My Phenomenology
This work begins from the body.
Not the body as symbol, metaphor, or object of interpretation, but the body as a site where perception, action, and consequence are inseparable. What I write emerges from practices in which abstraction cannot survive for long—where weight is real, timing matters, and dishonesty has immediate cost.
Dance, and especially ballet, has been the most rigorous laboratory for this kind of knowing in my own life. It is where truth cannot be argued into existence.
Ballet as a Site of Integration
Within dance, ballet has taught the integration of structure and freedom most clearly in my own body.
Ballet is disciplined to the point of austerity. Its structure is external, inherited, and precise. The vocabulary itself—largely French—is a language of actions: to bend, to stretch, to turn, to rise. The words do not describe feelings or ideas. They name what the body must do in space.
Crucially, I learned this vocabulary before I knew what the words meant.
The body learned the action first, through repetition and correction. Only later did the sounds acquire semantic meaning. Because of this ordering, the language never floated free of sensation. The words did not instruct my body what to do; they located what was already happening. Language functioned as orientation, not interpretation.
Meaning followed movement, not the other way around.
This trained a form of knowing in which language could not outrun consequence. Precision was not conceptual; it was physical. Alignment determined whether extension was possible. Stillness was not the absence of movement, but movement held with complete internal alignment.
What appeared effortless was sustained by rigor the audience never saw.
Over time, this paradox became undeniable: the stricter the structure, the more freedom the body discovered inside it. Freedom was not looseness. It was accurate. Expression was not spontaneity alone, but responsiveness within constraints.
This is not a claim about ballet as a universal form. It is a description of where, in my own body, the relationship between structure, truth, and freedom was most clearly trained and tested.
Contact, Perception, and Consequence
Alongside ballet, modern dance revealed the same principles from another direction.
Improvisation is movement without predetermined choreography. In modern classes exercises such as contact improvisation is where bodies meet weight directly. Perceiving each others shape and settling internally and externally must remain coupled moment by moment. When one body misrepresents stability, the other gets hurt. When one dissociates, the pattern collapses. These are not moral failures. They are simply mechanical facts.
Across both of these forms—one inherited and precise, the other emergent and responsive—the same law appears: truth only exists where perception informs action and action feeds back into perception under real constraint.
What This Phenomenology Makes Visible
Because this work is grounded in embodied practice, it treats truth differently than belief-based or purely conceptual ideologies.
Truth is not something one arrives at and possesses. It is something that happens—or fails to happen—through participation. It exists in time, in contact, and disappears when the feedback loop breaks.
When I applied these physical truths to my work in psychology and philosophy, personal and relational ethics are not primarily about intention or agreement alone. It became clear to me that trust starts with personal agency and responsibility clarifies when movement is shared in time. We can either enable a healthy rhythm or kill it with mistiming. It all depends on whether our shared structure tells the truth about the bodies that are living it.
A Note on Ethics
We don’t know what time ultimately is or what it’s for. We only know that it continues whether we are here or not.
Because time does not belong to us, no one has the authority to control it or escape it. While we are here, we are sovereign with one another—shared stewards of a time we did not create and cannot fully understand. Time is not merely a backdrop for experience. It is the medium in which meaning accretes.
When life is lived inside time—rather than fled, accelerated, or collapsed— meaning is not declared or imposed. It is integrated. Trauma does not only distort perception.
It pulls us out of time—into frozen presents, defended pasts, or imagined futures that bypass duration. Healing is not transcendence or mastery. It is a return to living inside time long enough for integration to occur.
Practices that regulate breath, movement, and rhythm do not manage time or escape it. They restore our capacity to remain within it.
Clock time is abstraction. Trauma time is collapse. Living time is duration— the condition under which not-knowing becomes tolerable.
From this emerges a temporal ethics:
How we inhabit time shapes, how we relate to knowing, how we treat one another, and how meaning is allowed to form. This ethic does not promise certainty. It does not offer salvation.
It does not excuse harm. It asks only this: That we do not abuse time by denying its cost.
That we do not escape responsibility by pretending to stand outside it. That we remain present with one another long enough for meaning to settle.
Not because we know where time is going— but because we share it.
What I Teach
I teach embodied structural literacy—the ability to recognize what's actually happening in your physical system so you can respond to reality instead of narratives that don't match what's structurally true.
This isn't about becoming more self-aware in the abstract. It's about learning to read the forces already organizing your experience—from the inside—so you can work with them intelligently instead of wondering if you're broken, behind, or spiritually failing.
Most people have never been taught how to recognize structure in their bodies. They feel exhaustion but interpret it as resistance. They hit capacity but wonder if they're avoiding growth. They experience thresholds but mistake them for moral tests.
The work is learning to read what's actually happening.
