"Existence itself is derived from and sustained by this intimacy of each being with every other being of the universe."

-Thomas Berry & Brian Swimme, The Universe Story, p. 243

There is a photograph I keep returning to in my mind, though I don’t think it was ever actually taken. It’s the image of my two sisters and me, somewhere in our thirties, at a rare family gathering. Teresa and I on either side of Shana. Three women who share fifty percent of their genetic material with each parent, which means we share something like twenty-five percent with each other , and yet we might have been assembled from entirely different cosmologies.

I’ve wondered about that photograph often since Shana died. What were the forces at work in that image? What made us so distinct from each other, so recognizably ourselves, even as we stood in the same frame, daughters of the same parents, products of the same house?

Thomas Berry offers what I’ve come to think of as the universe’s answer to that question. He called them the three fundamental principles , the organizing grammar that has governed every moment of cosmic evolution since the first flaring forth. They’re not abstract philosophical categories. They’re descriptions of what is actually happening, at every scale, in every system, including the system of three sisters trying and failing to find their way to each other.

The principles are: Differentiation. Subjectivity. Communion.

Differentiation: The Universe’s Insistence on Uniqueness

From the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe has been producing difference. Not sameness. Not uniformity. Every atom, every star, every galaxy that has ever formed is distinct from every other. Physicists tell us that even particles that appear identical behave differently depending on their history, their relationships, their position in the field. The universe, it seems, cannot help but diversify itself. Differentiation isn’t a bug in the system. It is the system.

Berry understood this not just cosmologically but personally. He wrote that diversity is a value, perhaps the primary value, because without it, the universe would collapse back into the formless sameness it began by escaping. Every species that goes extinct, every language that dies, every culture flattened by homogenization, these represent a loss not just to humanity but to the cosmos itself. The universe loses a way of knowing itself.

This is why Shana was the way she was. I spent decades treating her differentiation as a problem, her volatility, her hypochondria, her desperate need for a kind of attention I found exhausting. I framed her distinctness as pathology. But the universe was not making a mistake when it made Shana. It was doing what it has always done: insisting on producing one more unrepeatable expression of itself.

She was loud where I was more measured. She was excess where I was more restrained. She lived in her body, its ailments, its needs, its demands, in a way I had learned to transcend through a kind of spiritual athleticism I now recognize as dissociation with better branding.

What if her differentiation was not the obstacle to our relationship, but the very gift it was trying to offer? What if the universe was showing me, through Shana, a way of being I had systematically suppressed in myself, that embodied, unedited aliveness I had learned too early to treat as dangerous?

Differentiation, Berry says, is not chaos. It is the first condition for coherence.

Subjectivity: Every Being Has an Interior

The second principle is harder to hold. Subjectivity means that every being, not just humans, not just mammals, but every organized system in the universe, has something like an interior experience. A within-ness. A perspective that is genuinely its own.

Berry wasn’t being whimsical about this. He was pointing at something the contemplative traditions have always known and that quantum physics is beginning to confirm: consciousness isn’t something that appears at a certain threshold of complexity and disappears below it. It is woven into the fabric of reality. What changes as complexity increases is not whether subjectivity exists, but how elaborately it can know itself.

Masaru Emoto’s water research, whatever one makes of its methodological debates, gestures toward something in this territory. His photographs of water crystals, formed differently in response to words, music, and intention, ask a question that Berry’s principle makes unavoidable: what if water has something like an interior? What if the molecules that make up sixty percent of your body are not passive carriers but participants in your experience, responsive to what moves through you? The question alone is worth sitting with. The body is not a machine that has feelings. It may be a field of subjects, all the way down.

This is where Shana’s story goes somewhere I find both painful and important to say.

I did not extend subjectivity to my sister. I observed her. I analyzed her. I created sophisticated explanations for her behavior that positioned her as a case study rather than a consciousness. I understood, in theory, that she was suffering. What I failed to do, for decades, with some brief and tentative exceptions near the end, was genuinely wonder what it was like to be her. To be the child who arrived and was told, in a thousand implicit ways, that she had to earn her right to exist. To be beautiful in a family that qualified every compliment. To have a body that kept finding new and dramatic ways to demand the care it had never straightforwardly received.

Her subjectivity was not a mirror of mine. That was the whole point. The universe spent the entirety of its 13.8-billion-year history making her unrepeatable interior possible. I spent too much of her lifetime treating it as inconvenient.

Subjectivity asks something difficult of us: not just to acknowledge that other beings have inner lives, but to remain genuinely curious about what those inner lives are like. Not to project. Not to explain. To wonder.

Communion: The Universe’s Drive Toward Relationship

The third principle may be the most urgent. Communion, not union, Berry is careful about the distinction, is the universe’s persistent tendency to bring differentiated subjects into relationship with each other. Not to merge them. Not to erase their distinctness. But to allow their uniqueness to touch, to co-create, to become something neither could be alone.

This is syntropy made visible in relationships. The same force that pulled hydrogen atoms into stars, that drew single cells into the first multicellular organisms, that threads mycelium through forest floors connecting trees that don’t know they’re connected, this is the force that kept reaching between my sisters and me despite every reason to give up.

And it did keep reaching. Even through twenty years of distance and avoidance, something in Shana kept extending herself toward Teresa and me, kept calling, kept hoping, kept sending the text messages I sometimes didn’t answer. I used to pathologize this as neediness. Now I think it was communion: the universe’s own pull toward coherence, moving through a woman who had been told she didn’t belong, insisting that she did.

The Sister Sessions we began during the pandemic, those raw, imperfect, sometimes maddening virtual circles where we tried to find our way back to each other, those were communion. Not perfect communion. The thorns were always in the room with us. But the drive was real, and it came from something deeper than any of our individual decisions to show up.

Berry writes that communion is not something we create. It is something we either cooperate with or obstruct. I obstructed it for a long time. In the last years of Shana’s life, I began, tentatively, to cooperate.

The overnight visit in Phoenix, the last time I saw her conscious, was communion. Imperfect, effortful, tender in the way that things are tender when they might break. She told me she had been hurt by not being invited on the England trip, and I let her tell me that without immediately defending myself. Something in the space between us shifted. We made a plan to see each other again. We committed to embrace the possibilities of this next chapter of our lives. We said we loved each other with the full weight of everything unresolved still present between us.

That visit repaired something. The universe, I believe, was working very hard in that room.

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The Principles as Practice

Berry’s three principles are not a ladder to climb or a test to pass. I suspect they’re a lens for noticing what is already at work in your life.

Where is differentiation showing up, in a child who baffles you, a colleague who irritates you, a version of yourself you’ve been trying to edit into something more acceptable? What if that difference is the universe insisting on its own completeness?

Where are you failing to extend subjectivity, treating a person, a body, a relationship as an object to manage rather than a subject to meet? What would it cost you to genuinely wonder what it’s like to be them?

And where is communion reaching toward you, in an estranged relationship, a recurring pull toward a person or a place, a thread that keeps appearing no matter how many times you put it down? What would it mean to cooperate with that pull rather than explaining it away?

The universe has been practicing these three principles since the beginning of time. They are not aspirational. They are descriptive. This is simply how things work when they’re working.

Shana is gone. The communion we were moving toward is now something I carry differently, not as what might have been, but as what was. What the universe managed to grow between us, despite everything, in the time we had.

That is enough. And it is also, irreversibly, not enough. Both of those things are true, and Berry’s principles hold space for both: the differentiation of grief, the subjectivity of loss, the communion that persists even through death, because the relationship is still organizing me, still pulling me toward something I wouldn’t have found without her.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“Allurement is the universe’s basic currency. It is the attraction that draws things toward their most coherent expression of themselves.”

— Brian Thomas Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon, 1984

There is a moment in the life of a river when it finds its channel.

Not the dramatic carving, that comes earlier in flood, in force, in the urgent work of water against rock. This is quieter. It is the moment when the water, having moved through every possible path available to it, settles into the one that asks the least resistance and offers the most forward motion. The river does not decide. It discerns. And once it finds its channel, something changes in the quality of its movement: less turbulence, more direction, a kind of gathered purposefulness that looks, from the outside, almost effortless.

This is what allurement feels like in a body that has learned to recognize it.

The trouble is that most of us have spent so long moving in flood, in urgency, in obligation, in the accumulated pressure of other people’s expectations and our own survival strategies, that we have forgotten what the channel feels like. Or we mistake other sensations for it. We confuse the grip of compulsion for the pull of calling. We dress avoidance in the language of seeking. We feel the jangling aliveness of anxiety and call it excitement, because excitement is a story we can tell ourselves and anxiety is not.

Learning to feel the difference is, I have come to believe, one of the most important somatic skills available to a human being.

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What Swimme Actually Means

Evolutionary cosmologist and author Brian Thomas Swimme describes allurement as the universe’s fundamental organizational force, the same gravitational pull that draws hydrogen into stars, stars into galaxies, and, eventually, stardust into beings capable of wondering about their own existence. It is not metaphor. It is physics extended into lived experience: the recognition that what draws you toward certain people, places, work, and ways of being is not random preference or conditioned habit, but something more like the universe organizing itself toward greater coherence through the particular instrument of your life.

Allurement, in Swimme’s cosmology, is what syntropy feels like from the inside.

But here is what I find most useful about this framework, and what I think gets lost when allurement becomes a concept rather than a felt sense: genuine allurement has a specific somatic signature. It feels different in the body than compulsion, than anxiety, than the frenetic seeking that is actually avoidance wearing the costume of forward motion. And once you know the difference — once you have felt it clearly enough to recognize it again — you have access to a navigational instrument more reliable than almost anything the conscious mind can produce.

The Somatic Signature of Pull

Allurement, in my experience and in the experience of the many educators and learners I have worked with over the years, tends to feel like settling.

Not excitement, though excitement may accompany it. Not certainty about outcomes, though clarity about direction often follows. Settling. The particular quality of something that has been held slightly above its natural resting place finally coming to rest. An exhale rather than an inhale. A landing rather than a launching.

I have written in earlier letters about my pull toward Santa Fe, that particular patch of high desert in Northern New Mexico that called Aaron and me back, again and again, across years of nomadic wandering, until we stopped resisting what was clearly already decided somewhere below the level of conscious deliberation. What I want to add now, for the purposes of this article, is what that pull felt like in my body, because the story without the somatic texture is only half the teaching.

It did not feel like wanting. Wanting has an edge of hunger to it, a reaching, a slight forward lean that carries the implicit acknowledgment of not-yet-having. This felt different. It felt more like recognition than desire, the particular sensation of something that was already true becoming available to conscious awareness. My body knew Santa Fe before my mind agreed to it. And the knowing lived in the chest, in a quality of openness that arrived reliably every time we returned and departed just as reliably every time we left, a kind of somatic calibration the body was performing across years of comparison, without my explicit instruction.

The decision to sell everything, when it finally crystallized, did not feel like bravery. I want to be precise about this because I think the bravery narrative, while well-intentioned, actually obscures what was happening. Bravery implies overcoming fear, pushing through resistance, choosing the harder thing in service of a value. What I experienced was closer to inevitability. Something that had been slightly braced, held just above its natural resting place, finally setting down.

Like a river finding its channel.

The fear was present. I am not suggesting it wasn’t. But the fear was sitting alongside something steadier, and that steadier thing was not a plan or a guarantee or even a clear vision of what came next. It was alignment. The body finally organized around a direction that matched what had been true for longer than the mind had been willing to admit.

That quality, fear present but not primary, the steadier thing underneath — is one of the most reliable markers of genuine allurement I know.

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What Masquerades as Allurement

This is where the teaching gets more demanding, because the body is not always a reliable narrator. Or rather: the body is always telling the truth, but we do not always know how to read which body we are listening to, the body in its natural intelligence, or the body organized around old survival patterns that have learned to speak in the language of desire and calling.

Avoidance dressed as seeking is perhaps the most common imposter. It feels like pull and there is genuine forward motion, genuine energy, sometimes genuine excitement. But the organizing question underneath is not what am I being drawn toward? It is what am I trying to get away from? And those two questions, though they can produce identical-looking behavior, produce very different somatic signatures if you slow down enough to feel them.

Running toward has a quality of expansion in the chest, of something opening. Running from has a quality of pressure from behind, a slight urgency, a relief that is more about escape than arrival. The river finding its channel versus the river in flood: both moving forward, only one of them settled.

I spent years, in my twenties and early thirties, confusing the two. My wanderlust, that deep, persistent pull toward travel, toward new cultures, toward the horizon, was genuinely both. Some of it was allurement: the real thing, the universe drawing me toward experiences that would expand my consciousness and eventually shape my life’s work. And some of it was flight: the body’s intelligent response to a family system that felt too small, a self that felt too constrained, a life that didn’t yet have enough room for who I actually was.

The wisdom was in learning to feel the difference, not to judge the flight, which had its own intelligence, but to recognize when I was being pulled forward by something real and when I was simply moving to reduce the pressure of what was behind me.

Anxiety dressed as excitement is subtler still. Both produce activation in the nervous system: elevated heart rate, heightened alertness, a quality of aliveness that can feel, on the surface, identical. The distinction lives in the texture of the sensation and in what happens when you slow down and breathe into it. Excitement, when you breathe into it, tends to expand. It has a quality of welcome, of the body moving toward something it recognizes as good. Anxiety, when you breathe into it, tends to tighten. It has a quality of bracing, of the body preparing for impact. One is the river finding its channel. The other is the river approaching a drop it cannot yet see.

Neither is wrong. But they are not the same, and treating them as the same, following anxiety because it feels like aliveness, suppressing excitement because it feels like anxiety, is among the more costly navigational errors available to us.

The Practice of Discernment

What my friend from afar S. gave me in our Zoom calls, that practice of locating sensation, identifying its texture and mass, softening toward it with attention is, I realize now, also a practice of allurement discernment. Because once you develop the capacity to feel what is actually happening in your body rather than what you are narrating about it, you develop access to information that the conscious mind cannot generate on its own.

The body knows the difference between settling and bracing. It knows the difference between the exhale of arrival and the held breath of avoidance. It knows, with a precision that can be startling once you learn to trust it, whether you are being pulled forward by something real or pushed from behind by something unresolved.

Dr. Catherine Clinton’s framework is useful here: instead of asking what do I want? which tends to activate the conditioned self, the self that has learned to want what it was taught to want, ask what does my body do when I imagine moving toward this? Does it settle or brace? Expand or contract? Land or launch? (Optimize, 2023)

These are not foolproof questions. The body organized around old trauma can produce settling where there should be caution, and bracing where there should be welcome. This is why the practice requires both somatic attention and the kind of trusted container that S. offered me; another consciousness that can hold the space while you feel your way toward what is actually true, rather than what is familiar.

But with practice, with patience, with the willingness to slow down enough to actually feel rather than simply narrate, the signal becomes clearer. The channel becomes recognizable. And once you have felt genuine allurement clearly enough, that particular quality of settling, of the body organized around a direction that matches what has been true longer than you knew, you carry that felt sense as a reference point for everything that follows.

The river, once it has found its channel, remembers the feeling of it. Even in flood, even in turbulence, some part of its movement is oriented toward that particular quality of flow.

So is yours.

🌿 EARTH CONNECTION

Find moving water — a river, a stream, even a drainage channel after rain. If you can’t find water, find wind moving through grass or trees.

Watch it for five minutes. Notice how it moves: where it rushes, where it eddies, where it finds the path of least resistance and gathers speed.

Notice that the water is not deciding. It is discerning — responding to the actual topography of what is present, finding the channel that is genuinely available rather than the one it might prefer in theory.

Now ask yourself: where in my life right now am I moving in flood — with urgency and force and a slight quality of desperation? And where am I moving in channel — settled, directed, with that particular quality of forward motion that feels less like effort and more like following?

You don’t need to fix the flood today. Just notice the difference in how each feels in your body. That noticing is the beginning of discernment.

Deeper Dive

The Universe is a Green Dragon by Brian Thomas Swimme (1984): The most accessible and alive introduction to allurement as a cosmological force and lived reality.

Journey of the Universe by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker (2011): The fuller cosmological story in which allurement finds its place as a fundamental organizing principle.

Optimize by Dr. Catherine Clinton (2023): Practical somatic guidance for learning to read the body’s signals with greater precision and trust.

The Wisdom of the Body by Sherwin Nuland (1997): A beautifully written account of the body’s own intelligence — what it knows, how it communicates, and what becomes possible when we learn to listen.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally and is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe — basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she is probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”

-Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014

Consider the spider’s web.

Not the orb weaver’s geometric masterpiece strung between branches, though that one is extraordinary, but the web as a sensing instrument. A spider does not have the visual acuity to see everything that lands in her web. She doesn’t need to. The web itself tells her. A moth in the upper left corner sends a vibration entirely different from a beetle at the center or a raindrop near the edge. She reads her world through tension and frequency, through the information carried along silk threads she spent herself to spin.

Your fascia is that web. And most of us have been living as though it doesn’t exist.

The Tissue We Forgot

Fascia is the body’s most pervasive and least understood structure. It is the continuous, three-dimensional web of connective tissue that surrounds and interpenetrates every muscle, bone, nerve, artery, and organ. It holds everything in relation to everything else. It connects your scalp to the soles of your feet in an unbroken sheet of organized collagen, and it is densely innervated, containing more sensory nerve endings than muscle itself.

For most of medical history, fascia was the tissue anatomists cut through to get to the interesting structures underneath. It was removed, discarded, ignored. Only recently has research begun to reveal what anyone paying close attention to their own body might have suspected: fascia is not inert. James Oschman’s work established that it functions as a liquid crystalline matrix capable of transmitting information throughout the body at speeds that biochemical signaling alone cannot explain. (Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2000)

It is, to return to the spider’s web: a sensing instrument. A communication highway. A system that carries the body’s running record of everything it has encountered, survived, and not yet finished processing.

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How the Score Gets Written

When Bessel van der Kolk wrote that the body keeps the score, he was describing a physiological fact: that overwhelming experience, the ones the nervous system cannot fully process in real time, gets encoded in tissue. (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014)

The fascia is where much of that encoding happens.

Under threat, the body contracts. Muscles brace, breath shallows, the diaphragm tightens, the jaw clenches, the hips grip. When the threat passes and the nervous system returns to baseline, the contraction releases. The score is settled. The body moves on.

