The Knowing Body: Eco-Paganism as an Embodying Practice

Many eco-pagans explain their intimate relationship with aspects of the natural environment in terms of spirits of place. Such relationships emerge from a situated embodied knowing that enables eco-pagans to think with place; the ambiguity of that phrase is productive. While this process consists in both using a place as a tool to think with and thinking together with a place, it simultaneously defies dualist reduction. These examples of situated embodied knowing challenge conventional dualist notions and we are led to a relational notion of personhood where the self emerges from a matrix of bodymind and place. Because theorising embodied knowing in eco-paganism pushes us beyond ontological dualism, it demands an embodied epistemology and a model of embodied cognition. Philosopher and psychologist Gendlin provides the former, while my enactive process model answers for the second. The enactive process model synthesises Gendlin's process philosophy with the work of Varela and colleagues, who understand cognition as ‘embodied action’, a process they call ‘enactive’. Eco-pagan practice can awaken us from the dualistic dream that we are separate from the ‘wisdom of the body’ and thus models a strategy for re-embodiment.