The Literacies
Symbolic Literacy
The ability to work with symbols, myths, archetypes, and narrative structures as meaning-making tools without mistaking them for objective truth—or dismissing them as "just metaphor." Symbols organize attention. They provide coherence. They shape how meaning gets made. Symbolic literacy lets you use these structures intelligently—astrology, mythology, archetypal language—without being colonized by them. You learn to recognize when a symbol is clarifying experience and when it's overriding what your body already knows.
Pattern Literacy
The ability to recognize what's repeating, what's cyclical, what's structural—so you stop mistaking patterns for pathology. Not everything that returns is trauma. Some things are seasonal. Some things are how your nervous system regulates. Pattern literacy helps you distinguish between what needs healing and what needs recognition.
Temporal Literacy
The ability to read where you are in time, not just what's happening to you. Time has structure. Cycles have demands. Your nervous system responds to seasonal pressure whether you're conscious of it or not. Temporal literacy—often expressed through astrology, but not limited to it—helps you understand when you are, not just who you are.
Somatic Literacy
The ability to feel the difference between stretch and strain, between threshold and collapse, between capacity and exhaustion—in your own body, not just in theory. This is physics felt from the inside. It's what lets you say "I am at capacity" and mean it structurally, not apologetically.
Attentional Literacy
The ability to track where your attention is being pulled versus where you're placing it. Consciousness organizes experience like gravity organizes matter. Attentional literacy helps you recognize which schemas are running, which meanings are pulling your focus, and how to work with—not against—the gravitational force of your own awareness.
Why This Matters
Right now, there's an overwhelming amount of language about transformation, awakening, shadow work, and collapse. Much of it sounds profound. Some of it is structurally irresponsible.
Embodied structural literacy gives you a way to assess what's true for your system—not what sounds spiritually elevated, but what matches the reality of your nervous system, your capacity, your actual constraints.
It's not about transcending your limits. It's about recognizing them so you can work with them skillfully.
This work is for people who are tired of being told they're resisting when they're actually at capacity. For people who want to understand their cycles instead of pathologizing them. For people who need grounded language that respects both the mystical and the structural—without collapsing one into the other.
You don't need more intensity. You need better orientation.
That's what literacy provides.
An inquiry on how meaning organizes human experience
The Physics of Meaning is a long-form intellectual project exploring how meaning functions as an organizing force in human consciousness, culture, and collective reality. It brings together insights from psychology, mythology, cognitive science, and systems theory to examine how belief, time, identity, and symbolic structures shape lived experience.
Temporal literacy is a core capacity within The Physics of Meaning: the ability to perceive and work with time as an organizing force in human experience, rather than treating it as a neutral backdrop or abstract resource.
If The Physics of Meaning examines how meaning functions—how belief, identity, symbols, and attention organize consciousness and culture—temporal literacy names the specific skill of recognizing how time structures those processes.
Temporal literacy involves the ability to notice:
how attention is pulled forward or allowed to settle
how responsibility migrates or lands across time
how unfinished experience accumulates or resolves
how systems externalize cost into the future or absorb it in the present
In a temporally literate frame, time is not merely something that passes. It is something that shapes perception, behavior, and ethical responsibility. When time collapses, fragments, or is indefinitely deferred, meaning thins—even when belief remains intact.
Temporal literacy allows individuals and systems to distinguish between:
urgency and importance
preparation and arrival
adaptation and care
continuation and coherence
This capacity is not about productivity, optimization, or time management. It is about containment: the ability to let experience complete, consequences arrive, and meaning stabilize rather than constantly resetting.
Within The Physics of Meaning, temporal literacy functions as a diagnostic and orienting tool. Without it, people internalize structural failures as personal inadequacy. With it, responsibility can be located accurately, and care can be organized without collapse.
Temporal literacy is a perceptual and ethical skill.
And once developed, it changes how meaning is experienced, distributed, and sustained—at the level of the individual, the culture, and the systems we live inside.
The Physics of Meaning is an ongoing research and writing project.
At the center of this project is the Inner Gravity Theory, developed by Rebecca Sutter.
The Book
The Physics of Meaning
The Physics of Meaning is a book-length inquiry into how meaning functions as an organizing force in human experience. Rather than treating meaning as subjective interpretation, cultural ornament, or philosophical afterthought, the book approaches it as a structural phenomenon—one that shapes attention, identity, time, relationship, and collective reality in ways that are felt long before they are articulated.
Drawing from psychology, mythology, cognitive science, systems theory, and embodied experience, The Physics of Meaning examines how humans orient themselves within the world through symbolic structures that behave less like beliefs and more like forces. Meaning, in this framework, is not something we simply assign to events; it is something that exerts pressure—pulling perception, behavior, and identity into patterned form.
