and productive of ecosystems, full of berries and birds.” This is where “there are species that live in neither the new nor the old, but at the edges.” The emerging field of spiritual ecology is one such ecotone – where biology, psychology and spirituality meet to honor the sacredness of life and foster the conditions necessary for new ways of being to emerge.