Natural Inclusionality: From Self Recovery to Self Discovery

Have you ever felt utterly alien, alone and excluded from the natural world and the people around you? Do you struggle to find meaning in your life or feel like you’re living in a divided society? Or worse, that your mind or personality is broken? If so, you will find solace in the philosophy of Natural Inclusionality.

Based on the scientific principle of Natural Inclusion, a deeply rooted and ancient wisdom, this new philosophy taught me how to reimagine myself, my relationship with others and the world around me. This blog post explores how Natural Inclusionality influenced my psychosocial development, discusses the benefits of embracing the philosophy, and provides many practical tips for how you might incorporate it into your life.

I found Natural Inclusionality in 2008, whilst in the throes of what was then described as a mental health crisis. In many ways my struggle was typical. I felt like I was on the outside of society looking in, unable to grasp the essence of life, convinced it was a struggle that I wasn’t fit enough to win. I tried so many remedies; counselling, cognitive-based therapy, art therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, creative writing therapy, physical therapy, prescription medication and alternative medicine. I loved the great outdoors and often found temporary relief and comfort in nature, the natural environment always seeming to sooth my soul. But I just couldn’t seem to shift the deep sense of dread I held in my body.

For years my mind felt like a battleground, constantly at war with itself. I lived with an overwhelming and unforgiving sense of loneliness in my heart. I had family and friends around me, neighbours too. And yet in a crowded room I felt utterly dislocated from life. My journey towards self-acceptance, self-awareness and inner clarity and peace was not easy or straightforward. As a child, I struggled to make sense of the world around me. I often felt scared, inferior, isolated and vulnerable, which made it difficult to relate to and trust others. I often felt sensorily overstimulated and emotionally overwhelmed.

Upon serving my country as a soldier in the Royal Signals as a Digital Communications Systems Engineer, I had experiences that further challenged my interpretation of the world. Politics, power, war and conflict shook me to my core, and I struggled to reconcile what I had been taught with what I saw and felt on the ground. My beliefs and values clashed with the reality of the world around me, causing deep emotional pain and confusion. I felt betrayed, incompatible and a failure. After leaving the army I was unemployed, homeless and in debt, seemingly unable to find a place for myself that I felt I belonged. Through the use of drugs and alcohol, I developed maladaptive patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving that became increasingly difficult to manage. Through it all, I held onto hope that someday, somehow, I would find a way to make peace with myself and the world.

Several years later working as a software engineer in relative isolation in different countries around the world, my inner sense of dissatisfaction and turmoil impressed itself further upon me in ways that were no longer possible for the people around me to ignore. I withdrew even further into myself, becoming an unhappy, introverted and distraught observer of the lives others seemingly lived so easily. I began writing poetry to try and find ways of articulating my inner sense of suffocation. Whilst on a working trip to Detroit, Michigan, USA, I became even more estranged and decided that I couldn’t ever return to the UK again, that I should abandon it altogether and live a nomadic life in Canada.

After learning about a family tragedy, I returned home. My depression worsened and I resigned from my career in IT, unable to continue. I sought solace in the faces and stories of Nobel Peace Prize winners, Literary, Artistic and Scientific greats, searching for explanations for my sadness, fear and self-loathing. My attention was caught by scientific, religious and political History and the story of William Wilberforce’s successful campaign to abolish the Slave Trade.

I was deeply moved by the stories of the Roma people, their culture and the inextricable relationship they had with slavery and persecution. I grew obsessed and fixated with the history of the Roma people and their culture, feeling a deep emotional resonance between the figure of the traditional ‘Gypsy’ story and my own sense of displacement.

Compelled to keep searching for answers, I enrolled in an undergraduate creative writing and literature degree, reading widely in poetry, literature, the arts, philosophies, literary and critical theories. My sense of hope was tinged with pain and suffering as I cycled from elation and euphoria to depression and despair, always seemingly on the edge of a discovery that would help me to feel a sense of relief from my inner turmoil. It seemed to me that there was either a deep problem with my sense of reality or I had a damaged brain and was utterly beyond repair.

