Bibiane van Mierlo*, Alexandra Zwigard, ** Willem van de Put***
Abstract
This article proposes an embodied framework for understanding the human dimension of planetary health. While climate–health strategies increasingly emphasize technological innovation, governance, and policy reform, we argue that planetary health also involves how human beings experience themselves, relate to one another, and participate in the living world. Contemporary conditions of social acceleration, chronic stress, self-optimization, and alienation may weaken capacities for embodied awareness, emotional integration, connection, and resonance. These processes can shape how people perceive and respond to themselves, others, and the wider world.
Drawing on phenomenology, embodied cognitive science, neuroscience, affective science, and ecological and transpersonal perspectives, we develop a framework linking inner experience with patterns of relationship and participation in the world. The framework distinguishes four strongly interdependent dimensions of embodiment: affective, relational, ecological, and transpersonal embodiment. Affective embodiment concerns the capacity to experience and integrate emotional experience within the body. Relational embodiment concerns remaining connected with others while maintaining differentiation and boundaries. Ecological embodiment concerns experiencing the body’s embeddedness in and dependence upon the living world. Transpersonal embodiment concerns a possible expansion of identification beyond an exclusively individual sense of self, while remaining grounded in embodied experience.
These dimensions are not proposed as discrete stages or exhaustive categories. Rather, they offer complementary perspectives on how embodied capacities may influence perception, emotional regulation, relationships, meaning-making, responsibility, and participation in the wider systems of life. We suggest that strengthening these capacities may contribute to the human dimension of planetary health alongside, and in interaction with, the structural, political, economic, technological, and ecological changes required to address planetary crises.
Key words: Emotions, Embodiment, Boundaries, Planetary Health
*Body oriented trauma psychotherapist
** Research Fellow, Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA) Fordham University, former ITM
Introduction
Attention to the climate–health nexus[1] is steadily increasing. Recent global initiatives, including the WHO Global Action Plan on Climate Change and Health[2], emphasize that climate action must become integral to health strategies. On 20 May 2026, the UN General Assembly[3] further strengthened the political and legal momentum for global climate action, and the 79th World Health Assembly continued work on the relationship between health and climate change.[4] Yet planetary health is still largely approached through technological interventions, governance, and policy reforms aimed at reducing environmental risks and protecting vulnerable populations.
We suggest that planetary health also has a less examined human dimension: how people experience themselves, relate to one another, and participate in the living world. Horton and Lo (2015) identified conceptual, knowledge, and governance challenges in the emerging field of planetary health. We propose that these challenges are accompanied by a deeper question concerning the relationship between human beings and the world they seek to protect. Contemporary patterns of self-optimization, social acceleration (Rosa, 2013), and alienation (Han, 2015) may weaken experiences of connection, resonance, and embodied participation.
Modern societies also expose people to conditions of chronic stress that place sustained demands on the systems through which the body adapts to its environment (McEwen & Gianaros, 2010). At the same time, increasing reliance on cognitive, technological, and abstract forms of engagement may distance experience from immediate bodily and environmental contexts. From our perspective, these conditions matter because how people inhabit their bodies shapes how they perceive, regulate, relate, and respond. The capacity to remain present with emotional experience, tolerate complexity, maintain connection across difference, and experience one’s embeddedness in the living world may therefore be relevant to the human dimension of planetary health.
An emphasis on embodiment must not shift responsibility for planetary crises onto individuals. Ecological harm is shaped by energy systems, land use, economic incentives, political decisions, and unequal power. Greater bodily awareness cannot change these conditions on its own. Nor should people living with the consequences of environmental damage be expected to respond by cultivating a different inner state. Our narrower proposal is that embodied capacities may affect how people recognize dependence on the living world, remain engaged with others amid conflict, and participate in collective efforts to change the institutions that shape that world. Whether, and under what conditions, they do so requires further study.Our framework draws on phenomenology, embodied cognitive science, neuroscience, affective science, and ecological and transpersonal perspectives. These approaches differ considerably in their assumptions and evidential status, but they converge around an understanding of human beings as embodied and situated participants rather than detached observers. Phenomenology emphasizes lived experience and our embodied involvement in the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Embodied cognitive science and affective neuroscience have likewise highlighted the contribution of bodily processes and organism–environment interactions to emotion, cognition, and behaviour (Damasio, 1999; Craig, 2002; Barrett, 2017; Damasio & Carvalho, 2013). Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance provides a further lens for understanding how relationships with the world can become responsive, affective, and transformative rather than primarily organized around control and appropriation (Rosa, 2019). We propose that embodied capacities may influence how people perceive ecological dependence and participate in collective responses to it. The links between these capacities and planetary health outcomes remain an empirical question.
