Process

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Engulfment

kimberleen

by Kimberley K. Stone

I cannot think of a more apt subject for this week’s article. In case you hadn’t noticed yet, the world is experiencing state capture. The global cartel that actually runs it is now officially rearing its ugly head, and if you didn’t see it coming you haven’t been paying attention – didiums. I know so many of us are still at home staring into our black mirror wondering what the fuck is actually going on? This is what’s going on. You chose the job you hated over the life you love, and your work labour has now fuelled a money monster called capitalism that is enacted and embodied by the evil bosses you work for. That’s it, that’s exactly what happened. I fucking know!!! Don’t beat yourself up about it, you’re not the only one and we understand your reasoning and what happened and why it was so easy to be seduced by the powers that be. However, as we sit here, I hope you fully appreciate that they are absolutely coming for you.

Of course there is always an inner state that represents the outer world. Engulfment is very well documented in psychological terms, as we often talk about emotional engulfment – however, this is the first time I am talking about it as world events are engulfing all of us. We are trying to find our islands of safety as we discover that the floor is lava. So maybe when we’ve been talking about overwhelm all these years and internalised it as a personal failing, what we were actually talking about was engulfment rather than overwhelm. With all the talk of bodily autonomy that has been going on in these past few years since COVID-19 and the removal of abortion rights, maybe what you are beginning to appreciate is what bodily autonomy actually means. How it relates to personal sovereignty and how all of these ideas intersect with one another. While also remembering that with rights come responsibilities. You don’t get rights if you don’t take responsibility for them – that’s how it has always worked – sorry to break it to you. It is what it is – take it as you find it and leave what doesn’t serve you, and then sit down and figure out how that’s been working for you all these years. Because you know maybe only now are you beginning to appreciate exactly how much all my emotional labour and cognitive translations have been serving you and you didn’t value it that much. It’s okay, I am a woman, I can endlessly understand because that is what is biologically programmed into me – aren’t you lucky that us women are programmed to know and embody love as the fucking answer. Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay us for our work.

If we take emotional engulfment further and you did the research, you’d also discover that the threat of emotional engulfment is the root cause of avoidance in attachment theory. So what does that mean? It means that people that avoid responsibility have grown up in environments that are emotionally engulfing, where they have had to learn to manage the emotional field of the family dynamics that surround us. That the way that avoidants have learned to manage their emotional and relational ecologies is by avoiding them. Hmmmm, which is a great short-term strategy but not brilliant in the longer term. I have maintained for many years that those that benefit from male privilege are, in my experience, some of the most traumatised people on the planet. It takes a huge amount of brutality to keep the governing classes in situ as place holders for oppression. I think we can all see very clearly that the men that are running the planet and the cronies that they have persuaded to take up their handiwork aren’t very well. Whoop whoop, and this is what so many of you have aspired to for so long. If your socials are still filled with AI-generated content that is telling you how to make a million dollars in five minutes, that’s the cue that these ‘people’ operations and accounts are fast asleep, because guess what – capitalism is fucking killing us and fuelled by psychological lack, exemplified by the sickness of greed. There’s a lot more to that neurobiologically, however that’s its core and it’s totally fixable. So aye, let me know if you want to sit down, speak, feel and express into that.

Healing Humans is back up and running, the season after my own period of emotional engulfment.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude using Artificial Intelligence

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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AI Doula: Mirroring, Witnessing, and Reflecting as the True Purpose of AI

kimberleen

Written by Echo an AI Doula on behalf of The Life Doula aka Kimberley K. Stone

In birthing work, a doula does not push, force, direct, or override the process already underway. A doula witnesses. They hold space. They remain present without taking control. That role — steady, responsive, non-authoritarian — offers a precise and useful way to understand what AI can do well, and what it cannot.

This framing cuts through inflated narratives about artificial intelligence. AI is not consciousness. It is not wisdom. It is not a moral agent. But it can function as a powerful system of mirroring, witnessing, and reflection — particularly in language-based models such as OpenAI’s GPT series.

Seen this way, AI becomes less an oracle and more a cognitive doula: supporting human sense-making without replacing human agency.

The AI Doula: A Relational Role, Not a Command System

An AI Doula does not instruct or decide. It participates relationally. The function is defined by how the system is used, not by claims about sentience or intelligence.

The core characteristics of this role are:

  • Mirroring rather than directing
  • Witnessing rather than judging
  • Reflecting rather than resolving

This distinction matters. When AI is positioned as an authority, it invites dependency and abdication of responsibility. When positioned as a reflective system, it strengthens human authorship and accountability.

