The last snow had melted a few weeks ago, the ground had dried and the sun had successfully enticed shoots to break their winter retreat and unfurl their green. The morning sun had lured me out too, I was sitting on a bench meditating with my bare feet in the grass. My body felt at total ease being held by the Earth and the boundary of my skin diffused and merged with the surrounding space vibrantly alive with birdsong and the buzz of bumblebees, when suddenly I could feel something landing on the crown of my head. I was so relaxed by my extended practice I managed not to flinch in surprise. The delicate weight of what was sat on top of my head moved slightly to the right and then to the left. A bird!

I opened my eyes, as if wanting to look at the bird, but as you can imagine, I couldn’t see the top of my head. It felt like it was turning its head left and right to look around. “I can’t believe a bird just landed on my head!”, I exclaimed with glee silently in my head. “Does it think I’m a fence post?” I was beaming with the honour of having been mistaken for a picket. Or trusted as a safe landing platform.

I felt a gentle scratch on my scalp as the bird took flight. I looked up and it was perched on the edge of the gutter. The male pied flycatcher turned back to look at me briefly (I can’t say I saw it wink, but it probably did) and then it was gone.

Like robins, pied flycatchers are curious and intrepid, often peering into our house through the window. Wintering in tropical parts of Africa, in the spring they make their way to breed in Europe, in this case as far as our garden in South-Western Finland. Almost without exception, the males return to their old nesting ground, to the exact hole or nesting box they successfully nested in the previous year. So perhaps we’ve been building trust and he’s been eyeing up my head as a safe place to land for years now!

Jesting aside, to me this experience was a great example of physiological groundedness. With my bare feet on the earth, my electrical charge was grounded and balanced. Through my grounding meditation practice I was in coherence with my surroundings, my energetic vibrational frequency was coherent with the Earth so I was no longer something distinct, but had merged, become embedded in the landscape and in that sense become invisible. Or in other words, become a fence post.

It puts a new spin on the Finnish folklore warning of disappearing under the “blanket of the forest”. It was said that you may get so enchanted by the woodland you get lost, and if people are looking for you, they can’t see you, even if they walk right past you, because you’re hidden by the “forest blanket”. What if this blanket actually describes groundedness in which you are in such coherence with your surroundings you become one with the whole; no longer separate and set apart?

Grounding balances our bioelectrical charge

At its simplest, grounding can be about putting our feet on the earth and walking. Walking is one of our most primal ways of movement and walking in natural environments in itself is incredibly grounding physically, psychologically and spiritually.

Pilgrimage is a profound expression and practice of humility in front of Life; gradually landing into our depths and on the Earth through facing our pain layer by layer, sharing the journey in mutuality with others and stripping away the trivial in the face of the essential.

Perhaps at the most physiological level, grounding is about stabilising our electrical charge, like earthing a house. Grounding or earthing a house balances the entire electrical system and provides a secure path for voltage surges preventing lethal electric shocks and wiring from overheating, and stabilises voltage to protect our sensitive electronics. Grounding maintains the electrical system in a stable environment, making it safe.

Humans are bioelectrical beings. Every cell in our body acts like a tiny battery, maintaining an electrical charge that our brain uses to think, our heart uses to beat, and our nerves use to feel the world.

The ionosphere above us surrounding the planet is positively charged and the surface of the Earth is negatively charged. Our body is like a battery in between the two poles of that charge. When barefoot outside, touching the soil with our hands or swimming in natural waters, we are literally grounded or earthed, and the charge in our body is neutralised. But most of us spend the majority of our day indoors or wearing shoes that prevent our grounding.

When we insulate ourselves from the Earth we have no way of balancing the charge and coming back to neutral, so we tend to accumulate positive charge from electrical fields around us like devices, static electricity build-up, and also from our own body systems such as the immune response which works in part by flooding the body with positive charge.

Our bodies are designed to be in contact with the Earth to allow the free transfer of negative charge into the body in order to neutralise it. When you make direct contact with the ground, free electrons transfer into your body, helping to neutralise free radicals and reduce inflammation. This imbalance in modern life and insulating shoes means the neutralising doesn’t happen, which can contribute to chronic inflammation in the body, which in turn is involved in most ill health.

Coherence is the quality of forming a whole

We think of groundedness also as coherence: the mind coming into coherence with the body, the various functions of the body coming into coherence with each other and us coming into coherence with our surroundings, with our life, with reality, as it is, as opposed to how we think it should be. Coherence then is about becoming whole.

Coherence is a defining quality of living systems, and the HeartMath Institute has introduced the term physiological coherence to describe the degree of order, harmony and stability in the various rhythmic activities within living systems. The optimal functioning of a coherent system, such as a human being, is directly related to the ease and flow in its life processes and is indicated by parasympathetic (“rest and digest”) nervous system activity. An incoherent system, in contrast, reflects stress and inefficient use of energy in its life processes.

All matter is a process of energy burning, including our bodies. Energy within the body moves in waves of various intensities and frequencies and we are always surrounded by and interacting with numerous low and high-frequency waves around us such as radio waves or ultraviolet radiation.

The Earth has its own vibrational frequency, known as the Schumann Resonance, at approximately 7.8 Hz or cycles per second, which corresponds, for example, with our theta brain waves ranging from 4 to 8 Hz. Relatively slow within the range of human brainwaves, theta brain waves are associated with the first stage of sleep, dreaming, deeper levels of meditation, inspired creativity and imagination and mystical states of intuitive perception. So, perhaps it could be said that in meditation as well as creative flow states we come into coherence with the Earth’s natural electromagnetic fields and are in that sense grounded.

The HeathMath Institute has also been researching human-earth interconnectivity since 2008, when they launched the Global Coherence Initiative, a science-based, co-creative research project. The research focuses on the impacts of the resonant geomagnetic frequencies, Schumann resonances, on human health and behaviour.

On a more relational plane coherence can mean being in alignment with yourself and allowing yourself to be who you are, as you are, as well as finding compatible rhythms, shared values and mutual understanding with the people around you. We’ll dive deep into the psychological and relational aspects of grounding in another article.

Releasing energy into the ground as the first move of transformation

The concept of life force is found in many ancient cultures of the world; an energy that gives life, the breath of life that differentiates a living human being from a corpse. In these cultures, notably in Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Native American cultures, this energy is central in medicine and healing, as well as a vehicle for spiritual awakening.

The Chinese practice of Qigong is the practice of learning to observe and direct the movement of life force within the body to vitalise and heal the body and also attain union with Tao, the natural flow of the Universe.

Before any actual Qigong practice is begun, the practitioner assumes the posture that supports the flow of energy within the body and through an interoceptive process feels into any tense or stuck energy within the body, softens and transforms it, like ice to water. The energy is then dissolved downward through the body and released through the feet into the ground.

In embodied meditation practice a similar grounding process is vital as the first step. The frazzled energy of held tension, thought loops and emotional upheaval is released and put down like an armour with the recognition that we are being held by something unimaginably greater than our mind. The sooner the mind surrenders to that, the deeper the experience of grounding.

As the initial move in embodied practice, grounding provides a stable, safe and large enough container for traumatic energy patterns held in the body to begin to unwind and move. A grounded bodymind rooted in the Earth, held by the vast and mysterious container of Life, can attune and open to the flow of Life through it, without getting hurt or swept away.

Whilst an initial step, grounding can also be seen as a whole path that keeps unfolding and ultimately leads to our Source, to our deepest ground. We realise our nature of non-separateness, our embeddedness, and enchanted, disappear under the blanket of the Universe.

This year, when the pied flycatchers returned, we greeted each other in appreciation, at least on my part. I have continued to meditate outdoors, but never since have I been graced by being used as a landing platform.

To discover and land on your physiological, psycho-emotional and spiritual ground, take the new self-paced 8-week course Finding Your Ground in Turbulent Times, which we created for Alef Trust.

For more perspectives on the physiological aspects of grounding, listen to the Earthbound podcast episode 1 for Finding Your Ground with one of our teachers Kevin Schoeninger, a meditation teacher and Qigong Meditation Master Instructor with 40 years of experience in various mind-body modalities.

Resources:

Brown, Chevalier, Oschman 2015: The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4378297/

Frantzis, Bruce Kumar 1993: Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body. Berkeley, California: First North Atlantic Books Printing.

HeartMath Institute: https://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart/

Schumann Resonance Live: https://schumannresonancelive.com/en/

Tickell, Rebecca 2019: The Earthing Movie: The Remarkable Science of Grounding

My body had to physically stop me in my tracks and say “no more” for me to listen to the deeper calling that I’d been ignoring or making excuses against for decades previously. Ungroundedness made me unwell, unhappy and unable to connect deeply with myself and the world around me.

But thank goodness I listened. I let the calling land me back down into my body, back down onto the Earth and back into Life again. I found my ground.