In this article, we use embodiment as an organizing concept for examining this relationship between inner experience and planetary health. We distinguish four strongly interdependent dimensions: affective, relational, ecological, and transpersonal embodiment. These dimensions are not intended as discrete stages or exhaustive categories, nor as metaphysical claims. They provide complementary perspectives on different ways embodied human beings experience themselves, relate to others, participate in the living world, and understand the scope of the self.
The following sections examine each dimension in turn and consider its implications for individual experience, interpersonal relationships, ecological participation, and planetary health.
A framework linking a person’s inner world to planetary health
We propose a framework linking a person’s inner world—from emotions, regulation, embodiment, trauma patterns, attention, and meaning-making to planetary health. We draw on Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance (Rosa, 2019) as a lens for understanding why modern life can so often be experienced as alienating, accelerated, and “out of tune,” and how more responsive relationships with the world might contribute to a viable conception of the good life in late modernity. Rosa describes resonance as a responsive, affective, and transformative mode of relating to the world: an encounter in which subject and world mutually affect and transform one another, while neither can be fully controlled or appropriated
Further drawing on phenomenology and critiques of disenchantment and separation (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Weber, 2004; Latour, 1993), our framework understands human beings as embodied and relational participants in the world rather than detached observers. This view is complemented by developments in embodied cognitive science, neuroscience, and affective neurobiology, which increasingly emphasize the contribution of bodily processes and organism–environment interactions to emotion, cognition, and behaviour. Antonio Damasio (1999) highlighted the importance of bodily states in consciousness and feeling; Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) has shown how emotional experience emerges through the brain’s integration of interoceptive signals, prior knowledge, and conceptualization; and Stephen Porges (2011) has emphasized the role of autonomic processes in emotion regulation and social engagement. Craig (2002) further described interoception as the brain’s representation of the physiological condition of the body and proposed that this system provides a foundation for subjective feeling, emotion, and self-awareness.
Taken together, these perspectives challenge a simple separation of mind and body and point toward a more integrated understanding of human experience: our capacity to perceive, feel, make meaning, and act is grounded in neurophysiological processes that are continually shaped by our bodily, relational, and environmental context.
Or in plain language, we don’t just have bodies – we are bodies. Our thoughts, emotions, decisions, and relationships are shaped by the ongoing interaction of nervous-system processes, bodily states, perception, movement, and the world around us. Embodiment refers to the capacity to attend to and act through these bodily processes: sensing what is happening within and around us, regulating our responses, and drawing on bodily information when choosing how to respond. In this sense, embodiment is not simply thinking about the body, but developing the capacity to experience, interpret, and act through it.
In this article, we propose a framework for understanding the bridge between inner work and planetary health, structured around four strongly interdependent dimensions of embodiment: affective, relational, ecological, and transpersonal. Within this perspective, these dimensions are not intended as discrete or exhaustive categories, nor as metaphysical claims, but as complementary perspectives on different ways in which embodied human beings experience and participate in the world. Although deeply intertwined, distinguishing between them helps clarify how embodied capacities may shape patterns of relationship, meaning-making, behaviour, and, ultimately, collective life.
Affective embodiment
Contemporary Western culture often treats difficult emotions as problems to be managed or eliminated. We medicate them, pathologize them, dismiss them as irrational, or subject them to intellectual analysis. Emotional struggle is still often interpreted as a sign of personal failure or dysfunction. When difficult feelings arise, people may default to cognitive problem-solving or avoidance, while being continually exposed to messages that discomfort should be eliminated and happiness acquired. Emotion is therefore increasingly managed rather than experienced—through pharmaceutical intervention, ideological projection, digital distraction, or spiritual bypassing (Picciotto et al., 2017). This collective avoidance can also be understood as a cultural adaptation to an environment that rewards cognitive speed, productivity, and external achievement over emotional depth.