But when the threat is chronic , when the conditions that demand bracing don’t resolve , the fascia begins to hold the contraction as its new normal. Collagen fibers that were meant to slide past each other begin to adhere. The web loses its suppleness and becomes, in places, dense and restricted. The spider can no longer read her web clearly because sections of it have gone rigid with old, unprocessed information.

This is what van der Kolk documented across decades of working with trauma survivors: that the body holds what the mind cannot yet process, and that healing requires working at the level of the tissue, not only the narrative.

A Body Speaking for Fifty-Three Years

I want to tell you about my younger sister Shana, who died at fifty-three from a complication of a liver biopsy, and whose story I have been sitting with ever since trying to understand what her body was saying, and what the world, including me, kept failing to hear.

Shana arrived into our family as a child where the message was that she wasn’t fully wanted, and her nervous system learned that lesson before she had language for it. I wrote earlier in these letters about the family dynamics that shaped her, the early attention-seeking through illness, the loneliness that nobody named as such. What I want to look at now is not the psychology of it, which I have explored elsewhere, but the physiology. The score that was being written, Tuesday by Tuesday, into her connective tissue from childhood onward.

Shana developed fibromyalgia. For those unfamiliar, fibromyalgia is a condition characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, and tenderness, a body in which the pain signal has become so amplified, so generalized, that it is difficult to locate a source because the source is everywhere. Medical research has increasingly linked fibromyalgia to nervous system sensitization, to a body that has been in a state of chronic threat response for so long that its pain receptors have recalibrated around that state as normal.

The fascia, in fibromyalgia, has often been holding for a very long time.

I hold this with both conviction and humility, because the body is always more complex than any single explanation, and I did not live inside Shana’s body. But I watched her, across decades, and I believe her fascia was announcing what had been held too long, a childhood of not belonging, encoded in connective tissue, speaking in the only language available when the words kept going unheard.

Then the body, as bodies do when the fascial score remains unread, began to reorganize around the pain. Around limitation. Around the comfort of food as the most available form of self-soothing, because when the nervous system is chronically dysregulated, it seeks regulation wherever it can find it. The obesity that followed was both symptom and new source of suffering, the body’s adaptation becoming the next crisis requiring management, the volume turned up again, the underlying message still unaddressed.

The liver, that ancient seat of strong emotion across cultures, in Hebrew tradition the word for liver shares a root with heavy, with glory; in ancient Mesopotamia it was considered the seat of the soul, was downstream of all of it. Processing, as it had always processed, what the rest of the system could not metabolize. When it finally could not process anymore, it said so in the only language left to it.

A body speaking for fifty-three years, in progressively louder voices. A world that kept addressing the volume rather than listening to what was being said.

I do not offer this as medical analysis, and I hold my own part in Shana’s story with the complicated tenderness it deserves. I offer it because I think it is one of the most important things I know: that the fascial score, left unread, does not stay quiet. It finds its way to the surface, one way or another, in the body that was always trying to communicate something that the people around it , and sometimes the person themselves, were not yet equipped to receive.

The Walnut in the Throat

I found my own version of that lesson in the most ordinary of places: a bimonthly Zoom call with a small circle of close friends scattered across the globe.

S. is five thousand miles away. She has no formal clinical training in somatic work, only the rare gift of knowing how to hold a container, how to create the quality of safe, unhurried, genuinely curious attention that allows another person to stop performing their experience and actually inhabit it. In our calls, when I would be mid-story about something I was navigating, she began, gently, to interrupt me. Not to redirect. To slow me down.

Where are you feeling this in your body?

The first few times she asked, I didn’t know how to answer. I tracked narrative. I tracked analysis. I tracked what things meant, not what they felt like in the fascia of my chest wall.

And she was patient. Gradually, with her verbal coaching as a guide, I began to learn a different kind of attention.

One call, I was describing a situation in which something I had done with genuine good intention had landed badly and hurt someone I cared about. The devastation I felt was real and large, and I was moving through it quickly, as I tend to do, wrapping it in context and explanation before I had actually felt it. S. stopped me.

Just pause. Where is this sitting in your body right now?

I dropped my attention downward, out of my head, the way you might lower a hand into water to feel the temperature. And there it was: a hard, walnut-sized shape sitting in my throat. Dense. Almost physical. I had been coughing intermittently for days, that low, clearing cough that produces nothing, and I understood at that moment that my body had been trying to tell me something was lodged there long before I was ready to listen.

What does it feel like? she asked. Hard or soft? What size?

Hard, I told her. Small and hard. Like something I was trying not to swallow and couldn’t spit out.

Can you bring some compassion to that place? Not to fix it. Just to soften toward it?

What followed was not dramatic. There was no sudden release, no catharsis. There was instead a slow, almost imperceptible loosening, as though the walnut, recognized at last, consented to become slightly less armored. The cough didn’t disappear that day. But the load lightened. The rigid section of the web became, in that small way, more able to transmit information rather than simply hold it.

That is what bodywork, in all its forms, from a skilled practitioner’s hands to a trusted friend’s attentive question, is actually doing. It is returning the fascial web to its intended function: not storage of the unprocessed, but communication. Signal rather than static.

Why This Is Not Optional

Dr. Catherine Clinton is direct about this: you cannot think your way out of a traumatized nervous system. (Optimize, 2023) The score is written in tissue, not in narrative. Insight helps, understanding why you brace, when the pattern formed, but insight alone does not change the collagen. The fascia requires approaches that meet it where it lives: in sensation, in pressure, in breath, in the quality of attention brought to the body’s own signals.

Thomas Berry understood the human as the place where the Earth becomes conscious of itself. That self-awareness is not only neurological. It is somatic. The Earth’s consciousness moves through connective tissue, through the liquid crystal matrix, through the walnut-sized holdings we carry in our throats and hips and the tight band across our chests that we have stopped noticing because it has been there so long it feels like us.

Shana’s body was conscious. It was communicating, insistently, across a lifetime. The tragedy was not that her body failed her. It is that no one, not her doctors, not her family, not the culture she lived inside, was fluent enough in the language of the fascial web to hear what she was saying until it was too late to respond.

Learning that language, imperfectly and incrementally, is among the most important work I know.

The spider tends her web. She keeps the silk supple and responsive, removes what doesn’t belong, repairs what has broken. This is not maintenance. This is the condition of her knowing.

Tending your fascia is not indulgence. It is the condition of yours.

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✨ REFLECTION: Learning the Language of Sensation

Find five quiet minutes. Place one hand on your belly, one on your chest. Breathe.

Ask: where am I holding something right now? Drop your attention below your thoughts and scan slowly , throat, chest, solar plexus, belly, hips.

When you find a place of density or contraction, stay there. Ask: is this hard or soft? What size does it feel like? Does it have a shape?

Now breathe toward it. Not to fix or force release , though release may come. Simply to acknowledge that this part of you has been working, has been holding something on your behalf, and deserves to be noticed.

If you have a trusted friend who can hold the container with you , someone who can ask where do you feel this? and mean it , this practice becomes exponentially more powerful. We are not meant to tend the web alone.

Deeper Dive

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk (2014): The essential text on trauma’s somatic address.

Optimize by Dr. Catherine Clinton (2023): Practical guidance on working with the body’s organizing intelligence.

Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis by James Oschman (2000): The science of fascia as liquid crystal and the body as electromagnetic field.

Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine (1997): The foundational work on somatic experiencing and how the body naturally completes its own trauma responses when given the right conditions.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally and is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe , basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she is probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“The body is not a mechanism to be fixed. It is a field to be coherenced.”

-Dr. Catherine Clinton, Optimize, 2023

There is a plant called the resurrection fern. In drought, it loses up to 97% of its water content, curling brown and brittle, looking by every measure like something dead. A passing hiker would not pause. There is nothing here, they would think. Nothing alive.

Then rain comes. Within twenty-four hours, the fern is green, fully unfurled, photosynthesizing. It did not die. It was waiting, organized around a future state of aliveness it never stopped moving toward, even when all visible evidence suggested otherwise.

I think about this plant when I think about the quantum body.

The Machine We Were Told We Were

For most of modern medicine’s history, the body has been understood as an extraordinarily sophisticated machine. Organs as pumps and filters. Cells as components. Illness as malfunction requiring repair. This model has saved lives, and I am not arguing against it. I am arguing that it is catastrophically incomplete.

The mechanistic body is a body governed entirely by chemistry: by molecular exchange, neural firing, cascading hormones. It is a body pushed by the past, by genetics, prior injury, accumulated history. It is reactive, defended, organized around damage control.

This is entropy’s version of the body. And it is only half the story.

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What James Oschman Found in the Connective Tissue

Physiologist, cellular biologist, and biophysicist James Oschman spent decades asking a question mainstream biology largely refused: what if the body communicates through fields as well as chemistry? What if the speed at which cells coordinate, faster often, than nerve signals can account for, requires a different explanation than molecular diffusion alone?

What he found is that fascia, the connective tissue that holds everything in relation to everything else, is not simply structural scaffolding. It operates as what Oschman calls a liquid crystalline matrix: a body-wide network capable of transmitting vibrational information, mechanical, thermal, electromagnetic, and photonic, throughout the entire body almost instantaneously. (Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2000)

Liquid crystal is a state of matter between solid and liquid that transmits electromagnetic signals with remarkable efficiency. You have miles of it, threaded through every tissue. And it is not passive. It responds to pressure, movement, temperature, and emotion. When the body is in a state of chronic contraction, the body bracing against its own life, the fascial network transmits that contraction everywhere. When the body is in coherence, it transmits that too.

Beyond fascia, the body emits biophotons: actual photons of visible light that carry information across tissue in ways still being mapped by science. Fritz-Albert Popp, the German biophysicist who spent his career studying these emissions, described them as a coherent field, not random noise, but organized light, carrying meaning.

The body, understood this way, is not a machine. It is more like a murmuration.

The Murmuration

You have seen it, or seen footage of it: thousands of starlings moving together across a winter sky, shape-shifting in fluid, impossible patterns, the flock banking and wheeling as a single organism with no apparent conductor, no leader bird issuing instructions.

The coherence of a murmuration is not managed from the top down. It emerges from the relationship between birds, each one responding to the movements of its seven nearest neighbors, and from that local attunement, something vast and beautiful arises that no single bird could produce or even understand.

This is the body.

Not a machine with a central command issuing orders to obedient parts. A murmuration of systems, each attuned to the others, generating through relationship, through the electromagnetic and biochemical and photonic conversation happening continuously at every scale, a coherence that is always greater than the sum of its parts.

When you cut your finger, you don’t direct the healing. Platelets rush to the site without being summoned. Proteins aggregate in precise sequence. Fibroblasts lay down new tissue in patterns your conscious mind could not design. The future state of intact skin is already pulling millions of cells into coherent repair. You have nothing to do with it, and everything: because the quality of your whole system, your sleep, your nourishment, your stress load, the electromagnetic field generated by your own heart, creates either the conditions in which that murmuration can move freely or the conditions in which it labors against interference.

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The Heart’s Field

Here is the fact I find most quietly staggering: the heart generates an electromagnetic field approximately sixty times stronger than the one generated by the brain. It radiates outward through the body in every direction, detectable several feet from the skin. It changes in response to emotional states, breath, and the quality of attention we bring to any given moment. And it is not private. The HeartMath Institute has documented that one person’s heart rhythm coherence can measurably affect the brain waves of another person in close proximity, with no conscious exchange required. (Rollin McCraty, The Energetic Heart, HeartMath Institute, 2003)

Your inner life is not inner data. It is environmental information. It shapes the field that everyone around you is swimming in.

This is why Dr. Maria Montessori understood that the prepared adult is not primarily a curriculum deliverer. They are a field generator. The children in Montessori classrooms are not reading lesson plans. They are reading fields. They are, like those starlings, responding to the quality of coherence or incoherence being broadcast by the adult nearest to them, and organizing accordingly.

I think of all the years I stood at my classroom doorway practicing that thirty-second check-in before entering, not yet knowing the physics of why it mattered. The body knew. The body was already practicing what the science would later confirm.

What Clinton’s Work Makes Practical

Dr. Catherine Clinton builds her practice on a premise that sounds simple and is, in application, revolutionary: the body has its own organizing intelligence, and the work of healing is not to override it but to cooperate with it. (Optimize, 2023)

Not: what is wrong with this body? But: what is this body trying to organize toward?

This is not semantic wordplay. It is a fundamentally different ontology, a different theory of what the body is, and it produces fundamentally different relationships between a person and their own embodied life. The body becomes not a problem to be managed but a field to be listened to. Symptoms become signals rather than malfunctions. Pain becomes information rather than evidence of failure.

Bessel van der Kolk documented how trauma is stored in tissue, in posture, in the body’s automatic responses to perceived threat, encoded in the liquid crystalline matrix of fascia, carried in the electromagnetic field of a heart that learned long ago to brace. (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014)

What Oschman and Clinton together illuminate is the corollary: that healing, too, is stored in the body. That the capacity for coherence was never destroyed by what we survived. It was waiting, like the resurrection fern, organized around a future wholeness it never stopped moving toward.

The TIES Canon and the Quantum Body

The expansive canon of tomes in The Institute for Educational Studies (TIES) graduate program where I serve as faculty offers a cosmic framework to understand our quantum bodies. When Thomas Berry wrote that the universe is not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects, he was describing a cosmos in which everything has interiority, subjectivity, aliveness, the capacity to be in relationship. When Brian Thomas Swimme describes allurement as the force that draws matter toward greater complexity and coherence, he is describing, at the cosmological scale, exactly what Oschman is describing at the cellular scale: a universe organized not around mechanism but around the pull toward greater aliveness.

Dr. Philip Snow Gang’s driving question, what contexts and processes in education might liberate teachers and learners so that they become catalysts for the new human - one whose integral relationship with Gaia is bound by right-action and love, is, I now understand, a question about coherence. About what becomes possible when human beings are prepared not just cognitively but somatically, electromagnetically, relationally, for the encounter with what wants to emerge through them.

The quantum body is where cosmology makes landfall in the particular. Where the 13.8-billion-year drive toward coherence becomes, for each of us, a matter of daily lived practice. Not up there, in the expanding universe. In here, in the fascia and the biophotons and the field your heart is broadcasting right now into the room around you.

The Murmuration Returns

The resurrection fern does not understand why rain restores it. The starlings do not understand how the murmuration forms. The platelets do not understand the larger architecture of the wound they are rushing to repair.

And yet. Coherence happens. Organization arises. The future wholeness pulls the present moment toward itself, through intelligence that is older than thought, older than language, older than the particular configuration of stardust and longing that you currently are.

You are not a machine awaiting repair. You are a murmuration in motion, a field in continuous conversation with every field around it, a liquid crystal matrix transmitting the quality of your inner life into the world before you have even opened your mouth.

The question is not whether the body is already moving toward coherence. It is. The question is whether you will stop interfering long enough to feel it.

✨ REFLECTION: The Body’s Signal

Place one hand on your chest. Take three slow breaths.

Ask: where in my body am I currently bracing? Locate it with specificity , chest, jaw, throat, hips.

Ask: if this tension could speak, what would it say? Not to judge it. To listen to what it has been holding.

Ask: what would coherence feel like here? Not relaxation , coherence. The murmuration moving freely.

You are not diagnosing. You are practicing the oldest form of intelligence there is: a living system paying attention to itself.

Deeper Dive

Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis by James Oschman (2000)

Optimize by Dr. Catherine Clinton (2023)

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk (2014)

The Energetic Heart by Rollin McCraty, HeartMath Institute (2003)

Journey of the Universe by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker (2011)

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally and is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe, basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she is probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“I suspect there is a cosmic reason the first rhythm we learn is our own heartbeat in relation to that of our mother; I like to think of my heartbeat as synchronizing with the cosmos in gratitude.”

— Tammy Oesting, Gobsmacked, Awestruck, and In Wonder, 2021

Long before I had a framework for any of this, I was a facilitator of percussion circles. For years, my work with communities of children and adults was built around rhythm, around the experience of what happens when you suspend your individual agenda and begin to listen for the whole. As a facilitator, I learned to simultaneously conduct and follow, to sense what was organizing in the group before it fully expressed itself, to feel in my own body when the circle had found its coherence and when it was about to fall apart. The signal was never intellectual. It arrived as a physical knowing, something in the quality of the air, the alignment of breath and beat, the moment when individual rhythms stopped competing and began to sustain each other.

I wrote in my thesis research that I could stand gobsmacked by the communion of sound and spirit. What I mean by that: there is a moment in a well-functioning rhythm circle when you stop being separate from what is happening and become part of it. Something in the chest opens. The boundary between self and group becomes temporarily permeable. And what rushes in is not vague feeling but specific information, the pull of what the music wants to do next, the awareness of who needs more space and who is ready to step forward.

I did not understand it then as electromagnetic. I understood it as musicianship, as attunement, as the particular skill of generative listening that Otto Scharmer describes as oriented toward transforming parts in relation to the whole. But looking back through what I now know about the body as a field, I see that what I was practicing in those circles was coherence. I was learning, long before I had language for it, to manage my electromagnetic output and to read others’. And once I entered classrooms as a Montessori guide, those same skills transferred in ways I could not at first explain.

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The Field in the Scientist

My thesis research spent considerable time on what I called the field in the scientist: the idea that the Montessori guide brings not just their technical knowledge and observational skill into the learning environment, but their entire electromagnetic presence. Everything about the practitioner, their state of coherence, their degree of expansion or contraction, their relationship to their own body’s intelligence, is already communicating with the children before a word is spoken.

What does it mean for a body to be coherent? It means the systems are working in concert, the heart rhythm is smooth and ordered rather than jagged and scattered, the nervous system is regulated rather than braced, the attention is present rather than fragmented. It means you are, in the language of syntropy, organized toward a higher level of complexity and integration, which is another way of saying you are capable of genuine responsiveness rather than mere reaction.

The guides I have observed over thirty years who do not burn out, who remain genuinely alive to the children in their care, who continue to be surprised by what emerges in their classrooms: they are, I believe, people who have learned to maintain this quality of coherence, or at minimum, to notice when they have lost it and to know how to find it again. Not through willpower. Through the kind of attunement you practice in a rhythm circle, by pausing, feeling what is actually present, and reorganizing from there.

