There is a natural intelligence woven deep within the fabric of our being. It is inherent in all forms of life, and it is indivisible from us – body, psyche, and soul. When we begin to attune to it, it takes us far beyond the narrow parameters within which we normally operate. No longer bound by prescriptive ideas about how or what we should think, how or what we should feel, or how we should relate to our inner experience, we discover a profound intimacy with ourselves, each other, life, and what we might or might not be comfortable to call love, or god. Our relationship with ourselves slowly and radically changes – from harsh to tender – in parallel with an unravelling of the familial and societal conditioning to which we have all been subject. We enter into an emergent and evolutionary process that has its own timings and rhythms.

This exquisitely individual unfolding cannot be systematised, commodified, or mapped out in advance; even though we may have no idea where it is taking us, it knows the way as well as any migratory bird. Gradually, as we follow its promptings, we open to the knowing of another way to be human that is encoded in our cells. Something ancient within us remembers how it was to be in communion before the arising of the either-or binary in which mind is separated from body, they are separated from us, and the earth is treated as an exploitable object. We begin to extricate ourselves from the dominant social imaginary,[1] continuing to question and shed the narratives we have acquired, and to discover other ways of being, seeing, sensing, knowing, and relating that do not replicate the harms of the oppressive structures within and around us. The more we experience it, the more we begin to trust the wisdom that tangibly lives in our marrow. In contact with it, we become more real, more truly here.

This innate intelligence cannot be second-guessed, short-circuited, or expedited; it needs deep time in which to do its work. It requires us to step directly into the river, rather than trying to manage its course from the riverbank. We discover what it is to be in the completeness of raw, unfiltered, emotion, and the unmediated flow of imagery, thought, sensation, and other sensory impressions. Emotions, once felt in the breathtaking unconditionality of this space, are often transfigured in surprising ways. There is a spontaneous recognising and naming of the strands of felt experience as they surface, and an articulation of what has previously been muted or obscured. The resonance of words is felt at a whole-being level; thought is no longer disembodied.

Trauma has often distanced us from our innate knowing and estranged us from ourselves. Abuse may have undermined our trust in our own perceptions. The systems of empire have numbed us and dulled our senses. As we begin to reconnect with ourselves, we become more alert to anything that further estranges us from ourselves, however subtly or overtly. We realise that no-one else – no guru, no teacher – can know how our unfolding needs to happen, or where our unique thread is taking us. This is not the terrain of therapeutic methodology or spiritual practice (which is not to say that methodologies or practices might not sometimes have their place). As we keep returning to ourselves, however haltingly or fleetingly, our commitment to and trust in the unfolding grows.

In the privacy of ourselves, or together with a safe other, everything that has been suppressed, ignored, managed, defended against, or otherwise not allowed – all that is undigested from the past – can make itself known according to its own timetable, and in circumstances of its own choosing. The mechanisms and structures that have kept us from our aliveness are also met as they reveal themselves. An integration of the disparate and split off parts of the self takes place. Felt senses and energies, both personal and collective, are clearly seen for what they are. There is no requirement to conceptualise, justify, or explain our experience, and yet understanding, insights, and meanings come of their own accord. We develop an unflinching honesty with ourselves.

It is confronting to step into a realm in which everything we know from the world of linearity and rationality is likely to be upended. Over a period of years, however, we become freer from illusions about who and what we are, and possessed of a greater sense of agency and self-trust. The ruptures in our relationship with ourselves begin to repair, and we start to love ourselves – not with the idealised gaze of Narcissus,[2] but with a kind, blood-and-guts love which knows us to the core. Our relationships change accordingly, often in unexpected ways. Viscerally knowing that we are intrinsically neither inferior nor superior is a liberation.

Here, in the space of unconditionality, everything is held, whatever its nature, and everything slowly takes its rightful place. Everything can be as it is, not in rigidity, but in a state of evolution or fluidity. To be clear, it is not that we are being unconditional – far from it. Humans, by definition, are conditional; how can we not be, given that we are specific to a given context and a particular set of physical and psychological conditions? It is that, in this space, I am able to be as and what I am in the moment. Gradually, this unconditionality – which feels like a sometimes devastating love or kindness – seeps into one’s being, and radically changes one’s relationship with oneself.

To connect with ourselves in this space is to start to experience ourselves as emergent, rather than fixed, beings. It is impossible to become intimate with this space and continue to avoid or deny the depths of our vulnerability. This can be somewhat disconcerting, even humiliating, when we believe that we have progressed to a certain point. But here, the whole notion of a triumphal arrival or overcoming, the reaching of a destination, comes to seem absurd; being here, just as we are, is enough. We discover the joy of entering into our own depths. And sometimes, there is a touching into the sacred, a revelation, a knowing of the all of it that takes us beyond the usual and into love and grace, for however long it lasts.

[1] A social imaginary includes the historical and cultural narratives via which groups understand their identities and their position in relation to the rest of the world.

[2] In Greek myth, Narcissus became transfixed by his own reflection, and died from starvation as a result.