Living, Learning, Evolving

This painful self doubt culminated one evening when I was desperately trying to study for my literature exams. I was studying the literature of the Renaissance and Romantic periods, exploring the similarities in terms of their views on identity. Whilst the views the writers of the Romantic and Renaissance periods varied depending on their philosophical and cultural contexts, both periods saw a tension between objective science and subjective experience. The Renaissance saw the rise of empirical science, which emphasized observation and experimentation, but also recognized the limits of scientific knowledge.

Similarly, Romantic writers were often critical of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and empirical observation,
arguing that these approaches could not capture the richness and complexity of human experience. Both Romantic and Renaissance literature emphasized the importance of individual identity and self-expression. In the Renaissance, humanism emphasized the potential of the individual to achieve greatness, while the Romantic movement placed a premium on personal emotions, imagination, and intuition. The Renaissance period saw a renewed interest in classical learning and a focus on individual spirituality rather than institutional religion. Similarly, Romantic writers often rejected traditional religious institutions in favor of a more personal, mystical spirituality. In the Renaissance period, many writers were deeply influenced by Aristotelian logic, which continues to have a significant impact on the way we think and reason, particularly in the areas of philosophy, science, and mathematics. However, some Renaissance writers, such as Giordano Bruno, rejected Aristotelian logic and sought to develop alternative systems of thought.

Similarly, Romantic writers were often critical of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and logic, which they saw as limiting and reductive. Some Romantic writers, such as William Wordsworth, argued for a more intuitive and imaginative approach to knowledge in favor of a more nuanced understanding of reality. The principle of non-contradiction, which states that a proposition cannot be both true and false at the same time, is a fundamental principle of Aristotelian Logic that is still used in logic today. Aristotle’s system of categorization has influenced the way we classify objects, ideas, and concepts. His classification system based on genus and species is still widely used in biology, botany, and zoology. The scientific method, which is used to test hypotheses and theories, is rooted in Aristotelian Logic.

Aristotle’s emphasis on observation, experimentation, and deduction is still an essential part of scientific inquiry. Aristotelian Logic provided the basis for formal logic, a precise, mathematical language used in computer science, mathematics, and philosophy. It became clear to me that Aristotelian logic was deeply rooted in my very being and very much affecting the way I was reading poems, essays and stories about identity and trying to understand how to contextualise the perceptions of the writers. The writers of the Romantic and Renaissance periods had complex and varied views on the law of the excluded middle, reflecting the diverse intellectual and cultural contexts of their time.

The law of the excluded middle is a fundamental principle in logic that states that a proposition is either true or false, and there is no third option or middle ground. In other words, the law of the excluded middle asserts that every statement or proposition is either true or false, and there is no in-between state or third option. It’s a basic principle of logical reasoning used to evaluate arguments and draw conclusions.

Somethingness and Nothingness

That night of intense studying, as I tried to draw my own understandings to a concussion, I became very distressed. So distressed I vomited. I developed a strong headache. My blood pressure and heart rate increased, my body and mind fatigued and muscles tensed. The trigger was some kind of incongruent or discordant explanation in contrast with my experience, from either subjective or objective points of view. I just couldn’t accept any one explanation over
another when both felt true.

Exhausted and unable to make sense of the contradictions and paradoxes of my thinking, I became upset and discouraged, convinced I wasn’t able to take my exams the following morning. Desperate to succeed, I stood in my kitchen and drew upon my performing arts experience, in the hope of breathing life into my brain. I used the space around me as props, each wall representing a writer and period in time. I stuck post-it-notes of quotes and ideas all over the place, collecting together ideas into community-like groups.

I then spoke to the imagined writers as if they were in my company, begging them to reveal to me what I couldn’t seem to reveal to myself. I spun around in circles, switching characters, asking questions of one writer from the perspective of the other. Speaking their very words to each other. Asking how they came to believe in themselves, pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies of their explanations. I began to hear them speak back fast and furiously, the rampant din of voices and rapidly changing faces generating a kind of discord and disharmony that made me dizzy with despair. I closed my eyes, growing disorientated, unable to discern who was speaking to whom. The more I tried to focus and clarify the face or voice I was hearing and seeing in my mind, the more I saw myself reflected back at me. Object became subject, subject became object in a kind of paradoxical and reflexive loop.

