What the hell is inner permaculture anyway?

Do we need to pay attention to our inner landscape first?

A colleague and friend of mine over at Movement+ commented that he didn’t immediately understand why I was involved as a coach on a programme focused on mindful movement, physical injury recovery and longevity when my background is in permaculture and more recently, transpersonal psychology, meditation and breathwork.

It was a particularly interesting question as this new friend of mine has experienced living and working on permaculture projects in various parts of the world. So he gets the permaculture bit and he gets the need for psychospiritual inner work but it still failed to be clear to him how I fit into the mix of Movement+ coaches and instructors.

On the surface, I completely understand. I’m not a movement instructor, I don’t teach Qigong, or yoga or any of that stuff. In fact, as well as being a new coach on that programme, first I was a customer. I too was looking for a holistic approach to working with the body to increase strength, flexibility and fitness as I was recovering from back, shoulder and achilles issues. So from a “physical” perspective, I have no place on that coaching staff.

That led me to pondering the question, why does inner permaculture have a place in Movement+ but more widely, why does permaculture need “inner permaculture”? It feels obvious to me these days but perhaps it isn’t to others, so I thought I would try and flesh it out.

Stranger in a Strange Land

To put it bluntly. Most of us have no idea who or what we are. We go through life adopting the habits and cultural norms we are raised within without questioning their validity or taking time to check inside ourselves for signs of how we feel about the life we are living and the personality we are projecting to the world. We only notice the very obvious signals when they grab hold of us and shake us around like rag dolls. Rage, shame, exhilaration, infatuation, grief. But we are so desensitized to the deeper, subtler layers of who or what we are, that we assume there is nothing there to be sensed, or even worse, we are actively trained to ignore what’s “down there” because if we look too close, we might not like what we find.

So it’s really easy to plod along through life feeling more or less crappy and wondering what’s wrong. A sunny day, a glass of wine, or a compliment light us up with a shot of positivity, but the general trend is; ignore, persevere, numb, repeat. Whenever we look for answers, we look outwards to knowledge, culture, and examples. And over time we construct a reality that is entirely dependent on the outer landscape of existence.

So even when we “wake up” to something like ecosystem collapse and feel the wholly appropriate rage and grief and shame that accompany that dawning awareness, we might still externalise our response by deferring to experts to sort it out, or to another glass of wine to take the edge off all those raw emotions. Or we might decide to ACT. To go out into the world and make it less crappy.

And that for me was what permaculture was for many years. A way to change external circumstances around me to improve my environment, the connections I had with people and with land, and to feel like I was doing something helpful.

It felt good in the same way that starting any beneficial habit does. Going to the gym 4 times a week feels like momentum in the right direction. And of course, it is. Acting always feels good for as long as you can keep it up.

So Johanna and I pushed forward with permaculture businesses like The Handmade Bakery and our stab at Catalunyan olive and almond farming. We did a shit ton of outer work. For a decade or so we practised permaculture as a form of dedicated religion, submitting ourselves to the action-learning cycle of trial and error, season after season of homesteading. We learned a lot. But we were both, in our own way, totally disconnected. I drank to attempt to land back into my body, Johanna toiled to distract herself from an underlying fearfulness. We were running on fumes because we were just always “out there” in the world doing, doing, doing.

And like any self-improvement project, eventually we ran out of gas. This is so common amongst “change makers”, activists and back-to-the-landers but also amongst people trying to improve their health through exercise, cutting out alcohol, quitting smoking etc. Burnout, relapse, a sense of shame and failure and overwhelm.

And then, finally, I learned that lesson good and proper. Collapse, ill health, complete burnout. I finally was forced to stop looking “out there”, and turn my attention “in here”, and what I found was a complete mess. If you want to know more about my nervous system dysregulation, extreme fatigue and my process of recovery, you can do so here. But basically, I looked inside and felt like a stranger in a wild and stormy strange land. And I was miserable.

