Field Awareness: A Key to Human Evolution?

As I heard myself say this to a group last week, it sounded grandiose. “Expanding our awareness of our internal space, our personal field, along with the larger social and cosmic fields in which we are embedded, is key to our evolution as human beings.”

I admit to having said this without fully understanding what I was pointing to. As I said it last week in a workshop* I was co-leading with Alan Briskin, it resonated inside as clear as a bell. It is what I believe and is part of my meditation practice and living day-to-day. 

In exploring what I mean with these words I have more questions than answers.

Awareness of Internal Space

Every day we see actions that emanate from people who appear to be only aware of an internal space crowded with fear, ambition, hatred, self-absorption, anger, meanness, or enervating malaise. You might be aware of any or all of these at different times inside yourself. I know I am. Obviously, we also experience the opposite of these too: courage, contentment, love, compassion, joy, generosity, or energizing well-being.

Acting primarily from the surface of internal space too often drives behavior outside of conscious awareness towards self-protection in the form of fighting, fleeing, freezing, or fawning. The challenge is to expand awareness, to swim below the surface, to the calmer waters beneath all the phenomena of thoughts and emotions. Although the water underneath still moves, it does so gently and slowly.

It is here where I can find more trustworthy perceptions of not only what is occurring inside me but also with others, and within the larger social space. From here I am better able to access the wisdom coming from the cosmos, the noetic field. It is an integration of the wisdom of the body with the mind’s intelligence into something I think of as an integrated, embodied knowing.

For example, working with a small group recently, I felt a tightness in my belly and noticed my breathing had become more shallow and fast. I asked myself what was going on. Was I nervous about something or was this coming from the group? My body let me know that there was some constriction and anxiety in the group being mirrored inside me. This allowed me to feel more calm and clear about what to say. I described aloud my inner experience and asked whether that resonated with others. It did. A different conversation opened. As David Whyte framed it, “You cannot have a new conversation with someone who is unwilling to stop having the old one.”

Practice, Practice, Practice

Over years of studying and practicing meditation, Feldenkrais, and Focusing with Russell Delman’s Embodied Life School, I have come to trust what the body knows and communicates, albeit much more slowly than the mind. Try this simply exercise. Recall a time when someone misspelled or mispronounced your name. It could have been checking in at an airport or talking with a salesperson on the phone. Do you remember your kinesthetic reaction? Was there a sense of “no” in your body, perhaps a small tightening in your face or chest?

It’s taken me years of practice to clearly discern a bodily “yes” or a “no” in more complex situations. When I ask a question and the answer slowly bubbles up, I often test it by asking, “Is this true?” Just like with the name exercise, my body usually lets me know whether it is or isn’t.

The Role of the Personal Field

So, how does the ability of the body and our ability to “hear” it, relate to our evolution as human beings? My thoughts about this are still evolving but my answer goes something like this.

In the context that we use our consciousness to interpret our consciousness is a conundrum—what David Chalmers described as “the hard problem of consciousness”— how can we trust the consciousness that often leads us astray by not accurately perceiving what’s going on inside us and the world around us? My initial answer is that what we feel in the body, in the overall felt sense inside provides clues to what is really going on. This, instead of what my brain or ego, particularly in a reactive state, interprets as occurring and leading me to behave in ways that are often destructive.

However, this is only part of the story. What we experience in the space around us is also influencing our interior space. So, how do we differentiate between our individual, internal experience and how we are being influenced by what is around us?

The answer is sometimes we can and sometimes we can’t. It usually depends on how heavy the seas in which we are swimming and how aware we are of what’s going on inside us.

In the meeting mentioned above, for instance, I might have inaccurately assumed that the group did not like me or what I was saying. I also could have begun to judge them as uncooperative. Any of these could have led to unhelpful, destructive behaviors like defending myself by over explaining my point of view.

Awareness of the personal field—body sensations, emotions, thoughts, and images—seems to be essential to our awareness of what is beyond our interior space into the relational social field along with the larger social forces shaping us every day. These larger social forces—that are also part of the social field—include patriarchy, racism, sexism, isolationism, anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism. 

Although there are more life-giving forces like heterogeneity, equity and equality, interconnectedness, ecopsychologies, currently these seem to be pushed to the sidelines and wield much less influence on the social field than one wants.

And beyond this maze of external forces, how might we then access the greater wisdom of the noetic field in nature and the cosmos? Once again, my experience is that this initially emerges through the personal field as we also move beyond it.

How Can We Evolve as Human Beings?

How might this awareness help us evolve is a question I ponder. That said, I believe that this awareness of fields—personal, social, and noetic—is key to our surviving as a species and as a planet even if it is not key to evolving. 

Field awareness is key to our working with one another and the planet in constructive, compassionate, and life-giving ways. Our sensations, emotions, thoughts and images need not be continuously shaped by reactivity inside nor the constricting forces in which we are operating, such as patriarchy. The key is our awareness and our questions about our experience. Are our perceptions and thoughts true to reality?

I linger with such questions believing that they matter more than answers. They matter more because they reveal clues about the internal and external systems we too often mistake for reality.

*Our workshop is Cultivating Fields for Conscious Leadership hosted by the Conscious Leadership Guild.

Alan Briskin and I wrote Space Is Not Empty: How Hidden Fields Are Shaping Your Life and Our World because field awareness seems key to our working better together to create a more just and compassionate world.