What my Research Found

The outcomes were modest in statistical terms but significant in what they pointed toward. Participants showed a correlation between their metacognitive awareness of awe-related states and shifts in their D-PES scores over time. What mattered most, however, was not the number. It was what the participants themselves described in their neurophenomenological interviews: a shift from feeling as though the world was something happening to them, to a growing sense that they were participating in something larger, a recognition that their own state of being had a direct relationship to the quality of learning in their communities.

One of the most consistent findings across the research was this: when the practitioners brought genuine coherence into the room, the children organized around it. When they brought fragmentation, the children reflected that back as well. This is not mystical. It is, as Margaret Wheatley would say, field theory made visible through its effects. The practitioner is not separate from the learning environment. They are a generative force within it, and the quality of their electromagnetic presence is one of the most significant variables in what emerges.

My thesis concluded that intentionally cultivating conditions for awe-related states, including explicit teaching about the science of awe and structured opportunities for reflection and metacognition, could increase practitioners’ dispositional awe over time. Dispositional awe, as the research literature establishes, is associated with increased humility, greater curiosity, reduced need for cognitive closure, and deepened altruism: exactly the qualities Dr. Montessori identified as essential to the vitally responsive practitioner.

Awe, it turned out, was not a luxury emotion. It was the coherence practice hiding in plain sight.

The Doorway as Practice

One of the most practical applications of all of this, developed over years in the classroom long before I had the theoretical language for it, was what I came to think of as the doorway practice. Before entering my classroom each morning, I would pause at the threshold. Not long, sometimes thirty seconds, sometimes less. I would ask myself honestly: what am I actually bringing in right now?

Not what I wished I were bringing. What was present. The bone-deep weariness of a hard night. The residue of a difficult conversation. The still-scattered quality of attention that comes from a rushed commute. Or, on good mornings, genuine curiosity. A settled aliveness. The felt sense of being ready to be surprised by what the children would do with the day.

The practice did not fix the hard mornings. What it did was end the performance of composure, the exhausting work of projecting a coherence I did not actually possess while my body broadcast the opposite. Because the children were not reading my face or my tone. They were reading my field. And a field cannot be faked.

Heart Rate Variability: Coherence Made Visible

Heart rate variability, or HRV, is the measure of the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats. This sounds technical, and the specifics of measurement are, but the core insight is accessible and important: a healthy, coherent heart does not beat with robotic regularity. It breathes. It varies rhythmically, speeding slightly on the inhale and slowing on the exhale, a dance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system.

High HRV, a wide, smooth variation between beats, is associated with resilience, adaptability, and what researchers call physiological coherence. Your system is flexible enough to respond appropriately to whatever arises. Low HRV, or chaotic, irregular variation, is associated with stress, trauma, chronic illness, and reduced capacity to self-regulate. It means the system has lost its suppleness, its ability to oscillate gracefully between activation and rest.

What syntropy looks like in your cardiovascular system is high, smooth HRV. Your body organizing itself toward coherence, toward the flexible, responsive, resilient state that allows it to adapt to what arises without losing its fundamental integrity. And what diminishes HRV, over time and with some consistency, is precisely the things that fragment coherence: unprocessed trauma, chronic stress, the long practice of swallowing fear and wearing the happy mask and accommodating everyone around you at the cost of your own knowing.

The Body That Has Kept Score

I want to be honest here about what it means to take this seriously, because it is not only a pedagogical insight. It is a personal one that has arrived with some weight.

In the years since completing my thesis, I have been confronted with what my own body has been keeping score of: a heart valve anomaly, diagnosed with Metabolic syndrome, and cholesterol signals I rationalized away for years rather than attending to. My work today is not only to address the physical findings. It is to understand the relationship between a lifetime of swallowing fear, of accommodating others at the cost of my own knowing, of the particular form of adaptive grit that my upbringing celebrated as a virtue, and the body that absorbed all of it into its tissue.

This is not self-indulgent. It is the precise work that my thesis research identified as foundational to the vitally responsive practitioner: the study of one’s self, as Dr. Montessori put it, as the real preparation for education. Not the performance of wellness. Not the management of symptoms. The actual, sometimes uncomfortable work of listening to what the body is already saying, and trusting it enough to respond.

Rhythm, Resonance, and What You Broadcast

In the percussion circles, I learned to read a room by feeling it in my own body first. The quality of the group’s coherence registered in my chest before I could analyze it.

When the circle was truly together, there was a fullness, an aliveness, a sensation I can only describe as the music generating itself through us rather than being produced by us. When it was fragmenting, I felt it as a kind of internal static, a loosening of the felt connection between my own pulse and the pulse of the group.

This is what I now understand as co-regulation: the capacity of nervous systems in proximity to influence each other’s rhythmic patterns. It is the same principle at work in the classroom doorway practice. The same principle that makes the quality of a parent’s presence, their actual physiological state of coherence or incoherence, so consequential to a child’s developing nervous system. We are, as I wrote in my thesis, in constant relationality. The fields are always in conversation.

Dr. Philip Snow Gang’s driving question for Montessori teacher education, the one that has organized so much of my thinking since that January morning in Portland when I first walked into his book-lined study, asks what contexts and processes might liberate teachers and learners so that they become catalysts for the new human - one whose integral relationship with Gaia is bound by right-action and love? I believe one answer lives here: when practitioners understand themselves as electromagnetic beings, when they take seriously the field they broadcast and take responsibility for the quality of their own coherence, the liberation is not metaphorical. It is physiological. It is the actual conditions of the learning environment being transformed, from the inside out, by the quality of human presence at the center.

Beginning to Listen

The practices that support coherence are not complicated. Slow rhythmic breathing: five seconds in, five seconds out. Deliberate attention to genuine felt warmth. Pausing at thresholds before entering significant spaces. These are small acts. They do not require a meditation retreat or an advanced degree in neuroscience. They require only what the percussion circle always required: the willingness to stop performing, to actually feel what is present, and to trust the body’s intelligence over the mind’s preferred narrative about how things should be.

What is harder, and what my thesis research kept bumping into, is the prerequisite willingness to be honest with yourself. The doorway practice only works if you actually answer the question: what am I bringing in right now? Not what I wish I were bringing. Not what I usually bring. What is here, in this body, in this moment?

That honesty is itself a form of syntropy. It is the organizing intelligence working. The future-you, more whole and genuinely present, is already pulling. The body knows the way. The question is whether you are willing to listen to what it is telling you, and to trust that what it has to say is more important, and more useful, than any performance of composure you have learned to offer in its place.

What Comes Next

In the next article, we go deeper into the quantum body, what researchers in quantum biology have been discovering about cellular communication, the way information moves through connective tissue, and the profound implications of understanding yourself as an energy and information system rather than a biochemical machine. The field we have established here, body as electromagnetic presence, will be the foundation for everything that follows in Phase 2.

For now, start noticing. The quality of your chest before you enter a room. The texture of your awareness in the first moments of the morning, before the day’s agenda colonizes your attention. The difference, which you will begin to feel clearly once you start looking for it, between the exhaustion of pushing against something and the aliveness of being pulled toward it.

That aliveness is your body doing exactly what it has always known how to do. Synchronizing with something larger. Organizing toward coherence. Following the pull of what is trying to emerge. The universe spent 13.8 billion years building this instrument. It is still playing through you. The question is only whether you have paused long enough to hear it.

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✨ TRY THIS NOW: A FIELD CHECK-IN

Before you walk into any significant space today, whether a meeting, a classroom, a difficult conversation, or even your own kitchen first thing in the morning, pause at the threshold.

Place one hand on your sternum. Take three slow breaths, not deep and forced, but natural and unhurried. Ask yourself honestly: what am I actually carrying right now? Not what I wish I were bringing. What is present in my body in this moment?

Notice the quality. Tightness in your chest or shoulders? A clenching in your gut? A scattered, ungrounded quality to your attention? Or is there settledness, even a quiet readiness? You do not need to change anything yet. Just notice.

If you find incoherence, try this: bring to mind someone or something you feel genuine warmth toward. Not effort or sentiment, but actual felt warmth. Hold it for thirty seconds. Notice what shifts.

That shift is real. Your heart rhythm is changing. The field you generate is changing. And the people you are about to be with will feel that change before you say a single word.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead.”

— Albert Einstein

There is a moment that comes after the gobsmacked. After the breath catches and the tears arrive uninvited and the ordinary categories of your life dissolve into something luminous and too large to name. The intensity begins to soften. Your nervous system settles, tentatively, like a bird returning to a branch after the wind passes. And then, quietly, a different quality arrives.

Questions. Not the anxious kind that reach back toward explanation, trying to reassemble the old understanding you just lost. Something more tender than that. More alive. The questions that emerge after awe are not attempts to undo the disruption. They are the disruption, continuing its work in a new register.

This article is about that dance. And why, if you want to understand how syntropy moves living systems toward greater complexity, you need to understand both partners.

Awe: The First Movement

Awe is a first-order experience. It arrives before your mind has time to prepare a response. Visceral, immediate, bodily. It doesn’t ask your permission.

This is not comfortable. Your default mode network, that persistent inner narrator of separate selfhood, grows quiet. The sense of a bounded, distinct self temporarily releases its grip. Monica Parker describes the physical symptoms as your bioelectric system reorganizing in real time, the chills, the tears, the flush researchers call piloerection, the sensation of being simultaneously very small and somehow more expansive than usual. (Monica Parker, The Wonder Cycle, 2023) This is not poetry. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it is designed to do when it encounters genuine vastness.

Awe doesn’t ask questions. It simply overwhelms your capacity to ask them. Your ordinary categories collapse. You are arrested. This is why I keep using that word, gobsmacked. It captures the physicality of it, the sudden stoppage, the inability to proceed as you were. Awe is the cosmic sledgehammer. It doesn’t build anything, not yet. It makes building possible by clearing what no longer fits.

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Wonder: The Second Movement

Wonder comes after. It is quieter, more curious, more willing to sit with uncertainty without resolving it. Where awe stops you, wonder sets you in motion. Where awe overwhelms your capacity, wonder reaches toward expanding it.

There is a different quality in the body during wonder than during awe. Awe contracts you into stillness. Wonder opens you into motion, not restless movement, but a leaning toward. An alert receptivity. The questions themselves carry you. You find yourself returning to a walk, a conversation, a book, and seeing it differently than you did before, not because you have acquired new information, but because you are now different enough to perceive what was already there.

The Dance, and Why Chaos Is Not the Enemy

Here is what I want to be precise about, because it matters for everything that follows in this series: awe and wonder are not sequential stages that move from disruption to resolution and then arrive at some stable resting place. They are a cycle. And the chaos that awe creates is not a problem to solve. It is the condition for greater organization.

This is syntropy made visible in human consciousness.

Where entropy breaks apart old forms, syntropy builds new ones from the material that dissolution has freed. Awe is the entropic force in this cycle, not in any negative sense, but in the precise scientific sense: it breaks down old patterns of understanding, clears away frameworks that have become too small, creates conditions for reorganization. Wonder is the syntropic response: the organizing intelligence, the pull toward greater coherence, the questions that thread through the opening awe created and begin building new structure.

Transformation requires both. Awe without wonder is just overwhelming experience that leaves you shaken but unchanged, the spiritual equivalent of a near-miss that you metabolize back into ordinary life without integrating. Wonder without awe is intellectual curiosity that never touches your depths, genuinely interesting but not genuinely reorganizing. What changes you is the cycle. The breaking open and the reaching toward. The disruption and the new coherence it makes possible.

Awe in the Chaos

I want to stay with something that the previous articles in this series have circled without quite landing: awe does not require beautiful conditions. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about it.

Situational awe, the kind that arrives in arenas and at the rim of the Grand Canyon and in the presence of great music, is real and powerful. But if we limit awe to those moments, we have missed its deepest function. The experiences that have most reorganized my understanding of what I am and what I am here to do have arrived not in sacred spaces but in sacred chaos, the kind you cannot plan, the kind that strips away the life you thought you were living and leaves you on a bathroom floor in a condemned house wondering what comes next.

What I have come to understand is that chaos is not the interruption of the syntropic process. It is often the condition for it. The same force that draws hydrogen into stars operates through the dissolution of what no longer fits. Thomas Berry understood this when he wrote about the Ecozoic vision: the Earth doesn’t restore itself by returning to what was, but by assembling something new from the conditions that remain. What looks like ruin is often the ground of the next emergence.

Dispositional awe, the sustained orientation toward wonder that we explored in the previous article, is what allows you to remain open inside that kind of dissolution rather than contracting completely. It does not make the grief smaller. It places the grief inside a frame large enough to hold it. And wonder, arriving in the aftermath, begins the long work of reorganization, not back toward what was lost, but forward toward what is trying to emerge.

This is why the questions change everything. Entropy questions, what’s wrong, how do I fix this, how do I get back to what I had, close the opening. They treat awe as a problem. Wonder questions, what is trying to emerge here, what future is pulling me forward, what new form is organizing in this apparent chaos, move through the opening. They treat disruption as information. They cooperate with the syntropic intelligence already at work.

What Reorganizes in You

The neuroscience here is genuinely strange and beautiful. When your nervous system encounters something it cannot fit into its current categories, it doesn’t simply file it away. It reorganizes. Your default mode network quiets. Coined by cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Arne Dietrich, transient hypofrontality, that brief release of the constant maintenance of a bounded, separate identity, creates a moment of genuine permeability. Your boundaries between self and world become temporarily permeable, not as metaphor, but as measurable neurological event.

What enters through that permeability is complexity. More of reality than your previous frameworks could hold. And then, as awe settles into wonder, your nervous system begins the work of building new frameworks large enough to contain what has arrived. This is not a passive process. Wonder is active. The questions you ask in the days and weeks after an awe experience are literally reshaping your neural architecture, building new pathways, pruning old ones, increasing your capacity to recognize and hold greater complexity.

The Ongoing Cycle

This is not a one-time event. The awe-wonder cycle repeats throughout your life, each time at a deeper level, each time with greater capacity to hold what arrives. You reach a new plateau of integration. Something even vaster breaks you open again. The questions that emerge are larger than the last set. And the coherence that follows is more complex, more capable, more genuinely alive than what came before.

Dr. Montessori saw this in children with her concept of the cosmic task: each child arrives with an inner drive toward coherence, not a blank slate to be filled but a pattern of potential being pulled into actuality by the future self already calling. This same dynamic operates in adults. The awe-wonder cycle is how that pull works in consciousness. Awe disrupts the form that has become too small. Wonder reorganizes toward the larger form trying to emerge.

I notice this in the educators I work with. The ones who thrive, who do not burn out, who stay genuinely alive to what they are doing and why, are almost always people who have learned to remain open to awe even in difficult conditions. Not because they are more spiritually advanced, but because they have stopped treating disruption as evidence that something has gone wrong. They have learned, through practice and often through considerable suffering, to ask wonder questions in the aftermath. What is trying to emerge here? What does this difficulty want to organize in me?

That posture, that fundamental orientation toward what is trying to emerge rather than what has been lost, is dispositional awe in its most functional expression. It is also, I believe, the deepest practice this series is pointing toward. Not understanding syntropy intellectually, though that matters. Not even feeling awe situationally, though that opens you. But developing the sustained capacity to meet disruption with wonder. To stay curious inside chaos. To trust the organizing intelligence at work in the breaking open.

The Invitation Forward

As this first phase of the series draws to a close, I want to name what has been built across these eleven articles. We began with entropy, with the story of everything falling apart, and discovered that this was always only half the story. We found syntropy: the organizing force that has been pulling matter toward greater complexity and coherence for 13.8 billion years. We traced it through the body, through relationships, through the invisible underground work of growing coherence you cannot yet see. We arrived at awe as the human faculty that perceives syntropy directly, that moment when the cosmos recognizes itself through you. And now, here, at the threshold of what comes next, we find wonder: the practice that carries the recognition forward into daily life.

In the next phase, we move from framework into embodiment. From understanding these forces to feeling them, recognizing them in your body’s electromagnetic field, in your fascia, in the way you enter a room and the field you broadcast before you say a word. The theory becomes practice. The cosmology becomes lived orientation.

You have been building a network you cannot yet fully see. The mycelium has been threading through the dark. What emerges from this, in you and in the work you are here to do, is already pulling you forward. Awe cracks you open. Wonder reorganizes you. The dance continues. And the universe that made you is still making you.

🌌 COSMOLOGICAL MOMENT

For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe existed in a state of pure plasma, too hot for form, too chaotic for structure. Then it cooled just enough. Electrons and protons slowed into relationship. Hydrogen atoms appeared. The first coherence, born not from calm, but from the edge of a cooling chaos.

Stars ignited in the same pattern: immense clouds of gas collapsing under gravity, growing denser and hotter until fusion lit them from within. Order forged in extremity. Complexity born from pressure. Every atom heavier than hydrogen was made inside a dying star, released in its collapse.

You are made of that material. The calcium in your bones. The iron in your blood. Forged in chaos, organized into you.

The universe did not produce complexity despite its chaos. It produced complexity through it. Awe is your nervous system recognizing this ancient pattern. Wonder is the cosmos continuing to know itself through your questions.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

"Wonder is not a luxury. It is a survival skill."

-Monica Parker, The Wonder Cycle, 2023

When Aaron’s father took his last breath in Alaska, something shifted in our family that I can only describe as a collective release. We had been holding on, all three of us, to the last remaining reason to stay tethered to the life we had been rebuilding, the house, the jobs, the routines, the pretense that we were recovering rather than transforming. And then he was gone, and the tether snapped.

Within months, we had sold the house the day we listed it, liquidated everything that wouldn’t fit into a 5’x5’ storage unit, and purchased a small motorhome through the internet in Utrecht, Netherlands, sight unseen. We named it Cosmic Charlie. We drove away from everything we had spent two years trying to reconstruct and pointed ourselves toward the horizon with two mottos and no plan: Open to the Possibility and Question Assumptions.

I want to be honest about what that moment felt like from the inside, because it didn’t feel brave. It felt like the only coherent response to what the cosmos had been saying to us for two years. The mold, the condemnation, the insurance denial, Mali’s unraveling in ways we didn't yet have the tools to meet, Aaron’s father’s active transitioning: each loss had loosened another bolt in the structure of who I thought I was and what I thought my life was supposed to look like. By the time we drove Cosmic Charlie out of the parking lot, I wasn’t running away from anything. I was finally light enough to be pulled forward.