Even though I had plenty of good external habits lined up. I had been sober for 2 years at that point (8 years this year!), I meditated, I was doing homesteading, outdoorsy healthful stuff. But I was a complete wreck. For all the knowledge I had gained on how to navigate the outer world through permaculture and its emphasis on beneficial networks of meaningful relationships, I had no real relationship to my inner world.

Reading our inner landscape

So I learned with the help of some amazing coaches and teachers, to start wild tracking my inner experience. Discerning the sensations within and around my body, untangling the knots of emotions, conditioning and negative self-beliefs. I started learning to be a natural navigator of my inner landscapes, recognising the topography of my bodymind. And in that, I started to notice quieter, subtler, stiller aspects of myself. Eventually, I began to recognise that this quiet spaciousness was actually not just in me, but all around me and that it was a kind of connective field with which I could begin to feel connected to other people and to the world in a way that I had never known possible. I started to make friends with myself, to trust my body, to wake up to some of my unhelpful patterns. I felt much less crappy!

Running on Nature’s Engine

And a funny thing then started to happen. The overwhelm and exhaustion I had felt started to heal and I began to open up again. I felt like I was starting to run off a different engine. Not my own personal finite reserve of willpower, but something much bigger than me. Something Johanna and I have started to refer to as “Nature’s engine”. And so I came back to permaculture, systems change, helping others as a coach and teacher, came back to outer work again. But this time not by leaving my body, not by force and through fear, but from a trusting place, from a sense of inner wholeness that had been so lacking earlier in my life.

The cliche of “going with the flow” has become my preferred modus operandi. Finding fertile edges between ideas, people, projects. Feeling the connection between things rather than just a dry conceptualisation of the other cliche, “everything is connected”. And rather than looking “out there” for approval or validation or all the answers, learning the habit of checking “in here” as the first and primary port of call. Checking for resonance or dissonance and simply adjusting accordingly until I feel the flow again. Allowing Life to flow through me and in the process discovering the joy of a looser psychological grip.

I’m still learning, still practising, and will be forever and I’m completely comfortable with that beginner’s mind. And now it feels completely clear to me that this is a more natural state for humans. A 50/50 inner/outer sensing and sensemaking process. And I believe that is the same for any aspect of life. Learn to be here, available, and open to emergence. This practice and process applies just as much to permaculture design as it does to working with the body in a holistic way such as Movement+ offers.

I now feel that practising the outer work of permaculture and then going to do a yoga class or going for a run - all excellent habits in and of themselves - are very partial if we fail to experience them as one, seamless integrative process of coming back to our true nature. If we simply treat them as positive activities, we fail to engage with the deeper aspects of transformation. We are basically missing the point and as a result, are much more likely to exhaust ourselves into giving up and returning to feeling crappy about ourselves and the state of the world.

We need to reunite with the Whole by recognising our wholeness as a felt experience, and we need experience that internally before we can experience it externally. True outer work, is primarily an inside job!

And if we come back to our true nature we have a real shot at regenerating what has been destroyed, and creating a culture of human Being instead of just one of human Doing. I feel this is completely relevant to those that have nothing to do with permaculture and are, for example, looking for holistic approaches to fitness and injury recovery, so my role at Movement+ is to open up that perspective for clients as an approach to life and support them to learn to navigate their inner experience as a gateway to coming back into full relationship with Life. Permaculture offers me a unique language and perspective to ground that deep work in and it feels like our life’s work and a fertile edge.

Johanna and I are in the process of designing a funded research project with the Alef Trust as part of their Conscious Community Initiative to explore experientially with a group of permaculture practitioners, what happens when we give as much attention and care to our inner landscape as we do to our outer landscape. It’s time to see how this reorientation works for others out there in the wild! We hope, as well as it has worked for us! We’ll be sharing our reflections, questions and experience of that project as we progress over the next two years.

And finally, we’d love to read your thoughts and reflections on this post so please do use the comment, like and share buttons below to get in touch! We’d like this substack to become a place of connection and collective sharing and sensemaking for all of us.