An illuminating podcast with Dr Matthew Zylstra about how attention can alchemise our animate world.
Our Programme Director, Dr. Matthew Zylstra, was recently interviewed by the wonderful Veronica Stanwell from the Rooted Healing podcast. This personal exchange became one of the most popular Rooted Healing podcasts during 2024.
In the conversation, Veronica and Matthew explore themes around human-nature connectedness, attention, animism, and the role of ceremony in ecological and personal healing.
Some of the key themes and highlights were as follows:
Meaningful Nature Experiences & Synchronicity
- Matthew shares some of my more powerful personal stories of nature encounters that evoked deeper emotional, spiritual reflection, and searching questions around the nature of reality and the consciousness.
- They discuss the Westernised framing of these ‘synchronicities’ – meaningful coincidences that seem to arise particularly in times of emotional need, loss, or transition.
Attention as an Ecological and Spiritual Practice
- Matthew highlights the importance of the ‘alchemy of attention’, emphasising that where and how we direct our attention shapes our experience and connection with the world.
- They reflect on how the quality of our attention is buffeted by modern life and how the so-called ‘attention economy’ desensitises us from allowing greater connectedness (and empathy) with nature and others.
- Matthew offers an invitation for practices that reawaken attention, such as tuning in to bird calls or subtle shifts in our surrounds.
Animism & Ceremonial Consciousness
- They discusses animism as the predominant worldview for over 97% of human history (there was unlikely any other worldview to ‘chose’ from) and this view held all of nature as alive and infused with a life force, a perspective present in many extant indigenous traditions.
- Matthew describes ceremonial consciousness as a heightened state of collective intentionality that, in shifting into a non-ordinary state of awareness, allows insights to be revealed and seems to invite encounters with the animate world.
- Veronica and Matthew explore how rituals and ceremonies, especially in these times, quieten the mental noise, turn us away from (dopamine fuelled) distraction and can restore a sense of reverence for life.
Different Ways of Knowing
- Matthew draws on the idea of ‘multimodal agnosticism‘— being open to multiple explanatory models of reality (e.g., scientific, spiritual, psychological) without rigidly adhering to one.
- He shares that he finds the Toaist “taiji” (i.e. the yin-yang symbol) to illustrate that so many of experiences often blend – and hold the paradox of – ecological (rational) and animistic (psycho-spiritual) interpretations, with one always containing – yet juxtaposing – the other as part of a unified complementary whole.
Indigeneity and Place-Based Connection
- Veronica & Matthew discuss the complexity of longing for indigeneity – and a validated sense of belonging to the land – while acknowledging coloniality and the awkwardness of being ‘non-Indigenous’ in various cultural geographies.
- They wonder whether true belonging comes from relational reverence for place, not only ancestral lineage.
Parenting, Hope, and Future Generations
- Matthew openly shares how his young son’s curiosity deepens my own everyday nature awareness and helps him “see through new eyes” and spend time with things that he might have otherwise overlooked – or edited out of awareness.
- They emphasises that deeper connectedness needs a cultural container—a community that validates and celebrates those human and more-than-human connections.
Practical Takeaways
- Matthew shares practices like nature “nudges” (e.g., noticing a particular birdcall) as unexpected everyday invitations to pause for a mindful moment – noticing with curiosity what is happening in that moment – internally and externally.
- The couple talk about the importance of creating community rituals and embedding nature-based practices into everyday life.
Overall, this conversation is deeply personal, philosophical, and ecologically-grounded, weaving science with story, and analysis with awe. We hope is that it may serve as a compelling invitation to attend differently, belong more fully, and reclaim enchantment with the natural world.