Yet emotions are not secondary phenomena that interfere with rational thought. Neuroscience increasingly understands experience as emerging from an integrated system in which brain, body, and emotion are closely intertwined (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013). Emotions play a fundamental role in perception, behaviour, decision-making, and meaning-making. Bodily and emotional processes contribute to the evaluation of experience as the organism continuously responds to internal and external conditions in relation to its needs, expectations, and previous experience (Damasio, 1999; Damasio & Carvalho, 2013; Barrett, 2017). Our emotional and bodily responses therefore do not merely accompany our experience of reality; they participate in shaping it.
Affective embodiment refers to the capacity to experience emotional responses as they arise and to integrate them within the body. Research on embodied emotion and interoception emphasizes the close relationship between bodily processes and emotional experience (Craig, 2002; Damasio & Carvalho, 2013; Greenwood & Garfinkel, 2025). It involves remaining in contact with what a person or event evokes without immediately becoming reactive, analyzing or rationalizing the experience, suppressing it, or turning away from it. This emphasis on staying with present bodily felt affective experience is consistent with experiential emotion regulation, which involves an open and accepting awareness of ongoing emotional experience rather than immediate attempts to alter or avoid it (Ionescu et al., 2025). When feelings are given sufficient space to unfold through the body, they can become part of an integrated experience, creating greater capacity to respond rather than react.
Affective embodiment is not only a theoretical concept but can also be cultivated through specific somatic practices. One approach that explicitly operationalizes this principle is Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP), developed by Raja Selvam. ISP works with emotional experience by helping people attend to and expand the bodily experience of emotion rather than immediately suppressing, analyzing, or acting on it, with the aim of supporting greater emotional tolerance, regulation, and integration (Selvam, 2022).
When emotional experience is repeatedly suppressed or avoided, emotion regulation may become organized around relatively inflexible patterns of avoidance, rumination, and suppression (Aldao et al., 2010). Differences in access to bodily signals may also influence emotional awareness and regulation (Craig, 2002; Davey et al., 2021; Greenwood & Garfinkel, 2025). Such patterns may restrict emotional awareness and create boundaries between bodily experience, affect, and meaning. These boundaries can initially serve a protective function, allowing a person to maintain functioning when an experience feels overwhelming, but over time may limit receptivity to one’s own experience and to that of others (Sheppes et al., 2015).
When emotional experience becomes fragmented or poorly integrated, defensive responses may become increasingly automatic, reducing complexity to simplified interpretations of threat, blame, or wrongdoing. At an individual level, this can reinforce reactivity, avoidance, and projection; at a collective level, related processes may contribute to polarization and the displacement of difficult emotions onto external groups or individuals (Moreno, 2007).
Affective embodiment therefore has implications beyond individual emotional wellbeing. The capacity to remain present with difficult affect influences how we perceive, interpret, empathize, and respond to the world, and is therefore relevant to how we relate to one another and to the larger systems of which we are part. Affective embodiment can thus be understood as one potential foundation for resilience, empathy, and moral discernment—and, ultimately, as part of the inner dimension of planetary health.
Relational embodiment
Relational embodiment refers to the capacity to remain connected with others while maintaining a clear sense of one’s own boundaries and difference. Relationships are not sustained by thoughts or ideals alone, but also depend on the embodied capacity to remain present with oneself while in contact with another. When individuals can stay present with their own sensations and emotions, they are better able to remain engaged in relationship without losing themselves. In this sense, relational embodiment is not simply about connection: it also includes the capacity to step out of a relationship, establish distance, or engage in confrontation when necessary. Connection is neither a necessity nor an end in itself. Rather, relational embodiment makes it possible to enter, sustain, modify, or end relationships in ways that respect both self and other. This capacity to remain connected to others without losing one’s own perspective or sense of self is closely related to what Bowen Family Systems Theory describes as differentiation (Calatrava et al., 2022).