The book explores how these patterns emerge, stabilize, and collapse across multiple scales. At the personal level, it examines how identity forms around internal narratives and how crises, trauma, and developmental thresholds disrupt inherited meaning systems. At the cultural level, it analyzes how myths, institutions, technologies, and shared stories function as collective organizing centers—and what happens when those centers weaken in times of rapid social and technological change.
Central to the book is the concept that modern life is marked by a growing mismatch between complexity and coherence. As traditional narratives lose their explanatory power and information accelerates beyond the capacity of linear interpretation, individuals and cultures increasingly rely on symbolic cognition to maintain orientation. Rather than framing this shift as regression or irrationality, The Physics of Meaning treats it as an adaptive response to structural strain within contemporary meaning systems.
The book introduces original theoretical frameworks—including the Inner Gravity Theory—to articulate how belief, attention, and symbolic investment shape lived reality. It examines contemporary phenomena such as trauma discourse, technological acceleration, AI as cognitive mirror, and the fragmentation of shared narratives, not as isolated trends but as symptoms of a deeper reorganization in how meaning is produced and held.
The Physics of Meaning does not offer prescriptions, manifestos, or easy resolutions. Instead, it provides language for understanding what it feels like to live inside a system of meaning that is actively reconfiguring. It is written for readers interested in psychology, philosophy, cultural theory, education, and the lived experience of navigating a world where inherited frameworks no longer fully apply.
Ultimately, the book argues that meaning is not disappearing—it is shifting its structure, sometimes faster than human lives can comfortably hold. And understanding that structure is essential if individuals and societies are to remain coherent, embodied, and agentic during periods of profound transition.
The Physics of Meaning
The study of how meaning moves from origin to return—and how locating yourself within that movement determines whether you are carried, resisting, or participating.
Chronosomatic Intelligence
The Body's Knowing of Time
There is a kind of intelligence that operates below thought.
It is the felt sense of when. The body's knowledge of rhythm, sequence, pacing, and readiness. The capacity to perceive time not as abstraction but as lived texture—and to respond accurately before conscious cognition arrives.
I call this Chronosomatic Intelligence.
Chrono: time. Somatic: of the body.
What It Is
Chronosomatic Intelligence (CI) is the nervous system's capacity to accurately calibrate temporal sequencing, effort pacing, readiness perception, and recovery cycles in response to environmental demands.
This is not a metaphor for "being embodied." It is a specific construct—biological, trainable, and observable—describing the body's ability to:
Perceive and synchronize with external rhythms
Sense internal readiness and its absence
Sequence action without conscious rehearsal
Calibrate effort and recovery in real time
Accurately locate itself in temporal context
We already recognize this intelligence intuitively. We speak of people who have "good timing," who know when to speak and when to wait, who move through the world with a kind of temporal fluency. But we rarely examine what that knowing actually is, how it develops, or what happens when it breaks down.
The Core Claim
Standard developmental models treat executive function as foundational—the cognitive scaffolding that enables self-regulation, task persistence, and adaptive behavior.
CI theory proposes an inversion.
The body's temporal calibration system develops first and provides the substrate on which executive capacities are built.
If this is accurate, then what we call executive function is, at root, temporal:
Working memory is the capacity to hold temporal order—to feel what comes next without conscious retrieval
Inhibitory control is temporal delay tolerance—the ability to sustain a pause between impulse and action
Cognitive flexibility is adaptive pacing shift—the capacity to adjust internal tempo in response to changing demands
This reframing matters for intervention. If executive dysfunction is downstream of chronosomatic dysregulation, then cognitive strategies alone will be insufficient. The body's temporal calibration must be addressed directly.
Four Dimensions
CI operates across four primary dimensions
Rhythmic Attunement
The capacity to perceive and synchronize with external tempo—musical, conversational, relational, environmental. This is the felt sense of when to enter, when to pause, when the room is shifting. It enables smooth social navigation and reduces relational friction.
Temporal Sequencing
The body's encoding of action sequences such that they unfold without conscious step-retrieval. This is the somatic foundation of multi-step task completion. When intact, complex actions feel coherent. When disrupted, even simple sequences become effortful.
Readiness Perception
The body's accurate sense of whether it is prepared for what is being asked. This signal—not yet or now—operates in learning, healing, creative work, and relational risk. It can be trusted or overridden. Chronic override degrades access to the signal itself.
Recovery Calibration
The body's knowledge of how long it needs to return to baseline after exertion, stress, or intensity. When honored, effort becomes sustainable. When overridden, physiological and psychological debt accumulates.
Why It Matters
A regulated nervous system perceives time accurately. It can sense pacing, calibrate effort, recognize readiness, and recover appropriately.