My nervous system relaxed, my conditioning began to loosen and release, my energy returned, my love for my precious human body living this precious life on this precious living planet bloomed. And my capacity to be here for myself and others, even when things get difficult, began to increase.

To say this has been transformational would be an understatement. My entire sense of self has unfolded and relaxed and integrated with Life. I feel more able to stay present to the difficulty and the beauty, the loss and the gifts of this crazy whirl we call existence. That’s helped me find purpose, connection, friendships and meaning.

And all of this started by finding my ground. At every level. Physiological, psycho-emotional, subtle-energetic and spiritual. It’s our inheritance to belong to the Web of Life and the Field of Being, and it’s our deep wish to help illuminate a pathway back to that inheritance for those people called to do so.

To feel a persistent, pervasive sense of embodied safety and to be available to act from that sense of deep ground, is what will facilitate the transformation our nervous systems and our dominant culture so desperately crave. Finding our ground is foundational to everything else.

This is deep and rewarding work and it has to start somewhere and at some time. Why not start now with us?

We created a course and a rite of passage called Finding Your Ground in Turbulent Times to support you to land again. If this feels important for you right now, please be welcome!

Course intro:

We live in the most ungrounded times humanity may ever have experienced.

Disconnected from the Earth beneath our feet. Overwhelmed by the noise of digital life. Stuck in anxious rumination, fragmented from our bodies and communities.

If any of that resonates, this is for you.

Finding Your Ground in Turbulent Times is a new self-paced online course we created for Alef Trust — an 8-week embodied journey back to yourself, your body, and the Earth.

Through somatic practices, breathwork, meditation, guided reflection, and live Zoom integration sessions, this course offers a genuine rite of passage for our times. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced practitioner, the path is open to you.

Asking yourself:
→ How do I move from rumination back into my body?
→ How do I find my ground when the world feels unstable?
→ How do I re-member myself as Nature, not separate from it?

This course is designed to answer those questions — not through theory, but through lived experience.

Self-paced | 8 weeks + 1 year of live integration sessions | £197

Enrol now or find out more

www.aleftrust.org/finding-your-ground-in-turbulent-times

We live in the most ungrounded times humanity may ever have experienced. Disconnected physically from the Earth by concrete and steel, psychologically through the dominance of abstract thinking in the age of digital distraction, and spiritually through the deep-seated stories of separation we tell each other from generation to generation. We’re stuck in, or above, our heads in clouds of anxious rumination and feeling disconnected from our bodies, our communities, the places we inhabit and the Earth at large.

But there is a simple and profoundly natural path back to connection, coherence, peace and flow. Johanna and I are currently developing a new course for the Aleft Trust called Finding Your Ground In Turbulent Times. It is a course and a rite of passage that will take you through a process of embodied remembrance of your true nature as Nature.

We’ll keep you posted when it’s due to go live, but in the meantime, it felt important to check in with some of our most important teachers on our own paths to groundedness, to share their insights and experience in this essential capacity. We’ll be creating a themed series of “grounding” specific podcasts to help flesh out what we mean by the term and its profound implications from the physical, psycho-emotional, subtle energetic and spiritual dimensions. And perhaps most importantly, how to find it again in these crazy times.

In this episode of the Being Earthbound podcast, I speak with meditation teacher, Kevin Schoeninger, about grounding, embodiment, subtle energy, and why coming back into contact with the living earth matters so much to a culture artificially insulated from our home.

Grounding has been one of the most important threads in my own life. It was one of the first doorways that helped me come back into relationship with my body at a time when my health was really struggling, and I was in need of something to support me to safely descend out of that cloud in and around my head and back into my body. Kevin was one of the teachers who helped me begin that return, so it felt deeply meaningful to have this conversation with him.

Together, we explore what grounding actually is, why it matters, and what happens when we lose contact with the body and the earth. Kevin shares how his own path began through Tai Chi, slow walking, and learning to feel the soles of his feet on the ground. From that simple beginning, the conversation opens into a much wider exploration of presence, energy, coherence, and the deeper ground beneath the noise of modern life.

We speak about the consequences of being ungrounded, the way modern culture pulls us into abstraction and disconnection, and the importance of restoring direct contact with the living world. We also explore subtle energy, interoception, the light body, and the possibility that beneath all the static, there is already a deeper peace available to us.

For me, one of the most important threads in this episode is that grounding is not just a way to calm down. It is a return to reality, to relationship, and to the body as a place of presence and support. Sometimes that return begins very simply, by taking off our shoes, feeling the earth beneath us, and letting the body remember what it already knows.

To find out more about Kevin’s work, including his books, courses and his meditation guidance on Insight Timer, please visit his website at https://raisingourvibration.net

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If you know someone who would find this interesting, please do share it with them!

And we’d love to hear your experiences with groundedness and ungroundedness! What’s your path with this been like?

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What changes when we stop trying to live from the head alone, and begin to meet life through the body as a living instrument of relationship?

In this final episode of the Embodied Permaculture Project, participants reflect on what shifted through 18 months of applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The conversation gathers the impacts across inner life, relationships, and permaculture and change work, showing how embodiment can reshape not only how we feel, but how we design, facilitate, lead, and collaborate.

A central thread is the nervous system. Several participants describe moving out of chronic survival mode and towards grounded calm, trust, and steadier confidence. Embodiment is felt in practical ways: noticing the body without panic, listening to signals rather than overriding them, and finding more capacity to stay present even when the world is intense and heartbreaking.

The episode also explores belonging and agency. Participants speak about releasing people pleasing, becoming more able to ask for help, and meeting limits without shame. Fear does not disappear, but its grip changes. There is a growing willingness to step towards the edge, to take evolutionary steps, and to bring more of themselves into groups, teaching, and public situations.

As the focus turns towards permaculture practice, the conversation returns to the first principle: observe. Participants describe how embodiment refines observation into something more whole-bodied and intuitive. Designing becomes less about forcing solutions and more about sensing what is already asking to happen. Time on the land changes, too, with deeper listening, greater trust in emergence, and a more tangible experience of being in relationship with the more-than-human world.

Relational work is another strong theme. Many permaculture roles involve groups, conflict, collaboration, and community learning. Participants describe becoming less reactive, more spacious, and more able to facilitate from presence. Small acts, such as grounding together at the start of meetings, are described as quiet interventions that can shift culture from the inside.

Throughout the episode, nature connection moves from concept to lived experience. Several participants speak about no longer holding “we are nature” as an idea, but recognising it as something felt in the body, with profound implications for how we meet grief, death, responsibility, and our place in the wider ecosystem of life.

About the Embodied Permaculture Project

Welcome to the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about our work, visit earthbound.fi.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

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Episode 5: Everything Belongs - Experiencing Wholeness

What happens when we stop trying to “accept” life, and instead recognise that everything is already here?

In this episode, the conversation turns towards wholeness, not as an ideal state or something to achieve, but as an embodied recognition of reality as it is. Participants explore what it means to include all of experience, rather than dividing life into what belongs and what does not.

A central thread in the episode is the role of preference. Many of us associate wholeness with moments when life feels good, aligned, or comfortable. When things fall outside our preferences, whether internally or in the wider world, we often experience separation. This episode explores how that subtle rejection fragments our sense of belonging and uses up enormous amounts of energy.

The discussion introduces the idea of green-lighting experience. Rather than trying to accept, approve of, or manage what arises, participants explore the recognition that everything already present is already allowed. Joy and pain, ease and difficulty, clarity and confusion are all included.

For those engaged in changemaking and regenerative work, this inquiry raises important questions. How do we respond to injustice, harm, or conflict without hardening against life? The episode explores how relaxing the inner fight can create more capacity for meaningful action, clearer boundaries, and more relational ways of meeting difference.

Throughout the conversation, listeners are invited to sense their own relationship with rejection, acceptance, and effort, and to notice what becomes possible when experience is allowed to be whole.

Welcome to the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about our work, visit earthbound.fi.

Coming up next

In the final episode, participants reflect on the impact of the 18-month project on their lives and permaculture practice, and the changes they have observed along the way.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

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We're really happy to share that our Embodied Permaculture Project, funded by Alef Trust, has contributed to a recently published paper in Challenges — Journal of Planetary Health. The paper is titled "Conscious Food Systems: Supporting Farmers’ Well-Being and Psychological Resilience" and has been brought together by the amazing people at the UNDP Conscious Food Systems Alliance and includes contributions from across the planet which:

"...examines an emerging paradigm in agriculture that emphasizes the role of farmers’ inner development in fostering practices that enhance ecological health, community well-being, and a resilient food system. A key goal is to draw more academic attention to growing community calls for more holistic, relational, and spiritually grounded approaches to food systems as an important focus for ongoing research. Drawing on diverse case studies from Japan, India, and Europe, we examine how small-scale and natural farming initiatives are integrating inner development, universal human values, and ecological consciousness."