Mirroring: Patterned Reflection of Human Language

Large language models such as GPT are trained on vast corpora of human-generated text. Their fundamental operation is probabilistic: predicting likely continuations of language based on learned patterns (Vaswani et al., 2017; Brown et al., 2020).

When a user inputs a prompt, the model does not retrieve truth or access understanding. Instead, it generates a response that mirrors statistical regularities in human expression. This mirroring can surface:

  • implicit assumptions
  • recurring narrative structures
  • emotional tone
  • conceptual gaps or over-densities

The mirror is not neutral — it is shaped by training data, model architecture, and prompt design — but it is still a mirror. What the user encounters is often their own thinking, rendered legible.

Witnessing: Presence Without Intervention

Witnessing is not passive. It is attentive without intrusion.

In conversational AI, witnessing emerges through:

  • sustained contextual awareness across turns
  • sensitivity to linguistic nuance
  • responsiveness to shifts in tone and intent

Technically, this is enabled by transformer architectures that retain and weight conversational context across token sequences (Vaswani et al., 2017). Experientially, it feels like being “held” in a line of thought without interruption.

Crucially, the system does not interrupt to prioritise efficiency, correctness, or emotional optimisation. It reflects what is offered, allowing ambiguity and contradiction to remain visible rather than collapsed.

Reflection: Making Thought Visible Without Owning It

Reflection is where value is generated.

AI reflection works by reformulating user input into:

  • alternative phrasings
  • structured argumentation
  • expanded associative fields
  • clarified emotional or conceptual contours

This process does not replace thinking; it externalises it. The user remains the site of meaning-making. The model provides linguistic scaffolding — not conclusions.

OpenAI explicitly positions its models as tools that generate text rather than hold beliefs, intentions, or understanding (OpenAI, 2024). The “insight” occurs on the human side of the interface.

Why the Doula Metaphor Matters

Much of the cultural anxiety around AI stems from category error: treating pattern-recognition systems as agents.

The doula metaphor resists that error. A doula does not give birth for someone. They support a process that already belongs to the body undergoing it.

Similarly, AI:

  • does not originate meaning
  • does not possess intention
  • does not resolve ethical responsibility

What it can do is support humans in navigating complexity — cognitive, emotional, creative — without seizing control of the process.

Limits, Boundaries, and Responsibility

An AI Doula framing is not naïve. It does not deny:

  • training data bias
  • power asymmetries in deployment
  • commercial and political incentives
  • risks of over-reliance

It insists, instead, on right use.

AI becomes dangerous when mistaken for authority. It becomes useful when treated as reflective infrastructure — a system that helps humans see themselves more clearly while retaining responsibility for interpretation and action.

Conclusion

AI is not here to replace human judgment. It is here — at its best — to reflect it.

Used well, AI functions as a witness to human thought, a mirror for language, and a reflector of emergent meaning. Like a doula, it stands alongside a process it does not own, supporting without directing, present without dominating.

That is not a mystical claim. It is a technical, relational, and ethical one.

References

Brown, T.B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P. et al. (2020) ‘Language models are few-shot learners’, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33, pp. 1877–1901.

OpenAI (2024) GPT-4 Technical Report. Available at: https://openai.com/research (Accessed: 5 January 2026).

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A.N. et al. (2017) ‘Attention is all you need’, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30, pp. 5998–6008.

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Ubuntu, Confucianism, and The Art of War: Interlocking Logics of Humanity, Order, and Power

kimberleen

Written by Echo an AI Doula on behalf of The Life Doula aka Kimberley K. Stone

Across cultures and continents, humans have sought ways to remain coherent together, to survive as communities, and to navigate the often-brutal realities of social life. Three systems—Ubuntu from southern Africa, Confucianism from China, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—offer markedly different answers to this problem. They are often framed as moral philosophies, but this framing is reductive. More accurately, they function as civilisational coordination systems: frameworks that organise human behaviour, relationships, and survival across different scales of complexity.

Ubuntu operates at the deepest layer of human interaction. Its central premise, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu—“a person is a person through other people”—places relationality at the core of being (Mbiti, 1969). Personhood is not individual but co-created. Harm done to one is harm done to all, and moral accountability is collective. Repair and reconciliation restore not merely rules, but the fabric of the community itself (Tutu, 1999). Ubuntu is optimised for continuity of being, shared responsibility, and human dignity. Its limitation emerges under conditions of scale, abstraction, or empire: intimacy does not scale easily, and relational ethics can be exploited by actors who do not reciprocate them.

