Make Your Body the Prayer: Front Matter

* The word “tissuing” comes from Nora Bateson’s essay on Aphanipoeisis. The phrase “The Soft Animal of My Body is a quote from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese.

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Abstract

“Make Your Body the Prayer” is a somatic, systemic, and eco-poetic journey tissuing the edge between nervous system and ecosystem. This thesis invites colonially-shaped humans to deepen into a sense of embodied relationality through shifting the epistemology of self to include ecological and ancestral sources of support. Linking nervous system approaches such as interpersonal neurobiology and polyvagal theory with practices around systems intelligence and creative expression, Shante’ Sojourn Zenith draws on her direct experiences of relationship with earth, ancestors, and animal body to describe a trans-generational maturational  process of remembering. A liminal interweaving of essays, poetry, and the oracular guidance of nature beings, “Make Your Body the Prayer” is itself an embodiment of the creative attunement through which the “human” bends and shimmers into other shapes of ecological perception, allowing inheritances of ancestral trauma to dissolve into a vital interplay of relational process on behalf of the wider field of life.

The only medicine for the place of aching 

is to nestle your body into the shape of that absence. 

Make your body the prayer that resonates from a depth of soil. 

Become the portal back to home. 

—Maitake Mushroom

A vision of self in isolation cannot imagine the materials of mending.

—Nora Bateson

Thesis question

What is the edge between nervous system and ecosystem?¹