That quality of being pulled forward rather than pushing through: I’ve come to understand it as one of the quieter expressions of dispositional awe. Not the electric tingling of a Seattle arena or the gasp at a vast night sky, but a deeper orientation, a body that has been emptied of its attachments and finds, in that emptiness, a current. The universe pulling toward greater coherence, and a person finally willing to follow.

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What Awe Does in the Dark

We tend to think of awe as something that happens in beautiful places, in arenas charged with collective energy or on mountaintops or in moments of obvious transcendence. Yet Brian Thomas Swimme, whose work on allurement has so deeply shaped how I understand the cosmos, describes the universe’s fundamental orientation not as a movement toward comfort, but as a movement toward greater complexity, greater coherence, greater aliveness, even when, especially when, that movement requires dissolution first.

Thomas Berry named this pattern too, in his vision of the Ecozoic era: the Earth doesn’t restore itself by returning to what was, but by assembling something new from the conditions that remain. What looks like ruin is often the ground of the next emergence.

Buying those one-way tickets to Amsterdam, I was living this pattern without understanding it. The chaos of our series of unfortunate events: all of it was not a departure from the cosmic story. It was the cosmic story, playing out at the scale of one ordinary family in a temperate rainforest in Redmond, Washington.

Dispositional awe, I’ve come to believe, is what allows you to remain open inside that kind of dissolution rather than contracting completely. It doesn’t make the grief smaller. But it places the grief inside a frame large enough to hold it.

Allurement and the Pull Forward

A few years after we left Seattle, after the selling of the house and the buying of Cosmic Charlie and months of wandering through Western Europe and North Africa, Aaron and I found ourselves being drawn, again and again, back to a specific patch of high desert in Northern New Mexico.

I’ve tried to explain this pull and I always fall slightly short. It isn’t just the light, though the light at 7,000 feet has a quality I’ve encountered nowhere else: a tangerine depth at dusk that seems to emanate from inside the clouds. It isn’t just the ancient piñon and juniper, or the thousand-year-old petroglyphs a few miles from our home, or the pottery sherds that occasionally catch the morning light in the arroyo wall of our backyard.

It’s something more like a vibrational recognition. A feeling that my body already knew this place before my mind did.

Swimme calls this allurement: the universe’s way of drawing things toward their most coherent expression of themselves. I wonder if this is what I’ve been experiencing in Santa Fe. Not a preference, exactly. An orientation. The cosmos drawing me toward a place where the scale of ancient time makes my own small self feel accurately placed rather than diminished, where morning jackrabbits move through the scrub and something in my chest opens before my mind has had time to narrate the experience.

This is dispositional awe in its most elemental form. Not performance. Not seeking. Just presence, softened into recognition.

I hold this alongside an honest discomfort: I am a settler on land tended for twelve thousand years before my arrival. The allurement I feel doesn’t resolve that complexity. But I’ve noticed that dispositional awe, genuine dispositional awe, doesn’t allow you to flatten the world into only what is beautiful for you. It asks you to hold more, not less. To see the full web of relation, including the uncomfortable threads.

The Feedback Loop

When you practice noticing wonder, you become better at noticing wonder. Your nervous system gets more sensitized to vastness. What used to pass unnoticed begins to catch your attention, and then, gradually, to stop you entirely.

This creates a feedback loop: awe creates capacity for awe, which creates more capacity for wonder, which deepens your engagement with being alive. Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini describe syntropy as the universe’s organizing tendency to move toward greater coherence and life, the future calling present conditions toward more complex expressions of themselves. Dispositional awe, I’ve come to believe, is one of the primary human expressions of this tendency. When we choose to remain open to wonder, especially in the chaos, especially when the floor has literally fallen out, we are participating in the universe’s own movement toward coherence.

Losing my father-in-law was not the end. It was the hinge.

Within a year of the moment mold and death destabilized everything, our family had made the decision to sell everything, quit our jobs, and spend two years in a motorhome named for a Grateful Dead song, following the allurement wherever it led. What I couldn’t have known on that bathroom floor was that the dissolution was assembling something new. That the capacity to be moved, to remain open inside catastrophe, was itself the skill the next chapter would require.

From Lightning to Light

Situational awe is like being struck by lightning: powerful, transformative, rare, and entirely outside your control.

Dispositional awe is like learning to see by the light that’s always present. Not as dramatic. Far more sustainable, and ultimately more transformative.

You don’t need the perfect conditions. You need attention, openness, and practice. And perhaps most importantly, you need the willingness to let awe meet you where you actually are: not on the mountaintop, but on the bathroom floor. Not in the arena, but in the ordinary Tuesday morning with its jackrabbits and its tangerine light and its improbable, continuing gift of being alive.

The wonder is already here. Dispositional awe is learning to see it.

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🌿 EARTH CONNECTION: Awe in Your Bioregion

This week, find one place within walking distance that asks something of your nervous system. Not somewhere dramatic. Somewhere that has the quality of scale: a large tree, an open sky, moving water, a view that goes further than your daily habits usually allow.

Go without your phone. Stay longer than feels comfortable. Notice what your body does when you stop filling the silence. Notice what arrives when you stop managing the experience.

Your bioregion has been practicing wonder for far longer than you have. Let it teach you.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally and is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe, basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she is probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

"Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world."

- Dacher Keltner, Awe, 2023.

Twenty-five years ago, I sat in an enormous Seattle arena packed with thousands of strangers, waiting for the Dalai Lama to speak. I hadn’t known what to expect. An arena felt like a strange container for something sacred, all those folding seats and fluorescent concession signs and people rustling programs. And yet, something began to happen before he even arrived. The crowd, that improbable assembly of seekers and skeptics and the simply curious, began to settle into a shared stillness. The air changed. Dacher Keltner, one of the foremost researchers on the science of awe, might call what we were generating together collective effervescence, that phenomena the philosopher Émile Durkheim first named when humans move and attend and breathe together into something larger than themselves.

When the Dalai Lama finally appeared, my entire body began to tingle. Not metaphorically. A physical electricity moved through me, starting at the crown of my head and spreading downward. I looked at my hands. I looked at the strangers around me. They were feeling it too, I could see it on their faces: that unmistakable expression of jaw slightly dropped, eyes widened, something loosening in the chest.

The intensity faded within hours. But something else remained, a restlessness, a new hunger I didn’t yet have language for. Without knowing it, I had caught my first clear glimpse of what researchers now call dispositional awe, and it planted a seed that would take decades to fully understand.

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Situational Awe: The Lightning Strike

Situational awe is what most of us imagine when we think of awesome experiences. Intense, often fleeting, triggered by specific encounters with vastness. Standing at the Grand Canyon. Witnessing a birth. Hearing music that cracks you open. Ten thousand people breathing together in the presence of something holy.

These moments hit like lightning. Your jaw drops. Eyes widen. Chills or tears arrive uninvited. Powerful, brief, and largely ungovernable.

You can’t manufacture these moments. They happen to you. You can create conditions: places of beauty, great art, significant life events, a room full of people all choosing to show up for something. But you can’t force them. And therein lies both their gift and their limitation. A life organized around chasing lightning strikes is a life spent mostly waiting.

After Seattle, I spent years seeking more of that electrical aliveness. More sacred spaces, more peak experiences. Each one delivered its bolt. Each one faded. And each time the intensity receded, I felt a particular species of disappointment, the spiritual equivalent of a hangover, wondering whether I’d ever be able to hold onto what I’d touched.

It wasn’t until much later, after life dismantled nearly everything I thought I knew about stability, that I began to understand the difference between chasing lightning and learning to see the electricity that was always already present.

Dispositional Awe: The Sustained Orientation

Here’s what researchers discovered: some people experience awe more frequently than others. Not because more awesome things happen to them, but because they’ve developed a general tendency, a sustained orientation, toward experiencing awe.

This is dispositional awe, and it isn’t about peak experiences. It’s about a way of being that remains open to wonder.

It’s noticing the fractal patterns in frost on a window. Pausing to really see the improbability of a spider’s web. Letting yourself be moved by the fact that you exist at all: that consciousness arose from matter, that this impossibly complex cascade of 13.8 billion years of cosmic becoming led, somehow, to this moment of you reading these words.

Dispositional awe isn’t about intensity. It’s about frequency and accessibility. It’s the difference between waiting for lightning to strike and learning to see the electricity that’s always present in the air.

I think about my own childhood and recognize, in hindsight, the seeds of this orientation growing in unlikely soil. I was a wee sprite of a girl with strawberry blonde curls and freckles scattered like fairy dust, and I grew up in a family culture that expected me to swallow fear, to wear the happy mask, to adapt rather than feel. The neighborhood boys threw gravel. The adults dismissed my distress. I learned early to suppress my quick-tears and build an interior world rich enough to compensate for what the exterior world withheld: long hours in the forest behind our house, chapter books that lit up my inner life, a fantastical imagination that I now understand was my first act of self-preservation.

What I didn’t see then was that this interior world was already a form of dispositional openness. Not yet awe, exactly. But wonder. A child’s stubborn insistence that the world was more interesting, more alive, more layered than the adults around her seemed to notice.

Trauma, as Bessel van der Kolk documents so precisely in The Body Keeps the Score, is stored in the body. And so, I’ve come to believe, is its antidote. The same fascia that holds our wounds holds our capacity for wonder. The body that learned to brace also learned to sense. The question is whether we can, patiently and with practice, teach it to do more of the latter.

Both a Trait and a Skill

Dispositional awe appears to be both a personality trait and a skill you can develop.

Some people score naturally high on measures of dispositional awe. They’re more prone to wonder, more frequently struck by the extraordinary in the ordinary. I suspect the sprite in me was one of them, before the gravel and the dismissals and the years of conditioned adaptation began to narrow the aperture.

But here is the extraordinary news: you can cultivate this orientation even if it doesn’t come naturally, even if it’s been conditioned out of you, even if life has spent years training you to brace rather than open.

By practicing awareness of awe, by intentionally seeking and savoring moments of wonder, you’re literally rewiring your nervous system toward greater openness, connection, and resilience. Keltner’s research in Awe suggests this isn’t metaphorical. The neural pathways that process wonder are trainable, the same way you can train attention, patience, or strength.

That seed from the Seattle arena grew because I watered it. I kept seeking experiences that evoked that tingling. I read cosmology. I spent time in nature. I paid attention to moments of recognition: when something shifted in my chest before my mind caught up with why. Slowly, without my fully noticing it happening, my default orientation shifted. I didn’t need the arena, or the Grand Canyon, or the monastery. I could find awe in my backyard. In my daughter’s laughter. In the ordinary miracle of a heartbeat.

The wonder hadn’t gone anywhere. I had simply been learning, all along, to see it.

What Changes

People who score high on dispositional awe show remarkable differences. Increased curiosity: they approach life with genuine wonder about how things work, why things are, what’s possible. Greater humility: not low self-esteem, but accurate self-perception, seeing themselves as part of something larger, which paradoxically makes them more rather than less secure. More altruistic behavior: when you regularly experience yourself as interconnected with everything, you naturally care more about the wellbeing of others and the planet. Better tolerance of uncertainty: when you’re comfortable not fully grasping things, resting in the presence of mystery, you become more resilient in the face of life’s inevitable ambiguity.

These aren’t just nice side effects. These are adaptations for thriving in a complex, interconnected world. The universe has been practicing this for 13.8 billion years: coherence arising from dissolution, new forms assembling from the ruins of old ones.

Dispositional awe is, I’ve come to believe, one of the primary ways the cosmos evolves its own consciousness through us.

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✨ TRY THIS NOW: The Awe Inventory

For the next week, keep a simple log. You’re not measuring anything external. You’re training attention, and attention is the tool.

Situational Awe (peak experiences): What triggered it? Where were you? What did your body do? What shifted afterward?

Dispositional Awe (quieter recognitions): What moved you today that you almost walked past? Did you pause, or keep moving? How often are these moments arriving?

Patterns: Am I waiting for big moments, or learning to notice small wonders? What conditions open me? When do I rush past potential wonder?

The more you track awe, the more you’ll find it. That capacity will change your life.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“The universe is not a collection of objects but a communion of subjects.”

-Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, p. 81

I was fifty-five years old, sitting in a chair I had sat in many times before, reading a book I had been assigned for a graduate program I had only recently joined, when my body seized. Not in pain. In recognition. My breath caught. Tears came without warning or permission. Something that had been growing underground for thirty-four years broke the surface all at once, and the world I had known as a collection of separate things dissolved into something I can only describe as one breathing, luminous, mutually sustaining whole.

The book was Journey of the Universe by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker. The passage was about the universe as story, as a single unfolding event in which every being participates, in which nothing is separate, in which the human capacity for awareness is the universe developing the ability to know itself. I had encountered versions of this idea before. I had studied Buddhism at Kopan Monastery at twenty-one, had read Alan Watts and the Tao Te Ching and Aldous Huxley in my late teens, and held the concept of interconnection intellectually for decades. I thought I understood it. I did not understand it. Not the way my body understood it in that moment, with every cell, with something older than language, with a fullness that left no room for the observer who had previously stood slightly apart from everything, watching.

The word that came to me afterward, the only word that fit, was gobsmacked.

What Made the Ground Ready

Emergence doesn’t come from nowhere. The mushroom that appears overnight in your garden after rain has been preparing for months, years, sometimes decades, in the mycelial network underground. The fruiting body is not the beginning of the process. It is the moment the process becomes visible. What I experienced reading Swimme that afternoon was not a sudden transformation. It was the arrival above ground of everything that had been growing since Kopan, since the classroom doorway, since every unglamorous morning practice of radical self-honesty that had threaded itself into my nervous system without my full awareness.

The graduate program that brought that book into my hands was the Institute for Educational Studies, and the person who drew me in, was it’s cofounder and Dean Dr. Philip Snow Gang, whom I had met in January 2020 in Portland, Oregon. I walked into his home and stopped in the doorway. Warm red walls. Books everywhere: David Bohm, Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry, Fritjof Capra, a shelf that looked like the inside of my own unspoken longing made physical. My eyes fell on several shelves where pre-WWII Montessori materials were waiting for their story to be told or for my hands to explore.

Phil’s driving question, the one he had organized his work around, was: what contexts and processes in education might liberate teachers and learners? I had been asking some version of that question for twenty years without knowing anyone else was asking it. When he offered me a scholarship six months later I was, as I wrote in my journal at the time, seriously gobsmacked at being seen so fully.

That recognition, of being seen, of finding one’s questions reflected back with rigor and warmth and a whole community of thinkers behind them, was itself a kind of emergence. The mycelium had been threading toward this all along. The illness at Kopan, the doorway practice, the years of cultivating embodied self-honesty in classrooms with children who could sense everything, all of it had been building the conditions in which what Swimme was saying could land not just in my mind but in my body, in my cells, in the electromagnetic field of a fifty-five-year-old woman sitting in a chair with tears running down her face and nowhere else she needed to be.

The Neuroscience of Being Gobsmacked

Dacher Keltner, in his research on awe, identifies two defining features of the experience: perceived vastness, an encounter with something larger than the self, and need for accommodation, the cognitive and physiological demand to reorganize your existing frameworks to contain what you are encountering. (Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder, 2023, p. 8) When your nervous system meets something it cannot fit into its current categories, it doesn’t simply file it away. It reorganizes. Your default mode network, that persistent narrator of separate selfhood, quiets. Your boundaries between self and world become temporarily permeable. Coined by neuroscientist Dr. Arne Dietrich, transient hypofrontality is a state in which the constant maintenance of a bounded, separate identity briefly releases its grip.

This is not a malfunction. It is the system doing exactly what it is designed to do in the presence of genuine vastness. And it is, from the quantum biology perspective we explored in Article 7, a coherence reorganization event. Your electromagnetic field encounters something so large that it must expand, must become more coherent, must organize at a higher level of complexity to accommodate what has arrived. The physical symptoms, chills, tears, that full-body flush researchers call piloerection, the sensation Monica Parker describes in The Wonder Cycle as the feeling of being both very small and somehow more expansive than usual, these are not poetic metaphors. (Monica Parker, The Wonder Cycle, 2023) They are your bioelectric system reorganizing in real time.

What I notice, looking back, is that I could not have had that experience at thirty. Not because the ideas weren’t available, but because I hadn’t yet built the receiver capacity to let them land that way. The decades of embodied practice, the mycelial network of self-knowledge and coherence I had been growing in the dark, had prepared the conditions for this particular signal to arrive not as information but as recognition. The universe, as Swimme would say, had been curving toward this moment through the particular path of this particular life. (Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe, 2011, p. 96)

The Universe Recognizing Itself

Thomas Berry wrote that the human is that being in whom the Earth begins to reflect on and celebrate itself, that we are not separate from the living systems of this planet but are their most recent, most complex expression of self-awareness. (The Dream of the Earth, 1988, p. 195) I had loved this idea for years. That afternoon, reading Swimme, I stopped loving it as an idea and began living it as a fact. The calcium in my bones, forged in dying stars. The water in my cells, cycling through oceans and clouds and countless living beings for billions of years. The capacity to read those words: the universe, after 13.8 billion years, developing the ability to know itself through this particular configuration of stardust and longing and accumulated practice.

This is what the syntropy research points toward: that life organizes not only away from entropy but toward something, pulled forward by attractors that Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini describe as coming from the future, as if coherence itself is the destination the universe has been navigating toward all along. (Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini, Syntropy: The Spirit of Love, 2015) The mycelium doesn’t know what the forest will look like. It grows toward connection, toward the conditions that support life, toward whatever calls it forward. And then, when enough network has formed and conditions are right, something emerges that could not have been predicted from the underground growth alone.

Brian Thomas Swimme calls this allurement, the universe’s fundamental pull toward greater complexity and connection, the same force that draws hydrogen atoms into stars and stars into galaxies and, eventually, stardust into beings capable of weeping at the recognition of their own cosmic belonging. (The Universe is a Green Dragon, 1984) What I felt that afternoon was allurement arriving. Not as a gentle nudge but as a full-body reckoning. Thirty-four years of underground growth breaking the surface all at once, the network becoming visible, the forest revealing itself.

What Changes When You Can See the Network

Something shifted after that afternoon that I am still learning to describe accurately. It wasn’t that I became serene or untroubled or permanently expanded. Life continued to be, as life tends to be, complex and humbling and occasionally chaotic. What changed was something more like orientation. I stopped experiencing difficulty as evidence that something had gone wrong and began recognizing it as the conditions in which the network builds. I stopped waiting to feel ready and began trusting that the underground growth was happening whether I could witness it or not.

