My work has taught me about the profound power of sitting with another person. The power of transformation. The power of the uniqueness of the bond that forms between two people. This connection itself can ignite something—something that allows for change, for self-recognition, for movement. But it has also taught me something else: the challenge of thinking we know.
We can believe we know so much from these encounters. That’s the trap. We can believe we understand a great deal, and yet the real work is staying inside the mystery—honoring the unknown. The mystery of the individual sitting across from me, the mystery of what happens when two minds come together.
The Humility of Not Knowing
Again and again, each person teaches me that I don’t know. I don’t know their experience. That humility—that constant reminder—is critical. And it points to something missing in the dominant culture of mental health and treatment:
You cannot separate knowledge from the knower.
You cannot separate what is known from the person who holds that knowing. This is where the fantasy of objectivity begins to break down. And yet, it’s not enough to simply say, you are the expert on yourself. That’s too thin, too individualistic. There has to be something more—someone more.
Something beyond the individual human being to ignite, to hold, to support, to facilitate, to bear witness. The expertise of your own experience cannot emerge in a vacuum. It must be drawn out, engaged with, seen.
And yet, something even more radical is true.
Healing is Holding Complexity
The healing process isn’t just about the self. It’s not just about understanding the interaction between our inner world and our outer world. It’s not even about the endless binaries—nature and nurture, self and other, subject and object. We already know that it’s both.
But real transformation is about something deeper than influence, correlation, or causation. The radical move is understanding that these forces are not just interacting—they are co-creating, co-constituting.
Some of us already know this. We have seen it. We have felt it—especially those of us who have lived within systems of oppression. We know the experience of confusing the system with the self. And then comes the revelation: That was never mine. That was never me.
And after that—grief. And then, anger.
But not everyone sees this. Some don’t know what I’m talking about. That’s okay. The point isn’t to instantly understand. The point is to engage in the process. To make it a practice.
The Practice of Co-Creation
This is not about following a set of moves. It’s about seeing that the moves are already happening. Seeing the larger patterns that are already at play. Recognizing the principles that shape them.
And this is not abstract. This is about moods, states of being, the ways we make meaning. This is about diagnosis, about identity, about the forces shaping who we are and who we are allowed to be.
The work, then, is about holding tension—between what we are trying to create and what is already happening. Between where we want to go and where we are. Between what we are making and what is making us.
So naturally, this is a practice of perspective. Of seeing seeing itself. But it’s more than that. It’s about finding our way together, about creating a shared practice that is rooted in these principles.
A Radical Kind of Practice
No practice that is truly holistic—no practice that fully acknowledges our co-occurring, co-constituting, co-creating nature—can afford to ignore systems thinking.
And this is serious. Because we are in a crisis.
A crisis of loneliness. A crisis of homelessness. A crisis of climate collapse. We see that indigenous thought holds wisdom that we desperately need, but our systems have no way to integrate it. We are enmeshed in social systems, structural systems, financial systems, digital network systems. The systems are everywhere, shaping our choices, our connections, our ways of being.
But here’s the one system that’s been kept from you—not as a conspiracy, but as a consequence of the worldview we’ve inherited.
The Hidden System: You
Your central nervous system is a system. A living system. It operates by the principles of all living systems. You are open. You are dynamic. You are emergent.
And that simple fact? It is already radical.
Because to say that experience heals is already radical.
Science Cannot Grasp Experience—Or the Self
Science doesn’t understand experience. Experience is a problem—an issue of qualia, of the mind-body paradox, of the tension between matter and spirit.
Science cannot know experience—not in its own terms. And just as science cannot fully grasp experience, it cannot fully grasp the self.
Even though there are entire research paradigms dedicated to studying emotions, cognition, and subjectivity, the moment we try to study the self, we remove it from itself. The self becomes an object, something external to be measured, dissected, categorized. But the self is not an object—it is lived, felt, known only from within.
And that’s the paradox: the second we attempt to observe the self from the outside, we lose the very thing we were trying to study.
Radical Embodiment
But here’s what we do know:
Your body is open to healing through experience.
Not in spite of this openness.
Because of it.
Your body is open to the world.
Your body is open to others.
Your body is open to nature, to trauma, to change.
You know this. Look around. You already know.
But here’s what hasn’t happened yet:
People haven’t connected the dots.
Even those who understand the science.
Even those who feel it in their bones.
They haven’t put it into practice.
That’s What We’re Going to Do
This is not about passive understanding. This is not about intellectualizing the process.
This is about taking radical embodiment seriously.
This is about seeing systems in motion.
This is about making practice real.
We are going to engage.
We are going to create.
This is the work.
This is the practice.
And it begins right now.
