Shapeshifting and rebirthing
A dance of interbecoming
Dear friends,
On a full moon night a couple of months ago, I joined a dance on a wild and rocky beach, in the midst of a powerful wind storm.
The wind howled and the waves thundered against the rocks, throwing up exuberant plumes of white spray. And as I wove in and amongst all the other dancers, the icy surf frothing around my toes, I suddenly caught sight of a mysterious shape tucked within a nearby pile of kelp on the sand. Looking closer, I recognized the distinct outline of a ‘mermaid’s purse’ — the egg case in which a small shark or skate developed from an embryo into a fish.
The pouch was empty and torn. The creature had ruptured the strong walls that once held and nurtured its metamorphosis, swimming out — transformed — to meet the wide ocean!
I picked up this cast off egg case and felt its sturdy, brittle weight in my hand. Out in front of me, the waves churned and frothed with the dynamic beauty of ever-changing new forms. The wind’s spiraling vortices were mirrored playfully in the whirling of the other dancers leaping, stomping and pirouetting across the sand.
Proteus, the ancient Greek shapeshifting god of the sea, must have been in his element that night!
As daylight ebbed from the sky, a curved, watery halo of light lifted upward on the horizon. A wave of stillness spread from dancer to dancer. People stopped in their tracks, turning their faces toward the rising moon, a luminous and pinky orange perfectly round opal in the sky.
Our voices rose up to meet the moon with shouts and whistles and wolf howls.
It struck me then, as I stood entranced in the moon’s gravitational pull, at the intertidal zone where the sea meets the shore — that this unknown creature of the sea, who had emerged from the birthing sac, was my kin.
If this creature spoke and I listened, what stories might it tell me? How might it share its adventures of changing form and breaking free? What animal guidance could it offer for humanity, encased within our hard extractive systems that are consuming life rather than enabling it? What animate stories whispered from the sea might help us cross perilous thresholds and meet the imperatives of transformation?
Because all of us alive today on Earth — whether human, butterfly, shark, bat, or tree — are kin. If you go back far enough, we all emerged from the same bacterial multitudes that once proliferated in ancient seas. We emerged from a shapeshifting Earth whose dynamic geology morphs the continents and composes the atmosphere in conjunction with living ecosystems1. Our cells belong to “an ancient, anarchic love story,” the writer Sophie Strand proclaims2. Our symbiotic co-evolution and interwovenness through time is archived in our very cellular mitochondria3.
Dancing with this egg sac in my hand, I felt the threads of my connection with the creature that had grown inside of it. The feeling was visceral, expressed in my saltwater tears, my metered breath and pulsating heartbeat, my reverence for moonlight.
In strange and powerful moments of the dance, I actually felt myself inside of a small, streamlined pelagic body. I felt myself gliding through the cold, dark, moonlit waters, sheltering in the rocky crevasses of the undulating kelp forest, absorbing oxygen through my gills, navigating the advancing swells of the lunar tide with a swishing tailfin!
Have you ever experienced such imaginal moments of shapeshifting? I’m guessing you might have — because in case you didn’t know, we humans are innate shapeshifters!
We each hold within us a wild, human intelligence that is called shapeshifting —buried deep in the memory and architecture of our bones, our nervous systems and our consciousness. Through shapeshifting, we feel into the skin of another, as storyteller Sue Hollingsworth said in a previous conversation. We reach out to know other minds and bodies, mirroring these and bringing them to life in our own imagination and bodily gestures. Through such enactment, we come to know our plant, animal, mycelial and elemental kin on a deep somatic level. Learning, adapting and empathizing with the other, we bring our full bodied intelligence into direct participation and resonance with the living world.
The above is what resonated with me from a glorious conversation between Emerald Podcast creator Joshua Michael Schrei and Simon Thakur, the founder of Ancestral Movement, in a nearly two-hour long episode all about Shapeshifting! I am indebted to both, and in this piece I will try to put my own words to several of the ideas they expressed which illuminate my own experience on the beach.
As Schrei observes, the pervasiveness of shapeshifting in human cultures around the world and across the ages is no accident. Shapeshifting features widely in oral storytelling and mythologies; in martial arts practices and physical theatre performances. Even in our modern era of technological advancement, it remains at the heart of who we are.
As I wrote in a previous essay on Body Intelligence, “the body is our tactile, moving, feeling, sensory interface with the world.” Through shapeshifting, our bodies remember a time when our ears pricked up with the songs of the forest; when our sharpened senses responded to every twitching branch and slithering shadow, to the swirling air currents and the nuances of bird language. Our bodies remember feeling the coursing of the river and the condensation of the clouds with the heightened sensitivity of the hairs, tusks, horns, feathers and skins of our animal kin.