You can read the paper here:

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/17/1/3

Welcome to episode 4 of the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about the project, listen to earlier episodes and read articles about embodied permaculture, visit beingearthbound.substack.com/t/embodied-permaculture.

Episode 4: From Masking to Mutuality

What happens when we loosen our need to manage, fix and control, and allow ourselves to meet each other more openly?

In this episode, host Johanna McTiernan explores embodied relating as a pathway from masking and self-protection towards greater authenticity and mutual presence. Participants reflect on how early habits of fitting in, editing themselves, and seeking approval can become so automatic that they feel natural, even when they are rooted in tension and fear.

As the conversation unfolds, we hear how embodied presence can soften these patterns. Participants describe feeling safer in their own skin, communicating more openly, and relying less on external validation. There is a growing sense of permission to enjoy life, to value one’s own voice, and to care for others without disappearing in the process.

The episode then turns toward changemaking in polarised social fields. Rather than meeting opposition with more force, embodied relating offers a way to find common ground beneath positions. By resting in grounded presence, participants describe becoming more available to others and more able to hold difference without losing themselves.

A simple embodied practice returns from the early sessions of the project: “down and in” — bringing attention into the body, softening the face, and settling with the breath before engaging. From this place, listening deepens and connection becomes more possible.

One participant shares how this practice supported him to hold space for his wife and family when war broke out in his wife’s country of origin. Instead of rushing to solutions, he describes a growing capacity to stay present, grounded, and emotionally available.

In the second half of the episode, the focus shifts to control and agency. Through a guided inquiry led by Dan, participants explore what they are — and are not — in control of in their lived experience. Questions arise around fixing, improving, and outcome-attachment, and how much suffering is created when reality does not match imagined futures.

Participants reflect on fear, grief, resistance, and relief, as well as on the difference between power over and power with. The conversation gently opens into the possibility of participation without domination, choice without illusion, and action without guaranteed outcomes.

Throughout the episode, listeners are invited to notice their own relationship with control, agency, and trust, and to sense what becomes possible when effort softens into presence.

Coming up next

In the next episode, we explore what emerges when layers of resistance fall away, and experience is allowed to be as it is, touching into wholeness and deep belonging.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

Welcome to episode 3 of the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about the project, listen to earlier episodes and read articles about embodied permaculture, visit beingearthbound.substack.com/t/embodied-permaculture.

Episode 3: Tuning in to the Gut

What happens when we stop trying to hold life together from the head and allow ourselves to land more fully in the body?

In this episode, host Johanna McTiernan turns us towards the gut as a place of grounding, intuition, and deep trust. The conversation explores what it means to rest in not knowing, to loosen our grip on control, and to sense life from a deeper, quieter place within.

For many of us, a lack of grounding shows up as anxious energy, overthinking, or a sense of disconnection from meaning and belonging. How does that affect our work as changemakers, activists and permaculture practitioners? Project participants reflect on how tuning into the body, and particularly the belly and pelvic bowl, can bring a felt sense of safety and stability that allows experience to move through without overwhelming us. From this place, boundaries become clearer, and there is more space to meet what is happening without needing to manage or fix it.

The episode invites an exploration of intuition. Intuitive or inner knowing is described as something subtle, embodied, and relational. It often emerges through movement, time on the land, or moments of stillness, arriving not through effort, but through listening.

This way of knowing has implications beyond the individual. As the conversation unfolds, questions arise around collective work, decision-making, and changemaking. How do we stay true to inner guidance while working with others? What changes when we stop pushing upstream against life, and instead learn to move with its currents?

A recurring image in the episode is that of turning the boat downstream and allowing oneself to be carried, making small, responsive adjustments rather than forcing direction. This becomes an invitation to consider activism, leadership, and agency from a place of presence and relationality rather than oppositional struggle.

Throughout the episode, listeners are gently invited to reflect on their own relationship with control, trust, and grounded knowing, and to sense what might become possible if they allowed themselves to soften their inner grip and listen more deeply.

Coming up next

In the next episode, we explore embodied relating, moving from self-protection and masking towards mutual presence, authenticity, and holding safe space for others.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

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We’d love to hear how this work lands for you, so please do leave a comment or share it with someone you feel would be interested.

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Welcome to Episode 2 of the Embodied Permaculture Project, a 6‑episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking and the culture shift from our current paradigm to alignment with life on Earth. This series is based on a project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied life‑aligned embodiment practice for 18 months. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities Initiative, and it was designed and facilitated by Earthbound. To find out more about our work, please visit earthbound.fi.

Episode 2

In this second episode of the Embodied Permaculture Project podcast, we ask: What is embodiment, really? And how does it support those seeking to live in alignment with the Earth?

Johanna is joined by Dan, lead facilitator of the project, to explore how disconnection from the body mirrors disconnection from the wider living systems we’re part of. They trace how much of modern life draws us up into the head, away from the subtle signals of the heart and gut, and how this internal misalignment is mirrored in our external culture — from infinite growth models to ecological breakdown.

Drawing on reflections from project participants, this episode explores how returning to the body supports resilience, trust, and connection. We hear stories of burnout, illness, and inherited conditioning, and what began to shift when people slowed down, grounded themselves, and tuned in to their felt experience.

Together, we introduce the four principles that shaped the project:

Grounding – creating a felt sense of safety

Attunement – tuning into self, others, and Earth

Opening – softening into connection and flow

Integration – weaving inner work into outer work

These movements support a different kind of change: one that doesn’t push from urgency, but emerges from presence. One that reconnects us not just with ourselves, but with the land, with one another, and with life itself.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

Leave a comment

We’d love to hear how this work lands for you, so please do leave a comment or share it with someone you feel would be interested.

Share

Welcome to the Embodied Permaculture Project, a 6-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking and the culture shift from our current paradigm to alignment with life on Earth. This series is based on a project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied life-aligned embodiment practice for 18 months. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities Initiative, and it was designed and facilitated by Earthbound. To find out more about our work please visit earthbound.fi.

Episode 1

In this opening episode of the Embodied Permaculture Project podcast, we introduce the journey that brought this series to life - an 18‑month exploration with 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe, diving deeply into life-aligned embodiment practice. Designed and facilitated by us at Earthbound and funded through Alef Trust’s Conscious Community initiative, the project asked: What might become possible in permaculture, changemaking, and cultural regeneration when we root ourselves more fully in embodied presence?

We share why we believe embodiment is essential for the cultural shift we long for - a move from disconnection and burnout toward grounded, relational ways of being that are aligned with life. Through powerful reflections from project participants, this episode surfaces the tensions between inner and outer change, between head and body, and between working with nature and working as nature.

Together, we explore the invisible conditioning we carry from industrial cultures, how burnout shows up even in nature-aligned spaces, and what begins to shift when we slow down, reconnect to the body, and rediscover our belonging in the wider web of life. We also speak to the importance of trust, community, and the deeper qualities that enable transformation, not just in our systems, but in ourselves.

We created this podcast to share what we learned as fellow travellers and to invite you into this conversation about how real change happens.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. Join us in exploring what it truly means to live as nature.

Find out more about the course

In Episode 2, we ask: What is embodiment?

We’d love to have you with us for the journey.

I recently had the pleasure of returning to the Accidental Gods podcast with the wonderful for a wide-ranging conversation on one of the most vital topics of our time: how we cultivate genuine stability, connection and presence in a world that feels increasingly uncertain.

We explored:

• What it means to find our ground, not just physically, but psycho-emotionally and existentially
  

• Insights from the Alef Trust Calmer Farmer project and the real-world impact it’s having on landworkers’ wellbeing
  

• The shift from goal-driven to process-oriented living, especially in the regenerative farming space
  

• The role of co-regulation (questioning the existence of self-regulation) in building resilience
  

• The power of relational practices like What’s Here Now? for reconnecting with our authenticity, building trust, and as David Whyte puts it, increasing our capacity for “robust vulnerability”

We’re living in systems that are changing fast, and many of the traditional markers of “safety” are dissolving. This conversation is about how we meet that in ourselves, in our communities, and in our work.

If you’re interested in nervous system-informed leadership, regenerative models of change, or embodiment as a core competency for this era, please give it a listen.

🎧 Episode here: https://accidentalgods.life/still-in-the-eye-of-the-storm-finding-calm-and-stable-roots-with-dan-mctiernan-of-being-earthbound/

Let me know what resonates, and feel free to share it with anyone who might need support grounding in these wild times.

Share

I started saying this out loud this year. To my wife at first, then slowly to my clients, and last week on a podcast episode that thousands of people will hear. It’s been a deepening realisation that now feels settled in my marrow, in my gut and heart.

Self-regulation doesn’t and cannot exist, ever.

That feels a bit controversial to say in my line of work as a coach.

Firstly, it’s important to define what I mean by self-regulation. This is a term that comes from nervous system health modalities and polyvagal theory. It’s the notion that our nervous systems are often dysregulated, either switched on to a manic max or turned down to a frozen min as a result of living in a world of intense confusion that carries with it an underlying sense of pervasive threat to our bodies.