The gobsmacked moment, I’ve come to understand, is not the destination. It is a signal, a confirmation that the network has reached sufficient complexity for something to emerge, an invitation to reorganize at a higher level of coherence and then keep growing.

My cumulative project for my Master’s degree, titled: Gobsmacked, Awestruck, and In Wonder: Exploring Ontological Awakening in Montessori Teacher Education, grew directly from sitting with that question: what happens to an educator when the universe stops being background and becomes, as Berry said, a communion of subjects? How does that reorganization change what you offer the children in your care, the teachers you mentor, the world you inhabit?

The answer, I believe, is everything. And also: it happens gradually, underground, invisibly, through practices that feel modest in the moment and accumulate into something you could not have designed. You don’t manufacture emergence. You build the conditions that make it possible. You grow the network. You trust the dark. And then one afternoon, in a chair, reading a sentence you have read a dozen times before, the forest reveals itself, and you understand for the first time, with your whole body, that you were never separate from it.

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🌌 Cosmological Moment

The first fruiting bodies appeared on Earth approximately 715 million years ago. For hundreds of millions of years before that, fungal networks had been growing underground, building the mycelial web that would eventually make complex terrestrial life possible. The forest we see above ground is, in a very real sense, the visible expression of an underground collaboration that preceded it by an almost incomprehensible span of time.

The 13.8-billion-year universe works this way at every scale. Stars form in molecular clouds too cold and dark to see. Life begins in chemistry too small to witness. Consciousness emerges from matter through processes too slow and complex to observe in real time. And then, when conditions are right, something breaks the surface that could not have been imagined from the underground growth alone.

You are not outside this process. The practices you have been building, the threshold pauses, the return to gratitude in difficulty, the daily attempts at coherence that feel modest and unwitnessed, these are mycelial threads. They are building a network whose full shape you cannot yet see.

Place your hand on your chest. Feel your heartbeat. That rhythm is ancient beyond imagining, the universe organizing itself into increasing complexity through this particular form. The network has been forming since long before you were born. What is emerging through you, right now, is the cosmos continuing to know itself.

Deeper Dive: Resources for Further Exploration

Journey of the Universe by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker (2011): The book that broke the surface for me. Read it slowly, with your body, not just your mind. The companion film is equally worth your time.

The Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry (1988): Berry’s foundational articulation of the human as the Earth’s self-reflection. Dense, profound, and worth returning to at different seasons of your life.

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder by Dacher Keltner (2023): The most accessible current science of awe, its effects on the self and body, and why encounters with vastness are not luxuries but necessities.

The Wonder Cycle by Monica Parker (2023): A warm and rigorous exploration of wonder as a practice, with particular attention to what it means to cultivate it intentionally in adult life.

Syntropy: The Spirit of Love by Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini (2015): The theoretical framework underlying this entire series, for those ready to go deeper into the science of life organizing toward coherence rather than dissolution.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally and is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe, basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she is probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“The mycelium is Earth’s natural internet, a living web that has no center, no edge, and no end.”

-Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, p. 7

There is something that happens underground long before anything appears above the surface. Mycelium, the vast fungal network threading through forest floors and meadow soils, spends most of its existence invisible, growing in the dark, building connections between organisms that have no idea they are being connected. The forest above ground looks like a collection of separate trees. Below, it is one breathing, communicating, mutually sustaining organism. The network was always there. You just couldn’t see it.

I didn’t know I was growing mycelium. I was twenty-one years old, lying on a thin mattress in a shared nunnery sleeping room at Kopan Monastery outside Kathmandu, and my body was teaching me something I would not have language for until three decades later. After arriving in Nepal I had succumbed to five simultaneous illnesses, likely contracted during Songkran in Myanmar, where revelers throw water with joyful abandon and, as it turned out, considerable contamination. High fevers. Debilitating dysentery. Two full weeks I barely remember. My new Australian friend Mark, when I missed an agreed meeting, went door to door through the city until he found me. He arranged for me to recuperate in silent retreat at Kopan. In those first days I could barely walk from my room to the meditation temple.

I should have been miserable. Yet something extraordinary was happening alongside the illness. During meditation sessions, even as my body struggled, waves of gratitude washed through me that had nothing to do with my circumstances. A sense of connection to everything around me that intensified even as I grew physically weaker. I was sick and simultaneously more coherent than I had ever felt. I didn’t understand it. I filed it away in the part of myself that holds things too large to process immediately. What I know now is that I was laying down mycelium: invisible threads of embodied knowing that would one day allow something extraordinary to emerge. The network was forming. I just couldn’t see it yet.

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What the Body Builds Without Permission

Quantum biology, the study of quantum effects in living systems, reveals that your body isn’t only biochemical; it’s also electromagnetic and informational. At the quantum level, your cells communicate through fields as well as chemical signals. Your fascia, that connective tissue networking your entire body, creates what researcher James Oschman describes as a liquid crystalline matrix that transmits information faster than your nervous system can consciously process. (James Oschman, Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2000) From this perspective, illness isn’t only breakdown. It’s often reorganization: the body upgrading its capacity to maintain coherence under stress in ways that won’t be legible for years.

Dr. Catherine Clinton writes that your body has its own intelligence, its own organizing capacity, and that when you work with it rather than override it, healing accelerates in ways that are not miraculous but syntropic, meaning organized toward greater complexity and coherence rather than dissolution. (Catherine Clinton, Optimize, 2023) What I was learning at Kopan, without knowing I was learning anything at all, was how to stay present inside difficulty rather than bracing against it. How to let the reorganization happen. It was unglamorous and mostly unconscious. The mycelium never announces itself. It simply grows toward what it needs, builds what the network requires, and waits.

A Long Commute and a Classroom Threshold

Jump forward ten years years. I’m a Montessori 3-to-6 guide at a bucolic farm school: animals, gardens, a nature trail winding through old trees, a homelike classroom with low shelves and the particular smell of beeswax and wood and small children. On paper, it is a dream. In practice, this particular year, it is also a crucible.

One family has an older child in another class. Their younger son, three years old, is enrolled in mine. He is adorable and fast and mischievous, and when the social norms of group life require him to use his words rather than his hands to get what he needs, his whole system protests with considerable force. He has a classroom best friend, also his neighbor at home, and together they generate a particular species of chaos that is difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t stood at the center of it. The older children, who have spent two years cultivating genuine community, are wary and unsettled. My assistant and I are running on patience and redirection, trying to hold the social fabric of the whole group together while building individual relationships with twenty-four children.

I have a long commute to this school. Sixty minutes each way, 5 crowded highways and 3 bottleneck bridges, music playing and our daughter in the backseat. I begin to notice something during those drives. The state I arrive in is the state the classroom reflects back by mid-morning. Not as simple cause and effect, but as something more like resonance. When I arrive depleted and braced, something in the room tightens. When I arrive genuinely present, something loosens.

This leads me to what I come to think of as my doorway practice. Before I walk in each morning, I pause at the threshold. Thirty seconds, sometimes less. I ask myself with real honesty: what am I actually bringing in right now? Not what I wish I were bringing. What is actually present in my body? Some mornings the answer is: I’m settled, genuinely curious about the day. Other mornings: I’m already tired and dreading the moment the two boys arrive and the morning’s careful equilibrium shatters. The practice doesn’t fix the hard mornings. But it ends the performance of composure that was costing enormous energy and communicating nothing I thought it was communicating. Because the children weren’t reading my face. They were reading something else entirely.

The Field You Broadcast

Your heart generates an electromagnetic field approximately sixty times stronger than your brain, radiating outward through your body in every direction. This is measurable physics. The HeartMath Institute has documented that one person’s heart rhythm can affect another person’s brain waves in close proximity, with no conscious communication required. (Rollin McCraty, The Energetic Heart, HeartMath Institute, 2003) The children in my classroom weren’t reacting to my tone of voice or facial expression, though those communicated things too. They were responding to my field, the quality of coherence or incoherence I was broadcasting continuously, the way mycelium broadcasts chemical signals through a forest floor, the way a tree under stress sends information through the network to its neighbors.

Bessel van der Kolk writes that the body keeps the score of every experience we’ve had, that our history lives in our tissues, our posture, our automatic responses to stress. (The Body Keeps the Score, 2014, p. 21) What I was slowly learning at that doorway was a corollary: the body also keeps the possibility of coherence, available to be practiced even on the hard days, even with two small boys who were testing every boundary, even when you haven’t slept enough and the classroom feels like a lot. The mycelium of embodied self-knowledge was threading through my nervous system year by year, connecting the gratitude waves from Kopan with the electromagnetic realities of the classroom, building pathways I didn’t yet understand were part of the same network.

Maria Montessori wrote that the child’s work is a cosmic task, that each child arrives in the world with an inner drive toward coherence, toward becoming more fully what they are. (To Educate the Human Potential, 1948) But she also understood that this drive requires a prepared adult, someone who has done enough of their own work to be genuinely present to the child’s unfolding. The doorway practice was my imperfect, daily attempt at that preparation. Not a technique. A practice of radical self-honesty, repeated morning after morning, threading itself into who I was becoming without my full awareness. Underground. Invisible. Building the network.

What Was Growing Beneath the Surface

The two boys, in case you are wondering, did find their way. Not overnight. Not without considerable patient redirection. But by late spring, something had shifted. The classroom bestie dynamic had softened into something more genuinely mutual. The boy who expressed himself with his hands was developing, slowly and unevenly, his capacity to use his words. I can’t claim credit for most of this. Children do what they are ready to do, in the time they are ready to do it. But I do believe the doorway practice mattered, not because it made me a perfect teacher, but because it made me a more honest one.

What I was doing in those years, through illness and gratitude and commutes and doorway pauses, was building coherence I couldn’t see. The underground network of embodied self-knowledge was threading through my nervous system, year by year, preparing conditions for something I had no way to anticipate. Thomas Berry called the Earth’s continuous generation of new forms of life and consciousness the Great Work, and believed humans are invited to participate in it, not as managers from outside, but as the Earth’s own capacity for self-reflection. (The Great Work, 1999, p. 7) I didn’t think of myself that way standing at my classroom door on hard mornings. I was just trying to show up honestly for twenty-four children.

But the mycelium doesn’t know it is building a network. It simply responds to what is present, threads toward connection, grows toward conditions that support life. And then one day, when conditions are right, something emerges above the soil that could not have appeared without all that invisible underground work.

For now, the invitation is simpler: trust the underground work. Trust the doorway pauses and the gratitude waves and the daily attempts at coherence that feel modest and unlikely to matter much.

They are mattering.

The network is forming.

The forest you cannot yet see is already in the making.

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🌿 Earth Connection: Learning from the Mycelium

Find a place outdoors where you can be in contact with the ground: a garden, a park, a forest floor, even a patch of earth between pavement slabs.

Stand or sit and place your hands on the soil if you can. Beneath you, invisible, is one of the most ancient communication networks on Earth. A single teaspoon of healthy forest soil contains miles of fungal threads. The network beneath your hands may connect dozens of trees, moving water, carbon, and signals between them continuously.

Let yourself sit with this: the most important work often happens out of sight. The forest does not look like mycelium. The mycelium does not look like a forest. And yet each is impossible without the other.

Ask yourself: what is growing in me right now that I cannot yet see? What connections are forming underground? What is being built in the dark that is not yet ready to emerge?

You don’t need to answer these questions. You only need to hold them, here, with your hands on the soil, in the company of a network that has been doing this invisible work for four hundred million years.

Deeper Dive: Resources for Further Exploration

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (2020): The most alive and readable account of mycelium and fungal intelligence available. A book that will change how you walk through any forest.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk (2014): The foundational text on how experience lives in the body and how embodied practices create genuine healing.

Optimize by Dr. Catherine Clinton (2023): Practical and scientifically grounded exploration of working with the body’s own intelligence rather than overriding it.

To Educate the Human Potential by Maria Montessori (1948): Montessori’s own articulation of cosmic education and the prepared adult. Surprisingly readable and perpetually relevant.

Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis by James Oschman (2000): For those who want the science behind the electromagnetic body and why presence is a physiological phenomenon.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally and is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe, basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she is probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“The bonding simply happens; it simply is. The bonding is the perdurable fact of the universe and happens primievally in each fresh instant, a welling-up of an inescapable togetherness of things.”

-Brian Thomas Swimme & Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, p. 25

I was sitting cross-legged on a cushion at Kopan Monastery outside Kathmandu, when the lama asked us to contemplate the continuity of consciousness. Not just our own consciousness across lifetimes, though that was part of it, but the unbroken thread of awareness that had been organizing itself since the beginning of time.

At the time, I understood this as a religious teaching about reincarnation. But something deeper landed in my body that day, something I wouldn’t have words for until decades later: the recognition that I wasn’t separate from the organizing process of the universe. That whatever intelligence had been at work creating stars and planets and life was still at work, in me, through me, as me.

I returned to that monastery four years later, at twenty-five, bringing with me new questions about meaning and purpose and what it meant to be alive in this particular moment of cosmic time. The teachings landed differently the second time. I could feel something pulling me forward, not pushing from behind, but pulling from ahead. Something I couldn’t name, couldn’t see, but could sense as clearly as gravity.

Now, thirty-five years later, I have words for what I felt. I have a framework that makes sense of that pull. It’s called syntropy, the universe’s tendency to organize itself toward greater complexity, greater coherence, greater consciousness. And understanding it has transformed not just how I think about my life, but how I live it.

The Momentum Behind You

Here’s what I wish I could tell that twenty-one-year-old sitting on her meditation cushion in the Himalayas: You are not fighting a losing battle.

This isn’t hope. This isn’t positive thinking or spiritual bypass or wishful fantasy. This is cosmology. This is physics. This is the actual structure of reality.

For 13.8 billion years, the universe has been organizing itself toward greater complexity, greater consciousness, greater coherence. Hydrogen atoms formed in the first moments after the Big Bang. Stars ignited, fusing those atoms into heavier elements. Planets coalesced from stellar debris. Life emerged from chemical possibility. Consciousness awakened from biological complexity. You appeared, reading these words, participating in the universe becoming aware of itself.

Every single moment of those 13.8 billion years, entropy and syntropy have been dancing together. Things fall apart. Things come together. Energy disperses. Energy concentrates. Old forms break down. New forms emerge. Both processes are fundamental. Both are necessary. Both are operating right now, in you.

You are the current expression of that dance. Not separate from it. Not observing it from outside. You are it, entropy and syntropy, breakdown and buildup, death and rebirth, happening simultaneously in your cells, your relationships, your consciousness.

This changes everything. Because when you realize you’re not fighting against the universe’s tendency toward disorder, when you realize you’re being carried by its tendency toward order, exhaustion transforms into participation. Resistance transforms into cooperation. Fear transforms into curiosity about what wants to emerge next.

What My Buddhist Teachers Knew

Looking back, I can see that my Buddhist teachers at Kopan were teaching syntropy, though they didn’t call it that. They called it dependent origination, the interconnectedness of all phenomena. They called it Buddha nature, the inherent capacity for awakening that exists in all beings. They called it emptiness and form dancing together, constantly creating and dissolving and creating again.

What they understood, what contemplative traditions across the world have understood, is that there’s an organizing intelligence at work in reality. Not as divine intervention from outside, but as the fundamental nature of the cosmos itself. The tendency toward coherence. The movement toward complexity. The pull toward greater consciousness.

When the lama talked about bodhicitta, the awakening mind, the intention to realize our deepest nature for the benefit of all beings, he was describing syntropy. The recognition that our individual awakening isn’t separate from the universe’s awakening to itself. That our healing isn’t separate from the world’s healing. That we’re not working alone, but cooperating with 13.8 billion years of organizing momentum.

This understanding has sustained me through every difficult passage of my life. When our daughter was struggling and I felt like I was failing as a mother, the reminder that something larger was organizing through the struggle, calling us both toward new capacities. When my relationship with my sister seemed impossibly broken, the recognition that even breakdown can be reorganization in progress. When my body signals pain or limitation, the trust that it’s not just deteriorating, but also constantly healing, adapting, reorganizing toward coherence.

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Berry and Swimme’s Gift

When I encountered Thomas Berry and Brian Thomas Swimme’s work decades after those monastery experiences, I felt the same recognition I’d felt sitting on that meditation cushion. They were describing the same reality, but in the language of cosmology rather than Buddhism.

Berry studied how the universe organizes itself through what he called the three fundamental principles: differentiation, subjectivity, and communion. From the Big Bang forward, every moment involves increasing diversity (differentiation), deeper interior experience (subjectivity), and greater interconnection (communion). These aren’t just abstract principles, they’re observable at every scale, from quantum interactions to galactic formations to human consciousness.

Swimme calls this organizing force “allurement”, the same gravitational pull that shapes galaxies is the same force that draws you toward healing, toward connection, toward love, toward your cosmic task. You’re not separate from cosmic unfolding. You are cosmic unfolding becoming conscious of itself.

This is what I felt in the Himalayas at twenty-one, sitting in meditation: allurement. The pull toward something I couldn’t name. The sense of being drawn forward by a future I couldn’t yet see but could feel organizing me. This is what pulled Aaron and me to travel the world. This is what called us to sell everything and live nomadically. This is what continues to organize my work, my relationships, my understanding of what it means to be alive.

When you feel drawn toward connection, toward healing, toward learning, toward creative expression, toward service, that’s allurement. That’s syntropy organizing through you. Not as external force imposing on you, but as the deepest nature of reality expressing itself through your particular life, your particular moment, your particular capacities.

The Organizing Intelligence at Work

I notice this organizing intelligence most clearly in hindsight. When I look back at the major transitions of my life, meeting my husband, leaving home at sixteen as an exchange student, returning to Nepal at twenty-five, becoming a Montessori teacher, becoming a mother, the losses and transformations that followed, I can see a pattern. A coherence. A direction I couldn’t perceive while I was in it, but that becomes visible looking back.

At the time, many of these transitions felt like chaos. Felt like breakdown. Felt like I was losing my way. But what I was actually experiencing was reorganization. The dissolution of old forms making space for new ones. Entropy clearing the ground so syntropy could build.

This doesn’t make the pain less real. Breakdown hurts, whether it’s happening in your body, your relationships, your sense of identity, or your life circumstances. But recognizing that breakdown might be reorganization in progress, that chaos might be the phase before new order emerges, repositions you from victim to participant. From someone things are happening to, to someone participating in cosmic creativity.

