Even Shitty, Dissipative Structures Birth New Life

How We Can All Be Mothers To A New World.

Mothers and dissipative structures – what do they have in common? We're familiar with it as a gift of Nature, like rotting trees mothering mushrooms but, what about toxic structures and how do they relate to me and my development?

And who mothers whom? David Bohm and other quantum researchers saw biological growth as less about chemicals and enzymes and more about the interaction between the field and the subatomic particles of our quantum (fascial) bodies. The development of mothers and children is triggered by and emerges from the interaction and the background contents of the examined and unexamined field they live within. By field I mean a defined space to grow within, like the potting soil in the pot, the nutrients in the soil, the sunlight, watering frequency, etc. In the mother/baby diad this includes ancestral history, trauma, circumstances and one's deepest desires and support for it. As any mother can attest, babies make mothers as much as mothers make babies.

Sometimes I worry about how long it will take to overtake the entropy of a dissipative structure without nose diving into chaos. Do not have enough time or energy to find out? Is the clock running out on our ability to turn this ship around?

Dissipative structures are old systems that can no longer adapt to changing conditions. They fight change because it spells a death sentence for them. They slow down, dig in and become more and more disordered and factionalized. This is known as entropy, and it is a hallmark of a dissipative structure in a death rattle.

When I first learned about dissipative structures, I assumed they were not good things to be stuck in. Entropy meant inevitable burnout and the end. Who wants to live in an entropic universe?

I felt rushed and fearful, like a hamster on the wheel of time-running-out. I mean the doomsday clock is currently at 80 seconds to midnight. This did not help my anxiety. I worried that I would lack the energy for a long, protracted fight for freedom, like it was up to all me, a skinny David against the giant Goliath.

But then, I discovered that it doesn't take anything to create something new! Spontaneous emergent behavior is a thing in systems theory. A new system can emerge from what seems like nothing and begin organizing itself into more complex structures.

So dissipative structures, even brutal, corrupt ones, can actually birth regeneration! When an old structure begins to dissipate, it is losing it's hold on things. It's become entropic because it cannot respond and adapt creatively to change.

It looses some of it's energy and that energy becomes available to birth something entirely new. Dissipative structures, even shitty old patriarchical ones, can birth new life. Evolution is a thing we cannot stop. It is happening now. The progressive increase of disorder releases an energy that can be channeled into another direction – a productive, democratic, empathic direction.

From this can emerge a new, open, interactive form. This is the regeneration of biological life and social systems. It lives in our culture as much as our bodies. It is spontaneously emergent. It arises from nothing and begins organizing itself, as if motivated by an unseen force, an elegant, Implicate Order.

This is the nature of life and we can all be mothers to it. It lives in us too, in our bodies and our experiences and this is where to begin.

There is an unborn, undying, unwounded part of us calling out to be loved and nourished into our fullness of Being. It is coherent, plasmic and highly intelligent. Plus, for you nay-sayers, it is not woo-woo. It is science.

So, welcome in the Mother in us all. We are all mothers, male, female and in-between, to ourselves, each other and our world. It is a choice and a practice.

Our bodies can support us in this. Let your trauma dissipate and feed your radiant matter so that you are more coherent, stable, calm, creative and responsive. Even that hamster wheel of time-running-out fades into a more expansive sense of time-as-flow, gently holding us in sweet present-awareness as we march, call and co-create a future from our coherence, not our fear.

If you want to explore coherence practices that support you for the long term to be more calm, focused, embodied, present, and on purpose, subscribe to my Substack (feel free to restack or share too). I'll be sharing lots of explorations into breath, perception shifts and somatic movement practices that will turn the ship around without summoning the chaos monkeys.

Photo by Jesse Bauer on Unsplash