Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

What disconnected are intuitive centers from our heads?

While the mind is a playground for philosophizing, for exploring ideas and making sense of our

relationship to the world around us, it isn't a place for real connection, for felt intimacy

with people and land.

How can we go beyond cognition and drop into a different, deeper space of responding and engaging with the Earth.

In this essay, Tyson-Yunkaporta argues that we are overthinking and underfeeling our existence.

For him, it is the gut that governs our custodial relationships with land and all our human and non-human kin.

It is this second brain that is in constant dialogue with the world and the space where we do

what he calls our thinking feeling. When we ignore the gut's wisdom, we cut ourselves off from a deeper,

older intelligence and ignore data that we

need to relate properly to land and people. We find ourselves separating thought and emotion

and operating from a place of individualistic thinking, a way of being, he says, that does not

sustain life. And so pointing to how interaction between mind and gut

can mirror the cosmological structure of existence,

of earth and sky, of as above so below,

in which both brains, holding lore and knowledge,

work as a complementary dyad.

Tyson urges us to tend to the fire in our bellies.

The potential of a gut-brain- fire-lightening connection is a constant process of inquiry for me,

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