Unblackboxing Ecosystem in Practice

Despite reflecting that she is happy Ayurveda created her a substitute home, I remember Simona looking like she was dealing with some deep dis-eases. She, among others, had struggled with insomnia, digestion issues and stomach problems. As she learned to solve the acute stomach issue by eating chilli pepper, she also learned that the dis-ease she was suffering from was the constriction of the stomach, not an ulcer. Otherwise, spicy food would have caused inflammation, making it worse. Eating a chilli pepper accidentally gave her pain relief—

stomach relaxation. Finally, a permanent solution came with a job change. She reflects on it retrospectively, stating that “because I didn’t really want to go to work, I had stomach problems, but it was so hard that whatever I ate made me sick. [Even though] I didn’t vomit … [I] felt pain in my hips and stomach.” (interview, 9/2017) She emphasizes that now she chooses an environment that makes her feel comfortable and is not stressful for her. Still, the working environment is not the only aspect influencing well-being. To be well, she continually adjusts her habits to the changing surroundings.

“Because winter is coming, autumn is so much, like, a moody period, a very dry period, a period of changes. It is all the wind and such which makes the body more susceptible to illnesses, especially a vata body [a prominent bodily constitution usually characteristic by cold, dry, asymmetric, light qualities] … So I’m preparing for it. And, in fact, you’re cleansing the body, at least the nasal cavities—and plus I also rinse the mouth with oil—you’re cleansing other cavities and salivary glands

… .So, I feel the air completely different than when I don’t do it.

I do these jala neti in autumn and it’s beautiful… . Like, something I probably haven’t felt in, like, a long time without doing [it]. Like when ... I don’t know if it’s always been before a storm or after a storm that you feel this ... [ozone or something]

which you don’t normally smell. Maybe because we live in Prague, the environment is polluted; there are dust particles; there are a lot of different smells, even though it’s, like, garbage that you actually smell. So by cleaning that perception ... you clean that tissue ... so, you’re actually freshening that perception ... . I’m not even going to say if it’s just the air as perception of the inhalation ... the perception of

what you’re breathing in. You’re really perceiving other qualities than just breathing in. That’s really interesting”. (interview, 9/2017)

Within the Ayurvedic discourse, Simona identifies body boundaries as permeable and, therefore, a disruption of the bio-social field she is a part of results in bodily dis-eases (cf.

Langford 1995, 330). This relational understanding of (well-)being reminded me of Ingold's (2016) recent work. In it, he substitutes the prevalent mainstream (sociological) account of social life, grounded in an idea of the autonomous individual who is a priori endowed with agency and, therefore, intentionally acting with relational and processual understanding of social reality, which happens in correspondence. This idea, reflecting Cage’s notion of response-ability, connects concepts such attentionally (instead of intentionality), habit (instead of volition) and doing undergoing (instead of agency), which implies it takes (at least) two to tango. (ibid.) More precisely, Ingold in this line of thoughts claims, that “the operations of the attentional mind, in short, are not cognitive but ecological” (ibid., 20). Here, awareness is always an awareness with before the awareness of and responsiveness precedes responsibility.

As a result, Ingold approaches (similarly to Latour 2004) responsibility rather as a process of responding. This assumes an answerable person/thing—to be made present, vulnerable (Ingold, 2016, cf. 2018). Therefore also, to care for others, we must allow them into our presence, we must let them be, so that they can speak to us (ibid.).

5.2.4 “To Be” as Excessing a Need to Understand, Achieve or Have

What character does the situation have when “things are happening” for Simona? It appears that caring may occur when she allows herself to attend to things like the working environment, her stomach or the autumn air. It almost looks like these changes occur by accident when she is not aiming to make them happen. She has suffered from stomach cramps for months, but once, without knowing whether it was serious (so usually being careful), she ate something super spicy. Then her stomach relaxed under the influence of the opposite quality material that was causing the problem. Ingold (Ingold 2016) describes attention as a way in which beings wait upon and respond to the other—they attend. For instance, the decision to cleanse the nasal cavity is intentional, but the way the salty water is handled inside the nose is attentional, as is the way the air fluctuates inside when she leaves the building. Ingold here differentiates between this kind of attention, which is inherently mutual, and attention guided by a goal of achieving something (ibid.). He gives an example of understanding or explanation which falls under accounting. In this modus operandi, which is, to my knowledge, much more common for modernists, a person acts to get something done, that is, to allow something to be checked off the to-do list. This kind of action, with a defined start and finish, is exclusive to mutuality. This substitution for the notion of volitional acting is exactly the previously mentioned active undergoing, or, if you want, active experiencing, a process that changes that who is experiencing, a kind of a cognitive operation where the work of a mind that, in its deliberations, freely mingles with the body and the world (Clark in Ingold 2016, 16). Here, speaking of inhabiting a practice, there is no longer any “I” who acts a priori the experience but rather is undergone during the experience. “And being in the midst, it is continually rediscovering itself.

It is no longer possible to say, in confidence, ‘I do this’ or ‘I did that' … . Such is the ‘I’ of

habit, in which agency arises a posteriori as a query rather than being posited in advance as an efficient cause. As a query, it calls on others to respond, and in so doing to put their own agency on the line.” (Ingold 2016, 16–17)

5.2.5 (Well-)Being as Intentional Maintenance of an Ecosystem Equilibrium

Considering the Ayurvedic assumption is that the body is rather fragile in the sense of dependency on its environment, I have discussed there are specific situations where the person is made present, vulnerable concerning the object of attention, exactly the correspondence of responsivity and the enabling of care. But can we speak about this correspondence in relation to the Ayurveda way of wellbeing enactment? What is the character of this wellbeing?

Simona introduces how the correspondence of the body and surrounding environment can be grounded in particular (in this case, Ayurvedic) practice. In accordance with her occupation, she uses ecological metaphors to explain it:

“I choose an environment that I’m comfortable with and that’s not stressful. So, it’s the same thing as if you have an ecosystem and the plant is more comfortable in the soil than on a slope because there’s a risk ... . It’s not going to hold on to those roots as well and just get washed away by water. It bends, so it chooses an environment that it’s comfortable in, where it feels like it’s rooted, where it has cooperation with maybe other plants as well… . The ecosystem really works in such way that it is okay in the phase when it is stable—in the climax phase. In this phase, the energy relations, inputs and outputs are balanced, and when any stressor, in terms of an intervention from the outside comes, it can easily face this distress so that it does not affect it so much. If it is really in a state of equilibrium. And when it is not in equilibrium, the same force that would come from outside can destroy it and sweep it from the earth’s surface.

[The individual is according to her as follows]:

Like this system, which is now an external influence (which can be just the mind), comes in. It starts to burden the system. And just because it does not give good food. For example, when the cells are hungry, then they don’t process ... when they get bad food, they don’t process it well, or when they don’t get any at all, they are hungry and can’t produce what they are supposed to produce, then it cannot work well. For this reason, whatever the dysfunction is … it doesn’t have to be just the mind, it can be food, something that you eat, and it can be poisoned or harsh heat can influence you. But again, if the body is fine, it balances itself with hundreds of external influences and differently than the body, which may not be fine. And the mind is more like the rider who rides that horse. And if he rides the horse well, then the horse can overcome these external influences here more easily than if he doesn’t drive him well”. (interview, 9/2017)

There is a large difference between symbiotic coexistence, or to borrow Ingold’s term, correspondence and controlled coexistence based on the imperative of normative well-being of just one part of this entanglement.