Before You See, You Belong

Awareness and the relational mind

Last week my daughter looked at me and said,
“Mum, we live on Planet Earth, but we can’t see the Earth.”

Her words were remarkably precise. We live inside something so total that it disappears from view. Our situation becomes invisible, not because it is hidden, but because it is continuous, and because we are disconnected: the planet does not appear as our one true home when we are standing on tarmac, fixated on the next cup of coffee. Only when awareness opens does the blind spot reveal itself. And blind spots like this are both man-made and mutable. If we can drop the desire to acquire more knowledge and commit to unlearning, they will release us.

We might conclude from my daughter’s observation that human perception is limited, and of course it is, but something more subtle is true. Our perception is participatory, meaning it is also capable of dissolving limits and borders and judgements, and generating fluidity. The moment we named the delusion: we live on the earth, but we can’t see the earth, my guess is you suddenly saw the planet, and more than that, felt her. When we work closely with this kind of category error of perception, we begin to remember our power, not diminish it. Something comes into view that was previously unseeable. Not because reality changed, but because awareness opened — which is the hinterland of growth our species so desperately needs.

The world is not ‘out there’ in finished form happening to us (a position of victimhood), the world is continually appearing through the conditions of our perception, our history, our relationships, and our attention. We are not passive receivers of reality, we are co-creators in its unfolding. If we really let this in, it bestows upon us a huge level of freedom, agency, and responsibility.

Which is why the human mind is a system we must learn to use, rather than be unconsciously used by. Most of us do not realise we have a mind in this sense, we experience its output as reality; we assume that what appears is what is, rather than an appearing. Can you catch that? It’s not something the mind is designed to hold on to, but you can glimpse it, and over time learn to stay awake to it.

Phenomenological philosophy and depth psychotherapy meet in this recognition. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who placed the living body at the centre of how reality is known, observed that perception is never neutral or detached, but always embodied and situated. We do not stand outside experience looking in, we are already inside it, shaped by it, and shaping it in return.

Developmental psychoanalysis makes a parallel claim, beginning at the very start of life. In 1960, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote, “There’s no such thing as a baby. There is a baby and someone.” Meaning that wherever we find an infant, we find maternal care, or a primary caregiver. Without that, there is no infant. The baby will die. And within the biological imperative of this unit, the baby’s mind has yet to develop any sense of separate self. It’s a clear reminder that in the human realm there can be no isolated perceiver encountering a separate world, there is only a relational field within which awareness gradually forms.

We begin not as observers, but as social beings inextricably linked to each other, both intergenerationally and right here and now. And although our minds can and do individuate, our maturation depends upon our ability to step into the nuance of reciprocity and mutuality.

Melanie Klein extended Winnicott’s understanding by describing how the early relational bond is not left behind as development proceeds, but taken inward, becoming part of psychic structure itself:

The good breast is taken in, it becomes part of the ego, and the infant who was first inside the mother, now has the mother inside him.

In biology there is a phenomenon that underlines this deep interconnection in the most literal way. During pregnancy, cells from a foetus cross the placenta and enter the mother’s body, where they can survive, migrate, and even integrate into maternal tissues for decades after birth. Similarly, maternal cells can be found within the child, establishing a lineage that outlasts gestational time and persists across lifetimes. This bidirectional cellular exchange (known as microchimerism) reflects an embodied continuity between mother and child, living in and through one another.¹

Individuation, which is the process of becoming ourselves and realising meaning so deeply explored by Jung, does not leave relationship behind, it grows through it, just as awareness matures not by leaving the field, but by becoming conscious within it. From this perspective, attachment theory can be understood as a way of naming how early bonds, and disruptions in those bonds, continue to live on in the nervous system and play out in relationship, shaping how a person loves, expects, protects, and reaches for others.

Indigenous traditions understand the deep power of human relationship from another direction: the mother–child pair as a cosmological centre.

It’s that circle with the dot in the middle. It means mother and child. That foundational kinship pair is the centre of everything. All honour and respect and all resources are coming into and going out from that sacred place of increase.

Mother and child is the centre of everything. If your society is not built around that, then it will fail. If your society is hostile to that relation, it will do worse than fail, it will destroy what sustains it.

