GROUND (Digital)

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“GROUND is a seismic event that cracks open our human experience in multiple directions to let the light in where it is most needed. It is actually three books intricately interwoven as one. It is a story of personal excavation, fuelled by a deeply informed inquiry that cannot but illuminate the pathways of the reader’s own inquiry; it is a clinical diagnosis of an illness inherent to modernity, and of the ways in which its touch blights our lives and the lives around us; and it is a treatise of sober encouragement that helps point the way forward for us all. Gifting us with a holistic understanding of both our personal and cultural concerns, Ground couldn’t be more relevant for our times. Read it and be nourished!”

–Philip Shepherd
Creator of The Embodied Present Process, best-selling author of Radical Wholeness, New Self, New World, and Deep Fitness

This initiatory text from ancestral neuroscience pioneer Natureza Gabriel, the Developer of Autonomics, selectively maps 12,000 years of the history of our deviation from the deep ancestral baseline in safety and connection; the way it has been elaborated by imperial agendas; the way it has translated into multi-generational inheritance of traumas; and the way it lives in our bodies, uprooting us from contact with our true Mother: the Earth.

Accreting a modern notion of self is indistinguishable from modern civilization's fundamental alienation from the Earth, upon whom each of us is utterly dependent for survival. This has created a society where, instead of treating the earth with reverence, we blindly & fecklessly degrade her to meet our short-term needs. Not only does this destroy the only biosphere in the known universe; it is making modern humans profoundly ill. The global spike in complex chronic illness is a direct neurobiological sequelae of this embodied alienation.

Gabriel proposes that the genesis of a range of chronic illness is traceable back to the particular manner in which alienation has shifted the neurological baselines of our Grounding System, the most ancient of our three primary autonomic systems. Centered in the deep belly, its purpose is to digest our experiences: when it loses contact with the ground, due to lifethreat, we stop being able to digest what happens, as well as what we eat, and degrade into a spiral of illness that modern allopathic medicine is nearly helpless to reverse. It is impossible, Gabriel suggests, to understand this physiological breakdown, or how to heal it, without understanding the deep ancestral context of empire, and the ways that it has shaped social and familial systems for the past five thousand years. This volume provides a cartography of the history of alienation in the modern world, and a pathway to reclaiming our direct embodied relationship with the Living World.

See inside GROUND: How Modernity Disconnected from the Earth, Why it Matters & How to Fix It

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This is the digital version of the book.