Interbeing is represented here as roots that ground you in life and place and time. It orients you and gives you life as your umbilical cord gave you life when you were in your mother’s womb.
Your sevenfold body is continually interfacing with—and exchanging resources with—your milieu. Some interfacing is tangible, as when you breathe in oxygen or drink water produced or purified by your habitat. Other interfacing is intangible, as when the sun’s rays or a friend’s smile warms you. Interbeing is a new word coined by Thich Nhat Hanh to acknowledge that we are all one. In this method of self-care, we mean this biologically (ecologically) as well as spiritually. The fact that the language for human unity has only been preserved by the mystical traditions of the world reflects the degree to which moderns ignore cooperation and overdo competition. The process of self-care that becomes more available through paying attention to interbeing can thus serve as a particularly precious blessing. Even in loneliness and isolation, you are never alone or abandoned by society; it is not in anyone’s power to divide aspects of life that evolved as one.
This least familiar yet most important aspect of the body is the most difficult for those who think in still images. While you as a modern may perceive your body as a single flesh enclosed by skin and dictated by DNA, your body is neither defined by your skin nor separated from the life that surrounds you. Your body is in fact a body corporate, inclusive of your human flesh, any unborn life in the womb, and the microscopic community of commensals and symbionts that coat your skin and the linings of your lungs and gut. These discourage harmful bacteria, digest food, and produce essential nutrients such as vitamin B12. As we try to comprehend interbeing, we can return to the ancient view of the body as comprised of the same elements that comprise all phenomena. In that model, we are both tangible and intangible—borrowed from water, air, fire, earth, wood, and metal rather than dictated by DNA. In the emerging model, you can recognize that the soil inhabits us and we inhabit it.
If you are a visual thinker, it may help to imagine photographs of human scat in remote areas of Africa that reveal the resemblance between feces and soil. In areas of red earth, human feces are likewise red; in areas of white clay, they are white. This shows the continuity between soil and night soil, and reveals one of our countless interconnections with the body of life. Other images that reveal the unseen interconnections that join all tangible and intangible aspects of life into the body of life include: infrared images that reveal the heat body extending beyond the skin; fog that brings moisture into the lungs as it condenses on the skin; high altitude-adapted humans with barrel chests; humans berry-picking and mushroom hunting in the wild; indigenous people calling whales.
You can also overcome the limits of human visual sense consciousness by recognizing that your eyes fail to detect phenomena that either penetrate or fully envelop your body. The most obvious is the air, which includes substrates such as oxygen and carbon dioxide that one life form produces and another uses. We catch glimpses of these phenomena when we see our breath on a damp, cool evening; watch smoke reveal the contours of the air; watch clouds make visible the hydrologic cycle that provides our drinking water; espy we the aurora borealis that reveals ion curtains; swim in an ocean alit with plankton; or feel the complex field of gravity on which our movements depend but which we have long since learned to take for granted.
If you enjoy encounters with the natural world, you can experience the body of life directly through all senses combined, as when you partake of the inspiration, refreshment, and restoration offered by a walk in the wilds, or even when you take and savor in a lungful of fresh air. In such settings, you inhale soil organisms and minerals tossed across the landscape by dust devils, feel sheets of pollen on your skin, and taste swarms of gnats at dusk.
If you conceive of the world in scientific terms, you can include in your ideas of interbeing the carbon and hydrologic cycles; the energy of the sun and its catalytic formation of bioactive vitamin D; and the fixation of nitrogen in soil that nourishes the microbiome and, through it, the body corporate. If you conceive of the world in spiritual terms, you can recall the poetic language of religious mystics who mediate on phenomena that range in scale from the infinitesimal to the infinite. You can consider the imagery of Thich Nhat Hanh, who describes interbeing as an ocean and each living being as a wave on its surface. You can also refer to the ideas of physicists like Adam Frank and Brian Swimme who unite direct knowing through meditation and contemplation with indirect knowing through science and technology. You can then recognize that interbeing joins you with the biosphere, the matrix of space and time, and the history of the world, including that of our species.
While it may be difficult to know where to draw the line, a part of interbeing enters into or emanates from your body and the rest from other bodies within the body of life. The part of it that impinges on you comprises a level of the body is also called interbeing. This includes those historical psychosocial processes that abide in you and are continuous with the history of the body of the species and the body of life. These may manifest in you as time debts–that is, as the unfinished processes of the past that abide in and burden you and thus limit your present freedom and your future possibilities.
Through your part of interbeing, you have a particular place in the history of life on earth, and you are the inheritor of the errors and limitations of your antecedents. For example, your family or community may have suffered or perpetrated trauma that abides in your body as harmful states of being, as habits of perception and response that no one but you will be able to leave behind or use as the fodder for transformative care and cure. Likewise, the body of the habitats in which you abide may have been damaged by you and other moderns; this damage may have compromised your microbiome or other aspects of your interbeing, and you may only be able to care for them and cure them through habitat restoration.
You can also look to the legacy that you will leave behind when your time is up. In the emerging model, you can conceive of this as the sum of the world you inherited plus the benefits and minus the harm that you’ve done in the course of your life. If you run out of time or ignore the time debts that you inherit or create, your legacy may burden the body of life and its future. To leave a beneficial legacy, you can reconcile your chosen debts and thrive in and with the bodies in which you abide.
If you take the body too personally or try to rule or overpower it, you miss the reality that your body is a living community joined with all other living communities, the reality that you live in accord with life; this reality is irrespective of any illusions that arise from lack of awareness or comprehension and of any efforts to possess, use, or abuse the life to which you belong. By coming to know our interbeing, by pursuing contextual care and cure and thus reversing the most costly errors of modernity, we can care for and cure the body of life–rather than continue attacking it as if intent on carrying out a homicide-suicide pact.