As Schrei observes, “We hold millions of years of animal bodies within us; hold a multiplicity of life forms within us simultaneously — this body made of spiraling layers of mammal, reptile, bird and fish tissues.” Hundreds of millions of years ago, sharks and humans shared a common ancestor — a creature who had eyes and teeth and bones and blood. That creature carried the basic tubular, valvular and skeletal structures that shapeshifted through time and across countless branching iterations in the family tree to pump the blood, filter the nutrients, and form the structures of our modern human bodies.
Through imaginal shapeshifting, we feel into these deep memories of other bodies embedded in our bones, tissues, membranes, and neural pathways. We dip into the braided streams of our becoming, to tap the sharpened sight and soaring heights of the eagle; the acute sensitivity of the antelope on the plain; the sleek, joyful gliding of the dolphin surfing the wave.
Taking full poetic license, I try to imagine the journey of life’s creative intelligence sending out countless new threads over the aeons to form the living web, the vast cosmic Net of Indra that encompasses us all. I imagine this interconnected, animating life force as it shapeshifts and continuously, insatiably weaves expansive new forms within itself. With each branching iteration of reptilian / avian / fish / mammalian design, I envision this intrinsic vital force pushing the boundaries of adaptability, widening the infinite net of possibility. With my peculiar storied and culturally conditioned human mind — itself an expression of life’s boundless, insatiable shapeshifting — I try to imagine the bold intuitive leaps, the symbiotic experiments, the incremental fine-tunings through which life has continually morphed, moon-shot cosmic oscillations and geological ruptures, and composed dazzling symphonies of interbecoming4.
From the overview to the understory
I was astonished to learn from another Emerald episode, aptly titled Your Consciousness Comes from the Moon, that through deep evolutionary time, the moon lent its animating force to life’s emergent dances. We evolved in lunar tides, and to lunar rhythms — with the moon exerting its inexorable gravitational pull on the planetary waters cycling through oceans and bodies. These constant rhythms of ebb and flow shaped the pulsating valves pumping fluids through our animal bodies, and the hormonal cycles that govern our moods, reproductive cycles and birth passages. As Schrei describes, the lunar rhythms with which we and everything else evolved gave rise to our very human consciousness — that unfathomable ocean of mysterious tides, of transformation and emergence, of knowing and unknowing. The moon, like the human consciousness, is also a shapeshifter. Waxing and waning, both are illuminated by reflection, Schrei observes. Both have a shadow side which retains its mystery.
The quest for the moon was transformational for humanity. Escaping the bounds of gravity and travelling far enough out into space, astronauts turned their gaze back towards Earth and experienced the “overview effect”— a feeling of awe from beholding Earth’s splendid, fragile, ethereal beauty. For many, this marked a shift in human consciousness, the emergence of a planetary consciousness.
In one of those funny synchronicities that sometimes happen, just as I was thinking of the overview effect I caught a short audio recording by Alexa Firmenich, the host of the Lifeworlds Podcast, in which she asks: what would be an equivalent moment for today that could spark a similar shift of consciousness to the overview effect?
“What image or sensation of the Earth could we experience that would change us forever?” she asks. What would bring us from orbit to intimacy?
In the wake of the moon landings came the environmental movement of the 1970s. Another key moment arrived, as Firmenich writes, when bio-acoustician Roger Payne submerged a hydrophone in the ocean and recorded the songs of humpback whales, bringing humpback whale culture to human consciousness.
We have been feeling deeper into the living world with our finely tuned instruments ever since, discovering through science, technology and empathy some of the same things our indigenous forebears5 learned through finely tuned relational intelligence and shapeshifting bodyminds. The overview effect gave us a cosmic perspective to see the living earth. Firmenich playfully proposes ‘inworlding effect’ as a term to convey a next evolution of planetary consciousness: feeling down into the microcosmos of the mycelial, microbial, proverbial living soil and gaining intimacy with the dazzling webs of life that enmesh and entangle with us.
On this animate Earth, the oceans echo with whale songs and crackle with the multispecies conversations of coral reefs. The soils teem with mycelial networks tirelessly and symbiotically animating water cycles and composing and decomposing with forests. Within these exquisitely attuned living tapestries, multitudes of beings are constantly devouring one another as they sing and dance and run and climb and fly and wriggle and waggle and thread and ferment and glide and weave their participation with the continuity of life!
