Your body is an astonishing gift created through billions of years of evolution. The human body reaches out through generations across the divisions of species. In attending to our bodies, we draw closer to the truth, our radical interbeing with all life on this beautiful living planet. All living beings are our relatives and experience the world with us.
This essay shares a meditation expanded and adapted from the one created by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, The Evolutionary Gifts of the Animals, which is shared in their book, Coming Back to Life. It is an invitation to travel through deep time, deepening your sense of kinship with all the living world.
Meditation practices are often associated with religious traditions, especially Eastern religions, but science also offers exciting possibilities for meditation. Indeed, in modern science we often see that we are coming to understand aspects of the world that have long been a part of ancient wisdom traditions, especially how all things are connected, and we humans are part of a greater family of animals and other living beings. The stories of evolution reveal this truth.
You are welcome to read this text as an article, or to enjoy it as a meditation, pausing when it feels right to you, or when prompted with this symbol *
Alternatively, you may prefer to listen to the audio via YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1xx07hEzGg
Meditation
Find a comfortable seat, and take a moment to allow yourself to settle. Let go of all the busy-ness of your day, and allow your thoughts to settle, like snow settling in a snow globe. Coming down, into stillness.
Take a moment to notice your body, which connects you incontestably with nature. You might spread the fingers of your hands, flex your spine, loosen your jaw and smile, or take any movements that feel good to you. Enjoying your body, its simple existence, irrespective of any thoughts you may have about it.
Feel the weight of you supported by the Earth.
Notice the movement of breath in your body.
Tune in to any sensations, in your hands perhaps, or at your heart.
Spend a few moments here, in stillness, feeling your awake, alive, presence.
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Now anchored in this moment, let’s take a journey together through deep time. A journey full of gratitude, for the gifts we carry in our bones and muscles and organs. Our human bodies express our evolutionary story across millions of years, and through them our interbeing with all that lives on Earth. So let’s reach out with our imaginations.
Imagine back to when the very first single cell organisms arrived on earth around 4 billion years ago, when the earth was still young. Those cells were different from us, but they were alive, like us, and part of the great mystery of life on this Earth. Scientists still don’t know how life came about, but following DNA records, they say that all living things on earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, a single-celled bacterium, who lived in the hydrothermic vents on the ocean floor about 3.5 billion years ago. This cell was the ancestor to all of us. They had to be very tough to thrive underwater in extreme heat. Recalling this being, drop into your own sense of presence here. Sheer existence, creative, abundant, alive.
Let’s spend some time in gratitude for the arrival of life.
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Now find your pulse in your wrist. Feel the rhythm of the blood circulating in your body. The very first multi-celled creatures that came into being developed this capacity to move nutrients. As they grew, some developed a pump, the heart, whose beating you feel in your pulse. This heart is the gift of ancient, ancestor worm. Experience it now, with wonder and gratitude. Feel how life is flowing around your body, with the blood and with the breath.
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Next drawing upright, notice the curved line of your spine to your skull. This is your fish skeleton. Move it a little, side to side, flex and arch. The fish of the early, ancient oceans developed this astonishing, flexible line to allow them to move with grace through water. It is strong enough to shelter the spinal nerves, mobile enough to bend into the waves.
Notice your ribs protectively wrapping your heart and organs. This too is a legacy of our ancestor fish.
Spread your fingers and notice the bones radiating from the wrist to form your hand. This was once a fin, moving in cold salt water.
Fish may be unblinking, unsmiling and silent, but we humans hold their memory in our bodies. The fish are part of our deep time. They are a part of who we are.
The ocean waves are also a part of who we are, for our bodies evolved in conversation with the water. Let’s thank the fish and the ocean for our spines, which allow people to stand, and move through this world with strength and grace. And take a moment to feel your marvellous spine, your strength and flexibility in this world.
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Now relax the body and listen. What do you hear? Perhaps the sounds of your breathing, noises in the room or beyond your room. Rain. Cars. Voices.
Your ability to hear is thanks to tiny bones that began in the jaws of fish. Over the years of evolution, they moved to become part of sensitive mammal ears. Now these bones bring sound from outside to within, connecting us in a field of sensation. Let’s spend a moment with this gift from the fish, from the web of life, listening.
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When you were listening, a part of you was alert for any threats that might be heard. When we hear a loud noise, we startle. At the base of your brain, you have what is known as the reptilian brain. This was developed in our amphibian and reptile ancestors. It protects us. It prompts us to fight, flee or freeze when we are in danger. A part of us thinks like lizard.
This function of the brain developed early, but that does not mean lizard intelligence is basic. Reptile brains have also continued to evolve, and are complex and layered, as are mammal brains.
Lizards have the speed and skill and intelligence to survive fierce deserts. If we are to measure lizard intelligence according to what we think makes a human intelligent, they might not perform well, but they have their own understanding of the world, which suits their experience. We share with them a very strong, essential intelligence, that helps us to survive. For this we can feel gratitude to the reptiles, and kinship. Let’s spend some time with this gift, of awareness. Still listening, with another layer now: awareness of our listening.
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Our brains are complex and layered. Here, as you practice gratitude, your brain is reaching out to other beings, responding with emotion to your sense of connection with others. We are still learning about how this happens in the brain, but it is clear that this ability evolved long before humans, and perhaps not only in mammals. But we can think back to our long-ago mammal ancestors who began to give birth to live young and nourished them with milk. Some learned to live in families and groups. Feeling pleasure in a deep sense of connection with others in our family, whatever form our family takes, we might remember these ancestors. Let’s take a moment to appreciate this capacity for emotional connection, for love. If you wish, you could take this opportunity to think of someone you care about, and wish them well, a human or another animal.
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Now open your eyes if they were closed and look about you. What do you see? With our front-facing eyes, we have binocular vision, good for judging distances. This vision was cultivated by our primate ancestors, jumping from tree to tree, because they needed to know how far to leap to reach the next branch. It’s thanks to them that we see the world as we do.
Let your gaze turn to your fingers. Stretch out one hand, and notice the space between the thumb and fingers. The space is about right to grasp hold of a branch that is strong enough to support your body. The hand evolved in the forests, as our monkey kin swung between the trees.
And what about the branch? The branch grew in relationship with the sun and rain and wind. The trees grew strong and high to reach light, and flexible to respond to the wind. ‘So,’ Joanna Macy says, ‘we, with these hands, are grandchildren of tree and sun and wind as well.’
In your body you express the stories of generations, across the divisions of species. Your body knows the truth: you belong upon this planet together with all other living beings, and they are all your relatives, your family, experiencing the world with you. Take a moment to feel into this connection, through your body and through gratitude to your more-than-human ancestors.
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Take a few deep breaths, and any small movements that feel right to wake up your body in this moment.
Gather yourself, feeling how the ground is supporting you now. Perhaps look around you, noticing your surroundings.
Thank you for sharing this journey through deep time.
As you move into your day, remember the astonishing gift of your body, and your unconditional belonging within the web of life.
