Why Embodied Presence could unlock permaculture 3.0 and a pathway back to the centre of Life
The premise and promise of permaculture is a whole-systems approach to living. Isn’t it only natural and fitting then that we engage our whole system in the practice of permaculture?
The promise of permaculture is Big. A permanent/perennial culture. But what does that mean? It doesn’t mean something rigid or monolithic as we might sometimes define permanent. Something hewn from cold concrete, dominating the land and its inhabitants. We’ve done that already. It’s been variously called Empire, Kingdom, State and Corporation. This monolithic attempt at permanence fails time and time again, one civilization after the next falls under the weight of its own hubris in ever-increasingly impactful ways.
We’re now teetering at the fault line of a global Empire’s seismic collapse. Feeling the terrifying rumble of everything cracking open and tumbling down once again. This is Empire/Kingdom/State/Corporation no longer tearing down one country or one region at a time. To borrow a now famous line, this is everything, everywhere, all at once.
The Metacrisis is whole orders of magnitude more devastating than anything preceding it and so it stands to reason that our response to it requires something wholly different. A response of a completely different order. Something truly emergent.
I believe permaculture can be that response. But perhaps not as it’s currently conceived and practised.
Permaculture 1.0 and 2.0
Originally, permaculture came out of the uncanny state of industrial agriculture. Why do humans grow food in linear, extractive, destructive ways when nature can co-create endlessly replenishing abundance through cooperation, cycling, reciprocity and wholeness? This was the question David Holmgren and Bill Mollison first sought to answer.
Relearning from Indigenous pathways and tapping into the new fields of complexity studies and systems-theory permaculture offered elegant bio-mimicry solutions to meeting our needs for food, water, fuel, fibre and shelter while increasing ecosystem health. This was permaculture 1.0.
Permaculture 2.0 was the widening recognition that observing and working with nature’s patterns and flows was a good idea in all domains of human life. The emphasis on primary needs widened to include the organisational design of businesses, education, communities, lifestyles and many other fields of human activity. The shift from permaculture being a contraction of “permanent agriculture” to now, “permanent culture” marked the next big transition towards a social permaculture and has been unfolding along these lines for several decades. Permaculture systems thinking and doing has been proven to be applicable, useful and helpful in almost all contexts in almost all parts of the planet.
And yet, permaculture practitioners, despite all the projects, gardens, communities and livelihoods that have been created, are just as liable to burnout, stress-related illness, and entrenchment into polarised tribal positioning and identity politics as the rest of society. It could be argued that the more socially or ecologically aware we become the greater the risk of succumbing to despair, rage and exhaustion. So many of us fall victim to acute Activist-itis. Holding the twin weights of knowing the state of the world more fully, and the pressure to respond to these crises with feverish strategising, resisting, designing and fixing can and do take their toll.
We all want to be useful in this emergency. But running on desperate willpower to make change happen, to fight for what is right, while noble, is self-evidently self-defeating if we can’t sustain the “battle”. And while it’s true that permaculture works much more to a solution focussed modality than the resistance model of most traditional forms of activism, if we ask ourselves honestly what’s driving all that positive productivity, it’s often fear, righteousness and subtle forms of force.
This was part of my permaculture journey. The transition from consumer to producer. The empowerment of systems Thinking and Doing. This was an essential element of my pathway into a generative life. But it didn’t sort out my anxiety or my occasional depression or my negative self-talk, or my need to self-soothe with alcohol dependency. That’s because I came to permaculture straight out of the dominant culture of the Machine. The culture that says if you aren’t economically productive you aren’t valuable. The culture which says that you are not natural, that you are human, which is something that stands outside of Life. I was taught, as we all have been, this powerful story over and over in a million small and large ways until it conditioned our minds and bodies. Anyone educated in the English language (in the UK) defers to The Oxford English Reference Dictionary for definitions and therefore as a gatekeeper of reality. And this is their definition of nature:
“The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.
So it’s clear that the sense of who or what we are, inevitably affects how we think and act. Most of us fundamentally believe ourselves to be separate atomised small units of production desperately in need of defence and control to feel any sense of relative safety. Even if we rationally can accept the precepts of permaculture that declare that “everything is connected”, or that we are all a “part of the web of life”, our conditioned psychology does not accept that readily. There are subtle layers of resistance and rejection that feel, as one member of the Embodied Permaculture Project described, like “invisible barriers” between us and Life.