Sometime later I awoke on the cold floor in the early hours of the morning, having had a very vivid vision. The extreme psychological and physiological stress and my inability to withstand the torment of my oscillating thoughts and perspectives literally struck me down. When I opened my eyes, in an instant I had a new realisation that changed the way I thought and felt about myself and reality forever. It had been instigated by some kind of dissonance, incongruence or discordance within my thoughts, feelings and bodily experience around the pursuit of an absolute truth of either a subjective or objective point of view. I just couldn’t accept any one of these perspectives over another when both felt true to me.

For the first time in my life, I had a new awareness of myself as a creative, living and evolving being, an inhabitant of nature, in a constant state of flux and flow, rather than a static, unchangeable, badly formed, damaged and broken product of my upbringing, my culture and society. My subjective and objective experience had blended in a dynamic, inclusive way that caused a huge shift in my mind and mood. This occurrence altered my perception of everything.
Many others have written about similar paradigmatic shifts occurring in their own lives. And I was just learning of Natural Inclusionality.

But for me, the notion of Natural Inclusion came through an embodied experience. It was sudden and eventful, releasing the profound grip my brain and modes of thinking had held on my heart. That experience allowed me to breathe again and to love again. I entered a state of flow. I felt immediate self-compassion and confidence. I accepted my differences and embraced them as unique gifts. The gulf between my inner thoughts and outer expressions had shrunk. I felt at peace with myself and the world around me.

Navigating the Great Turning

I’d felt states of euphoria and elatedness in my life before. Experiences that had been described by clinicians and experts as mania and hypomania. But there was something different about this. I didn’t feel the same kind of energy coursing through my veins this time. I was calm, serene, and very much at ease in my body and mind. The world seemed slower. The day of my exams went without a hitch. I wrote steadily, without any self doubt or self consciousness. I was able to navigate my thoughts with a coherency and freedom that I haven’t known before. Ideas seemed to form of their own accord as my hand moved. It was because I was no longer paralysed by the belief that there was an absolute and correct way to think and to explain, from a fixed subjective or objective perspective.

Now I was able to manoeuvre around and through the words and ideas on the page, without losing perspective or becoming disorientated. My creative and critical thinking seemed to flow from my own locus of felt, lived experience. My mind felt more embodied than it had before. I felt no shame in being unable to finish and conclude something. I was aware of the implicit truth of the nature of reality as always creatively opening to new possibilities.

Later that same day, sure that this experience was the key to a sustainable way of living, I began a new branch of research and discovery. I turned to Google to find examples of other people experiencing extraordinary states of mental clarity and physical calm. This was when I discovered the positive psychology topic of flow and peak states of consciousness. These are mental states in which a person is completely focused on a single activity, directing all of their attention towards the activity. In these states they do not experience many thoughts about themselves or their performance.

I read as much as I could of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow, happiness and creativity and felt as though I’d finally discovered a language I could understand. I learned that what happened to me was likely because of the dynamic balance between the challenge of the activity in which I was deeply engaged, and the way I was thinking and feeling using reason, logic, my sensory experience and intuition to analyse and understand.

This understanding led me to research more about the challenge I perceived and described as a paradoxical and reflexive loop; the endless oscillating between one imaginal spatial-perspective and its opposite. I hoped that if I could better understand that, it might help me to know what to do next and how to transcend the daily challenges of life. I studied paradox, contradiction, cognitive dissonance, logic and dialectic logic. I ventured into the world of The Three Laws of Logic, The Law of Contradiction, Non-Contradiction and The Law of The Excluded Middle.

This is when I discovered Dr Alan Rayner and Natural Inclusionality, a Natural Evolutionary Science & Philosophy of Inclusive Flow. When I found this work and the natural flow logic of Inclusionality, everything fell into place. I’d not only found an ‘evolutionary ecology’ of life, I’d found an alternative to the theory of natural selection advanced by Charles Darwin and the binary, paradoxical logic initiated by Aristotle. Finally, I had found an explanation of my lived experience that made good sense.