Modern culture often conceives of boundaries as rigid barriers of self-protection: “This is where I end, and you begin.” From an embodied perspective, however, boundaries can be understood more dynamically, as interfaces that regulate the flow of information, attention, emotion, and interaction between self and other. A healthy boundary does not necessarily imply withdrawal. It allows individuals to remain differentiated while connected, making intimacy, reciprocity, and authentic communication possible. Relational embodiment therefore supports the ability to communicate from one’s own experience, reduce domination-based dynamics, and allow difficult interactions or conflicts to be processed or brought to an end without blaming the other or projecting unresolved emotions onto them.
Fuchs (2017) describes how we are bodily and emotionally affected by one another through processes of intercorporeality and interaffectivity. Bodily processes are continuously involved in interpersonal interaction, including bodily resonance and mutual affective influence. From this perspective, relational difficulties cannot be understood solely at the level of conscious intention: embodied states influence how people perceive and respond to one another, including how they negotiate closeness and distance.
When relational boundaries become inflexible or insufficiently differentiated, relationships can become organized around either excessive separation or excessive fusion. Rigid boundaries may contribute to isolation, control, or domination, while overly permeable boundaries may make it difficult to distinguish one’s own experience from that of others, increasing vulnerability to enmeshment, exhaustion, or dependency. Relational embodiment offers a way of remaining sufficiently differentiated to retain one’s own perspective while sufficiently open to encounter the other. This makes it possible to tolerate difference without immediately experiencing it as a threat.
Developing this capacity requires more than cognitive understanding. Somatic awareness allows individuals to notice internal changes, such as contraction, activation, openness, or tension, in the presence of another person and to remain attentive to these experiences rather than immediately acting from them. As emotional capacity expands, it becomes more possible to stay present with discomfort in relationship without resorting to defensive narratives or automatic reactions. One can speak from lived experience rather than simply from an interpretation of the other person. Difference can consequently become informative rather than threatening, while empathy can deepen not merely as an idea or moral principle, but as an embodied experience of resonance. In this sense, relational intelligence is cultivated through the body: through developing sufficient capacity to remain present with the complexity of emotional and interpersonal experience.
This understanding also has broader social implications. If people have difficulty tolerating difference, vulnerability, or relational tension within themselves, these difficulties may be expressed through interpersonal and collective forms of separation, exclusion, or domination. Patterns of othering can become embedded in social structures and practices. The point is not that such phenomena can be reduced to individual nervous-system states, but that the capacity to remain in relationship across difference is relevant to how societies negotiate boundaries, belonging, conflict, and power. The same relational capacity can extend beyond human relationships to how we perceive and relate to the more-than-human world. Relational embodiment opens the possibility of experiencing other forms of life as part of a wider field of felt relevance, involving a shift in how relationship itself is perceived.
Ecological embodiment
Ecological embodiment refers to the felt awareness that the body is not separate from the living world but exists in continuous exchange with it. Every breath connects the organism with the atmosphere; the body constantly exchanges matter and information with its surroundings and responds to changes in temperature, light, sound, food, microorganisms, and other environmental conditions. From this perspective, the body is not an isolated entity situated in nature, but a living organism embedded in and dependent upon the larger biosphere. Ecological embodiment involves experiencing this interdependence not merely as an abstract fact, but as something directly relevant to how we inhabit the world.
This perspective challenges a modern conception of the human being as a self-contained individual, separate from nature and primarily understood through processes occurring within the brain and body. Within such a worldview, nature can appear as something external: a backdrop, a resource, or a problem to be managed. When the living world is perceived primarily in this way, our dependence upon it can become less perceptually and emotionally salient. The ecological crisis is therefore not only a technical or political problem; it also concerns how human beings understand and experience their relationship with the living world. This resonates with the ecological philosophy of Arne Næss, who challenged narrowly human-centred conceptions of value and emphasized the interconnectedness of human beings with the wider ecological community (Næss, 1989).
Disconnection from embodied experience can further reinforce this sense of separation. When attention is increasingly absorbed by abstract systems, digital technologies, economic structures, ideologies, and other conceptual environments, sensory contact with the immediate environment may become less salient. Nature can consequently be experienced as something “out there,” separate from everyday life. Environmental degradation may then remain primarily an abstract or distant problem rather than something experienced as relevant to one’s own embodied existence. Research on climate change communication suggests that the scale, complexity, and temporal distance of climate change can make it difficult for people to experience it as an immediate concern, limiting the motivational force of abstract information alone (Markowitz & Shariff, 2012).