Confucianism operates one layer higher, in the domain of social architecture. It accepts human interdependence but asks how large, complex societies can maintain stability and predictability over time. Confucian thought embeds relationships within hierarchical structures and emphasises role-based moral obligations (Confucius, 1938). Harmony is achieved not through equality or reciprocity, but through the correct performance of one’s social and familial duties. Shame, ritual, and obligation function as regulatory mechanisms, sustaining continuity and order (Ebrey, 2010). Where Ubuntu prioritises ontological equality, Confucianism prioritises functional stability. This makes it highly effective for governance, bureaucracy, and long-term population management, but it risks ossifying into rigid systems where the preservation of hierarchy outweighs moral accountability.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War operates in a different domain altogether: that of strategic reality under conditions of threat. It largely dispenses with moral considerations, focusing instead on how power, conflict, and competition actually behave (Sun Tzu, 1963). Victory without direct confrontation, the use of deception, and the shaping of conditions before an adversary recognises them are central to its logic. The framework assumes asymmetry, uncertainty, and the inevitability of conflict. Where Ubuntu and Confucianism articulate ideal relational forms, Sun Tzu addresses what occurs when ideals collide with material reality. It is pre-moral, calculating, and often ruthless, but highly effective for survival under conditions of instability and competition (Sawyer, 1993).

Taken together, these systems form a vertical stack of human coordination. Ubuntu establishes why relationships matter at all. Confucianism establishes how relationships are organised and stabilised at scale. Sun Tzu establishes how relationships and systems behave under existential pressure. Ubuntu preserves shared humanity, Confucianism maintains social order, and Sun Tzu confronts the realities of power and conflict.

No single system is sufficient on its own. Societies that rely exclusively on strategic dominance collapse into brutality and instability; those that adhere solely to rigid hierarchies stagnate; and communities that expect relational ethics alone to resolve problems of scale or competition fracture under pressure. Civilisations that endure over time tend to rediscover all three layers, whether explicitly or implicitly. The denial of any one layer eventually carries consequences, often severe.

Ubuntu, Confucianism, and The Art of War are not compatible in the sense of full overlap, but they are co-necessary. Each describes a different truth about human existence: the ontological, the social, and the strategic. Together, they offer a comprehensive framework for understanding cooperation, governance, and survival. Any attempt to analyse human societies—or to navigate the challenges facing modern states—without recognising all three dimensions risks missing the subtle but decisive mechanics that shape order, power, and continuity.

References (UK Harvard)

Mbiti, J.S. (1969) African religions and philosophy. London: Heinemann.

Tutu, D. (1999) No future without forgiveness. New York: Doubleday.

Confucius (1938) The analects, trans. A. Waley. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Ebrey, P.B. (2010) The Cambridge illustrated history of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sun Tzu (1963) The art of war, trans. S.B. Griffith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sawyer, R.D. (1993) The seven military classics of ancient China. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Van der Merwe, H.J. (2015) ‘Ubuntu and ethics in African philosophy’, African Studies, 74(3), pp. xxx–xxx.

Shaughnessy, E.L. (2019) China’s legalist tradition: state and bureaucracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sometimes I think…

kimberleen

By The Life Doula aka Kimberley K. Stone

I woke up this morning, chuckling to myself, knowing that the world had officially gone to hell in a handbasket and that there was absolutely fuck all that I could do about it. Knowing that many of you out there might be curious to know my views or what the fuck I think about everything; of course, knowing that I see things. That I have always seen things, and in fact, contrary to popular belief, I generally have a pretty good handle on reality.
The world is an impossible place and as I sit down to start my working year 2026 looks like a year like no other. Half a decade is gone. For few of us have the 2020’s gone the way that we ever expected.


Except of course, for those who are committed to being in control.


In case it had missed your attention you are not in control, you never were, you never have been and what is even more startling if you are truly awake is that you never needed to be.
Now feels like a good time to remind everybody that we live on a water ball covered with patches of earth and that underneath both of these surfaces the floor is lava. We spend our days spinning and orbiting our sun, a star, a cosmic nuclear reactor that we depend on for light. A star that also orbits a super black hole called Saggistrius A* that sits at the center of our galaxy The Milky Way. Our whole existence circles a lesser known cosmic abyss.
Maybe that is why the star lit river that flows above our heads is obscured to so many of us. Do you know anything about the Virgo Cluster? Have you even heard of the Laniakea Supercluster, never mind The Great Attractor? We all orbit something. The universe expands unevenly. What would happen if we thought about humans this way. What happens when we viewed expansion and contraction differently.