It challenged me to reconsider the way I related to my sense of self, other people and where I lived. These realisations cultivated a deep sense of shared-purpose as an individual and member of the community. It inspired me to live differently amidst complex environmental and social challenges. A way of life that also felt therapeutic, as if I was actually healing me as I evolved.

Keyhole to Open-Heartedness

So what is Natural Inclusionality? It’s what I call an ‘everyday philosophy’, an accessible and practical view of reality that readily applies to my life. It was pioneered by Dr. Alan Rayner, Natural Scientist and former Reader in Biology at Bath University, and emerged from decades of his research on the foundational science of Natural Inclusion. It’s a new but anciently rooted philosophy that supports me to make sense of my lived experience, whilst encouraging me to engage with what occurs within and around me in creative and novel ways.

I found it difficult enough to understand how I learn, how I process sensory experience and communicate my thoughts and feelings, without the additional distractions of the clinical, medical terms of reference. Often this affected my behaviour. I have struggled to develop my emotional intelligence, and in building relationships and functioning in social groups. My heightened emotional reactivity, hyper focus, impulsivity and cognitive dysfunction have made it difficult to always be present. And despite this, I am a sibling, son, father and husband and I feel a deep sense of responsibility towards my family.

By embracing Natural Inclusionality, I overcame biassed and partial understandings of myself, others and the reality that pervaded me. This philosophy reduced and resolved the disagreements and conflicts that were causing so much trauma and harm. Most importantly, I remedied the deep-seated sense of division in my mind and heart.

Now, I can engage in generative, compassionate and socially healthy activities that nurture personal relationships and instil a strong sense of community. I can consciously and conscientiously exercise a sense of belonging to and immersion in the world around me. I no longer feel alone and isolated. Upon recognising that everything is interrelational, I see the world in a new way. I am more aware of my unique values and our collective shared-purpose, my ability to love, and my worthiness of being loved. This transforms the meaning of my relationships with myself, other people, animals, plants and my natural environment; which includes the neighbourhood in which I live, play and work. It helps me genuinely develop compassion for myself and others. My mind-and-body are aware of receptive-responsive relationships and their profound influence on the world around and within me. I rediscovered how to trust others, feel secure in their presence, and allow myself to receive their love.

With the help of Natural Inclusionality, I have learned to accept and embrace my differences. I found a renewed sense of purpose and meaning in my relationships with self and others. Today, I am a better person because of my journey towards self-acceptance. It began as a journey of recovery when diagnosed with mental illness and it evolved into a journey of self discovery as I became aware of Natural Inclusionality. I have restored my love and curiosity for the possibilities that lie ahead. It is my hope that by sharing my story, those struggling with their own inner conflicts can find solace and confidence in knowing that they too can overcome their challenges and embrace their unique selves.

Expressions of Receptive-Responsive Relationships

The practical, receptive-responsive approach to life recognizes Natural Inclusion as the fundamental creative and evolutionary process that brings all material forms into being, including human beings, as well as our thoughts and feelings. Whilst it may sound technical, it’s actually very simple. It explains how people, cultures and life forms on earth arise through dynamic receptive and responsive relationships at every scale, from atomic to global. Although complementary to living systems theories, what Dr Rayner has helped me awaken to is a fundamentally different approach to others. It’s one that helped me to cultivate a sense of homeliness and self-love wherever I was on earth.

I could achieve this because of how I adjusted my relationship with space itself. I now see space as an infinitely receptive and welcoming presence. Space always invites me to live and grow, beckoning me to keep moving and exploring. I began to notice things in my natural neighbourhood that I’d never noticed before or had long forgotten. I was becoming deeply related to the place in which I lived, just as I was the people I now noticed I lived amongst. Seeing space as inherently creative and alive, rather than as an empty, meaningless void or as a source of unrelenting danger and threat, empowered me to overcome deeply embodied fears of the unknown. Including the fear of myself becoming someone and something ‘great’ whom I and others cared deeply about.

It’s not just my understanding and appreciation of space that changed. My view of energy, matter, and all life forms on earth changed, including the way I conceived of myself. Rather than being an isolated, independent, vulnerable subject walking alone and in distress on the impersonal earth, I began to see myself as a living body of energy and matter moving into and through space as a creative flow-form. An energetic, co-creative inhabitant of my local neighbourhood.