Ecological embodiment involves becoming more aware of this sensory and material interdependence. The air we breathe, the food we consume, the environments in which we live, and the organisms with which we coexist are not simply external influences; they are part of the conditions that sustain our lives. The boundary between organism and environment is therefore dynamic rather than absolute. Ecological embodiment makes this relationship experientially available: we can begin to notice how our bodily states are continuously shaped by and responsive to the environments in which we live.
This does not require romanticizing nature or dissolving the distinction between human and non-human life. Rather, it involves a shift from viewing nature primarily as an object of observation, management, or consumption toward experiencing oneself as a participant within a living system. Research on human–nature relationships suggests that contact with natural environments can be associated with greater connectedness to nature and with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours (DeVille et al., 2021). Ecological perspectives have also emphasized the possible importance of environmental biodiversity for human health, including through interactions between the human organism and the microorganisms in its environment (Rook, 2013).
Eduardo Kohn’s work among the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon takes this argument a step further. In How Forests Think, he asks anthropology to attend not only to how humans experience a forest, but also to the ways living beings within it interpret signs and respond to one another (Kohn, 2013). Ecological embodiment, as used here, concerns the human experience of participation in the living world. Kohn reminds us that this world is not merely the setting for human experience: other forms of life are active within it on their own terms.Within the framework of ISP™, this process can be approached through increasing the capacity to experience bodily sensations and affective states, including what the method describes as energetic experience (Selvam, 2022). As attention to bodily experience becomes more refined, awareness of the body and its surroundings can become more continuous—not because the distinction between self and environment disappears, but because perception becomes more sensitive to their ongoing interaction. The body can then be experienced as a responsive participant in a larger field of life.
Ecological embodiment also has implications for consumption, responsibility, and care. When the consequences of our actions are experienced as affecting a world of which we are ourselves a part, ecological responsibility need not depend entirely on external rules or abstract moral imperatives. It can also arise from a felt recognition of interdependence. Care for the living world becomes connected to an awareness of the conditions that sustain our own lives and those of other beings. In this sense, ecological embodiment extends relational embodiment beyond human relationships to our relationship with the more-than-human world.
Embodied awareness alone does not change the institutions that shape ecological harm. A changed relationship with the living world can also be expressed in collective practices and law. The legal recognition of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, gives representatives a role in speaking for the river as a living whole. Such arrangements do not depend on everyone experiencing the river in the same way. They show how a relationship can acquire public form and affect decisions about the material world (O’Donnell & Talbot-Jones, 2018).
Planetary health therefore requires more than technological innovation or effective policy, important as these are. It also involves the perceptual and embodied capacities through which people experience their relationship with the living systems on which life depends. Ecological embodiment does not provide a substitute for political, economic, or technological change. It addresses a complementary dimension: the capacity to experience ourselves not as detached observers or managers of the living world, but as embodied participants within it.
Transpersonal Embodiment
Transpersonal embodiment refers to a shift beyond exclusive identification with the individual self, in which awareness becomes less centred on one’s own needs, experiences, and perspectives and more open to a wider sense of interconnectedness. Whereas relational embodiment concerns how we remain present and differentiated in contact with others, and ecological embodiment concerns our felt relationship with the living world, transpersonal embodiment concerns the possibility of experiencing ourselves as part of something larger than the individual self. These dimensions are complementary: one concerns how we relate to others and the world, while the other concerns how we experience the boundaries and scope of the self itself.
The search for meaning and purpose is an important and widespread dimension of human experience (Niemiec et al., 2020). Although spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences vary considerably across cultures, many traditions address questions that extend beyond the material and immediately visible self. Such questions can become particularly salient in relation to the finitude of human life. Encountering mortality can narrow attention toward individual survival, but it can also open questions about meaning, belonging, and what it means to participate in life.