Everybody says it takes a village to raise a child. But instead we ask one person to be the village, to do everything, and then judge them for falling short. That unequal break in the mother–child relation becomes a template for wider disconnection, socially, spiritually, relationally. The pattern repeats from the planetary scale right down to personal relationships. — Tyson Yunkaporta²

Across Indigenous knowledge, contemplative traditions, ontological enquiry and psychoanalytic theory, a shared insight becomes visible. Relationship comes before perception. Context comes before conclusion. Field comes before figure. We do not stand apart and then relate, we first belong, and only later learn to distinguish.

This has consequences for how we understand and explore consciousness. New Age spiritual culture gravitates toward charismatic authority and exceptional figures who appear to stand outside ordinary accountability. Yet whenever authority is separated from reflective process and relational feedback, distortion becomes more likely. Not because spirituality is misguided, but because human beings are human.

Both Indigenous custodial systems and the profession of psychotherapy build safeguards around accountability directly into their structure. Elders are held in circle rather than placed apart. Practitioners remain in supervision, continuing education, and personal enquiry throughout their working lives. It’s a form of guardianship — for those they serve and for their own perception.

Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta describes how, within custodial cultures, corrective feedback is not considered unkind but necessary, even bracing at times:

There’s something in our tradition of the slap, and the growl… where you really do growl somebody. It’s supposed to shock them and cause them to reflect — and it’s supposed to transform them.

Correction, in this sense, is not humiliation but belonging. It keeps a person inside relationship and inside responsibility, rather than outside it in spiritual entitlement or unchecked authority.

There is a reason psychotherapists train for so long, and why maintaining a license requires so much ongoing professional development, supervision, therapy and more. It is a formal recognition that no one stands outside conditioning or unconscious wounds. Reflection is not optional, feedback is not an insult, maturity is not self-declared. The work remains alive through plurality — of teachers, colleagues, and continued exposure to wider intelligence. Not one voice, but many elders, participating in the continued health of the field.

All of this brings us back to awareness. The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist expresses it with quiet precision: the world we attend to is the world we experience. Attention is so much more than a narrow beam illuminating a fixed conclusion, it is world-forming. It selects, shapes, and discloses.

When we cannot see the human mind, the world appears fixed. We sense deeply that we are trapped in some kind of repeat and yet we can’t work out why. Usually, we blame someone else, or ourselves. But there is another way. When we can learn to welcome the intelligence of our unconscious, which is a reservoir of honesty, and when we are supported to see the context we are coming from, different possibilities become available. Not because we are doing anything new, but because we are finally attending to our lives at the level of being.

This is Maturation as I practice it. Zero self-improvement or transcendence-seeking. Simply learning to recognise the way of being through which our experience is currently being generated. In other words, becoming context-aware and seeing the lens while still looking through it. Most importantly, this refusal to become a better version of ourselves engages the ordinary part of us that needs help, friendship, grace and patience. In short, compassion.

Something new inevitably follows. The moment we see that perception is shaped, we are no longer fully trapped inside the shape. Space opens up, choice becomes available. The past did not disappear, it is just no longer mistaken for the present.

We are not in the world as objects among other objects, but as beings who belong to it. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty

None of this means turning away from injustice or harm. As a psychotherapist, I work every day with the legacies of abuse, violence, trauma and systemic oppression. These are not illusions of perception, they are events in the human field that leave real marks in bodies and relationships. Context-awareness must not be used to neutralise psychodynamics. It is what allows us to meet reality more cleanly: to recognise both what has happened to us and how we now participate in the worlds we are shaping with others, and to develop the capacity to raise our voice. There are absolute truths and there are lived, relational truths. We remain accountable to one another.

As my Chi Kung teacher Thalbert said to me recently: you can’t fail at being human. We live inside relationship, we perceive from within context, and we mature as awareness becomes conscious of the field it is part of. It is my particular calling to carry the work of relational healing (Psychotherapy) alongside the possibility of freedom (Maturation), and this unusual weave has a singular vision: for you to remember the wisdom you were born with.

I’m offering an in-person Retreat Day in London on Friday 12th March, with five places available. It’s a close-knit group space where this approach is experienced live, through Elemental Chi Kung, therapeutic holding, ontological enquiry, and Dreamweaving with sound healing. All supporting the emergence of the unique essence that dwells within a person and longs to live. If you’d like to join, talk to me.

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/foetal-cells-hide-out-in-mums-body-but-what-do-they-do

2. From an exceptionally good episode of Joshua Michael Schrei’s Podcast The Emerald: https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/sand-talk-tyson-yunkaporta/