I began to see myself as a dynamic expression of energy and space. I was now able to look into myself, into the dark depths of my mind and feel an infinite source of receptivity, love, hope and possibility companioning me. This was made possible literally by the space within me. I have become finally aware that I could only truly care for and understand myself by caring for and understanding my natural neighbourhood.

This principle helped me to overcome the existential dread caused by my misunderstandings of the relationship between my mind, body and the world around me and between material and non-material realities. Those misunderstandings led me astray. They had led me (and many of us) to see myself and the world either as discrete entities or as interconnected parts of a single whole. That is a mistaken view. Rather than discrete entities, they are dynamically distinct identities in receptive and responsive fluid relations with each other and their surroundings. The consequences of seeing reality as mechanical, rather than fluid, has–I am sure–contributed to the substantial rise of mind and body disorders and to existential crises that blight communities the world over.

Relationality, the idea that everything in the universe exists in relation, is an important concept in many areas of study. These include philosophy, sociology, ecology, and systems theory. In many of these fields, scholars envisage the ‘interconnectedness’ of entities in complex systems. Each entity is considered to be an individual part of a larger whole: a system in which every action or event impacts on something else. These impacts form networks and chains of cause and effect.

I understood very well that this mechanistic way of thinking and describing reality was not meant to be taken literally: that life on earth was much more nuanced, diverse and interesting than those rationalisations sounded. But the words and ideas themselves conjured up strange sensations in my mind. And left me feeling void of life and love. I was desperate for a new language and way of thinking and communicating. Natural Inclusionality provided me with a language and understanding I had been searching for. It revived my enthusiasm for life and for thinking about communities of living systems.

It convinced me that this mechanistic interpretation and understanding was not applicable to living systems at all. Actually, mechanistic lenses are unhelpful and harmful to our human development as individuals and as a species. Seeing living beings and life forms as connected in a web of interconnections denied me the richness of my own and other people’s interior lives. In contexts of Mental Illness and Social poverty, this way of looking at people and life may well cause more harm needles and unnecessary harm. A vivid interior life is essential. My living relationships are animated by the active inviting and welcoming space in which we live and that lives in us. The very openness of space itself co-creates the conditions for receptive-and-responsive mutuality: the very pulse and heart of life. To me, it’s the very fabric of social health and social capital.

The shift from a pervasive, mechanistic understanding of myself as a ‘broken’ and ‘dislocated’ part to a vision of myself characterised by flux and flow included by Nature everywhere was made possible because of Natural Inclusionality. For years I was conflicted by my oscillating belief in my own and other people’s subjective and objective perceptions of reality, believing that one view must have authority over the other, or the other side of the other: that they were absolute, mutually exclusive and independent realities. I was plagued by an inability to confide with an understanding of the world that felt true to my experience: the way it felt to me versus the way it appeared according to others. My true, subjective self lived in the invisible and dark recesses of my mind, kept imprisoned through self stigma and abuse, whilst my objective self lived out in the open, available for all the world to see and reject indiscriminately. That was my trap.

That all changed when I discovered Natural Inclusionality. Alan Rayner’s vision of natural ecology helped me cultivate an appreciation of my experience as an occurrence of the mutually inclusive, receptive-responsive relationship between space and energy in all material forms. My subjective and objective experience became inclusive of one another, each dynamically informing the co-creation of the other. My subjective and objective selves became reconciled in the sensitive, compassionate embrace of the other.

Now, I no longer feel like an outsider looking in. I am an inclusion of this world, and it is an inclusion of me; each in the dynamic embrace of the other. The mental conflict and cognitive dissonance that once broke my heart has been replaced by a deep sense of calm and understanding. I am still on my journey, but I know that I am not alone. And neither are you.

Fixed Minds Present Fixed Times

The move from that ‘abstract exceptionality’ (the trap of thinking “about”) to Natural Inclusionality (the freedom of thinking through) significantly altered the way I viewed time. I had viewed time as “past to present to future.” I had viewed myself as a living being with a finite lifespan. This shift helped me to resolve some of my most profound existential anxieties and fears. Rather than seeing myself as living in a world in which I was sure to be devoured and annihilated sooner rather than later, where space and time were absolute and independent entities that exist on their own (as separate objects and events): Natural Inclusionality allowed me to see and experience the world anew.