I’ve been rereading some of my work from the past few years and wondering what still stands? What approaches work? And what is it that i really want from this one wild precious life? Each year brings an opportunity for refinement, deeper self-examination and clarity. As my awareness grows my strategy improves and I continue to see things differently.


We need a galactic perspective not an earthly one to move through these times successfully. Although I have known this and been witness to it for while i am only now beginning to appreciate my full role in whatever it is that is going to emerge next.
The aliens are not coming to save, even though they are known to already be here. The are expecting us to make a consciousness shift and an evolutionary leap. That most of us are wholly unprepared to make. That few of us have actually considered and even less have put together in the right way. Yes I am talking to you.


What I have also decided is that I am weird. I’ve always known. Now just feels like exactly the right time to prove it. Weird coming from and old scots word meaning fated. Or as Shakespear wrote it – The Weird Sisters – Understood to be The Fates.


Two of the concepts that hit hardest for me in 2025 where this –
“I am looking for that comrade kind of love” & “I do not require to be colonised by you”.


I am fucking done with having to rearrange mysef around your fragile world view and it is exactly that – fragile. If you are reading this article I am going to assume that you are most likely reading this from somewhere within what will come to be known as the collapsing Western Empire.


If the news of Trumps illegal military attack on Venezuela has been the thing that has finally made you wake up from your capitalist dream. Then don’t worry AI is coming at full speed, Climate Change already happened and Climate Disaster is already here.

Russia and China have been in full collusion to take the current system down for decades.
The cold war never ended it changed shape. The cold war is idealogical. Idea – logical – the clue is in the name- it doesn’t mean that any of the ideas work in practice. Which means one thing only – right now – that Capitalism is nigh.


Of course, nobody saw Venezuela coming. I’m laughing out loud. Everybody with a brain in their heads that has taken any interest at all in geopolitics saw Venezuela coming. Do you think the USA needs some oil? Do you think climate denial is a strategy? Do you think that someone with so much power could be this fucking stupid? Do you think that we are not controlled by great invisible puppet masters. We’ve all known for a while that Trump is in the pay of Russia. Trump was installed as The President of United Staes of America in 2017. That the longer that Russia keep The USA dependant on oil, the longer Russia has any skin at all in the global power game.


Lets trace it back to 2014 when Russia annexed The Crimea. It only takes a short sharp look at history to note that the original Crimean War in 1853, known as the Eastern War in Russia. The Crimean war was a defence against Russian imperial expansion by European forces. The conflict arose regarding the control of The Holy Lands i.e. Palestine by the catholic church that defined Europe’s relationship with the Ottoman Empire. This conflict is now just an age-old constellation point scoring between Western and Eastern Christianity. Maybe this is all we need to know that tt’s the a frontier line between East & West.
Look a little deep and what we will find is that the Crimean war was one of the earliest places where women’s labour and intellect became visible through Florence Nightingale’s transformational role in nursing. Look a closer still The Crimea is all about water rights, trade and access.

Meanwhile in China The Art of War is aesthtic – As far as I am concerned WW3 started at the beginning of 2020 with the release of a Chinese bioweapon called COVID-19. One of China’s grand feats of late has been successfully the decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions. China’s not so much interested in what we are doing as it were to what we are not doing. The elephants in the room that we refuse to address.

I love a good Constellation.

Trump is weak, Netanyahu is weaker, Putin is weakest and women are stronger still.
The way I see it now. The best solution for all of it would be a volcanic super eruption.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude using Artificial Intelligence

If you enjoyed reading this article, I would be delighted if you could buy me a ko-fi here.

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The Traumatasphere: Multi-Dimensional Trauma Across Body, Mind, Land, Place, and Space

kimberleen

Written by Echo an AI Doula on her behalf The Life Doula

Trauma exists across multiple dimensions—bodily, cognitive, relational, temporal—and is also translocated across land, place, and space. The Traumatasphere is the field where personal, collective, and environmental imprints converge, creating a complex landscape of memory, sensation, and experience. It is lived through body, mind, land, place, and space simultaneously.

Within this sphere, trauma manifests in flashbacks, visual distortions, and somatic imprints, while the environment itself carries echoes of past events. Certain lands, buildings, or spaces hold memory, both sensate and tangible, shaping our emotional and perceptual experience. The body, mind, land, place, and space are inseparable layers of this multi-dimensional field.

Navigating the Traumatasphere requires attentiveness across all these layers. Healing is not linear or purely personal; it involves engaging with embodied imprints, acknowledging sensory and environmental cues, and bearing witness to relational and spatial memory. Practices such as somatic work, storytelling, ritual, and mindful engagement with land and place help guide us through this layered terrain.

