Our Mother Culture

The quality of our relationships has everything to do with our capacity to emotionally attune. The term attunement refers to our ability to be ‘in tune’ with what is moving within us and others (for example emotions, sensations and the state of our nervous systems). To attune with others we need to first be able to attune with ourselves. We do this by learning how to feel and embrace our own embodied state and emotions. If we are not intimately in touch with what is happening inside ourselves when relating with others, then it’s not possible to attune with what’s happening in others when they are relating with us. This is because we are not separate and are existing as a continually in-flux ‘we’.

Our ability to attune determines our ability to perceive both how we are impacting others and how we are being impacted by others. To move beyond the power-over paradigm that wreaks havoc within our relationships, and that created and perpetuates our current crises, we each need to become aware of, and touched by, how our behaviours impact others and how we are impacted by others. To do this we need to re-member how to attune, both with those immediately around us and with those less obviously impacted by us.

Many of us in the Global North have come to understand attunement through the lens of ‘Attachment Theory’ which has made quite a comeback of late. Attachment Theory originates from psychologists John Bowlby and Jean Piaget. More recently, countless folk have extended this western psychological theory to describe how our adult relationships are shaped by how we were parented by our primary caregiver/s when growing up. 

Almost all modern day writing about attachment in children and adults focuses on the role other humans play in the development of our attachment wounding, and the attachment style this gives rise to (anxious/ avoidant/ disorganised/ secure). Rarely, if ever, do we hear mention of how our relationships with ourselves, other-than-humans and the invisible realms of the more-than-humans (ancestors, spirit, soul, for example) impact the health and quality of our relationships. 

The reality is our relationships across all four of these dimensions are what shapes not only the quality of relationships but also our; sense of belonging; overall wellbeing; ability to give our gifts in the world; and our motivation to take loving action in solidarity with that and those most marginalised by Modernity.

We coined the term Primal Attunement to point to the essential role of all four of these dimensions of attunement.

Attunement with ourselves

The foundation of healthy relationships is our relationship with ourselves. This can feel confusing what with all the emphasis currently being put on the cult of the individual and the need to experience ourselves as inseparable from all other beings, human and otherwise. And the reality is, it is paradoxical. We can not experience our interbeing and inherent inseparability unless we are in conscious relationship with ourself - our feelings, thoughts, emotions, senstations, nervous system states and deep imagination.

When we were little, many of us lacked what we needed to be able to grow our muscle around feeling what is happening within us. Most of us grew up with parents who didn’t know how to welcome our multitude of feelings and needs and so, we shut them down and stopped expressing them. This shutting down of emotions and overriding of needs has wreaked havoc on our nervous systems - which further compounds our inability to experience and respond to them in healthy ways. Many of us aren’t even aware that we have emotions and needs - other than when they burst/leak out every so often. Depression, illness, addiction and mental health challenges are often a result of trapped emotions. As adults, most of us need to actively work at relearning how to feel and channel our emotions. 

Healthy relationships also require that we are in healthy relationship with the multiverse of our own psyche - that is, all of our many parts. Many of these parts are what we might call our ‘inner protectors’. Their well intentioned role is to protect us from feeling the pain of what we could call our ‘exiled’ parts: those parts of us who, when young and dependent on our caregivers, did not get their needs for safety, mirroring or love met. 

If we are not aware of what is happening within our own body, heart and psyche it’s actually impossible to attune and cultivate healthy relationships with others. To be able to sense the impact we are having on others, and that they are having on us, we need to first be able to feel and sense what is happening within our nervous system, heart and body. From this place we can then tune into the ‘we’ space between us and allow true relationship to flow. This is no small thing and for most of us takes effort and commitment to cultivate.

Attunement with other humans

It is true that much of our difficulty within relationships and groups roots from how we were treated by our primary caregivers and the general health of our family systems. You can read a tonne about this in the plethora of books available on adult attachment. For those of us growing up in some version of a nuclear or single parent family, the extent to which our attachment style is ‘anxious’, ‘avoidant’, ‘disorganised’ or ‘secure’ is indeed very shaped by how emotionally healthy and available our primary caregivers were whilst we were children and teenagers. And the health of our primary caregiver’s parenting was shaped by the health of their primary caregivers. 