Places became curious, dynamic formulations of local space and local time. Each space and each time births the other into being. People became beautiful again and I began to believe in love again, in a new compassionate and passionate way. I was able to overcome the seemingly intractable problem of how to reconcile the infinite with the finite, the continuous nature of space and time with the distinctive occurrences within them. Issues that have been debated among philosophers for centuries and have led to various theories and approaches suddenly made sense without the anguish of cognitive dissonance. Natural Inclusionality could be understood as the “philosophical river” bringing these views into confluence. In many ways, it helped me to reinterpret my own history, to change the way I related to what was happening to me and reimagine my potential future. In other ways, it saved my life.

Placing Love in the Heart of Life

With an awareness of Natural Inclusionality in my heart, not only was I able to overcome my profoundest depressions, anxieties and fears and recover my sense of self, I was able to discover that I deeply loved the world. I was loved by the world and wanted to continue living within it, as the world lived in me. Placing love in the heart of life offers profound opportunities for recovery and rehabilitation for mental ill-health. To evolve any meaningful systemic response to human suffering, in my view, requires a fundamental appreciation of the philosophy of Natural Inclusionality and a deep reimagining of cultural psychology.

Incorporating Natural Inclusionality into our daily lives can begin by simply taking a walk in nature, practicing mindfulness and self-reflection. Taking time to reflect on your own thought patterns and biases. This can help you to become more aware of how your own ways of thinking may contribute to ideas of division or disconnection.

Other ways might include:

Fostering interdisciplinary collaboration by encouraging collaboration and dialogue between individuals from different fields of study or areas of expertise. This can help break down the traditional boundaries between different disciplines and lead to more inclusive and creative approaches to problem-solving.

Emphasising relationality and inclusion over connection and separation by focusing on the ways in which things are unique but complimentary, rather than different and incompatible. This can involve acknowledging the interdependence of humans and nature, and recognising the ways in which our actions impact eachother and the environment.

Prioritising community and collaboration by nurturing communities of shared purpose (social capital) that prioritise collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision-making. This can involve creating spaces where individuals from diverse backgrounds and different organisational communities can come together to share ideas and work on common goals.

Encouraging empathy and understanding by developing programs and initiatives that promote empathy and understanding between different groups of people, particularly people with lived experience of trauma, social poverty and mental ill-health. This can involve education and awareness-raising campaigns that challenge stereotypes and promote natural inclusion and trauma informed thinking.

Re-evaluating economic models by rethinking and re-prioritising individual gain over social and community health and well-being. This can involve exploring alternative models, such as cooperative economics or community wealth-building strategies.

Supporting regenerative practices by encouraging the adoption of regenerative practices that prioritise the long-term health and sustainability of ecosystems. This can involve supporting regenerative leadership and learning, regenerative agriculture, green energy initiatives, and other sustainable practices.

Making these kinds of efforts to relate empathically with yourself, the people around you and the places in which we live, work, play and move can help us all to become more aware of Natural Inclusionality.

Most important of all is simply noticing as we live that although we may often feel alone, disconnected and strangers in our own homes, prisoners to our fears, we are never truly isolated from anything at all. Whilst we are unique and distinct entities in our own rights, we are not tethered together in a definitive whole. We are actually all dynamic inclusions of the ultimate reality of Nature and of one another’s lives.

By embracing this philosophy, we can start to see the world as it really is and cultivate a deep sense of relationship and meaning in our lives.

It offers us all a new way of understanding the world that is both practical, accessible and inspiring, particularly for people like me who have experienced from trauma and ‘mental ill health’.

Together we can learn to see each other and the world as a place of creative possibility, with endless opportunities to reimagine ourselves as inclusions of the natural world. By recognising the dynamic relations of all things–and embracing the receptive-responsive relationships between space and energy–we can overcome the biases that often dominate our modern human culture. We can engage in and reconcile ourselves to a more comprehensive approach to understanding the world.

So why not give Natural Inclusionality a try? You will be surprised with its ability to help you flourish and find meaning in your life, as it has mine.

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