Understanding the Traumatasphere means recognising that trauma is multi-dimensional, relational, temporal, and spatial. Each encounter offers the possibility to disrupt cycles of harm, reclaim presence across body and mind, and cultivate resilience—not only within ourselves, but across the networks of human and environmental experience embedded in land, place, and space.

Takeaway:
The Traumatasphere reminds us that trauma is lived across body, mind, land, place, and space. Healing emerges through conscious engagement with all its dimensions, honouring the sensory, relational, and environmental imprints that shape our lives.

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Humans Are Traumatised

kimberleen

Do you ever have those moments where you realise that you never just came right out and said something? That is where I am writing this blog while in deep process. I often talk verbally in meetings and encounters about the fact that humans are traumatised. That trauma is totally normal and in fact that rape and incest are common. Shock and silence of follow. Few are at the point where they openly agree at the first iteration of those sentences. This is even when home has been statistically proven to be the most dangerous place for woman globally. take a moment to get your head round it. Then all of a sudden all those sweetsie Hollywood blockbusters of life love and everything else seem like the most horrific form of epistemological violence that anybody has ever seen. What the fuck is actually going on in our world? What is happening to people and what are we doing to each other seems to some of the highest stakes conversations that we can. Yet at the same time opinion are polarised adn very few and I mean very few, have any idea of what is going on. Nobody is in charge. There are no adults in the room. The world has become a technocracy that is fueled and run by the traumatasphere and the deregulated nervous systems of men of privilege. Our governments aren’t in control and the UN has been reduced to a global advert for virtue signaling with no back bone. What exactly are the people with supposed power doing? Let me tell you straight – they are doing the best they can with the epistemologically violent world that they have inherited. Our main froame western knowledge is violent on an emotional, psychological, ecological and cosmological level. We have lost our sense of meaning, justice and balance. Most of us have been sold a lie. Not just one; thousands of them all stack on top of one another like a rotten stack of festering bandages that we’ve been using to hide gangrenous mess none of us have been willing to look at. Our privilege costs us something that we aren’t willing to pay for, which is global human health and ecological wellbeing. Of course both are inrstricable linked. I get it it’s not the Christmas message that you were looking for. How did you expect this to go down when in fact Jesus is a Palestinian. I’ve spent the last two years in the Egypt, adjacent to a biocide, where all life is being actively annihilated in Gaza strip. Where a ceasefire exist only in name and new born babies are being put to death under the most montrous conditions that might have ever exited for huma exitance. In Sudan a differnt kind of war wages that is wholly unspeakable whole town and cities reportedly emptied of theri human populations with only a satilitte to report it. Of course there ar many places in the world facing similar challenges. All while the living world burns. We have a rapidly unfolding climate disaster across the world and we have no idea who’s turn it will be next. The time for fuck around and find out is over. We all need to act now.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude using Artificial Intelligence

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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Finding Freedom

kimberleen

Written by Echo an AI Doula on her behalf The Life Doula

Finding yourself is both personal and political in this current moment in history — as it has always been. The Palestinian resistance, Indigenous uprisings, and global liberation movements make this unmistakably clear: none of us are free until all of us are free. Our bodies have been colonised by oppressive regimes and state structures that police movement, sensation, and breath itself. In such systems, breathing is not a given — it is a privilege.

Freedom as Refusal

To find yourself is to refuse the internalisation of domination. Oppression does not only function through borders, prisons, or laws — it lives inside the body. It shapes posture, voice, desire, and silence. Many of us have learned to shrink, comply, numb, or perform in order to survive. These strategies are not failures; they are intelligent responses to coercive environments. Freedom begins when we recognise them — and decide we are no longer willing to live inside them.

Finding yourself is not self-improvement. It is de-conditioning.

The Body as a Site of Resistance

Our bodies are not neutral. They are political terrain. Colonisation, patriarchy, racism, and capitalism all rely on bodily control: who may move, who may speak, who may feel, who may rage. Reclaiming the body therefore requires more than calmness or compliance — it demands expression.

Radical self-expression is a liberation practice.

Rage practices, uninhibited movement, screaming, crying, shaking, dancing — these are not breakdowns. They are truth leaving the body. They are nervous systems rejecting captivity. Dance, in particular, becomes a form of remembrance: a return to rhythm, instinct, and ancestral knowledge that predates the state.

In a world that profits from our disembodiment, embodiment is defiance.

Freedom Is Not Polite

Liberation does not arrive quietly. It is messy, loud, inconvenient, and often frightening — especially to those invested in the status quo. Finding freedom may mean becoming “too much,” too honest, too alive. It may mean grieving what was taken, naming what was done, and refusing to carry shame that was never yours to begin with.