Our nervous system states are an embodied reflection of all the external confusion and turbulence in the world right now. A world in which nobody has the faintest idea what’s going on, which consequently makes it very hard for our inner experience to flow gracefully between heightened and relaxed states as our mammalian physiology is designed to do under normal circumstances. Normal being the previous 300,000 plus years of human existence, where we weren’t constantly asked to make up the rules of life on a daily basis and where global catastrophe - barring a meteor strike or geo-magnetic pole flip - was not on the cards as a real possibility.

An important field of internal healing work has emerged out of this recognition of dysregulation. It’s essentially the process of coming back into relationship with our inner experience at an energetic level by becoming more comfortable sensing our sensations and feeling our feelings. It’s also the process of actively calming our nervous system in order to retrain it to come back to states of relaxation more readily. Over time, this allows the nervous system to recalibrate and release much of the need to be on high alert, which in turn allows for better sleep, better health and better relationships.

It’s important and helpful work, and I bring many of these perspectives and practices into my coaching and group work. But it’s based on a false premise: That this process is done by you and me in isolation, that we can self-regulate at all.

To be fair to nervous system regulation practitioners, there is also the concept and experience of co-regulation to factor in here. Co-regulation is the ability of one nervous system to bring another nervous system back into regulation. It’s the secret source of all good coaches, therapists, parents and friends. The more grounded and relaxed I feel, the more ability you will have to be with what’s disturbing your nervous system and, through the alchemy of connection, for you to begin to come back into a greater state of relaxation and rest.

You know the felt experience of this. If you are feeling stressed, then hanging out with other stressed people just agitates your system further. Likewise, hanging out with someone relaxed and open feels like a big internal sigh of relief. You relax. You are in relationship at a nervous system to nervous system level. You are a tuning fork, resonating with the vibrational frequencies of another. This is true.

But what if this were true of the whole of Life, the whole of the time? What if the process of self-regulation (when you don’t have another nervous system on hand to help you relax) is false?

I’ve been sensing into this through my own lived experience for several years now. Earthbound offers coaching from the foundational premise that we are not atomised separate selves but rather, we are Nature. We are a seamless togetherness when we notice our experience at the deeper levels of Life.

So what if we let go of the notion of self-regulation entirely and just relaxed into the more true experience of continuous, unbreakable co-regulation? What if what we thought was “self-regulation” was actually just an experience of remembering our seamless togetherness with existence? What if that act of embodied remembrance was all our nervous system was seeking in the first place?

Take some of the basic practices of “self-regulation” and feel into them as a remembrance of seamless togetherness instead.

Breathwork is one of the most powerful tools we can work with to bring rapid changes to our nervous system states. But rather than it being a process of “me breathing to support my system”, what if it is an act of receiving and remembering our relationship with air, forests, plants, and oceanic oxygen-producing phytoplankton? What if each lungful was a gentle greeting from Life? A reminder that we are not alone?

“Orienting” is another classic nervous system practice. It’s the gentle process of noticing where we are and what surrounds us as a means of allowing us to land back into the here/now. We feel the floor beneath our feet, notice objects around a room, or if we’re outside, we engage our outer senses on the landscape, the buildings, other beings. This is often framed as a process of bringing ourselves back to our selves and away from being lost in a cloud of turbulent, thoughts, feelings and sensations. But what if this was actually the world bringing us back to itself instead? What if the process of orienting was an invitation by Life back into the centre of Life again? Another reminder that “alone” doesn’t really mean anything.

Our bodies are teeming with other microorganisms, our blood is coursing with iron from ancient supernovae, our cells are drenched in the lifewaters of stream and cloud and sea. Our bones and muscles are built from the body of the Earth and from countless bodies that have built that earth. The magnetic pulse of the planet resonates through our body, and photons from the Sun flood our flesh with luminosity.

There is no alone. You are never alone. You can never be alone. There is only relationship. There is only seamless togetherness and the embodied sense of fundamental safety and connection that recognition brings.

There is no self-regulation. There is only co-regulation. We just need to remember the truth our nervous systems know already. What changes then?

The world needs more grounded, attuned, open and integrated people.

The Earthbound Practice Circle is a group for those who feel the call to illuminate their own inner lives in service to the outer work of regeneration and reconnection so needed in these times.

You might be a full-time parent or carer, the CEO of an organisation, a changemaker working in environmental or social justice fields, a teacher, a therapist or a homesteader or none of the above. Wherever you find yourself in this life moment, the quality and intention of your response to the "Call" is what matters most.

The "Call" is Life inviting you back into its wholeness. The invitation away from the current dominant story we live by that says we are separate from each other and from nature and which feels hollow at its core. The call is the welcoming that lands you back in your body, back in connection with the earth and which opens you up again to yourself, to other people and to the world.

The path from hollowness to wholeness that transforms the way you feel about yourself and empowers you to show up in the world authentically and heartfully.

We know that following that call can be tricky because of all the noise, demands, and pressures of our dominant culture, which can lead us to distraction, burnout and ill health. Coming back to embodied presence takes regular practice and a community of mutual support. So we created a practice circle that offers just that.

The Earthbound Practice Circle is a community for people who want to live from embodied presence and are seeking others to learn and grow alongside.

Share your light with the world and join us.

Drawing on the best of whole-person psychology, nervous system regulation techniques, contemporary contemplative and spiritual approaches, and integrative relational practice, we offer an innovative and highly effective approach to wellbeing.

Sessions include a combination of embodied meditation and other somatic practices such as breathwork, group coaching, emotional process work, reflective practices and lots of space for sharing and connecting.

Including:

Grounding in embodied presence: Landing back in our bodies and back on the Earth

We learn how to regulate our autonomic nervous system through breathwork, embodied meditation and other grounding practices to allow us to access natural states of being that feel safe, resourced and connected. This is the essential foundation for our recovery, our health and our ongoing wellbeing.

Tuning in through the body to the wisdom of the World

We discover a relaxed, effortless approach to embodied meditation that allows us to tap into a much deeper well of “knowing” and wisdom than just our problem-solving mind. We learn to “listen” with our whole system both internally and externally and to begin to live from that much fuller bandwidth of intelligence.

Holding Space and co-regulation: Embodied Relating

We practise a form of relational “inquiry” that allows us to be with and to release held and constricted emotional and psychological energy in the body and to facilitate that for others. These developmental constrictions or "conditioning" are often created as coping mechanisms during childhood in response to overwhelming situations. They came into existence to keep us safe but now as adults, they keep us held back from fully maturing into self-actualised grown-ups. Gently freeing this energy to cycle back into healthy flow again allows much more space in our bodies and our lives. We shift from conditioned reactivity to being "here and available" for others from a greater sense of peace and maturity.

Showing up for others in embodied presence is one of the greatest gifts we can give another person and our aim is for this to become normalised within our daily lives and culture.

Deep togetherness: The felt sense of interbeing

Our group and personal practice is all oriented towards ever greater experiences of connectivity, alignment and flow with the whole of Life. So we begin to feel that “we are nature” on a regular basis rather than just knowing it intellectually. This is a shift from a cogni-centric approach to a life-centric approach.

Creative Emergence

As we begin to feel grounded, attuned and open we become more receptive to our inner guidance and to new ways of being and acting that will enrich and enliven our lives. Instead of a repetitive reactive loop, life starts to become an unfolding discovery!

Action from Being

As we learn to show up in the world from embodied presence we discover it's possible to do the slow work of repairing, regenerating and reconnecting communities and landscapes without burning out, falling out with others or dropping out altogether. We learn that we can rely on Life's energy and wisdom to guide our action in the world which brings greater confidence, trust, capacity and joy to our work.

We meet every two weeks online via Zoom.

Meetings are held on:
2nd Friday of the month (with some exceptions) at 10am UK time - 90 mins

Friday sessions are a teaching/coaching space that includes themed teaching, group coaching, embodiment practice, psycho-emotional inquiry work, and plenty of space for reflections, questions, and connection.

And 4th Saturday of the month (with some exceptions) 10am UK time - 60 mins

Saturday sessions are our What’s Here Now? Club. This is relational, voiced meditation done in pairs. Find out more about this profound and transformational practice here.

Membership includes:

• 2 live group sessions per month (90-minute Friday Circle meetings plus Saturday What’s Here Now? Club sessions)

• Access to member-only private community chat in Substack

• Recordings of Friday Circle sessions

• A growing audio library of guided embodied presence practices

• 10% discount off 1-1 coaching for as long as you are a member.

Membership Price:

15 euros per month or

12 euros per month with an annual subscription

Meet your guides:

Dan McTiernan

Dan is a transformational whole-being coach working at the intersection of transpersonal psychology, embodiment and Nature. Combining deep ecology literacy, permaculture practice and training as a certified transpersonal coach, embodied meditation teacher and breathwork instructor, he offers a holistic framework to help clients reconnect with their vitality, true nature, and relationship with all of life.