Transpersonal embodiment does not require adopting a particular spiritual belief. Rather, it refers to a possible shift in how experience is lived: the sense of self becomes less exclusively identified with thoughts, emotions, roles, and bodily states, while remaining grounded in embodied experience. The individual does not disappear, nor does the capacity to think, make choices, hold values, or act in the world. Instead, identification with any single aspect of experience becomes less exclusive. One can participate fully in personal life while recognizing that no particular thought, emotion, role, or self-concept completely defines who one is.
This distinction is important because transpersonal embodiment is not an escape from the body or from ordinary life. The body provides the experiential ground through which such shifts in awareness become accessible. By remaining present with sensations, emotions, intensity, emptiness, contraction, or expansion without immediately taking them to define the self, a person may begin to experience awareness as broader than any particular content of experience. Contemplative traditions have described related experiences using terms such as witness consciousness, nondual awareness, or unity consciousness. Dossey (2013) develops a more expansive interpretation of such experiences in One Mind, proposing that individual minds participate in a greater dimension of consciousness rather than being entirely separate. This remains a philosophical and transpersonal proposition rather than an established scientific account of consciousness. Contemporary research has also begun to investigate changes in the ordinary sense of self, including experiences described as self-boundary dissolution (Nave et al., 2021).
At the same time, experiences of transcendence can become a way of avoiding rather than integrating difficult aspects of human experience. What has been described as spiritual bypassing occurs when spiritual beliefs or practices are used to avoid painful emotions, unresolved psychological conflicts, relational difficulties, or concrete responsibilities (Welwood, 2000). Transpersonal embodiment therefore requires that expanded states of awareness remain grounded in bodily experience, emotional integration, relationships, and everyday life.
From a phenomenological perspective, the significance of such experiences lies not in proving that consciousness exists independently of the individual organism, but in examining how the experience of self can change. The usual sense of being a separate observer located behind the eyes and looking out at an external world may become less fixed. Awareness may instead be experienced as more dynamic, relational, and less confined to a narrowly defined personal identity. Such experiences have been described in contemplative and transpersonal literature, although their interpretation remains contested. They should therefore not be conflated with scientific evidence for a non-local or universal consciousness.
The body therefore functions not as an obstacle to transpersonal awareness but as its experiential ground. As bodily experience becomes more differentiated and tolerable, sensations and emotions can be observed without being immediately taken as defining the self. Boundaries may then be experienced as dynamic rather than absolute, while individuality remains intact. This does not mean abandoning one’s identity or ceasing to act from personal values and perspectives. A person can still fulfil social roles, develop knowledge, defend a position, make decisions, and participate fully in everyday life. The shift lies in no longer experiencing these identities and perspectives as the entirety of who one is.
This widening of identification can also have ethical implications. When the self is experienced as less isolated and more embedded in relationships, communities, and the living world, the interests of others may become more directly relevant to one’s own experience. Care and responsibility can therefore arise not only from externally imposed moral rules but also from an expanded sense of belonging. This does not mean that compassion or ecological responsibility automatically follows from transpersonal experience, nor that such experiences eliminate conflict or self-interest. Rather, they may provide an experiential basis for considering the well-being of others and the more-than-human world as connected to one’s own.
In this sense, transpersonal embodiment adds another dimension to the movement toward planetary health. Relational and ecological embodiment concern how we remain connected with other people and with the living world while retaining differentiation. Transpersonal embodiment extends this inquiry to the experience of the self itself: how far can our sense of self expand while retaining the groundedness and agency of the individual? Planetary health may therefore require not only changes in systems, technologies, and policies, but also a transformation in how human beings experience their place within the larger web of life.
From embodied experience to collective action
The four dimensions described here concern how people experience themselves and their relationships. They do not, by themselves, explain how societies change. The passage from embodied awareness to planetary health depends on what people do together: how they interpret shared problems, handle disagreement, organize resources, and gain influence over decisions. A person may feel deeply connected to a landscape while having little power to prevent its destruction. Conversely, institutions can protect a place even when those involved do not share the same experience of it.
Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” is helpful here. It asks us to remain engaged with the difficult relationships and responsibilities of living on a damaged planet, rather than imagining that awareness will resolve them (Haraway, 2016). In collective settings, the capacities discussed in this article may help people remain attentive to loss and uncertainty, encounter different interests without immediately withdrawing, and consider the lives affected by their decisions. Whether they do so will depend on the conditions in which people meet and act.