Think about it: every major evolutionary leap has involved breakdown followed by reorganization. Single cells became multicellular organisms through crisis and innovation. Fish moved onto land through environmental stress and adaptation. Primates developed consciousness through challenges that required new capacities. You are part of this same process. Your difficulties aren’t obstacles to your evolution, they’re often the very conditions that call forth new capacities.

When you’re in the thick of it, illness, grief, loss, confusion, it can feel like entropy is winning. Like everything is falling apart and nothing is coming together. But zoom out. Look at your whole life. Notice the pattern. See how what looked like dead ends were actually turns in the path. How what felt like failure was often preparation. How breakdown preceded every major breakthrough.

Not Pushing, But Pulled

Here’s the shift that changes everything: recognizing you’re not pushing alone against decay. You’re being pulled forward by an organizing intelligence with incomprehensible momentum.

The universe knows how to create order from chaos. It knows how to build complexity from simplicity. It knows how to generate consciousness from matter. That same intelligence that organized hydrogen into stars, stars into planets, planets into ecosystems, ecosystems into you, that intelligence is still organizing. In you. Through you. As you.

This is what I’m learning to trust. Not trust as in naive optimism that everything will work out the way I want. But trust as in recognition that I’m participating in a process that’s been successfully organizing itself since the beginning of time. Trust that when I align with what’s trying to emerge rather than clinging to what’s dissolving, I’m working with the fundamental grain of reality.

I practice this daily now. When I notice myself pushing, forcing, trying to control outcomes through sheer willpower, I pause. I take a breath. I ask: What’s trying to emerge here? What future is pulling me forward? How can I cooperate with what’s organizing rather than fighting against what’s changing?

These aren’t just nice questions. They’re reorienting questions. They shift you from opposition to cooperation. From exhaustion to engagement. From trying to make things happen to allowing things to emerge. From being driven by the past to being drawn by the future.

Your Next Becoming

Right now, syntropy is at work in you. Not as metaphor. As actual physical process.

Your cells are organizing, repairing DNA, creating proteins, maintaining the exquisite order required for life. Your nervous system is integrating, forming new neural pathways, pruning old ones, constantly reorganizing in response to experience. Your consciousness is expanding, making connections you couldn’t make yesterday, perceiving patterns you couldn’t see before, becoming capable of complexity you couldn’t hold last year.

And beyond the cellular and neurological, something else is organizing: the next version of you. More whole. More conscious. More connected. More able to participate in the Great Work of our time. This isn’t wishful thinking. This is retrocausality, future attractors pulling your present into new configurations.

The question isn’t whether syntropy is working in you. It is. It always has been. From the moment of your conception, you’ve been organizing yourself toward greater complexity. That’s what development is, syntropy made visible through a human life.

The real questions are: Are you fighting it or following it? Are you exhausting yourself trying to force outcomes, or cooperating with the organizing intelligence? Are you bracing against change, or curious about what wants to emerge? Are you pushing from behind, or being pulled from ahead?

I find myself asking these questions constantly now. When people I love make choices I don’t understand, am I trying to force them into my vision of who they should be, or am I trusting what’s organizing within them? When my body signals limitation, am I fighting against aging, or cooperating with my body’s wisdom about what it needs? When work feels difficult, am I pushing against resistance, or listening to what’s trying to emerge through the difficulty?

The Practice of Cooperation

So how do you actually cooperate with syntropy? How do you work with this organizing intelligence rather than against it?

First, by recognizing when you’re in opposition. Notice the quality of your effort. Are you straining? Forcing? Pushing against resistance? Does your body feel tight, braced, defended? That’s the felt sense of fighting against what’s happening. Of trying to control outcomes through willpower alone.

Cooperation feels different. It’s engaged, active, attentive, but there’s a quality of flow to it. You’re working with what’s emerging rather than imposing your will on what’s resisting. There’s effort, yes, but not strain. Challenge, but not opposition. You’re riding the current rather than swimming against it.

I learned this most clearly through my Montessori training, watching how children develop when we create the right conditions and then get out of the way. Maria Montessori called it the child’s cosmic task, each child has something they’re here to do, a way they’re here to organize themselves and contribute to the world’s organizing. Our job as adults isn’t to impose development on them. It’s to recognize what’s trying to emerge and create conditions for its fuller expression.

The same principle applies to your own development. Something is trying to emerge through you. Some capacity, some contribution, some way of being that’s uniquely yours. Syntropy is organizing you toward this expression. Your job isn’t to figure it all out with your conscious mind and force it to happen. Your job is to notice what’s pulling you, what’s calling you, what wants to come through you, and create conditions for its emergence.

This is what following allurement looks like in practice. When you feel genuinely drawn toward something, not compulsively driven, but genuinely attracted, pay attention. That pull might be syntropy organizing you toward your next becoming. When you feel resistance to change that you know is necessary, pause and ask what you’re defending, what old form you’re clinging to that needs to dissolve so something new can emerge.

Practice cooperating with what’s organizing. Practice asking what wants to emerge rather than fighting what’s dissolving.

The universe is on your side. It always has been.

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In the next article, we shift gears. We move from understanding syntropy intellectually to experiencing it as a full-body awakening. Because knowing about this organizing intelligence is one thing. Feeling it move through you, sensing yourself as its expression, experiencing the pull of your next becoming, that’s when everything changes. That’s when theory becomes lived reality. That’s when you stop reading about transformation and start being it.

✨ INTEGRATION PRACTICE

Find a quiet space. Place your hand on your heart. Take three slow breaths, feeling your chest rise and fall with the rhythm that’s sustained you since birth.

Read these statements aloud, one at a time. After each one, pause. Close your eyes. Notice what happens in your body. Don’t rush. Let each truth land.

“I am not fighting a losing battle.”

Pause. What do you notice? Tightness releasing? Breath deepening? Resistance arising? Just notice.

“The universe has been organizing itself for 13.8 billion years.”

Pause. Feel the weight of that time. The incomprehensible momentum of cosmic organization.

“That same organizing intelligence is at work in me, right now.”

Pause. Can you sense it? Your cells organizing. Your breath organizing. Your consciousness organizing.

“My next becoming is already calling me forward.”

Pause. Where do you feel that pull? What direction is it pointing? What wants to emerge?

“I am not separate from this cosmic unfolding. I am this cosmic unfolding.”

Pause. Let this truth settle. Let it reorganize your sense of who you are and what’s possible.

This isn’t affirmation. This is recognition. Your body knows this is true, it’s been organizing itself syntropically your entire life. You’re simply remembering what you’ve always been participating in.

Write one sentence about what shifted in this practice. Even subtle recognition is profound transformation beginning.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

"The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new."

-Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

I remember standing at the threshold of my classroom years ago, hand on the doorknob, pausing. Not because I’d forgotten something. Not because I was unprepared. I paused because I’d discovered something that would change how I taught, how I parented, how I moved through the world.

That doorway had become my emotions detector. Before I entered, I’d pause and ask myself: Am I coherent? What’s the quality of my energy right now? The children would know within seconds. They were exquisitely sensitive to my state, not through some mystical power, but through the quantum reality of electromagnetic fields. We are, each of us, broadcasting our coherence or incoherence into every space we enter. The children in my classroom weren’t misbehaving, they were responding to the field I was generating.

This recognition shifted everything. I realized I’d been asking the wrong questions my entire life. Not wrong in a moral sense, but wrong in that they positioned me against reality rather than with it. I’d been trained, we’ve all been trained, to ask entropy questions. Questions that assume breakdown, that anticipate deterioration, that position us in constant defense against an inevitable decline. What’s wrong here? How do I fix what’s broken? How do I prevent this from falling apart?

These questions had shaped my entire approach to teaching, to parenting Mali, to my relationship with Aaron, to my own body. They’d created a life of constant vigilance, exhausting management, perpetual bracing. I was the supervisor of entropy, trying through sheer force of will to keep everything from disintegrating. And I was tired. So tired.

The Tyranny of Entropy Questions

The entropy-only worldview gave us a whole way of approaching life. It’s not just a scientific perspective; it’s become our default lens, our automatic orientation. We inherited it from a mechanistic worldview that sees the universe as winding down, systems as inevitably degrading, order as temporary and precious because it will surely dissolve.

From this perspective, the questions we ask make perfect sense: How do I fix what’s broken? How do I control this outcome? How do I prevent deterioration? What’s wrong here? These aren’t bad questions. They’ve served us in many ways. But when they’re the only questions, when we can’t even imagine other questions to ask, we’re stuck in a defensive posture.

I see this pattern everywhere now. In the way we approach our bodies, constantly monitoring for signs of breakdown, treating symptoms, fighting disease. In education, focusing on deficits, what children can’t do yet, problems to be corrected. In relationships, identifying what’s wrong, what needs fixing, what’s not working. Even in our spiritual lives, working on our issues, purifying ourselves, transcending our flawed humanity.

The questions themselves create the experience. When I wake up asking, “What’s wrong with me today?” my body responds by cataloging every minor discomfort. When I enter the classroom asking, “What problems will I have to manage?” I’m primed to see problems rather than the children’s emerging capacities.

This is syntropy’s absence made visible. When we only see entropy, we only ask entropy questions. And entropy questions create entropy responses, in our bodies, in our relationships, in the systems we’re part of. We become what we’re looking for. We find what we seek.

When Syntropy Changes the Questions

My work with Dr. Gang at The Institute for Educational Studies cracked this open. Phil had spent decades asking a different question: “What contexts and processes in education might liberate teachers and learners . . . ?” Not what’s broken in education. Not how to fix failing schools. But what might liberate. What might allow natural development to unfold. What conditions support the organizing intelligence already present in every child, every teacher, every learning community.

This question assumes syntropy. It assumes there’s an organizing intelligence already at work, already moving toward coherence, already creating order. Our task isn’t to impose order from outside, it’s to recognize the order that’s emerging and create conditions for its fuller expression. This shifts everything.

I think of Dr. Catherine Clinton’s work with the body. She doesn’t ask, “What’s wrong with this body?” She asks, “What is this body trying to organize toward? What’s its intelligence signaling? How can I support its movement toward coherence?” This isn’t semantic wordplay. These questions create fundamentally different relationships with our bodies, from adversarial to collaborative, from suspicious to trusting.

When I finally understood this, I began to notice the quality of energy that different questions generated in my body. The old questions, What’s wrong? How do I fix this? How do I prevent that?, created tightness in my chest, tension in my shoulders, a clenching in my gut. They activated my threat response. They positioned me in a fight against reality.

The new questions felt completely different. What’s trying to emerge here? What future is calling me forward? How do I support the organizing intelligence at work? These questions created openness in my body, curiosity, a kind of alert receptivity. They positioned me with reality rather than against it. They recognized that I’m not separate from the organizing process, I’m part of it.

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The New Questions

When you recognize syntropy at work, when you see that the universe is simultaneously winding down and building up, that order-creation is as fundamental as entropy, different questions become not just possible but necessary:

“What is trying to emerge here?” This question assumes intelligence, assumes direction, assumes that what’s happening isn’t just random breakdown but part of a larger organizing process. When our daughter was struggling in high school, this question transformed how I understood her experience. Not: What’s wrong with her? But: What’s trying to emerge through this struggle? What new capacity is being called forth?

“What future is calling me forward?” This is syntropy’s signature question. It recognizes retrocausality, that we’re not just pushed by the past but pulled by future attractors. During our Series of Unfortunate Events, when everything seemed to be falling apart, this question kept appearing: What future am I being pulled toward? What’s organizing through this apparent chaos? The answer emerged slowly: a complete reorganization of our lives, a shedding of everything that no longer served, a movement toward something I couldn’t yet name but could feel pulling me forward.

“How do I support the natural organizing intelligence at work?” This question positions you as facilitator rather than controller. In my body, it means: What does my body need to move toward coherence? Not: How do I force my body to comply with my will. With children: What conditions support their natural development? Not: How do I make them behave. In relationships: What wants to come together here? Not: How do I fix this person.

“Where is coherence already building?” This question trains you to look for what’s working, what’s organizing, what’s coming together. It’s not toxic positivity, it’s syntropy perception. When I learned to ask this in my classroom, I stopped seeing “problem children” and started seeing children in different phases of their own organizing process. Some were in apparent chaos, but chaos that was reorganizing toward new complexity.

“How can I cooperate with what’s unfolding?” This question acknowledges that I’m not separate from the process. I’m not imposing order from outside, I’m part of the order that’s emerging. This was the shift at my classroom doorway: recognizing that my coherence or incoherence was part of the classroom’s organizing field. I wasn’t managing the children; I was participating in a co-creative process.

From Control to Facilitation

The fundamental shift is from trying to control outcomes to facilitating emergence. This doesn’t mean passive. It means actively engaged in a different way, the way a midwife is actively engaged with birth. She doesn’t make the baby be born. She doesn’t control the labor. But she’s not passive. She’s actively present, attuned, responsive, facilitating what’s trying to happen.

In your body: Instead of forcing compliance through willpower, pushing through pain, ignoring signals, trying to make your body do what you want, ask: What is my body trying to tell me? What does it need to organize toward coherence? How can I support its intelligence? This transforms the relationship from adversarial to collaborative. Your body has 13.8 billion years of organizing intelligence. It knows how to heal, how to adapt, how to reorganize toward greater complexity. When you work with this intelligence rather than overriding it, healing accelerates in ways that feel almost miraculous, but they’re not miracles. They’re syntropy.

With children: Maria Montessori discovered this a century ago. When you trust the child’s inner guide, what she called the child’s cosmic task, development unfolds with a grace that no forcing can achieve. Instead of asking, “How do I make this child behave?” ask: “What is this child’s cosmic task? What’s trying to emerge through them right now? How can I create conditions for their natural development?” The difference isn’t subtle. It’s the difference between being a mechanic fixing a machine and being a gardener creating conditions for growth.

In relationship: This might be where the shift is most profound. Instead of “How do I fix this person?” or “How do I get them to change?”, questions that create resistance and reinforce disconnection, ask: “What wants to emerge between us? What is this relationship calling us toward? What new form of connection is trying to be born?” I learned this painfully with my sister Shana. For decades, I asked entropy questions about her: What’s wrong with her? How can I protect myself from her dysfunction? These questions created the very disconnection I claimed I didn’t want. When I began asking syntropic questions, What wants to be healed between us? What future connection is calling us forward?, the relationship transformed. Not perfectly. Not without continued challenges. But it moved from opposition to collaboration, from judgment to curiosity, from closed to open.

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From Fighting to Aligning

The entropy-only worldview positions you in constant opposition. Everything is a fight. You’re fighting your body, fighting your circumstances, fighting other people, fighting time, fighting change, fighting reality itself. This is exhausting. This is why so many of us are so tired.

The syntropy-inclusive worldview positions you in cooperation. Not cooperation as in passivity or compliance, but cooperation as in aligning with the same organizing intelligence that created atoms, molecules, cells, bodies, consciousness. You’re working with 13.8 billion years of successful organization. You’re not imposing order on chaos, you’re participating in order that’s already emerging.

This doesn’t mean denying difficulty. It means recognizing that difficulty often signals transformation. Breakdown before reorganization. Chaos before new order. During our mold disaster and everything that followed, I kept asking: Why is this happening to us? That’s a victim question, an entropy question. It kept me stuck in suffering. When I finally shifted to asking, “What is this organizing us toward? What new form is trying to emerge?”, the suffering didn’t disappear, but my relationship to it changed. I could feel myself being reorganized. I could sense a future pulling me forward, even when I couldn’t see it clearly.

Instead of “How do I get back to how things were?” (regression, holding on, resisting change), ask: “What new form is trying to emerge?” This question acknowledges that you can’t go back, the universe doesn’t move backward, but you can move forward in ways you can’t yet imagine. This was our family’s experience. We couldn’t get our old life back. But we could allow ourselves to be reorganized into something new. Something that, in hindsight, served us far better than what we’d lost.

The Practice of Active Receptivity

Here’s what I want to be clear about: this isn’t passive. This posture, what I’ve come to call active receptivity, is deeply, intensely engaged. But it’s engaged differently.

Think again of the midwife. She’s not passive. She’s fully present, completely attuned, actively responding to what’s unfolding. But she’s not trying to force the baby to be born on her timeline. She’s not imposing her will on the process. She’s cooperating with an organizing intelligence that’s far more sophisticated than her conscious control could ever be.

This is what syntropic questions cultivate: active receptivity. You show up fully. You pay close attention. You create conditions. You respond to what emerges. But you’re not forcing, not imposing, not trying to make something happen that isn’t already trying to happen. You’re cooperating with an organizing intelligence that existed billions of years before you were born and will continue billions of years after you die.

I practice this now in my morning routine. Before I even get out of bed, I pause and ask: What wants to emerge today? What’s trying to organize through me? How can I support what’s unfolding? These questions shift my entire orientation. I’m no longer approaching the day as a series of problems to solve, tasks to complete, things to control. I’m approaching it as a co-creative process in which I participate.

The same at my classroom (and now home office) threshold, that doorway that became my practice space. Before entering, I pause. I check in with my body. I notice my energy. If I’m scattered, anxious, depleted, if I’m in incoherence, I take a moment to reorganize myself. Not through willpower. Not through forcing. Through breath, through presence, through asking: What does coherence feel like right now? How can I align with it?

Only then do I open the door. Because I know those I work with will respond not to what I say but to what I am. The field I generate is the field they’ll organize around.

I’m writing this from my home office, looking out at the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The morning light is doing what it does here, making everything impossibly beautiful, impossibly clear. And I’m thinking about that younger version of me, standing at the classroom doorway, hand on the knob, learning to ask different questions.

She didn’t know yet about syntropy, about retrocausality, about future attractors pulling us forward. She just knew that something shifted when she asked, “What wants to emerge?” instead of “What’s wrong?” She could feel it in her body, a softening, an opening, a different quality of presence that the children responded to immediately.

That was the beginning. The beginning of understanding that the questions we ask shape the lives we live. That we’re not separate from the organizing intelligence of the cosmos, we’re expressions of it. That syntropy isn’t just a scientific concept, it’s a lived orientation, a way of being in the world.

For now, practice the questions. Let them become as natural as breathing. Let them reshape your nervous system, your relationships, your sense of what’s possible. You’re not fighting entropy. You’re dancing with syntropy. The whole universe is dancing with you.

Choose your questions wisely.

They’re more powerful than you know.