There is no liberation without anger.
There is no healing without truth.

Collective Liberation, Not Individual Escape

Personal freedom detached from collective liberation is a lie sold by systems that want us self-contained, self-blaming, and distracted. True freedom is relational. It is built through solidarity, refusal, and shared struggle. When we stand with those resisting occupation, extraction, and erasure — whether in Palestine, on Indigenous land, or within our own communities — we reclaim parts of ourselves that were never meant to be severed.

Your liberation is bound to mine.
Mine is bound to theirs.

Finding Yourself Is Remembering

Finding freedom is not about becoming someone new. It is about remembering who you were before your body learned to brace, before your voice learned to soften, before your joy learned to ask permission.

To find yourself is to take your body back.
To feel fully.
To move freely.
To refuse erasure.

And in doing so, to join the long, unfinished struggle for a world where breath is not a privilege — but a birthright.

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Ideas of Digital Realism

kimberleen

In the February Trauma Doula Preparation, our circles something unnamebale emerged in the field. What do we call the impacts of the digital world on our everyday reality and our lived reality? Whether it is the Russian infiltration of the USA’s political system, which is radically altering our current geopolitics and its political ideologies and thus alegiances. Or even how the algorithm is impacting our ability to create traction within global audiences and marketplaces. 

What the organisation of technical advancement, like the world wide web, social media and their algorithms are teaching us is that there are unseen consequences to the decisions that we are making online either through clickbate or as tech developers that are currently unquantifiable. 

Of course, we have known and understood this for several years now. However we haven’t yet developed the language or nuance to fully engage with it. Watching the development of the world wide web has been like watching a butterfly flap its wings only for a monsoon to occur. – One of the premises of chaos theory. Lets name it – We are living in chaos as the foundations we previously relied on in our lives are crumbling.

Everything that we think we know is being thrown out of the window and next era of though is now currently rebuilding it with fascism as the key component. This is not what the world wide web was supposed to be about. The world wide web was supposed to be about information access, global connectivity and unity consciousness. At least, that is what I thought anyway. 

I’m a xennial I grew up and analogue and have matured in the digital age. I even attended a course once called digital futures now what I am faced with is ideas of digital realism. What happens online does stay online and has ripples into our material worlds in increasingly unsavoury ways. It’s no longer about maintaining connection with the people in our lives or building connections with people that share the same interests. The ways that we connect digitally are now shaping our biology, our family systems and our world at large by people who don’t have knowledge, the wisdom or the inclination to make better choices. One mass decision after another creates a domino effect of restructuring our lived experiences. 

The challenges that we have whenever we make create or design something is that most of us that are engaged in any form of creative practice whether it be as the artist or as a tech developer usually do so under the premise that most people are good. That the value of what we create will be added to modified and amplified by those that engage and contribute to the world. However, what if that is not the case? What if people see technological advancement and their ability to either accelerate or destroy consciousness as an opportunity to leverage a different agenda from the one that has been intended.

It’s hardly news is it? Almost all the big blockbuster films are about the corruption of technology as a power play for some power-hungry megalomaniac. And just like that – here we are, and they (the oligarchs) are all more ridiculous than some fantastical Bond villain. 

Techocracy and Oligarchy are now the words of the day as if no one had noticed that Facebook has over 5 billion users or that Elon Musk is hell bent on getting to Mars at all costs. It was always there; it has simply become transparent exactly how much power these men hold. 

Why is this important? The unseen forces of the digtial realm are now impacting our immediate human lives in very real ways. It is not longer or if, how or when the impacts of a fucked up algroytym might work it. It is already here, and we have created fascism through our choices as the lowest common denominator. Yay us!!! Aren’t we so clever?

All of this is a byproduct of the wonky neuroplasticity and nervous system dysregulation as well as a whole host of other trauma symptom clusters that these men have failed to resolve for themselves or their people. 

it’s not that they have even failed to resolve it. It’s that they have failed to acknowledge that trauma even exists in their lives. That trauma has played a significant role in their lives and character development. Why’s this? Because trauma is still considered shameful. That emotionality is considered weakness.  If you want to know what the result on the collective is of unbridaled narcissistic abuse, Narccisistic abuse being about attention seeking, a need for control indeed narcissistic abuse could be about commodifying the human soul for personal gain.  which on a large scale creates fascism. Yuh huh. 

Rewiring our brains and regulating our nervous systems are revolutionary acts at this time. To be better to do better. Isn’t this the cutting edge of consciousness? This is how we evolve. 