The tools, methodologies, principles and even the ethical framework of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share can therefore remain somewhat dry, conceptual placeholders for something much more deeply rooted and alive if we remain trapped within our industrialised conditioned self-perception.
Permaculture 3.0?
The Embodied Permaculture Project and lots of other practitioners and thinkers in the ecological, social justice, psychological and contemplative domains are beginning to explore what is now needed to facilitate a transformative phase shift of humanity to unfold. What is missing that needs to be reintegrated fully?
For us, the key lies in redressing the imbalance of industrialised existence between Doing and Being. When we shift from consumer to producer in our permaculture journey we are making an important step in the right direction towards participation in Life. But if we mistake “doing” for the totality of “participation” then we simply end up perpetuating the same self-belief that says your worth is based on your productive capacity. If you can’t keep up you can’t be a part of Life. This way of living operates on a perpetual fear of existential abandonment. It’s the Garden of Eden original sin mythos alive and well in the 21st Century of secular scientism.
But the truth of who or what we truly are is not made up of all our busyness whether that be thinking or doing. We are Beings fundamentally. And our being, our very existence, is not conditional - at least not when we can observe its essence outside of the conditioning of industrial materialism. Our Life is a gift. Our being is both welcome and unconditionally accepted by the whole of Life because we are Nature and nothing we do or make or think, despite its appearance, ever sits outside of that reality.
And a part of us knows that deeply and truly despite the conditioned egoic mind’s persistent denial. We feel the yearning for Home. With some guidance and some regular practice, we can relearn to tap into that Being-ness that knows we are the web of Life, that knows we are completely and forever part of the Whole and that changes everything.
We do that by bringing back online the whole bandwidth of our natural, organic, somatic intelligence. We slowly and gently come home to the fully Embodied Presence of Being. To experience transformation, we can’t just operate from our problem-solving conditioned mind. We have to remember that we can listen with, think with and live from our hearts, our guts, the very ground of our Being.
This is the order of response needed to meet and artfully navigate and transcend the metacrisis. This is the promise of something that could become a permaculture 3.0.
This is the conscious cultivation of our felt-sense experience of being alive and of being in relationship to everything, everywhere all at once.
When we re-learn to experience reality internally and externally as a current of enlivened energy ebbing and flowing, giving and receiving, constantly communicating and relating, notions like behaviour change and polarisation become almost farcical. Why would we behave against our own best interests if we view ourselves as part of the living world? We can’t “other” someone or something that feels fundamentally non-separate from our Self.
This is the Kinship model that Four-Arrows lays out as the foundational precept of the indigenous worldview. This is the pathway home. And as the saying goes, the medicine will find the illness.
We now have all the world’s psychological, emotional, somatic and existential healing, connecting and contemplative modalities at our disposal to repair this rift in our psyches and societies once and for all. It requires the blending of ancient and modern therapeutic, coaching, transpersonal, ecological and relating practices to cultivate the conditions in which our bodyminds can heal, self-organise, and flourish. The shift from separation to connection cannot be only cognitive-behavioural, it has to be a deeply felt experience in our in the marrow of our soul.
The potential for a permaculture 3.0 then is the sacred and highly practical union of inner and outer landscapes as our ancestors once knew, integrated with the best wisdom and knowledge of our modern world. It’s not sufficient to just become adept systems-thinkers and systems-doers as I used to believe. Systems-Being is what is asked of us and what our hearts truly long for.
The power of a fully embodied, fully present permaculture practitioner is the power to truly “be the change we want to see in the world”. When we switch from reacting from fear and acting from willpower, to responding from connection and acting from Life energy then we will finally be running once again on Nature’s engine.
In subsequent writing, we’ll explore what this means in practice. What are the psycho-emotional barriers, and what are the enablers for this transformation? We’ll explore what it means to be physiologically, psychologically and existentially grounded and how deeply felt safety is essential to the embodied approach to changemaking. We’ll explore felt-sensing and the richly rewarding experience of learning to listen to the world through the body rather than conceptualising it through the neo-cortex. We’ll investigate the transition from consumer to producer to co-creator and the implications this has for designing as a receptive rather than productive process. And we’ll share the experiences of opening back up to Life as a gateway to full participation and therefore to radical cultural transformation.
The premise and promise of permaculture is a whole-systems approach to living. Isn’t it only natural and fitting then that we engage our whole system in the practice of permaculture? Coming home to Embodied Presence is the key that unlocks that doorway to wholeness. The potential of what lies across the threshold beyond is unfathomable but so incredibly inviting. We can step through together.