What does it mean to remember that we belong to the Earth? For four days in late April, Buddhist teachers, Indigenous wisdom keepers, climate scientists, and writers gathered for Tricycle’s annual Ecology Summit. Their shared answer was simple: come back to your senses, literally.
Many of us have come to believe we’re separate. Our screens, our cities, our devices have trained us to forget that we breathe the same air as the trees, that our blood carries the same minerals as the rivers. The summit invited us to remember otherwise, to feel our way back into belonging.
I asked organizer Sam Mowe about this year’s focus on embodiment. His response cut straight to the heart of things. “With AI on the rise, more of us are asking what it really means to be human. One answer is that we are bodies having sensory experiences through the earth. Reconnecting with our bodies and senses is how we reconnect with the planet—and that can be part of how we respond to the ecological crisis.”
Climate scientist Kate Marvel said her job is to appreciate interdependence. No system stands alone. Study the atmosphere, and you must learn about the ocean, because they’re in constant conversation. Care for tropical coasts, and you must care for polar ice, because that ice drives sea level rise. “A molecule of carbon dioxide or methane emitted anywhere,” she said, “warms everywhere.”
The summit was brimming with vivid, hands-on practices that brought this interdependence to life.
Zen scholar Chris Ives spoke of embodiment as a gateway. He instructed us to step outside, or simply open a window. To check in with our senses one by one. To sit near a tree, or a potted plant, and breathe until we could feel the exchange of oxygen passing from leaf to lung, carbon dioxide drifting back again. “Really feel that reciprocity,” he said. “That dance.”
Ayya Santacitta, a Buddhist nun trained in Ajahn Chah’s forest lineage, offered a meditation on the four great elements. We sensed the hardness of our bones, the wetness of our blood, the warmth of our skin, the movement of our breath. Earth, water, fire, wind: the same elements that hold up mountains and stir oceans. “We never cut the umbilical cord to the body of the earth,” she said.
Yuria Celidwen, a scholar of Nahua and Mayan lineages, asked us to remove our shoes and feel the ground beneath our feet. To open our eyes, turn on our cameras, and take in all the little windows before us. Her talk was the only one not recorded—a deliberate choice, she explained, to honor the fleeting, irreproducible nature of presence.
Karen Wakonda Lewis, a medicine healer and Dharma leader of the communities of Laguna and Isleta Pueblos, invited us to draw. First, how our body feels. Then, the air moving through us. Then, how it feels to sit with a living thing, a plant or a tree. The practice, she explained, quiets the brain so the body can receive, so we can be in relationship. “Back and forth. Back and forth.”
Belinda Eriacho, of Dine (Navajo) descent, shared the worldview that guides her people: the Earth is not a place but a person. Her bones are the mountains. Her hair is the grass. Her breath is the wind. “When we understand this,” she said, “everything changes.” Our senses, then, are not just tools for collecting information. They are the language of reciprocity: how the Earth speaks and how we respond.
Karen remembered being taught to sprinkle water and sweep the yard at dawn. This task, passed down through generations, cultivates reciprocal care: “You’re sweeping Mother Earth’s hair, her skin.” In Japan, Zen monastics practice samu—washing dishes, raking leaves, sewing robes. Embodied sensory labor, Chris explained, enables a keener realization of interbeing.
Different ways of learning reciprocity. Different ways of practicing its shape over time—generations of caregiving, languages that teach kinship, a responsibility that outlasts any single meditation session.
The sacredness of mundane tasks raises an urgent question: what do we lose when we outsource every chore to a machine? When we no longer touch the soil, no longer feel the broom in our hands, no longer stand barefoot on the ground? Technology has given us much, but it has also stolen our small, daily reminders of connection.
And then there is the question of permission.
Karen spoke plainly about the deep scars left by Christianity’s violence against Indigenous peoples. About the distrust that lingers between tribal nations and Buddhist communities, because sacred ceremonies—talking circles, prayer practices—were taken without permission. “We can only move at the speed of trust,” Belinda agreed.
And yet, there they were. Indigenous wisdom keepers in dialogue with Buddhist teachers. Sharing wisdom and reticence alike. In vulnerable, hopeful relationship across traditions.
The summit embodied this tension from the start. Speakers began their talks with a land acknowledgment: Lenape, Abenaki, O’odham, Nipmuck, Wampanoag. One speaker called this continent by its original name: Turtle Island. Chris named himself what he is: “an uninvited settler.” A reminder that, for many of us, our presence here is not innocent. We gather on stolen land. We need to repair this.
Yuria spoke longingly of in-person gathering, of bodies and hearts touching through sight and smell and sound and belonging. And then she acknowledged the gift of Zoom, which brought us all together across oceans and borders. The complexity hung in the air: we are here, together, but we are not here. We are reaching toward each other through screens, through distance, through centuries of harm.
The forces that have brought us to ecological collapse—colonialism, capitalism, the illusion of separation—did not arise overnight. Neither will the healing. So we turn to older, wiser traditions that remember what we have forgotten. We return, as best we can, to the senses. One breath, one touch, one small act of attention at a time. Perhaps that is where repair begins.
Nina Müller is a Mindfulness Teacher who offers online mindfulness coaching sessions. If you would like to find out more, please visit The Mindful Practice to book a complimentary consultation.
See more
Tricycle’s Buddhism and Ecology Summit: A Sense of Belonging
Related features from BDG
Dear Otter: A Letter on Complicity and Compassion
I See You. I Believe You. I Am Here.
Sitting with Your Wounded Child