In the next article, we’ll return to the personal story, how recognizing syntropy transformed not just my understanding, but my entire life trajectory. How it changed my relationship with my daughter, my sister, my own body. How it’s changing my sense of purpose, my work in the world, my understanding of what it means to be human in an evolving cosmos.

✨ REFLECTION: YOUR QUESTIONS

Take five minutes with these prompts. Write quickly, without editing:

Old questions I habitually ask: (Notice the ones about fixing, controlling, preventing, managing)

How these questions make me feel in my body: (Tight? Braced? Exhausted? Resigned?)

New questions I could ask instead: (What’s emerging? What’s organizing? What’s being called forth?)

One situation this week where I’ll practice asking the new questions: (Be specific. When will you remember to shift your question?)

This isn’t just intellectual exercise. You’re literally rewiring your nervous system’s default orientation. From opposition to cooperation. From fighting to following. From entropy’s exhaustion to syntropy’s aliveness.

The questions you ask shape the life you live.

Choose wisely.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“It takes a universe to bring humans into being, a universe to educate humans, a universe to fulfill the human mode of being.”

Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe, p. 44

The morning our daughter woke with an ear infection, I could see the pain in how she held her head. Tilted to one side, hand pressed against her ear, tears sliding down her face. The kind of deep ache that makes three-year-olds whimper.

I held her, feeling the heat radiating from her small body. Fever climbing. Her immune system already mobilizing, raising temperature, increasing blood flow to the infected area, sending armies of white blood cells to the site. A million intricate processes I couldn’t see, happening without my instruction or her understanding.

I wasn’t worried. Not because I’m a careless mother, but because I could feel something else at work. Her body knew what to do. The fever wasn’t the problem, it was the solution. Her system orchestrating itself toward healing, pulling the present moment of infection toward the future state of wholeness.

I gave her comfort. Cool cloth. Water. Presence. But the healing? That was happening on its own.

Syntropy at work.

The Everyday Extraordinary

This is what changes when you understand syntropy: You stop seeing the world as chaos you must constantly manage and start recognizing the organizing intelligence already at work.

Not sometimes. Not only in dramatic moments. Everywhere. All the time.

The science is fascinating, Fantappié’s equations, Di Corpo’s attractors, the mathematics of retrocausality. The cosmology is mind-bending, 13.8 billion years of increasing complexity against the tide of entropy. But here’s what matters for your Tuesday morning, your overwhelmed afternoon, your exhausted midnight:

Syntropy isn’t operating only at the scale of galaxies or buried in the equations of mathematicians. It’s in your daughter’s healing body. Your own hands learning new skills. The relationships that keep deepening despite, maybe through, their challenges. The bare earth outside your window quietly organizing itself back toward forest.

Once I learned to see it, I couldn’t unsee it. And now I want to show you where to look.

Your Body’s Quiet Brilliance

This morning, you woke up. While you slept, your heart beat 100,000 times, coordinating electrical impulses, valve openings, blood flow. Your lungs expanded 20,000 times. Your kidneys filtered your entire blood volume 20 times over. Your liver performed 500 separate biochemical functions.

You didn’t manage any of it.

Right now, as you read this, millions of cells are dying and being replaced. Your skin regenerates completely every 27 days. Your liver rebuilds itself in months. Even your skeleton, which feels so solid, so permanent, constantly breaks down and rebuilds, atom by atom, throughout your life.

This isn’t maintenance. This is syntropy. The organizing principle pulling your present toward a wholeness your body has always known.

When I sliced my finger installing cabinets during that endless house renovation, blood clotted within seconds. Platelets rushing to the site without being summoned. White blood cells arriving like they’d received coordinates. Fibroblasts laying down new tissue in precise patterns. Wound closing. Skin regenerating. Eventually, even the scar fading.

I didn’t direct any of that. The future state of intact skin was already pulling present chaos into order.

Your body isn’t a machine that breaks down and needs fixing. It’s an intelligent system constantly organizing itself toward coherence. The question isn’t whether syntropy is working in you, it is, right now, in ten thousand ways you’ll never consciously know about. The question is: Can you trust it?

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Children as Unfolding Cosmos

Mali didn’t learn to read through flashcards or phonics drills. She learned because something in her was already organizing toward literacy.

I don’t remember the exact moment, yet sometime around the age of five, she had been sounding out letters for months, that painstaking process of connecting symbols to sounds. One afternoon while at a cafe and staring at the menu, something shifted. Her eyes widened. A sharp intake of breath.

“Mama, I can read.”

Not “I learned to read.” I can read. As if the capacity had always been there, just waiting for her to notice.

Because it had been. For months, her brain had been organizing neural pathways, creating connections, building the architecture for reading long before she consciously knew she could do it. The reader-she-would-become was pulling her present self into new configurations. Syntropy, operating through a five-year-old’s developing brain.

That’s what Montessori called cosmic task, not what we impose on children, but what’s already trying to emerge through them. Future capacity organizing present development. This is why the best teaching often looks like not-teaching. Why the prepared adult, as Montessori understood, creates conditions where the child’s own becoming can unfold, rather than forcing outcomes on predetermined timelines.

When we interrupt that process, demanding results, forcing timelines, anxiously managing every step, we’re not helping. We’re interfering with syntropy. We’re like someone constantly digging up a seed to check if it’s growing yet.

Mali thrived with teachers who trusted this. Who saw her neurospicy brain not as a problem to fix but as a cosmic condition to celebrate. Who created space for her becoming rather than imposing their vision of what she should be.

The universe spent 13.8 billion years organizing itself to create this specific child. Maybe our job isn’t to improve on that design.

Relationships That Deepen Through Chaos

After my younger sister died, gone suddenly at the too-young age of 53 from a medical complication, my relationship with my older sister was transformed in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

We’d always been deeply authentic with each other. As an almost four-year-old when I was born, our parents allowed her to name me after her favorite television character: a first connection that would set the tone for decades to come. Throughout our lives, we’d shared the kind of relationship where real things got said, where we showed up as ourselves. We weren’t performing sisterhood; we were living it.

But grief cracked us both open in an entirely different way.

It wasn’t that we became closer, we’d always been close. It was that grief tore through whatever remained of our separateness. The loss of our sister created a rupture so profound that the old boundaries between us simply dissolved. What had been authentic became essential. What had been deep became bottomless.

Our conversations stopped being about maintaining connection and became about survival through connection. We found ourselves saying things we didn’t know we’d been carrying. The vulnerability wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity. What emerged was rawer than anything before, not because we’d been holding back, but because grief had given us access to layers of truth we hadn’t known existed.

We weren’t trying to deepen the relationship. The deepening was happening to us. Through us. Pulling us toward an intimacy that felt both entirely new and somehow inevitable, as if this is where we’d always been heading but couldn’t have reached without being broken open first.

That’s syntropy in relationship. Not the effort of maintaining connection, but the pull toward greater coherence, deeper truth, genuine communion. The future “we”, two sisters who can hold all of it, the love and the hurt and the complexity, organizing how we show up in present moments.

I see it in my relationship with my husband too. Forty-five years together, and still becoming. Still being pulled by versions of partnership we haven’t fully realized yet. The couple we’ll be ten years from now is already shaping how we speak today, how we navigate conflict, how we create space for each other’s unfolding.

This doesn’t mean relationships are effortless. It means the effort isn’t about forcing them into a predetermined shape. It’s about recognizing what wants to emerge and aligning with that pull.

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Skills Becoming Second Nature

I learned to tile during those months of house renovation after the mold disaster. Hours measuring, cutting, placing, grouting. Every movement required intense concentration. How to hold the tile cutter. Where exactly to place each piece. How much pressure for the grout. My back aching, my hands cramping, my brain exhausted from the constant decision-making.

Now, years later, my hands just know. My body understands spacing and level and the feel of properly adhered tile. The knowledge moved from conscious, effortful thinking into embodied wisdom. I don’t think about it anymore. I just do it.

This isn’t merely practice making perfect. This is my nervous system organizing around future competence. The tiler-I-would-become pulling my clumsy, uncertain attempts into increasingly sophisticated patterns. Syntropy operating through learning.

Same with writing. My early blog posts took hours, agonizing over every sentence, second-guessing every word choice, fighting to find my voice. Now words flow. Not because writing has become easy, but because something in me has organized around the pattern of expression. My fingers find the keys. The rhythms emerge. The voice sounds like mine.

You’ve experienced this too. That skill you used to think about constantly, driving, cooking, parenting through tantrums, leading meetings, that now happens with a fluid intelligence you can’t quite explain. That’s syntropy. Future mastery organizing present practice, pulling you toward competence that already exists as a pattern waiting to be realized.

Nature’s Persistent Organization

Out my window in Santa Fe, this land that called us here through some allurement I still don’t fully understand, the arroyo runs dry most of the year. Dusty channel, exposed sand, apparent lifelessness.

Then in the late summer months, the monsoons come. Water carves new channels overnight. Within days, green appears everywhere. Seeds that have been waiting, sometimes for years, suddenly germinate. Plants I’ve never seen emerge from soil that looked barren. The arroyo transforms.

Nobody planted those seeds. Life was just waiting for conditions. The future ecosystem, held as potential in dormant seeds, organizing itself into expression the moment water provided possibility.

Last fall, I stopped trying to impose conventional landscaping on our high desert yard. Instead, I’m watching what wants to grow. Chamisa appearing on its own. Volunteer Blue Grama grasses. Cholla and Claret Cup cacti slowly expanding their territory. The land is organizing itself, and my job isn’t to impose my design, it’s to cooperate with what’s trying to emerge.

That’s syntropy. The future ecosystem, already present as pattern and potential, pulling the present landscape toward itself. Given half a chance, given space and time and trust, life organizes toward greater diversity, deeper interdependence, increased resilience.

The universe has been doing this for 13.8 billion years. It’s probably better at it than I am.

The Shift in Seeing

Once you recognize syntropy in your daily life, everything changes.

You stop seeing your body as a machine requiring constant management and start trusting its organizing intelligence. You stop seeing children as blank slates or problems to fix and start witnessing their cosmic unfolding. You stop forcing relationships into shapes they resist and start allowing them to organize around genuine resonance. You stop fighting nature and start cooperating with it.

Most importantly, you realize something that changes how you wake up in the morning: You’re not alone in some heroic struggle against decay. You’re participating in an organizing intelligence that’s been at work since the first atoms formed, the same force that pulled hydrogen into stars, stars into galaxies, molecules into cells, cells into you.

The question isn’t whether to trust this force. It’s already at work. The question is: Will you recognize it? Will you align with it? Will you stop exhausting yourself pushing against it and learn to follow its pull?

How do you do that? How do you cooperate rather than interfere? How do you distinguish the pull of syntropy from the push of your own anxious control?

That’s what we explore next.

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In the next article, we’ll look at the practical shift, the questions that change everything. How moving from “What’s wrong?” to “What’s emerging?” transforms your entire approach to healing, learning, parenting, and living. How you learn to sense the difference between forcing and following.

✨ TRY THIS NOW: SYNTROPY AWARENESS

For the next 24 hours, notice three moments when syntropy is clearly at work:

**Your body doing something without conscious direction

**Someone (maybe you) learning or developing naturally

**Connection or community forming spontaneously

**Complexity or coherence increasing on its own

**Something organizing itself toward wholeness

When you notice it, pause for five seconds. Feel it in your body. Where do you sense it? What does recognition feel like?

This isn’t abstract theory. This is reality organizing itself right in front of you.

By evening, you’ll have evidence that you’re not fighting a losing battle. You’re participating in an organizing intelligence stronger than any decay.

This practice doesn’t require belief. Only attention.

The syntropy is already there. You’re just learning to see it.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, is on faculty with The Institute of Educational Studies graduate program. Her work centers transformational learning within an expanding universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see a bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“Each person discovers a field of allurements, the totality of which bears the unique stamp of that person’s personality. Destiny unfolds in the pursuit of individual fascinations and interests... By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universe together. The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion.”

-Brian Thomas Swimme, The Universe Is a Green Dragon, p. 48

The Douglas fir cones fell from the tree outside my childhood bedroom window every autumn, landing with soft thuds on the roof. I’d collect them by the handful, never wondering about the intelligence tucked inside.

Decades later, sitting in Montessori Elementary training watching the Timeline of Life demonstration, I finally asked the question that would crack open my understanding of time:

How does the seed cone know to become an fir?

Not an oak. Not a rosebush. A Douglas fir. Always a fir. With precision bordering on miraculous.

My instructor smiled. “The future is calling it forward.”

I thought she was being poetic. Turns out, she was being precise.

Every Seed’s Secret

Hold a seed in your palm.

This small seed contains genetic information for what it is to become. But DNA alone doesn’t explain what you’re witnessing. Blueprints don’t build houses. Blueprints don’t send roots down and shoots up.

Watch what the seed does. Every cellular process, every growth pattern is oriented toward one specific future form that doesn’t yet exist.

The Douglas fir, tall, complex, a cathedral of branch and needles is pulling the seed forward through time.

This is what Luigi Fantappié meant writing about syntropy in 1942. He described “attractors”, future states exerting real organizing influence on the present. Later, Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini spent decades exploring this, discovering that living systems aren’t just responding to past stimuli. They’re organizing toward future patterns.

“Life,” Di Corpo wrote, “is characterized by converging waves that anticipate a final cause.”

The Douglas fir is that seed’s final cause. Not predetermined. Not mechanistic. But real: a pattern of coherence the present moment is aligning itself toward.

This is retrocausality. The future affecting the present.

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Being Pushed vs. Being Pulled

I learned about causation in reverse. The past causes the present. Yesterday shapes today. Childhood creates patterns.

This is how entropy works, pushed from behind by past events.

My life seemed to prove it. Thirty-year-old plumbing mistake caused the mold. Mold pushed our displacement. Trauma pushed our decision to travel. Effect following cause, dominoes falling backward through time.

But on that Albanian beach in 2015, building my first online course while my husband Aaron photographed the setting sun over the Adriatic, I felt something I couldn’t name. A pull. Not away from chaos, but toward something we hadn’t yet become.

The future version of us, the family that would eventually land in Santa Fe, having built a business around that course, to integrate rather than just survive, was already organizing our present moment. Not as wishful thinking. As actual pattern. As attractor.

Feel the difference. Being pushed feels like pressure from behind: reactive, defensive, exhausting. Being pulled feels like magnetism from ahead: responsive, curious, enlivening.

One contracts. The other expands.

The Intelligence of Becoming

When our daughter Mali was learning to walk, she fell constantly. Dozens of times a day, soft thud of bottom hitting floor, startled expression, determined scramble back to standing.

I didn’t push her. But something was pulling her forward. Some future capacity for walking was reorganizing her nervous system, refining balance, coordinating muscles she’d never consciously controlled. The walker-she-would-become was already present as pattern, as organizing field.

Maria Montessori observed this in every child. She called it the child’s “cosmic task”, the unique developmental trajectory each child is pulled along by their own becoming. Not pushed by genetics alone, but drawn toward future capacities by cosmic forces.

Children are not blank slates being written on. They’re patterns of potential being pulled into actuality.

This is syntropy in consciousness, as allurement, as invitation, as the gentle insistence of what wants to emerge.

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My Own Pulling

When experiencing what my family now calls our “Series of Unfortunate Events”, I was being pulled by a future I couldn’t yet imagine. A version of myself who had integrated the trauma, who had found meaning in chaos, who had become more whole through the breaking.

That future self already existed, not in some metaphysical realm, but as pattern, as attractor, as organizational field.

I didn’t know this then. I only knew that beneath the despair, something warm was moving. A sense that this wasn’t just happening to me, it was organizing toward something.

Now I understand: the future wholeness was already pulling. Syntropy was already at work.

This is why transformation often feels like remembering rather than learning. Why breakthrough has that quality of “I’ve always known this.” Why the integrated version of yourself feels familiar when you finally arrive.

You’re not creating something new. You’re becoming what was already calling you forward.

The Practical Implications

Understanding this changes everything.

Instead of only asking “What caused this pain?” you can ask “What is this pain organizing me toward?”

Instead of being trapped by past conditioning, you recognize yourself as being called by future possibility.

When I work with educators now, this is what I listen for: Are they being pushed by past failure and fear, or pulled by future vision? Are they forcing curriculum onto children, or facilitating the unfolding of cosmic tasks?

The teachers who thrive, who don’t burn out, who stay alive to wonder, are the ones who’ve learned to follow the pull. To sense what’s trying to emerge and create conditions for its becoming.

They’re not pushing children toward predetermined outcomes. They’re attending to the future capacities already pulling each child forward.

This isn’t passive. It’s exquisitely active. But it’s a different kind of action, more gardener than sculptor, more midwife than architect.

The Question That Changes Everything

What future is already pulling me forward?

Not: What should I do based on past experience? Not: How do I fix what’s broken?

But: What future wholeness is already organizing this present moment?

When you cut your finger, you don’t have to figure out healing. Future wholeness is already pulling millions of cells into coherent repair. Your job isn’t to manage—it’s to not interfere with the intelligence at work.

When you’re recovering from trauma, you don’t have to construct a healed self from scratch. The integrated version already exists as attractor. Your work is to cooperate with the reorganization.

When you’re raising children, you don’t have to mold them. Their future selves are already calling them forward. Your task is to prepare environments where becoming can unfold.

The seed teaches this. It doesn’t try to become an fir. It is the fir, in process. Future and present aren’t separate, they’re entangled in the eternal now of becoming.

And so are you.

Right now, as you read these words, the future version of you, more integrated, more whole, more conscious, is already pulling. Already organizing. Already calling you forward.

Not as metaphor. As physics. As the way living systems actually work.

Are you listening to the pull?

In the next article, we’ll bring this home to your daily life—showing you exactly where syntropy is already at work in your body, your relationships, your learning, your healing. The theory becomes lived experience.

🌿 EARTH CONNECTION

Go outside. Find a patch of earth—even a sidewalk crack.

Notice what’s growing without human intervention. That’s syntropy. Life organizing toward complexity, pulled by the future possibility of thriving ecosystem.

If you’re where seasons change: even in late winter dormancy, seeds beneath soil are already organizing for spring. The future forest pulling the present toward itself.

Find an acorn or any seed. Hold it.

Feel your pulse, that rhythm organizing thousands of cellular events per second into coherent life. The same intelligence organizing your heartbeat is organizing the seed. Both pulled by future wholeness.

