Episode 5: Everything Belongs - Experiencing Wholeness

What happens when we stop trying to “accept” life, and instead recognise that everything is already here?

In this episode, the conversation turns towards wholeness, not as an ideal state or something to achieve, but as an embodied recognition of reality as it is. Participants explore what it means to include all of experience, rather than dividing life into what belongs and what does not.

A central thread in the episode is the role of preference. Many of us associate wholeness with moments when life feels good, aligned, or comfortable. When things fall outside our preferences, whether internally or in the wider world, we often experience separation. This episode explores how that subtle rejection fragments our sense of belonging and uses up enormous amounts of energy.

The discussion introduces the idea of green-lighting experience. Rather than trying to accept, approve of, or manage what arises, participants explore the recognition that everything already present is already allowed. Joy and pain, ease and difficulty, clarity and confusion are all included.

For those engaged in changemaking and regenerative work, this inquiry raises important questions. How do we respond to injustice, harm, or conflict without hardening against life? The episode explores how relaxing the inner fight can create more capacity for meaningful action, clearer boundaries, and more relational ways of meeting difference.

Throughout the conversation, listeners are invited to sense their own relationship with rejection, acceptance, and effort, and to notice what becomes possible when experience is allowed to be whole.

Welcome to the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about our work, visit earthbound.fi.

Coming up next

In the final episode, participants reflect on the impact of the 18-month project on their lives and permaculture practice, and the changes they have observed along the way.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

Get full access to Being Earthbound at beingearthbound.substack.com/subscribe