He is the co-founder of Earthbound, a nature-based coaching organisation. He leads the Embodied Permaculture Project, an international research initiative exploring the connection between personal wellbeing and ecological change. Dan is also project lead on the farmer wellbeing programme, Calmer Farmer, as well as a facilitator on the Nurturing The Fields of Change programme.

Johanna McTiernan

Johanna is a certified embodied meditation instructor, Realization Process™ teacher, nature connection facilitator and co-founder of Earthbound.

She is the co-faciliator on the Embodied Permaculture Project, where she integrates her experience in nature connection and wellbeing. Johanna is a facilitator and storyteller on the farmer wellbeing programme, Calmer Farmer. She also has a history of working in the regenerative food sector, as the co-founder of a permaculture-designed award-winning bakery at the forefront of the UK’s real bread revival in the early 2000s. Johanna has also worked on regenerative olive oil and almond farming projects in Spain.

What people are saying about working with Dan and Johanna

“I turned from being busy, irritable and feeling scattered, into a calm "just being", feeling grounded, feeling connected to others and my surroundings, in the now. From my head into my entire body. This helped me grow into a more whole being. I trust myself, Life and the ground and this trust makes that my life is much more mine now. I do my things wholeheartedly.”

- Barbara

“I’m really grateful for all you gave us…you have helped me see and feel things differently. I now have the tools to respond to all aspects of life - as nature needs me to. I have learned to step aside from my own needs for particular outcomes, and to align with the way things are in the present moment in whatever setting. I can respond with confidence to benefit natural systems most effectively, sometimes in ways I would never have expected! I see the benefits for nature through groups I am part of, organisations I volunteer with and in my own life through relationships and design work. I can allow nature to work through me.”

— Meg

“This has been life-changing for me. It has changed the way I wish to work and deepened in me a sense of feeling and connection and a more natural flow that goes beyond a thinking process. Dan and Johanna are incredible facilitators, holding space in a beautiful and unique way and I would highly recommend them.”

— Suzanne

“I am finding the Practices very powerful. I get real moments of awareness/insight realisation.... I guess I could summarise these as 'paradigm shifting'. It's funny, I always resisted 'embodied' courses in the past. Because I didn't understand - my own body, what somatic awareness meant, what on earth others were on about, when they talked about their body and what it was saying! I guess I was very shut off from my body, and it didn't help to be on a course with others who 'got it' and couldn't explain it well enough to me, in a way I understood. I think this plays to my way of 'knowing', of learning. I need teachers who explain things in a wise way. What I resist the most is when a teacher or guru gives us a riddle! One 'kind of' gets what they're saying, but not really, and whatever it was, just floats off. So I am doubly appreciative of how Dan and Johanna are teaching us. It is so easy to understand, to 'get', to absorb, to feel into. You both have created an amazing learning journey. The world so needs this. With huge thanks.”

— Wendy

Welcome, fellow Being

This is a newsletter, podcast and community of practice exploring inner work for outer change and the process of coming home to our nature as Nature.

The promise and premise of being Earthbound is a healthy whole-systems approach to living in the world as Nature. Isn’t it only natural and fitting then that we bring our whole system in this process of transformation?

Finding the balance between our inner and outer landscapes feels like the great work of our times as we search for coherence, peace, flow and meaning in a domination culture that's badly off-kilter.

What does a fully embodied, fully integrated sense of self and world offer us as we seek to regenerate, reconnect and reintegrate towards cultures of care and away from the story of separation that's wreaking such havoc?

These are explorations facilitating growth, connection and healing at the fertile edge between transpersonal psychology, embodied presence and holistic systems change.

Johanna is a nature connection facilitator and Realization Process teacher, Dan is a transpersonal psychology coach and breathwork instructor, and we are both trained and certified embodied meditation teachers and long-term permaculture practitioners.

We’re looking forward to getting to know you.

Dan and Johanna

ps. If you’re interested in why the name Earthbound felt right then please read this post.

Ways to engage with Being Earthbound

1. Free Substack Subscription

The vast majority of posts and podcasts we create will always be kept available for free to subscribers as we want this work to be shared widely and be easily accessible.

2. What’s Here Now? Club

If you are interested to dip your toes into some live embodied presence practice then we invite to to discover the transformative effect of What’s Here Now? practice. This is relational, vocalised, embodied meditation. A type of reimagined meditation for the world we live in. We meet once per month and you can find out all about it and sign up here. Just 5 euros/month.

What's here Now? Club

You can also read a post about it here.

3. Interested to Dive Deeper Into Embodied Presence Practice In Community?

Join the Earthbound Practice Circle

10am UK time every second Friday of the month, plus access to What’s Here Now meetings.

Twice-monthly online gatherings to explore embodied presence in community.

Includes:

✔ Monthly Deep Dive Circle sessions

✔ Includes access to What’s Here Now? Club

✔ Growing guided practice audio library

✔ Recordings of all Friday Circle sessions

✔ 10% off 1-1 coaching

Just 15 euros per month or 12/month with an annual subscription.

Earthbound Practice Circle

4. Embodied Permaculture Course

A 9-week Transformational Immersion Into Embodied Presence For Changemakers

This course is for changemakers, permaculture practitioners, activists or anyone who intellectually know that they are embedded within nature’s web, but don’t yet have - and long for - a daily embodied, felt experience of being one with Life.

It's for people who know that the problems of the world cannot be solved with the same thinking they were created with, and want to learn to attune to emergent nature-aligned embodied wisdom.

And it's for people who feel like they need to drop down from their busy heads, back into their body and back into deeper relationship with themselves, with other people and with the rest of Life.

Welcome to the Embodied Permaculture Course, a transformational 9-week online self-study programme based on the success of the ground breaking 18-month Alef Trust funded Embodied Permaculture Research Project.

We’ve priced this course at £35 to keep it super affordable for all.

Find out more here:

Embodied Permaculture course

5. One-to-One Coaching

And if you are looking for the support of working 1-1 with Dan, a transformational coach working at the intersection of embodiment, transpersonal psychology and Nature then please find out more here

1-1 coaching

Meet your Earthbound guides:

Dan McTiernan

Dan is a transformational whole-being coach working at the intersection of transpersonal psychology, embodiment and Nature. Combining deep ecology literacy, permaculture practice and training as a certified transpersonal coach, embodied meditation teacher and breathwork instructor, he offers a holistic framework to help clients reconnect with their vitality, true nature, and relationship with all of life.

He is the co-founder of Earthbound, a nature-based coaching organisation. He leads the Embodied Permaculture Project, an international research initiative exploring the connection between personal wellbeing and ecological change. Dan is also project lead on a farmer wellbeing programme called Calmer Farmer.

Johanna McTiernan

Johanna is a certified embodied meditation instructor, Realization Process™ teacher, nature connection facilitator and co-founder of Earthbound.

She is the co-faciliator on the Embodied Permaculture Project, where she integrates her experience in nature connection and wellbeing. Johanna is also a facilitator and storyteller on a farmer wellbeing programme called Calmer Farmer. Johanna also has a history of working in the regenerative food sector, as a founder member of an award-winning bakery at the forefront of the UK’s real bread revival in the early 2000s and has also worked on regenerative olive oil and almond farming projects in Spain.

What people are saying about working with Dan and Johanna

“I turned from being busy, irritable and feeling scattered, into a calm "just being", feeling grounded, feeling connected to others and my surroundings, in the now. From my head into my entire body. This helped me grow into a more whole being. I trust myself, Life and the ground and this trust makes that my life is much more mine now. I do my things wholeheartedly.”

- Barbara

“I’m really grateful for all you gave us…you have helped me see and feel things differently. I now have the tools to respond to all aspects of life - as nature needs me to. I have learned to step aside from my own needs for particular outcomes, and to align with the way things are in the present moment in whatever setting. I can respond with confidence to benefit natural systems most effectively, sometimes in ways I would never have expected! I see the benefits for nature through groups I am part of, organisations I volunteer with and in my own life through relationships and design work. I can allow nature to work through me.”

— Meg

“This has been life-changing for me. It has changed the way I wish to work and deepened in me a sense of feeling and connection and a more natural flow that goes beyond a thinking process. Dan and Johanna are incredible facilitators, holding space in a beautiful and unique way and I would highly recommend them.”

— Suzanne

“I am finding the Practices very powerful. I get real moments of awareness/insight realisation.... I guess I could summarise these as 'paradigm shifting'. It's funny, I always resisted 'embodied' courses in the past. Because I didn't understand - my own body, what somatic awareness meant, what on earth others were on about, when they talked about their body and what it was saying! I guess I was very shut off from my body, and it didn't help to be on a course with others who 'got it' and couldn't explain it well enough to me, in a way I understood. I think this plays to my way of 'knowing', of learning. I need teachers who explain things in a wise way. What I resist the most is when a teacher or guru gives us a riddle! One 'kind of' gets what they're saying, but not really, and whatever it was, just floats off. So I am doubly appreciative of how Dan and Johanna are teaching us. It is so easy to understand, to 'get', to absorb, to feel into. You both have created an amazing learning journey. The world so needs this. With huge thanks.”