Have you ever experienced the conflicting desire both to be directly enmeshed in this living web, and to stand outside of it, just as those astronauts looked down from the lofty heights of space? Going back to Thakur and Schrei’s shapeshifting conversation, the episode touches on a schism of the human condition — it explores how we experience feelings of both separation and belonging in the web of life. Often in our waking lives, with our capacities for mental abstraction, we exit the direct stream of life, and enter a mode of analysing and judging, perspective taking and sensemaking.
I don't see this as a bad thing necessarily; without this capacity, we couldn’t invent those instruments that allowed us to gaze down on earth from space, explore the wonders of the microcosmos, and much more. The harm comes in when separation becomes our dominant, unquestioned mode of being. It seems that perhaps the cultural and intergenerational traumas of our civilisations over the last several thousand years have played a hand in shifting cultural stories from those of partnership and belonging to stories of separation and power-over, increasingly untethered from the living world. There is much more to be explored in this idea than I could possibly address here and now — so perhaps I’ll dive into some themes of trauma in my next essay. But in a very few inadequate words and broad brushstrokes, from the work of Humberto Maturana and Gerda Verden-Zöller, Thomas Hübl, Kosha Joubert and others, I’ve come to a view that when trauma seeps in to the stories of cultures, narratives can shift toward modes of dominance, exploitation and control, opening space for patriarchal, colonial, racist and human-centric patterns of living to take root.
Through ancient knowledge and increasingly modern science as well, we see again and again that in spite of our distinct skins, absolute separation is an illusion. In a magnificent piece, Supracellular, recently published in Emergence Magazine, Sophie Strand writes:
“We have believed, for too long, that our minds belong to us as individuals. But advances in everything from forest ecology to microbiology show us we are not siloed selves but relational networks, built metabolically by our every biome-laced breath, thinking through filamentous connectivity rather than inside one neatly bounded mind.”
The mind is not separate from the body. The body is not separate from its environment. Through our senses and our nervous systems we touch into extensive collective and relational fields. Emerging stories from polyvagal theory to quantum social change speak profoundly to our entanglement and interconnectedness. The membranes and porous boundaries of our skin and cells, of our bodies and communities, our individual and collective minds weave a dance of separation and belonging, of reciprocity and exchange across complex networks and ecologies, in resonance and response with symphonies of other beings with whom we are entangled.
Shapeshifting is how we sense our way back into the stream of direct participation with life’s ongoing symphonies. It plunges us into the stream of ‘visceral, somatic, ecstatic’ knowing, says Schrei, enabling us to become one with the whale, the ocean, the grasshopper, the wind.
Like the oceanic shapeshifter Proteus, we experience deeply felt knowing, gnosis, says Schrei, as our bodies take on the shape of all things:
“[Proteus’s] mercurial wave body touched all things, felt all things, like fingers of sea foam know the shore… he reshaped into all things and through his ability to shapeshift he knew all things that would come to pass because he had become them, had felt the temporal ripples and waves of shape, form, pattern, inevitability through his ocean body…
This is how shapeshifting weaves its way into the heart of insight, of knowing, of human communication.”
Humans may have acted out stories physically for thousands of years before spoken language emerged, Thakur says. Our mirror neurons provide intricate pathways through the nervous system that enable our bodies to feel and respond in real time to all that we perceive. Acting out the stories of the environment with our bodies, we gain a deep, visceral understanding of what is happening, Thakur says:
“Through this relationship to the mirror neurons, this kind of physical storytelling makes us have a stronger empathic response to everything in the environment, including the mountain, the trees, the sky, the water.”
Through ongoing mimicry, our forebears would have known the intricate body language of the animals, Thakur says. Attuned to the whole ecology through ongoing participatory enactment, they would have developed nuanced understandings of the different relationships and movements on the land: the connections between the seasonal rains, the cycles of the moon and stars, and the migrations of animal herds. They would have known that when a certain tree was flowering, the fish would be running in the river. All this information would have been held within the ‘distributed nervous system’ of the entire community, Thakur says. And if the stories of the land were alive in peoples’ bodies, they would have noticed when the rhythms were changing, or if an animal’s body language was sending an important signal about the ecology as a whole. Holding such relational, collective, embodied intelligence in conjunction with the land would have placed humans well to serve as caretakers and protectors of the environment, as keystone species and ‘architects of abundance’, as has been illuminated in the work of Dr. Lyla June Johnston and others.