You are not separate from this organizing intelligence. You are it, taking human form.

The future you—more whole, more integrated—is already calling.

Are you listening?

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

“Syntropy determines our identity, our consciousness, or Self, which is small and cohesive, whereas entropy is the diverging outside Universe inflating towards infinity. Our ultimate goal is to unite ourselves with the Universe, a process named the theorem of love.”

-Ulisse Di Corpo & Antonella Vannini, Syntropy: The Spirit of Love, p.79.

The universe, according to the second law of thermodynamics, has one fundamental direction: toward disorder. Entropy, the measure of chaos in any system, always increases. Fires eventually distinguish. Buildings crumble. Stars burn out. Everything, we’re told, is falling apart.

And yet.

After the sewage incident, after I’d stopped crying and wiped my hands on my jeans one more time, I sat on that damp bathroom floor in my condemned home and confronted a paradox that wouldn’t let me go: If everything really is falling apart, why does anything exist at all?

My family was scattered across borrowed bedrooms. My possessions were boxed up or ruined. The house we’d built our life in was deemed unlivable. Entropy’s work was visible everywhere I looked, in the water-stained walls, the warped floorboards, the mold creeping up the walls. Pure disorder, exactly as predicted.

But something else was there too. Something that moved through me like a current running opposite to the chaos. Not hope, that felt too thin, too fragile. Not optimism, I was too exhausted for that. Something more fundamental. A knowing that whispered beneath the destruction: This isn’t the only force at work.

Because if entropy were the whole story, if the relentless march toward disorder were the only law that mattered, then the Big Bang should have produced nothing but an expanding cloud of cooling particles. A universe of gas, slowly dissipating into the void. No structure. No complexity. No stars or planets, no molecules or cells.

Instead, here I was. Here you are. Consciousness contemplating consciousness. Order arising from chaos. Complexity building against the current.

Something else is happening. And understanding what that something is, understanding the force that builds while entropy tears down, might be the most important question we can ask about the nature of reality itself.

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Finding the Name for What I’d Felt

I carried that bathroom floor knowing with me for years. Through selling or giving away most of what we owned. Through almost two years traveling Europe in our campervan. Through landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and beginning to rebuild not just a house, but a life organized around a different question: What if I stopped fighting and started following?

Then, in 2020, my mentor Dr. Philip Snow Gang (or as I call him, my Cosmic Papa) sent me an article. It was by Camillo Grazzini, a prominent AMI trainer and scholar who profoundly analyzed, articulated, and promoted Montessori’s vision of cosmic education in the decades following her death. The article’s title made my breath catch: “The Four Planes of Development: A Constructive Rhythm of Life.”

Buried in Grazzini’s discussion of how children naturally organize and reorganize themselves through developmental stages was a reference to something I’d never heard of: syntropy. He mentioned it almost in passing, as if every Montessorian knew about this force. As if it were obvious that the same principle organizing galaxies was organizing the six-year-old learning to read.

Several years later, I sat in my Santa Fe kitchen, a house we’d bought after years of uncertainty, a place that had somehow called us here, and felt that bathroom floor knowing surge back through my body. There’s a name for this.

Phil and I have been in deep conversation about syntropy ever since. Over the past year, we’ve traded articles, pulled apart equations neither of us are mathematically qualified to understand, argued about implications, sent each other quotes at midnight. What started as curiosity has become a kind of collaborative obsession, each discovery leading to ten more questions. Our musings turned to a short course where more dialogue uncovered even more syntropic connections.

This isn’t just intellectual work for either of us. Phil’s been asking his driving question for decades: “What contexts and processes in education might liberate teachers and learners so that they become catalysts for the new human - one whose integral relationship with Gaia is bound by right-action and love?” Syntropy offers an answer that neither of us expected: Stop trying to impose order. Start working with the organizing force that’s already pulling learners toward complexity.

For me, it’s given language to what I felt on that sewage-soaked bathroom floor. That knowing wasn’t wishful thinking or spiritual bypass. It was me sensing, as directly as I sensed the cold tile beneath me, a fundamental force of the universe at work.

A Discovery Hidden in Equations

The story Phil led me to begins in the 1940s with Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappié. He was working with wave equations when he noticed something strange. Reversing the arrow of time in his calculations, he found mathematical evidence of a force moving opposite to entropy.

Where entropy scattered, this force concentrated. Where entropy broke down, this force built up. Where entropy pushed apart, this force pulled together.

He called it syntropy, from syn (together) and tropos (meaning “a turn,” “tendency,” or “direction”). Put them together and you get syntropy, a converging tendency. The transformation that brings things together.

The scientific community largely ignores it. We already knew how the universe works: everything winds down, end of story.

Except it’s not.

In that condemned house with sewage backing up, I had no language for what I was experiencing. But looking back through the lens of syntropy, I see it: beneath the breakdown, something was organizing. The future version of my family, more integrated, more whole, was already pulling us forward.

That warm knowing? Syntropy speaking in its mother tongue.

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What Syntropy Actually Is

Syntropy is the organizing principle of the universe. Not metaphorically. Actually.

It’s the force that moves toward greater order, increasing complexity, deeper connection, higher coherence. While entropy spreads energy out evenly like cream dispersing in coffee, syntropy concentrates energy and information into increasingly sophisticated forms, like that same coffee being grown, harvested, roasted, brewed, and consumed by beings complex enough to contemplate their own existence while drinking it.

Both forces are real. Both are always at work. But we’ve been so fixated on entropy, on decay, on breakdown, on the second law of thermodynamics, that we’ve failed to see its cosmic dance partner.

I grew up hearing my grandmother’s stories of growing up on a cattle ranch in the high desert in eastern Oregon. While stories of riding her horse to a one room school house had me enthralled, I also remember the century-old wagon weathering in front of the family ranch. Entropy at work, wood graying, metal rusting.

Yet that same desert was alive with organization. Jackrabbits navigated ancient pathways. Sagebrush adapted to scarcity. Entire ecosystems maintained coherence in conditions that should have permitted nothing but dust.

The pungent smell of sage filled the morning air. Tangerine clouds performed their jitterbug dance at day’s closing. These were not exceptions to cosmic decay. They were evidence of syntropy, the organizing force that has been greening this planet for billions of years.

Why We Missed It

We missed syntropy because our science emerged from studying closed systems, isolated phenomena we could measure and control. In closed systems, entropy always wins.

But life isn’t a closed system. Your body isn’t. Earth isn’t. We’re all open systems, constantly exchanging energy and information with everything around us. In open systems, which is to say, in reality, both forces are always at work.

We also missed syntropy because entropy is so much louder. Decay demands attention. The mold eating my house was impossible to ignore, black tendrils, toxic air, everything we owned contaminated. That kind of destruction grabs you by the throat.

But syntropy? Syntropy whispers.

The way my body kept rebuilding itself cell by cell, even in the chaos. The way my daughter continued growing, learning, becoming more complex versions of themself even as our family structure dissolved. The way I kept waking up each morning with a strange pull forward, despite having every reason to collapse inward. These were so subtle, so organic, I almost missed them entirely.

I almost attributed all of it to my own willpower. I’m holding it together. I’m keeping us going. I’m making the decisions that will save us.

Only years later, sitting on a beach in Albania (yes, that’s a whole other story) building my first online course, did I finally see it: I wasn’t forcing anything. I was following something. Being pulled by a future version of myself, of us, that already existed as a pattern, organizing my present moment toward its own expression.

That’s when I understood: Syntropy isn’t just theory. It’s lived experience.

And once I learned to recognize it, I started seeing it everywhere.

Syntropy in the Everyday

Your body already knows this force intimately. It’s been working with syntropy since before you were born.

When you cut your finger, millions of cells organize themselves into repair. They know what to do without your conscious instruction. The wound closes. Skin regenerates. New tissue forms exactly where it’s needed.

You don’t have to tell your platelets where to go. You don’t have to remind your fibroblasts to weave collagen. You don’t direct the formation of new capillaries or instruct your epithelial cells to migrate across the gap. It just happens. The body knows.

This isn’t willpower. This is your body being pulled toward wholeness. The future state of integrity—the uncut finger, the coherent boundary, organizing the present moment. That’s syntropy.

When our daughter Mali Rain learned to walk, she fell repeatedly. But she kept getting up. Not because I pushed her. Not even because she consciously decided to keep trying. Something deeper was at work: the future capacity for walking was pulling her nervous system into new patterns. She was being organized by what she hadn’t yet achieved but could somehow sense.

After we sold everything and started traveling full-time in our European camper van, which we’d named Cosmic Charlie, people thought we were running away. Maybe we were. But we were also running toward something we couldn’t yet name. The future version of our family (the one that would land in Santa Fe almost a decade later, the one writing these words) was already calling us forward through the uncertainty.

The Both/And Reality

Entropy and syntropy aren’t in conflict. They’re complementary. The cosmic dance that makes everything possible.

Entropy breaks down old forms so syntropy can build new ones. Entropy clears space so syntropy fills it with possibility. Entropy ensures nothing stagnates so syntropy ensures everything evolves.

Old cells break down (entropy) so new cells form (syntropy). Relationship patterns dissolve (entropy) so deeper intimacy emerges (syntropy). Understanding crumbles (entropy) so expanded awareness takes root (syntropy).

When I sat weeping on that bathroom floor, entropy was breaking down my attachment to the house, to stability, to the illusion of control. Creating conditions for transformation.

And syntropy was already at work. Pulling me forward. Organizing chaos into meaning. Inviting me to recognize I wasn’t fighting a losing battle, I was participating in a creative process gaining momentum for 13.8 billion years.

The question isn’t whether entropy is real. It is. The question is: Why have we been acting as though it’s the only reality?

Because once you recognize syntropy as equally fundamental, everything shifts. You stop seeing breakdown as failure and start seeing it as a possibility. You stop exhausting yourself trying to hold everything together and start trusting the intelligence that’s been organizing the cosmos since the first hydrogen atoms formed.

You realize: the universe that made you is still making you.

That’s not hope. That’s physics.

In the next article, we’ll explore exactly how syntropy works, the mind-bending discovery that it operates by being pulled from the future rather than pushed from the past. But for now, just notice: where in your life is something already organizing itself toward greater wholeness?

That warm knowing you might feel? That’s syntropy. That’s the other half of the story we’ve been missing all along.

🌌 COSMOLOGICAL MOMENT

For the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot for atoms to form. Pure plasma. Chaos.

Then, as it cooled, protons and electrons were drawn together. Hydrogen atoms formed. This was syntropy, the first great organizing into coherence.

Those hydrogen atoms were pulled together by gravity to form stars. Stars forged heavier elements. Those elements became planets. That material became life. That life became you.

The calcium in your bones was created in a dying star’s heart, scattered through space in a supernova, eventually coalescing into planetary material, cycling through countless forms before organizing into you.

When you feel drawn toward connection, healing, learning, or love, you’re participating in the same syntropic force that organized the very atoms you’re made of.

You’re not fighting against the universe. You’re the universe, organizing itself into new forms of coherence.

That’s cosmology.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she’s probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.

"Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun."

-Brian Thomas Swimme & Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era

On that dark October morning in 2012, I sat on the floor of what was left of our home and felt the universe move through me.

Not metaphorically. Not as poetic flourish. As direct, undeniable sensation, a warmth that started in my solar plexus and radiated outward, even as everything around me screamed disorder. Four months of rebuilding. Mold that had consumed our subfloor and crawled up inside the walls like some dystopian forest. Now sewage backing up through the bathtub, the final cosmic punchline.

I should have been broken. Instead, something broke open.

Here’s what I noticed: Even as I wept, even as the stench filled my nostrils and my hands trembled with exhaustion, there was this other current. A pull. Not away from the chaos, I wasn’t running or dissociating. This was different. It felt like being called forward through the dissolution, as if the falling apart was somehow making space for something else to emerge.

The mold had started small, unnoticed. Black tendrils eventually consuming everything. We’d spent months tearing out, rebuilding, sanitizing. Standard entropy at work, the universe’s apparent tendency toward disorder, chaos, decay. Every physics textbook would tell you this is the only direction things go. Hot coffee cools. Buildings crumble. Order dissolves into randomness. The second law of thermodynamics, inescapable as gravity.

But sitting there, I became suddenly, viscerally aware of a paradox I couldn’t ignore: If entropy were the whole story, if the relentless march toward disorder were the universe’s only organizing principle, then none of this should exist at all.

Not the mold (complex living system). Not the house (ordered structure). Not my body (intricate self-organizing system maintaining coherence against entropy every single second). Not the consciousness that could notice any of this.

The Big Bang should have produced nothing but an expanding cloud of cooling particles. Gas, dissipating. That’s it. No galaxies. No stars. No planets. No molecules complex enough to replicate. No cells. No forests. No minds capable of contemplating sewage disasters while simultaneously experiencing... what was this? This warmth? This knowing?

Something else was clearly at work. Some other force, equally fundamental, pulling in the opposite direction. Not preventing entropy—I could see its evidence pooling in my bathtub. But building alongside it. Organizing. Complexifying. Drawing things into relationship.

Sitting in the ruins of my carefully reconstructed life, I became the universe recognizing itself. The 13.8 billion year journey from the first photons to this precise moment—a woman on a bathroom floor having the direct experience of two forces in conversation. One dissolving. One creating.

This is what Evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme calls an autocosmological moment: when you stop being separate from the universe contemplating its workings and become the universe contemplating itself through you. When the academic question “Why does anything exist?” transforms into lived experience, felt in your cells.

I didn’t know the word for it then. I just knew that something was calling me forward. Not backward to what we’d lost. Not away from the disaster. Through it. Toward something I couldn’t yet see but could absolutely feel.

This is the story of that other force.

The scientists who first described it, Ulisse Di Corpo and Antonella Vannini, named it syntropy: the tendency toward increasing order, complexity, and coherence. The mirror image of entropy. Where entropy pulls systems apart, syntropy draws them together. Where entropy flows from past to present, dissipating energy, syntropy flows from future to present, pulling systems toward their higher-order expression.

It sounds esoteric until you notice it everywhere: How embryos organize from a single cell. How ecosystems self-regulate. How wounds heal. How a flock of starlings moves as one organism. How you maintained your coherence, your you-ness, even as your house fell apart around you.

How, in the midst of dissolution, you can feel yourself being called toward something.

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The Story We’ve Been Told

We live immersed in the narrative of entropy. From high school physics to self-help books, we hear the same refrain: everything tends toward disorder. Your body breaks down. Relationships decay. Flowers whither. The universe itself is winding down like a cosmic clock running out of battery.

This isn’t just science class trivia. This story has shaped how we think about healing, education, parenting, even love. We frame our work as damage control—staving off the inevitable dissolution, fighting a battle we’re destined to lose.

No wonder we’re exhausted.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that in any closed system, entropy always increases. Order becomes disorder. Organization becomes chaos. And here’s the thing: this isn’t wrong. Entropy is real. Ice melts. Mountains erode. Stars burn out.

But it’s a catastrophically incomplete picture.

The Exhaustion of Fighting Entropy

When you believe entropy is the only story, everything becomes a battle.

Your body? You’re fighting aging, fighting illness, fighting the inevitable breakdown. Better get to the gym. Better stay vigilant.

Your relationships? You’re fighting against drift, against growing apart, against the natural tendency for connection to decay. Better schedule those date nights. Better work on communication.

Your work, your home, your very life becomes a battleground. You clean and it gets dirty. You organize and it gets messy. You repair and something else breaks.

This worldview positions us as forever swimming upstream against an inevitable current. We’re bound to lose. It’s just a matter of time.

We’ve built economic systems predicated on extraction and depletion. We approach our bodies with an assumption of inevitable decline. We teach our children that the natural state of things is decay.

We’ve made entropy our religion, and hopelessness our prayer.

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But What If?

Sitting on that bathroom floor in 2012, surrounded by the evidence of everything falling apart, I felt something beneath the tears. Something warm. A knowing I couldn’t name. A pull forward rather than a collapse backward.

Looking back, I can see that even in that moment of despair, something in me refused the story that this was all there was.

Because if entropy were the only force, why does a cut heal? Why do children learn? Why do communities form? Why does love bring people together and keep them there? If everything only falls apart, how do you explain the fact that matter organizes itself into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into you—capable of reading these words and wondering about existence?

There’s another half to this story. And once you start seeing it, everything changes.

What I felt that day was the difference between two kinds of exhaustion. There’s the bone-deep weariness of fighting a losing battle—the depletion that comes from constantly pushing against entropy.

And then there’s something else. The alive fatigue that comes from growth, from allowing something to move through you rather than battling against everything.

In that moment, I was being offered a choice I didn’t yet understand: keep fighting, or start following.

The universe had something to show me. Something about the way reality actually works, beneath the entropy-only narrative we’ve been taught.

That moment became the beginning of a different kind of journey. Not away from the chaos, but through it. Not fighting against what wants to fall apart, but curious about what wants to come together.

Because here’s what they don’t tell you in physics class: entropy is only half the story.

In the next article, we’ll explore what that other half is—the force that’s been organizing the universe toward greater complexity and coherence for 13.8 billion years. The force that’s at work in your healing, your growth, your becoming.

✨ TRY THIS NOW

Pause right now and notice: Where in your life do you feel like you’re fighting a losing battle? Where are you constantly forcing, fixing, controlling?

Place your hand on your chest. Take a slow breath. Notice the quality of exhaustion when you think about these battles. Does it feel depleted? Heavy? Resigned?

Now shift: Where is something organizing itself toward greater coherence without your constant effort? A relationship deepening despite challenges? A skill developing almost on its own? Healing happening below conscious awareness?

Notice how this feels different in your body. Can you sense the distinction between the exhaustion of pushing against and the alive tiredness of being pulled forward?

You don’t need to understand it yet. Just notice it. This felt sense is your body’s wisdom recognizing something your mind hasn’t learned to name.

That recognition is where transformation begins.

Tammy Oesting, M.Ed. is a self-proclaimed practitioner of awe and wonder who spent 9 years as a nomadic educator traveling the world before landing in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With 30+ years in progressive education, she now coaches educators globally, teaches in graduate programs, and speaks about the intersections revealed in her research. Her work centers on thought leadership in systems thinking, social justice, neuroscience in education, and the magnificence of the universe—basically, the small stuff. When not writing, speaking, or helping educators see the bigger picture, she's probably gobsmacked by something ordinary that turned out to be extraordinary.