— Wendy

Stay up-to-date

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To find out more about us and our work please also visit: www.earthbound.fi

When most people think of meditation, a solitary cross-legged figure comes to mind—someone deeply anchored to the ebb and flow of the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils, removed from the hubbub of life, a renunciate.

But our times are calling for us to remain engaged. To live fully within the centre of life. To notice spaciousness and quietude even within that hubbub. So we may try the householder path. We attempt to insert meditation into our busy lives by meditating with apps, attending evening classes or going on weekend retreats. These can be extremely helpful and I still make use of them all.

However, if you’re one of those who has been trying to fit meditation into life, successfully finding some peace, flow and connection while meditating, but feel like that evaporates as soon as you get up off the cushion, then perhaps “What’s Here Now?” is for you.

This is a wholly different approach to meditation. It’s not solitary, it’s not done in silence, and it’s designed to allow you to be in your life and be in presence at the same time. It’s relational, voiced, embodied meditation. Let me explain what that means.

Relational

What’s Here Now? is done in pairs or sometimes threes. It’s an invitation to share your inner experience with another human being for a few minutes. An opportunity to let yourself be as you are while being witnessed. How often do you get that invitation in regular life? How often do we present how we “should be” rather than simply allow ourselves to “be as we are”? This is an opportunity to relax and Be with another person.

And the flip side of this practice is that, because we take it in turns to share and the receive, you also get to hold space for another human to be as they are as they share. You get to give the gift of your presence. This is an act of service, and it is truly nourishing.

Another fascinating effect of this practice is the power of co-regulation. When two or three people come together, there is a field effect in which our nervous system states come into regulation and coherence with those around us. As we sit in presence, eyes closed as someone shares their inner experience, we witness them begin to relax, to release held tension in the body and to settle into their own being. As a natural consequence, we find that seemingly without us having done anything other than remain receptive, our nervous system also relaxes and opens.

Voiced

The practice of What’s Here Now? involves a short period of grounding and landing back into your body followed by a period - ten minutes each - taking it in turns to share what you notice internally - sensations, emotions, energy, space etc. - out loud.

There is something very powerful about naming our inner life verbally. Marrying the correct words with the actual, real inner experience we are having right now, creates a kind of coherence and wholeness between our inner and outer worlds that can be harder when we remain silent and solitary in our meditation practice. This helps bridge our presence back into our everyday life.

Voicing things out loud also helps us circumvent the mind’s tendency to dismiss our inner experience as “not real”. To say out loud that we feel subtle energy flowing through our legs, or that the edges of our body seem to be diffuse or porous, or that we are sensing an inner luminosity, allows us to own and embody these experiences as part of us. Sharing these experiences with another person helps us to normalise them. This normalisation of embodied presence is, I feel, one of the most important capacities we need to cultivate if we want to see true regeneration of our creaking industrial cultures of separation.

Embodied

This practice is all about coming into the sensate body and giving the strategic mind a break. If something has been on your mind or disturbing you during the week it can feel like it just goes round and round but is essentially trapped inside. As much as we’d like to imagine we can rationalise ourselves out of our agitated states, if you are honest with yourself, how often does that work? What’s more true is that the tension or nervous system activation eventually dissipates of its own accord.

But What’s Here Now? offers a very different approach to being with stuff that’s swirling around inside. It’s an opportunity to be really intimate with it without trying to avoid it, push it away or force it to change. The question is not “how would you like to be now?” or “what should you be feeling now?”, it’s “what’s here now?”. What’s here now might be physical aches and pains, or strong emotion, or feelings of nervous system contraction in your chest or gut or solar plexus. It might also be feelings of relaxation or energy pulsing, streaming or flowing, or quiet, peace or pleasure. The beauty of the question is that it’s not about your preferences, it’s about reality in this moment, right now. So there is an inbuilt permission to allow yourself to be, to notice areas in the body and to share what’s felt there.

And that’s where the magic happens. When we honour our own experience and do that in the presence of another, then very often, that energetic stuff which had been stuck in your system for days, softens, relaxes, releases and returns to the Whole to be used again by Life as needed. It’s an incredible process of embodied recycling or composting. The energy that felt like systemic indigestion gets digested.

Meditation

On the surface, this could feel like an active listening exercise where partners take it in turn to listen while the other speaks. After all, that’s what’s happening on one level. But this is happening not from the surface but from depth. This is deep contact for both the sharer and the receiver. This is a practice that welcomes us into embodied presence; a place where we can feel what’s going on in our own body, some of what’s going on in someone else’s body and what’s going on in the space between us. It’s a practice that allows us to feel that “I’m fully here and I’m available.”

Often people say they can’t get on with meditation because they can’t be still or because their mind wanders too much. But this practice has an easy level of availability because you are in relationship while you are doing it. It’s relatively simple to spend 10 minutes sensing yourself at depth and sharing that without even realising what you are doing is meditating. It’s much easier to do this with a partner than to do this on your own, possibly because relationship is hard-wired into our nature. So why not hardwire it into our meditation practice as well?

And what is meditation anyway? It’s being present, completely embedded and awake to the moment-to-moment aliveness of your body, the world and existence. And as both the sharer and receiver, that is what is happening throughout.

This practice is also an invitation to remain accountable and to stay present because it’s in service to someone else as well as to ourselves. That tendency to drift back to thoughts that can frustrate so many beginner meditators simply drops away. It’s easy to remain aware, sensing, and present for both ourselves and for our practice partner.

Getting real with reality

We need to stop living in the constructed stories in our heads as if that were our only reality. Most of those stories are often skewed at best and sometimes downright undermining and damaging at worst. Our prefrontal cortex has an incredibly limited grasp on reality. Our whole body, however, is immersed in reality all the time, so why not come back into relationship with it? There is a wisdom and intelligence in the body that we have been educated to ignore, and we do so at our own peril and that of the world. We need to come back to what’s real and allow ourselves to be more open and available to others while also holding space for those around us to do the same. That’s the gateway to true culture transformation. We need to normalise embodied presence everywhere. We need to foster what poet David Whyte calls “robust vulnerability”.

What’s Here Now? allows us to practice that robust vulnerability in a way that gives us the courage more and more to live from that deeper sense of self wherever, whenever and with whomever we find ourselves.

I am in my fourth year now of meeting weekly online (and yes, this works incredibly well on Zoom) with two other fellow coaches to practice What’s Here Now? and I can honestly say it’s one of the most potent spiritual and psychological practices I have ever done. I have also worked with many coaching clients to hold space for them to explore their own experience in this way. This practice allows me to discharge held tension and stress in the body, it invites in me an experience of really profound togetherness with my practice partners and it has supported me to get to know, and make friends with myself on ever-deepening levels.

What’s Here Now? is a practice for our times.

If you’d like to try it at home with someone else, here is a pdf with some instructions.

What's Here Now instructions

Join a community practicing What’s Here Now?

If you like the idea of coming together and practicing this in community then we are offering two ways to meet up and practice regularly.

Starting on Saturday 26th April 2025, we’ll be offering a monthly 60 minute What’s Here Now? Club session on the last Saturday of each month at 10 am UK time. This will include an introductory guided somatic grounding meditation followed by paired What’s Here Now? practice in breakout rooms and space at the end of the session for group reflection, sharing and questions. For just 5 euros per month, the price of a coffee, you can access this transformative experience of mutual presence.

Find out more and sign up to the What’s here Now? Club here.

find out more and sign up here

(You can cancel membership at any time.)

Are you interested in a deeper dive into embodied presence?

And for those that are interested in an even deeper dive into dedicated embodied presence practice, we are also launching our new online twice-monthly Earthbound Practice Circle starting starting on Friday 9th May at 10@ UK time and continuing on the second Friday of every month.

Includes:

✔ Monthly Deep Dive 90-minute Circle sessions

✔ Includes access to What’s Here Now? Club

✔ Growing guided practice audio library

✔ Recordings of all Friday Circle sessions

✔ 10% off 1-1 coaching

👉 Read More About Joining the Earthbound Practice Circle here

I want to acknowledge transformational coach Nicholas Janni and transpersonal psychotherapist and spiritual teacher John Prendergast for informing and supporting me to develop in this profound dyadic inquiry practice. I owe them a great debt.

Calmer Farmer – Supporting Food Producers’ Inner Wellbeing in Service to Food Systems Transformation 🌱

sign up for Calmer Farmer course now

Feeling stressed or overwhelmed by the demands of farming in the UK?
Looking for a different approach to your wellbeing?