Such engagement needs institutional form. A food cooperative, a community energy initiative, or a group caring for a shared landscape can give people opportunities to negotiate responsibilities and practice cooperation. Its effects also depend on rules, resources, access to decision-making, and connections to wider policy. Ostrom’s work on governing shared resources shows why durable cooperation requires attention to institutional arrangements, not goodwill alone (Ostrom, 1990). We therefore propose embodied capacities as one possible contribution to collective action, whose effects must be studied alongside the distribution of power and the design of institutions.
Conclusion: Embodiment and Planetary Health
The four dimensions explored in this article—affective, relational, ecological, and transpersonal embodiment—describe different expressions of an underlying capacity to remain present, responsive, and connected while experience changes. Although they overlap and may occur simultaneously, considering them separately reveals a widening field of embodied awareness. Affective embodiment concerns staying present with one’s own experience; relational embodiment extends this capacity into contact with others; ecological embodiment brings the living world into that field of awareness; and transpersonal embodiment explores how the sense of self itself can become less exclusive while remaining grounded in embodied life.
This movement is better understood as a deepening spiral than as a fixed sequence. Greater capacity to remain present with emotion can support greater flexibility in relationships. Relational experience can deepen a sense of belonging within the living world, while ecological awareness can challenge assumptions of human separateness. Transpersonal experiences may further expand the felt scope of identity. Each dimension can therefore enrich the others without implying a prescribed developmental hierarchy.
Across these dimensions, boundaries remain essential. Embodiment involves sensing distinction while also recognizing the exchanges that continually cross it. Emotional experience moves through the body; relationships involve mutual influence; organisms exchange matter and information with their environments; and the sense of self develops through participation in a wider world. Boundaries can therefore be understood as living interfaces that support both differentiation and exchange.
This perspective is relevant to the challenges facing humanity today. Ecological degradation, social fragmentation, conflict, and rapidly changing technological environments place demands on our capacity to regulate affect, tolerate complexity, remain connected across difference, and perceive consequences beyond the immediate moment. These challenges are shaped by political, economic, technological, and institutional forces, while also being lived through human bodies and relationships. Embodied capacities consequently form one part of the human dimension of planetary change.
The four dimensions identify capacities that may support this dimension: staying present with difficult experience, maintaining connection across difference, experiencing our dependence on the living world, and questioning the limits of an exclusively individual sense of self. These capacities can influence how responsibility, care, cooperation, and belonging are experienced. They do not replace political action, technological innovation, scientific knowledge, or structural change; they contribute to the human capacity required to engage with these processes over time.
Planetary health therefore depends on both the systems humans create and the capacities through which we participate in those systems. The movement from affective to relational, ecological, and transpersonal embodiment widens the field within which experience becomes meaningful—from the immediate body, through relationships, to the living world and the larger questions of identity and belonging.
Embodiment ultimately brings attention to the conditions through which life is lived: the body, emotions, relationships, environments, and the wider web of life in which they are embedded. It offers a way of understanding planetary health as involving participation as well as intervention, responsiveness as well as action, and belonging alongside responsibility. Embodiment becomes a return to participation in life—the life of which we have always been a part.
About the authors
*Bibiane van Mierlo, M.A., is an educational scientist and psychotherapist specializing in complex trauma, with over 25 years of international experience. Trained in Somatic Experiencing and Integral Somatic Psychology, she is a lead assistant in the international ISP training team and co-founder of Culture 4 Change, supporting organizations in fragile settings .
**Alexandra Zwigard is a body-oriented trauma therapist trained in Somatic Experiencing, Neuro Affective Developmental Psychology, and Integral Somatic Psychology. she is a lead assistant in the international ISP training team and co-founder of the TAP Institute, where she develops trauma-informed programs for healthcare professionals and midwives.
***Willem van de Put, M.A., M.Sc., is a medical anthropologist – philosopher and senior research fellow at Fordham University. Formerly Director of HealthNet TPO, he has more than 35 years of experience in global health, mental health, and humanitarian work. He is also co-founder of Culture 4 Change.
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