Which leads me to wonder — as we humans have shapeshifted throughout our evolution, how will we continue to shapeshift with the emerging future we are co-creating? As technological advancement immerses us deeper into virtual worlds of blinking screens, artificial intelligence, instrumentalism and extraction, will we remember how to touch in to the living world, to feel into the shapes of all things? To care for life instead of destroying it, as a sixth mass extinction picks up pace? To reinvent ourselves as a keystone species?
Perhaps the all-knowing, shapeshifting god Proteus would tell me — if I ever could catch him!6
Instead of catching Proteus, I heard the living world speak from the shark egg pouch. Connecting with the small being who grew inside of it felt like a call back to the wild, an invitation to the freedom and ecstasy of joining with other minds and bodies, and feeling the world through another skin that is also my own.
I am reminded that the creature from the egg case grew from an embryo into a fish within a firm enclosure. As its body matured, it grew to a point where the casing became too restrictive and it had to break out so that it could swim free. I feel the power of this moment of birthing — when the structures of holding become constraining — when the growth and development of the body can no longer be held by the structure that encases it.
This inspires me to wonder: what if the chaos, confusion, fear, sorrow and pain that so many of us humans seem to be feeling now are contractions of rebirthing processes? What if life is asking us to dream and dance into new iterations of consciousness, new multiplicities of being, new portals of change as a multitudinous, multispecies, entangled thing? What if we were to shapeshift and evolve our capacities to be not only wiser and more compassionate, but also more fluid and fluent in our multiplicities of interbecoming?
Dancing with this egg sac on the moonlight beach, I felt myself joining with the whole living web in offering up a prayer to the future. A prayer to be carried up on the wild winds of freedom, and down into the darkest depths of the sea. A prayer for life’s wild, entangled willfulness to grow and shapeshift and evolve.
The late evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris spoke of our time as humanity’s ‘butterfly moment’ of transformation. Life, she said, has a maturation cycle, a natural impulse towards greater levels of complexity and cooperation. In evolutionary terms, our species is still young. Like adolescents, we have been going through a feisty (her word), reckless, competitive phase, testing limits and boundaries, over-consuming, wading through the reeds of confusion and uncertainty as we try and figure out the perplexing emotions and powerful capacities of these human brains evolution has bestowed upon us.
According to Sahtouris, humanity’s current predicament echoes a moment a couple of billion years back, when the planet was populated by single-celled bacteria. Locked in fierce competition for increasingly scarce resources, they poisoned the atmosphere and consumed all the food. They transformed the environment to a point where they almost couldn’t survive. There was no choice but to evolve to new patterns of cooperation — manifesting first in the nucleated cell, and later on in complex multicellular organisms7.
This is the butterfly moment. The metamorphosis. Encased in the cocoon, the caterpillar dissolves. Its tissues and structures break down into an amorphous soup. Then the stem cells begin to form a new body from a new blueprint. Finally, the butterfly flies out from the cocoon, transformed through this maturation cycle from a heavy feeder into a floating pollinator whose light touch helps regenerate the land.
What does this mean for us now, and what does it look like? I haven’t a clue! But what I do understand now on a deeper level is that evolution equals shapeshifting. And this, friends, is our moment to shapeshift: to feel into the skins and stories of others, to deepen our inter-becoming, to feel the shape of all things, to sense into and participate in the world’s interspecies emergence. That may sound kind of grandiose, but it doesn’t have to be. We can shapeshift in all kinds of ways — through a glimmer of recognition with the bird in our backyard, or with the tree boughs dancing in the wind that we see from the window.
This week, I’ll be dancing through life with a keener awareness of my inner shapeshifter. I’ll be stretching myself to notice what happens in those present, awakened moments of the dance. I invite you to do the same! What do you experience and learn by feeling deeper into other bodyminds as you deepen into yourself? Let me know — I’d love to hear from you!
With love,
Megan
See Stephan Harding, Animate Earth.
As quoted in the Emerald Podcast: Neckhairs of the Shapeshifter
See Lynn Margulies and Dorion Sagan, Microcosmos.
An evolution of Thich Naht Hanh’s term interbeing, posited by Indy Johar and others.
If you go back far enough, all of us came from indigenous ancestry, as is beautifully evoked in this conversation between Dr. Lyla June Johnston and Alexa Firmenich.
Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff of the Proteus Initiative in South Africa share the story that Proteus will reveal the future to you — but you have to catch him first (which you never can, he’s already moved on to a new form!)