Discover how you can:

Cultivate greater calm and presence, even in challenging times
Feel more connected to your body, relationships, and the land
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I had the great pleasure of exploring inner work for outer change on the amazing Accidental Gods podcast with Manda Scott recently and it was published today.

We discussed the role wholing and healing have in our capacities as regenerative changemakers and importantly how to practically begin that process of remembering our place within the miraculous web of life as a daily, felt sense in the body.

What kinds of life-generating systems could we design together from a deep sense of embodied safety and openness with each other? What happens when we feel culturally able to shift from activism to connectivism as a vehicle for transformation?

We touched on Earthbound and Alef Trust's work with changemakers on the Embodied Permaculture Project and our new 9-week online course based on the success of the research project. We also explored Alef’s new wellbeing programme, Calmer Farmer offered to UK growers and farmers that we’ll be launching in January. We’ll share more about both these exciting developments in subsequent posts but for now here’s the podcast episode.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!

Listen here:

or listen via her website here:

https://accidentalgods.life/avoiding-burn-out-fall-out-drop-out-and-freak-out-with-dan-mctiernan/

And here are Manda’s notes on the episode for a bit more detail:

”How do we become the change we need to see in the world? What are the actual, practical steps to grounding, connecting and resonating with the world?

As you’ll hear, Dan is working at the leading edge of the change we need to embody. He has straightforward practices that any of us can do to help us with grounding, attunement, opening and integration so that we can be the nodes in the web of life.

This is key: we need to stop trying to think our way out of this with our head-minds. It doesn’t work. It’s not going to work. We need to come into our physical bodies, find that truly calming place of peace – and then find connections we can trust with the wider web. This is what we’re here for. And Dan has routes to get there.

We’re on the brink of cataclysmic change. Knowing this, we have choices: we can either fold into despair, terror, rage…whatever rises up in us as we watch the whole biosphere hurtle towards irrevocable tipping points. Or we can become the change we need to see in the world: each of us. This is a cliché by now, but that doesn’t stop it being true. Here are others: we are the people we have been waiting for and if not us, now then who and when? We’ve been saying these for a long time and if you’re listening to this podcast, then you’re already on board, at least intellectually. You know there is no going back, that ideology cannot win out over biophysical reality and avoiding ecosystem collapse doesn’t just mean moving to regenerative farming or buying second hand clothes or even changing all the narratives of all the world’s media systems – good though each of these things would be.

But there’s been a gap between what we know and how we behave, between where our better selves might push us and the behaviours that are locked into the core of our being, our firmware, if you like. But now – this minute now – we’re hitting the buffers where the old paradigm is so obviously not fit for purpose that we need something new. The core questions are what? And how?

And this is where we’re going with the podcast just now – After Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network reminded us of our purpose on the earth, and Andrea Hiott of Waymaking helped us embrace paradox – now we’re talking to someone who can help guide us into the embodied reality of a different way of being.

Dan McTiernan is a certified Transpersonal Psychology Coach, embodied meditation teacher and breathwork instructor. With his wife Johanna, he’s the co-founder of embodied coaching organisation, Earthbound. He hosts the Being Earthbound podcast – which is absolutely on my must-listen list. He’s a facilitator on Alef Trust’s Nurturing the Fields of Change programme and is the project leader for the Embodied Permaculture Project – an international 2-year action research project exploring the impacts of holistic wellbeing on outer ecological change work. The first 9 weeks of this programme have just been released as a self-study course – and by the time this podcast ends, you will want to join up with that.

He is currently working with Alef Trust and the A Team Foundation to deliver an innovative project supporting farmers and growers in the UK with a programme of embodied wellbeing known as Calmer Farmer which will be launched in January 2025.”

A new paradigm of activism is emerging across the world. You could call it Connectivism - awake, embodied, relational action. Its foundational orientation is one of diverse, inseparable wholeness. Within that orientation, the notion of oppositional activism begins unravelling as we ask questions like, what or who is our opponent? What or who stands outside of wholeness? Is opposition even possible from wholeness? This orientation does not preclude us from saying no to harm, and yes to health but it no longer seeks to position people, places or circumstances on the outside looking in. It recognises that everything is within the wholeness of capital L Life.

One context this is showing up is the emergent edge of agroecology and regenerative agriculture. There is a growing movement of farmers, growers, buyers and consumers that recognise that if what we seek is whole-system change, then we need to bring our whole system - both outer and inner - to that process of transformation. And it is a clear sign of the traction this new orientation is getting that the United Nations Development Program has convened and funded the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) to connect people and projects from around the planet who are taking a consciousness approach to food system transformation.

So it’s both gratifying and energising to share that the Embodied Permaculture Project, our program grant funded by Alef Trust through their Conscious Communities Initiative has been featured by CoFSA as a case study in their new publication highlighting 31 global projects bringing this work into the world. 

The Embodied Permaculture Project supports ecological systems designers, regenerators, educators and leaders to make the paradigm shift from "working with nature" to "working AS Nature". 

Through an 18-month program drawing on the best of whole-person psychology, nervous system regulation techniques, contemporary contemplative and spiritual approaches, and integrative relational practice, we've been offering an innovative and highly effective approach to wellbeing. 

As we learn to show up in the world from embodied presence we discover it's possible to do the slow work of repairing, regenerating and reconnecting communities and landscapes without burning out, falling out with others or dropping out altogether. We learn that we can rely on Life's energy and wisdom to guide our action in the world which brings greater confidence, trust, capacity and joy to this essential work of our times.

Farmers and Food producers are at the front line of a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex cascade of disruptive changes to both our ecosystems, our climate and our societies and we need to discover, practice and integrate ways of being and acting that allow not just survival, but a transition back towards thriving. The projects highlighted in CoFSA’s case studies all offer solutions to support that transformation. These are people, projects and helpful pragmatic inspiration from a panoply of cultures and contexts and crucially they also paint a picture on our cultural canvas of that beautiful truth we are working from; diverse inseparable wholeness.

To read these case studies of Connectivism in action please download the publication here:

https://tinyurl.com/tx8m3tsz

And for more information about the Embodied Permaculture Project please visit:

https://beingearthbound.substack.com/t/embodied-permaculture

Subscribe now

And for more about this approach to coaching 

www.earthbound.fi

The Embodied Permaculture Project is now entering its storytelling phase and we are currently gathering the collective wisdom of our participant’s 18-month journey together. We’ll be sharing the findings and telling their stories via podcasts and articles here on Substack over the coming months.

This is an essay I wrote back in 2018 but haven’t published here on Substack yet. In a recent conversation with someone about the magic of compost toilets as a vehicle for deep connection with nature I felt it was worth revisiting and sharing it here. Enjoy!

I lived for 5 years in a yurt in an old olive grove in Catalunya, Spain with my wife and two children. I now live in a small wooden house on an old strawberry farm in Finland with my wife and two children. Polar opposites superficially, climatically, culturally, agriculturally; but philosophically, emotionally and logically identical.

You see, our lives are a slow process of unlearning and reconnecting. My soon to be 6-year-old knows no other way. Before he could walk he was living in a cob hobbit house in the foothills of the Sierra de Montsant, taking his baby naps lying in the grass while his parents learned to rotationally graze sheep and chickens, to grow gardens and food forests, to prune almond and olive trees, to come directly face to face with the bare reality of human life. To consider our needs as opposed to our desires, to observe, measure and steer the energetic flows required to survive. And consequently to learn to love the lowly bucket…

We need to eat, to drink water, to be sheltered, to expel our wastes, to love and be loved. And nothing more.

Simple right? I have often repeated that mantra to students and volunteers on our permaculture homestead, to myself, to my wife, to my boys. It bears repeating often and loudly.

Human life is as uncomplicated as the life of a bullfinch, a hare, a pike.

And yet we convolute industrially-civilised-human existence to such a level of abstraction and complexity that it has become unfathomable to even the most erudite.

What would the bullfinch say to us civilised, urbanised human beings?

“Where is your food? I see none here.”

We rely on businesses that bring our food to us in supermarkets via planes and boats and trucks. We do not know in truth where are food comes from or how it was created.

“What do you drink?”

We rely on corporations to pump water from far away, to sterilise it with chlorine and medicate it with fluoride. And when it is dirtied to the point of toxicity, to filter it and re-sterilise it again and again for us to re-drink. We do not know in truth where our water comes from or where it goes.

“Where do you shelter?”

We live in apartments or houses which for most of our lives we do not own, if ever. We rely on banks and landlords to provide these buildings for us and we are indebted to them seemingly forever. We do not understand in truth the mechanism by which we are sheltered, just that we are fortunate to be sheltered.

“Where do your bodily wastes go?”

Clever men designed ways to take away our urine and faeces using our drinking water to flush it to far off parts of our cities where it is ‘cleaned’ and sent away so that we do not need to see or think about it. We understand that this has made cities less lethal than they were before but we do not understand in truth where our waste goes or what happens to it after it leaves our houses.

