GROUND: HOW MODERNITY DISCONNECTED FROM THE EARTH, WHY IT MATTERS, & HOW TO FIX IT
Over the past 5,000 years, alienation has shifted the normative neurological baselines of our Grounding System, the most ancient of our three primary autonomic systems, functionally disconnecting us from the earth. In addition to undergirding the existential ecological crisis humanity is facing, the global spike in complex chronic illness a direct neurobiological sequelae of this embodied alienation. This book addresses how this happened, what it means, and how we can transform it across sociological and timescales ranging from the civilizational to the deeply personal.
A brief conversation with Gabriel about GROUND
Who is this book for?
GROUND is an inquiry into the millenias-long uprooting of humans from the earth.
Why did you write this?
After I finished The Neurobiology of Connection, I began thinking seriously about writing a book focused on each of the other two autonomic systems. Modern trauma therapy, specifically the Polyvagal Theory, has a deep understanding of the dorsal vagal system, this sub-diaphragmatic vagal system that undergirds lifethreat responses. But it doesn’t seem to me that the field at large understands that this conceptualization of the oldest unmyelinated branch of the vagus is only lifethreat occupied in its pathogenic aspect. I wanted to write about the system in its health-creating aspect, where it connects us to the earth, but realized that in order to do so I would need to look at the past several thousand years of modern civilization, so-called, because most modern people have been uprooted from their deep relatedness with the Living World. This is a cultural phenomenon, an imperial phenomenon, a byproduct of domination mind, and it is also a profoundly physiological and autonomic phenomenon. So I wanted to tackle both of these layers, and explore how we can transform this.
What surprised you in writing the book?
Most of the books I write surprise me, to be honest. But something that surprised me here, pretty consistently, was how much the book wanted to grapple with the origin stories of the modern world. It spends a fair bit of time looking at the antecedents to modern civilization through the lens of this denaturing. Perhaps this finally puts to good use my classical liberal arts education ;)
How is the book structured?
Like The Neurobiology of Connection, the book feels pretty fractal, but in GROUND the movement is really between these different scales of time and social organization. We look at the civilization itself, by which I mean the antecedents to what we consider the modern world and the modern sense of self. At this scale, we are looking at the past 5000 years. We look at the colonial framing of the past 500 years. At a more personal level, I look at my family history for the past 125 years or so, and then I look at my personal history. And interwoven with all of this there is the question of autonomic physiology, of our nervous systems, of how these events are shaping what it feels like to occupy these bodies that we wear.
Anything else you’d like to tell us about the book?
GROUND is the second book in the Autonomics Trilogy, which I regard as the primary expression of my lifework. We are anticipating the book’s arrival in December of 2025, but if you are inspired by this project you can pre-order. Pre-orders help us to bite off these large and ambitious projects, which we self-fund.
Like all the books in the trilogy, this is a real deep-dive. The book will be more than 400 pages, and it is comprehensive.
We are putting a huge amount of effort into the look and feel of the books in the trilogy; everything is designed by hand. There are well over a hundred illustrations, all in full color. The book will be hardcover, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, with a dustjacket (pictured at the top of this page).