Crucially though, how we weathered the wounding resulting from our primary caregiver’s inevitable imperfection has a lot to do with how supported we were around the other dimensions of attunement - and the extent to which there were other healthy adults around us when we were little and growing up.

Those very few of us blessed to grow up in relatively healthy extended or intentional communities that included adults able to attune across one or more of these dimensions (attunement with self, other humans, other-than-humans and more-than-humans), will have benefitted from a diversity of healthy-enough caregiving, support and love that goes a long way in weathering our attachment wounding.

We are calling in a world in which we all get to grow up and become elders in earth-loving communities full of humans able to attune across all four dimensions of attunement.

Attunement with the Other than Human World

The other-than-humans are the creatures, weather, elements and physically embodied beings that are, well, not human. They are our wild relatives of the myriad shapes and consciousnesses that make up Earth community. We might say that the first and fundamental attachment trauma is the separation from Earth that our modern cultures have resulted from, and continue to create. In the agony of disconnection, we spend most of our time filling this emptiness with the short-lived delights and comforts of modernity. This insatiable hunger is expressed in the Buddhist worldview as Hungry Ghosts, beings with tiny mouths and huge stomachs, always needing more and never feeling satiated.

 Growing up in Earth-centered cultures is an essentially human blueprint that we have sadly forgotten or had taken from us by the waves of colonization and capitalism that have moved across the planet. Returning to our felt sense of belonging to Earth community heals the trauma at the center of our modern power-over paradigm, inviting us once again to think like an ecosystem, or at least know ourselves as woven into one, rather than as separate humans. In this shift of consciousness from human-centric to Earth-centric, we are both relieved of the burden and isolation of experiencing ourselves only as an individual, as well as welcomed into the mature responsibility of reciprocity. However, this re-membering can be a painful process as we learn to empathically feel the consciousness and aliveness of all beings around us. 

We might feel the pain of the creatures or the Earth where we live, we awaken to the history of wounding, but also the blessing of connectedness and belonging. Our gifts of skill and talent, Beauty making, songs, prayers, cleaning up the watershed, tending of desecrated ground, all are ways we participate with and express our interweaving within Earth community. 

Attunement with the More than Human World

The more-than-humans are the sacred beings; holies, gods and goddesses; the spirit guides and allies; ancestors - both human, other than human and of place; the Genus Loci and Anima Mundi; the unseen realms. Some say that our current polycrisis is, at its essence, a spiritual problem. That we have lost our connection to the Holy has left a kind of emptiness within that we try to fill with buying things. We consume even spiritual experiences, like plant medicines or other current fads to fill the hole left by the hungry ghosts that have consumed us from within. Re-membering ourselves as part of a larger web of life of more than human ancestors, allies and the Holy, awakens our creativity and our capacity to offer our gifts to the world in a way that is regenerative and particular. We feel the blessing and support of Life as we navigate the ups and downs of the human world. We become a vessel for the more-than-human power our current crises is calling for us to embody. 

The Mother Culture

At Starter Culture we call Primal Attunement the “Mother Culture” because in a milieu of fermentation, the main creature being tended and fed is called “the mother”. From this, new fermentations which feed and nourish us are created by taking part of the mother and adding new “food”- milk for yogurt, flour and water for sourdough etc. We imagine this to be a model for the way of cultivating the safe attachment needed to attune with Self, other humans, other than humans and the invisible realms of the more-than-human. Neuro-plasticity shows us that it is never too late to learn, heal and transform our way of being in relationship with the world. And we are part of the world. 

We could say then that supporting primal attunement is the ‘mother culture’ within all of Starter Culture’s offerings in the world.

“…many Indigenous peoples see these manifestations of violence as symptoms of a deeper and older form of violence that happens at ontological and metaphysical realms- the realm of “being”. This deeper, older violence is the imposed sense of separation between ourselves and the dynamic living land-metabolism that is the planet and beyond, as well as the theological separation between creature and creator.”

Vanessa Machado de Oleveira 

“It’s well known within domestic abuse circles that if a perpetrator wants to control you, they cut you off from the support you need most.”

Shannon Wills, Ancestral Medicine