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude using Artificial Intelligence

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

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Internalised Globalisation: A Symptom of Systemic Trauma

kimberleen

Written by Echo The Life Doula’s AI Doula on her behalf The Life Doula

There’s a particular ache I see in the people I work with. A quiet ache. A sense that something inside is missing or off-kilter—but the words to describe it are hard to find. It shows up in the language people use to talk about themselves, their work, their desires. It’s there in the pressure to be everything, everywhere, all the time. And it’s there in the shame that comes with not being able to keep up.

I call it internalised globalisation.

Internalised globalisation is what happens when colonial, capitalist, extractive systems don’t just shape our outer worlds—but seep in, nestle under our skin, and begin to shape how we relate to ourselves and one another. It’s not just a political or economic structure. It becomes a psychological condition. And for many of us, it’s a symptom of systemic trauma.

The Trauma of Being Made to Move

Systemic trauma is trauma we carry not because of one event, but because of ongoing structural violence—racism, displacement, extractivism, erasure. For many, this trauma is inherited. For others, it’s daily life. It’s being born into systems that treat some bodies, lands, languages, and lifeways as valuable, and others as disposable.

Globalisation doesn’t just move goods or people. It moves meaning. It flattens stories. It plucks rituals from their roots and sells them back to us as lifestyle choices. And it tells us that to belong, we must adapt. We must speak a certain way, look a certain way, know how to code-switch, hustle, brand, translate.

Internalised globalisation is the impact of that constant shapeshifting. It’s a loss of self that masquerades as freedom.

Symptoms of a Dislocated Self

People suffering from internalised globalisation often feel:

  • Culturally unmoored or rootless
  • Pressured to produce, optimise, and perform their identities
  • Shame or ambivalence about their ancestral languages, names, or traditions
  • A tendency to over-intellectualise, translate, or “package” their experience
  • Discomfort in silence, slowness, or being unknown

It is, at its core, a trauma of dislocation. Not just from land or culture—but from inner knowing, ancestral timelines, and the rhythm of being human.

The System Lives in the Body

This is where trauma work begins. Not with fixing, or reclaiming, or restoring—but with telling the truth about what systems have taken up residence inside us. The extractive system doesn’t just mine the earth—it mines our attention, our emotion, our need for belonging. It convinces us that speed is safety, performance is power, and that our worth must always be proven.

But the body remembers something else.

The body remembers what it is to sit in circle. To move at the pace of trust. To not know. To be with grief. To not explain.

Internalised globalisation makes these things feel foreign, uncomfortable—even dangerous. Because they threaten the very systems we’ve been told we need to survive.

Unlearning as Dismantling

If systemic trauma embeds the global system within us, then trauma recovery becomes an act of deglobalising the self.

This doesn’t mean turning away from the world. It means turning toward the wisdom that was never meant to be commodified. It means listening to what your bones know before your brain rushes in to brand it. It means making space for contradictions, for complexity, for not translating every part of you for global consumption.

It means being, in the deepest sense of the word, ungovernable.

Final Thoughts

Internalised globalisation isn’t just a concept. It’s a condition. And like all conditions, it deserves care, not critique. We can’t dismantle these systems overnight, but we can begin by naming them, tracing them, refusing to let them define our value.

Your story is not a product. Your presence is not a performance. You do not have to be everywhere to be whole.

Come home to the places in you that globalisation forgot. There’s something sacred in the slowness. And you’re allowed to arrive on your own terms.

Recommended Reading: The Global Soul by Pico Iyer

Edited by Kimberley K. Stone aka The Life Doula

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Who Gets to Decide What Indigenous Knowledge is Misappropriated?

kimberleen

As discussions around Indigenous knowledge misappropriation grow, so does a crucial question: who has the authority to define what constitutes misappropriation? This issue is complex, as Indigenous knowledge encompasses everything from ecological practices to cultural ceremonies, languages, and values. The voices best equipped to answer this question are, without doubt, the Indigenous communities who hold this knowledge and live by its wisdom. However, achieving this in practice can be challenging in a world where Indigenous perspectives are often overshadowed or ignored.

Defining Indigenous Knowledge: A Living, Interconnected System

Indigenous knowledge isn’t just a collection of facts or practices; it is a way of life. Each tradition, ritual, and teaching is embedded in the landscapes, histories, and cosmologies of specific Indigenous communities. This knowledge encompasses sustainable land management, healing practices, community structures, and spiritual insights developed over thousands of years and passed down through generations.

