Your body is the sacrifice site

Sometimes when we talk about the polycrisis of modernity, people are under the impression that it is happening elsewhere, or to someone else. If you are not feeling directly impacted by climate change, economic uncertainty, toxic or traumatic stress, or any of the other myriad structural forces of extraction, it is easy to think that this is someone else’s problem.

I like to remind people that the embodied collision of the domination paradigm with your life occurs upon the territory of your body. Endstage capitalism, with its genius for transactionalizing everything, has already commodified your life. Beingness is commodified in modernity. Modernity transforms the eternal into a schedule. Time does not in actual fact exist. The very fact that you know what day of the week it is means that you are downstream of the commodification of the eternal.

To be involved economically in the modern world, and it is almost impossible not to be involved, means that you are downstream of the extraction engine. And whatever your relative position is on the economic ladder, the way in which your time is exchanged for dollars, this is already a demonstration of the way that commodification impacts your body. Yearning for affluence is probably in essence a yearning to be beyond commodification of our time.

This duly noted, I don’t know anyone interfacing with a modern economy who is not making bodily sacrifices. Sometimes these sacrifices are in the form of bodily damages from carrying loads that are too heavy, or doing work that is too repetitive. A physical cost. Sometimes those sacrifices are in the form of numbness, disconnection, or the dissociation required to go about conducting the business of extraction: to conform to the demands of jobs, workplaces, industries complicit in harm. A psychic cost. In both cases a spiritual cost is extracted.

I have a very vivid image of a patient lying etherized on a table beginning to wake up, who begins frantically removing all of the IVs and drip lines poking into their body, which have somehow arrived there during their anaesthetic sleep.

Our bodies are crisscrossed by these extraction conduits. The mortgage, our grocery bills, paying for utilities, our phones, the Internet, water, electricity, all of these are extraction conduits. Our credit cards are extraction conduits. Insurance is an extraction conduit…

Can you visualize a life where you are free from these? Where you reclaim the sovereignty of your time, exchanging its commodification for access to the eternal? Can you imagine a life where you do not trade life force for dollars?

If we are able to ground into a worldview that understands that safety and connection are the root drivers of well-being, and begin to operate biologically from this place, one of the things we start to notice very quickly is the degree to which the systems that we are enmeshed in are organized through a very different logic of domination. How do we begin to transform those systems so that they align more deeply with a view arising from safety and connection? 

In December, at a place called Brave Earth in Costa Rica, which is a center for applied cultural transformation, I will be deep-diving into these questions with my brilliant friend and colleague Sufi activist Alnoor Ladha, co-author of Post-Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse. If you haven’t read the book, and you are interested in a structural understanding of what capitalism, as currently practiced and proselytized is, stop what you are doing now and read it.

Together with 30 visionaries, activists, and changemakers, Alnoor and I will deep-dive into the neurobiology of connection and its implications for systems transformation: economic, political, etc. You can learn more about the retreat and fill out an expression of interest, which is the first step in joining us, here:

The Autonomics Tour begins October 2024, timed with the release of The Neurobiology of Connection. Over the next two years I’ll be teaching around the world with a variety of friends and colleagues on the book and related topics. You can stay appraised of all of our tour dates here

Confirmed so far…

Bay Area, Northern California, October 23-27, 2024

Costa Rica, December 18-22, 2024 (with Alnoor Ladha)

Tuscany, Italy, June 2025

Kauai, Hawaii, August 2025 (with Selah Weaver, Founder of the Vagus Study Group)

New York, November 2025