What Does Self-Awareness Have to Do with Spatial Awareness?
Aerial view of the Es Baluard bastion and Parc de la Mar in Palma de Mallorca For over two decades my work pointed in one direction: inward. Somatic education, neurosomatic practice, teaching people to notice what was happening inside their own bodies and to build the capacity to work with it. I tracked how nervous systems change over time, in real environments, with real people, across thousands of hours. Now my work points outward. How environments shape the people inside t
Contact, Simulation, and the Felt Experience of Space
We’ve long understood that the brain mirrors other people. We’re now beginning to see that it may also be mirroring the environment itself. There’s new evidence that the brain’s mirror neuron system responds not only to social interactions, but also to interactions and perceived relationships between inanimate objects in our environment. For decades, the mirror neuron system (MNS) has been understood as a mechanism for social cognition and connection. Observing another person
Rewriting the Nervous System Blueprint: Top-Down vs Bottom-Up
Sometimes the practices that once helped us feel calm start to feel ineffective. We sit down to meditate and our minds spin faster. We try to focus, reflect, or reset, but nothing really lands. We feel restless, overstimulated, or flat. It’s easy to assume something is wrong with us, that we’ve lost discipline or that we’re doing the practices incorrectly. But often, the issue isn’t the practice at all. It’s the state of the system we’re trying to apply it to. Our nervous sys