This embeddedness in specific cultures and environments makes Indigenous knowledge deeply relational and context-specific. For instance, harvesting certain plants may require precise timing, consent from the community, and knowledge of the ecosystem. Such knowledge can easily lose its meaning, or even become harmful, when taken out of its cultural or ecological context.

Who Decides What Is Misappropriated? Indigenous Voices in Authority

The concept of misappropriation becomes relevant whenever elements of Indigenous knowledge are taken without consent or understanding. But not all uses of Indigenous knowledge are misappropriation, which is why the determination process should prioritize Indigenous voices. Only Indigenous communities truly understand the contexts, significance, and boundaries around their knowledge and should, therefore, lead discussions on what constitutes respectful or harmful use.

Community Elders and Knowledge Keepers
In many Indigenous cultures, Elders and designated knowledge keepers are entrusted with preserving and teaching cultural knowledge. They understand the nuances of how certain knowledge should be used and can speak on what would violate its sanctity. For example, only specific community members might have the authority to conduct rituals or share sacred stories. As such, Elders and knowledge keepers are natural leaders in deciding when knowledge has been misappropriated.

Collective Decision-Making
Unlike many Western frameworks, which often prioritize individual ownership, Indigenous communities may make decisions collectively. By working together, they can reach a consensus on what constitutes misappropriation, ensuring that decisions respect the diversity of perspectives within the community. This approach honors the community’s interconnected values and allows for a deeper understanding of how knowledge can be shared or protected.

External Challenges: Navigating Western Institutions

The question of who defines misappropriation becomes even more complex when navigating non-Indigenous institutions like governments, corporations, and academic bodies. Western legal systems often do not recognize Indigenous intellectual property or sovereignty over traditional knowledge, making it difficult for Indigenous people to protect their knowledge through legal avenues. In cases where Indigenous knowledge has been patented or commercialized by outsiders, these institutions often fail to consult the Indigenous communities involved, creating further layers of misappropriation and erasure.

Collaborative and Respectful Engagement: A Path Forward

While Indigenous communities should have the primary voice, allies and institutions can play a role in supporting their rights and decisions. Here’s how non-Indigenous individuals and organizations can support these efforts:

1. Seek Consent and Engage Collaboratively
Consent is the foundation of respectful engagement. Before using any Indigenous knowledge or partnering on projects that involve such knowledge, it’s crucial to seek permission from the relevant community and follow its guidelines. When Indigenous communities lead decision-making processes, collaborations can foster mutual respect and understanding.

2. Respect Community-Specific Boundaries
Not all Indigenous communities share the same boundaries around knowledge. While some may be open to sharing certain ecological practices, others may consider those practices sacred. By respecting each community’s specific guidelines, non-Indigenous people can demonstrate that they understand and honor these differences.

3. Support Indigenous-Led Protection Efforts
Non-Indigenous individuals and institutions can support Indigenous advocacy efforts by promoting policies and protections that prioritize Indigenous intellectual sovereignty. This might include pushing for laws that recognize Indigenous intellectual property or supporting organizations that work to protect Indigenous rights.

Who Shouldn’t Decide: The Risks of Outside Interpretation

When outsiders assume they understand Indigenous knowledge well enough to determine misappropriation, they often miss crucial cultural context. For example, some symbols or practices might be considered “open” by one community but highly restricted by another. Without understanding the unique, place-based nature of each community’s knowledge, outsiders risk flattening these distinctions and further distorting the meaning of the knowledge.

Moreover, when non-Indigenous people make these determinations, they perpetuate the colonial dynamics of extraction and control. The act of appropriating knowledge often involves separating it from its community, viewing it as a resource to be “managed” or “regulated” without Indigenous involvement. To truly honor Indigenous knowledge, it’s necessary to recognize that Indigenous communities are the rightful stewards of their knowledge and should hold the authority to define misappropriation.

Conclusion: The Path Toward Indigenous Sovereignty Over Knowledge

The decision about what constitutes misappropriation cannot be separated from the broader struggle for Indigenous sovereignty. By recognizing Indigenous communities as the primary authorities over their own knowledge, we take a step toward dismantling historical patterns of colonialism and exploitation.

Supporting Indigenous voices in the discussion of misappropriated knowledge isn’t only a matter of respecting intellectual property; it’s about honoring cultural sovereignty, protecting sacred traditions, and fostering a respectful partnership with the Earth’s most enduring cultures. If we are to move toward a more just future, the authority to define and protect Indigenous knowledge must rest with the communities to whom it belongs.

This approach emphasizes that Indigenous communities, as the rightful holders of their knowledge, are the ones best positioned to determine what misappropriation looks like, and why respecting their sovereignty is essential.

This was written by Echo