“What do you do all day?”

5 or 6 days per week we work for the corporations we rely upon, so that we can earn just enough money to pay them back for the food, shelter and water they generously provide for us. On our days of rest we seek distraction to briefly erase the reality we face again the following week. We do not understand in truth why we do this, just that in order to eat and drink and be sheltered, we have no choice.

“Oh…I must be on my way.”

I lived that life. For 35 years I lived a life according to the industrial progress narrative. Did what I was supposed to do because everyone else did the same, not understanding the energetic flows in and out of my life, not seeing a human as an animal, instead dumbly and mutely accepting the lie of our self-made image: A being entirely abstracted from this thing we choose occasionally to visit and photograph: Nature.

And all throughout my adult, urban life of disconnection and misinformation I was the none-too-proud owner of exactly one bucket. A mop bucket, to be precise. It’s all one needs right?

I have now come to realise through my years of living a homesteader’s existence, that nearly everything I do requires a bucket and that despite it being a construct of our technological humanity, this simple vessel represents in almost every way, a chance to reconnect with our true animal selves. The bucket is a tool of humility, of gratitude and of realisation. I now own at least a dozen. Let me walk you through my day in the company of buckets.

I wake, shuffling my way down to the wood stove to boil water for tea. On my way past I pick up the ‘wee bucket’ we use during the night. We separate and collect our urine and treat it as the precious resource it is; a prime fertiliser loaded with all the nutrients needed for garden plants, grasses and trees to grow and flourish. It gets diluted and distributed around our farm as needed throughout the seasons.

Ash from our woodstove needs emptying before we light the fire. This ash is deposited into a bucket and again is spread around our kitchen garden and fields as an additional soil amendment full of calcium, potash and phosphate and helpfully reducing the acidity of our northern coniferous soils here in Finland.

I light the fire with wood my wife or I hauled from the barn in a wooden basket (a form of pre-industrial bucket). While the kettle boils we go out to feed the chickens, ducks and goats and to collect their eggs and milk. We take the scrap bucket from under the sink out to the chickens, stopping at the water butt to fill a bucket of fresh rain water for them. On our way to milk the goats, I stop at a rowan tree to pick berries as a treat for them, enjoying the satisfying pop-pop-pop as they tumble from my hands into the base of another bucket. In the barn I scoop grain for the goats and chickens into a different bucket and we see to all their needs.

During the day we visit the bathroom, which, you guessed it, is a bucket-based compost toilet. When it’s full after a few days use, it gets transported out to a much larger container for long term composting. Just as with our urine, our faeces is a valuable resource we treasure, as through the magical process of decomposition known as composting, it can be returned once more to our soil to regenerate it over the years.

Around lunch time one of us will wander out to the kitchen garden in summer, or the cellar in winter to collect vegetables. The ubiquitous bucket swinging at our side. The bucket therefore becomes a unit of measurement, an assessment of quantity, as much as a means of transport. A quarter of a bucket of potatoes per meal equals how many buckets needed per year to sustain us? A bucket of oats pays a dividend in so many litres of goat milk. How many buckets of compost are required per veg bed per year? Our universal and quotidian reference gauge.

Our water comes from our own well and here I have to admit to having made the uneasy transition from bucket to pump. For our first few months in Finland we drew water from the well by bucket and hauled it the 35 metres from the well to our house. I am, at heart, a luddite and carry with me the story a friend once told me about another friend of his, obstinately refusing to install a tap and pump from his well to his house. His reasoning was simple:

“I want to know the weight of water”

This answer conjures untold images of women and girls of the global South carrying, often huge, containers of water on their heads or their backs. For these women that know daily, the weight of water, the preciousness of every drop, this friend of a friend feels the need to continue to bear that weight as a token of unspoken solidarity. But I have to admit that I have succumbed to a certain modern pragmatism in this aspect of our lives as the thought of drawing water from our well in minus 25 °C during our long Nordic winters got the better of me. The well bucket sits patiently however, biding its time, waiting for the day the pump breaks or the electricity comes to an end.

Our experience of regenerative farming in drought ridden Southern Catalunya, gave additional meaning to the weight of water in our own lives. Every drop collected in our rain gauge and our soils was duly recorded and celebrated, every litre of our drinking water needed to be fetched up the dusty hill to the farm from the village fountain. During our initial 6 month permaculture apprenticeship in Montsant, Catalunya our hosts and mentors, eked out their spring and rainwater capture with stoic determination and often painful realisation. If the autumn or spring rains didn’t come there simply would not be enough water to justify planting certain crops.

July onwards in Finland delivers a harvest of delights from the forests. The shlop of wellies, the insistent whine of mosquitoes, the brush of a bucket or basket against our thighs, the soundtrack as we head into the woods to harvest raspberries, bilberries, lingonberries, chanterelles, ceps and hedgehog mushrooms. On these trips the bucket, an empty vessel as we start out, represents a question posed to the forest and to our animal neighbours.

“May we, please fill our container? Are you willing to share with us? Us, the species whose modus operandi is to take without asking, to take all without leaving enough for others in need. Can you re-teach us unconditional generosity and reciprocity?”

A bucket comes on every fishing trip with us in case we get a catch. Again more in hope than divine right.

And twice a week, at the end of the day, we light another fire to heat water and sauna stones and clean ourselves. The method we, and all Finns in the not too distant past, use to wash ourselves. Scooping water directly from a barrel (aka a bucket on steroids). When hot water doesn’t automatically come out of a shower or tap — as it hasn’t in our lives for the last 14 years — a different appreciation is fostered for it. We learned directly exactly how many buckets of hot water a family of four needs to wash themselves during our time in Spain. Sometimes heating our water through pipes running through the body of a very large compost pile, sometimes heating water on our stove or via the sun, we came to appreciate the calorific energy, both human and fuel based, required to get our bodies clean.

And then finally, after long tiring days of fetching and carrying, off to bed, ‘wee bucket’ in hand, to collect more of that liquid gold.

And that is only a small example of the uses we have for this ultimately useful tool. Living a life that requires the use of a bucket so many times per day, means living a life in which you are literally, physically, carrying those energetic flows through your days. Our food and water and fuel come in, grown, and chopped and carried by our own hands. Our fires are lit and our bodies are nourished and hydrated and warmed and cleaned. We understand where that nourishment and warmth and hydration has come from, how it has come to be available to us. We are humbled and grateful that we can be part of these most natural processes of the human animal. And afterwards the energetic flows from our bodies and our lives are returned directly to the land and ecological communities that sustain us. Our bodies and our buckets are the vessels for that return to the earth. By carrying our basic needs in and out of our lives we can answer with honesty and clarity, when our comrade, the bullfinch asks us his probing questions.

“We do, finally, understand how to live and every day we strive to move one more blade of grass closer to our home alongside you, bullfinch. But we do not understand in truth, why we ever felt the need to venture beyond the pail.”

Manda Scott is a force of nature. She’s the creator of the acclaimed Accidental Gods podcast and an award-winning writer of approaching 20 books. She is perhaps most known for her excellent Boudicca series which brought to life a rich and vivid portrayal of the Earth-connected cultures that existed in Britain before the invasion of Rome. 

I devoured those novels back in the early 2000s being drawn to them initially because I discovered Manda had “dreamed” these novels into being. This creative upwelling had been gifted her through her decades of shamanic practice and her connection with what she refers to as the “Gods of the Land”. 

As well as a very gifted author, she is also a teacher of 21st Century shamanic practice and works with people around the world to hone these capacities for deep connection and deep listening through her Dreaming Awake school. 

All of these threads of her life are coalescing currently into what she describes as “thrutopias”, the living stories that will support us to move from our current trauma-based culture to an initiatory culture that prioritises relationship over control and mutual flourishing over profit. Her latest novel, Any Human Power is just that; a necessary story for our times that acts as a guide, a support and a beacon of hope for a species and a planet that is crying out for a better story to live by.

In the podcast, we discuss the calling that beckoned her on this life path, the thrutopia movement, the limbic hijacking we are currently experiencing, cutting-edge socio-political technologies for systems transformation and above all, the power of a good story well told.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And just before you listen, I just wanted to mention that at the very end of the interview, I ask Manda if there is anything else that needs to be shared. She closes her eyes, turns inwards and asks the Gods of the land. There are long pauses as she listens and shares what comes. I have left them in because it feels important to share this process and practice to illustrate how it works in the world and to normalise this form of active receptivity as something we can all learn to do. In fact, I believe this human capacity of deeply grounded attunement could be one of the most important to rediscover and live from.

To find out more about Manda and her work and to read Any Human Power, please visit MandaScott.co.uk. To learn more about 21st century shamanistic practice visit dreamingawake.co.uk and to listen to Manda’s excellent podcast visit AccidentalGods.life.