A dysregulated nervous system distorts temporal perception. Time compresses or elongates. Readiness signals become inaccessible. Recovery is interrupted or refused. The capacity to differentiate past from present—and to calibrate response timing to actual conditions—degrades.
This is one reason trauma is so disruptive. Trauma often involves temporal rupture: an event too fast, too intense, or too uncontained for the nervous system to process in real time. What follows is disrupted temporal integration—difficulty distinguishing past threat from present safety, impaired ability to calibrate response timing to what is actually happening now.
Healing, from this perspective, is partly the restoration of accurate temporal perception. Not metaphorically. Concretely—through regulated relational experience, embodied practice, and supported pacing.
How It Connects
CI does not stand alone in my theoretical work. It interlocks with two other frameworks:
Schema as Gravity
Schemas—the patterns of perception and response that organize experience—are not only cognitive structures. They are temporal structures. A schema encodes not just what to expect, but when and how fast. Early relational experience establishes the tempo baseline against which all future experience is measured.
A person shaped by chaos develops schemas that expect unpredictable pacing. Even in calm, her system may calibrate for storm. A person shaped by attunement develops schemas that trust rhythm. Slowness does not trigger anxiety because slowness was once safe.
[Read more about Schema as Gravity →]
Origin Drift
Meaning has a temporal dimension. When understanding is alive—fully inhabited—it has a felt rhythm. As meaning drifts from its source, it loses that aliveness. Repetition without presence is recognizable by its pacing: too fast, too automatic, too smooth. The body is not in it.
CI allows us to sense this difference—to feel when we are speaking from genuine understanding versus rehearsed performance.
[Read more about Origin Drift →]
Observable Markers
If CI is a valid construct, it must be observable. These behavioral markers distinguish high and low CI functioning:
Low CI indicators: Frequent dysregulation during transitions. Rushing or freezing in tasks. Difficulty estimating duration. Chronic pacing mismatch with group tempo. Responding to present situations with intensity calibrated to past threat. Impaired delay tolerance. Recovery that is truncated (pushing through) or extended (collapse).
High CI indicators: Smooth transitions. Accurate effort calibration. Multi-step persistence without fragmentation. Reliable readiness perception. Self-directed recovery proportional to exertion. Adaptive social pacing. Temporal flexibility. Frustration recovery that returns to baseline cleanly.
These markers are observable across educational, clinical, and relational contexts—and provide a basis for assessment and intervention design.
Developmental Emergence
CI is observable in infancy, before executive function can be measured as an independent construct.
It appears first in co-regulatory rhythm: heartbeat entrainment, gaze coordination, vocal turn-taking between infant and caregiver. Recovery calibration is visible early—how quickly an infant returns to baseline after distress, and whether that recovery is supported or interrupted.
By toddlerhood, readiness perception becomes behaviorally visible: the pull-back, the not yet, the lean-in when ready. Temporal sequencing emerges in play. Transition behavior becomes measurable.
This developmental sequencing is central to the substrate claim: CI precedes and scaffolds EF because temporal calibration develops in sensorimotor and co-regulatory phases before explicit cognitive control systems mature.
What Degrades It
Chronic override. When external demands consistently trump internal signals, access to readiness perception and recovery calibration erodes. This is a primary mechanism of burnout.
Trauma. Experiences involving temporal rupture disorganize the chronosomatic system. The body loses accurate purchase on time.
Externally imposed pacing. Digital platforms and institutional schedules often operate on tempo determined by external optimization rather than human regulatory capacity. Chronic exposure may reduce opportunities for practicing internally generated temporal regulation—particularly in developing systems.
Cultural acceleration. Environments that treat speed as virtue and rest as inefficiency teach us that the body's signals are obstacles. This value system, internalized, degrades CI from within.
Research Directions
The CI framework generates testable hypotheses:
If CI scaffolds EF, then interventions targeting temporal calibration should produce downstream improvements in working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility
If schemas encode expected tempo, then trauma histories should predict measurable differences in pacing expectations and recovery patterns
If pacing authority matters, then educational environments preserving teacher discretion should show better CI outcomes than those with externally imposed pacing
If CI transmits through co-regulation, then caregiver CI levels should predict child CI development
I am actively seeking research collaborators interested in operationalizing and testing these hypotheses.
Practical Implications
If CI is foundational:
Early environments must protect pacing authority. Curriculum design should preserve space for internally generated rhythm and adult-mediated tempo.
Chronic acceleration is not neutral. Environments prioritizing pace over readiness may produce performance at the cost of CI development.
Teacher pacing discretion is neurodevelopmental scaffolding. The capacity to slow down and adjust is not preference—it is a mechanism of CI support.
Trauma work must include temporal recalibration. Cognitive processing without attention to pacing restoration may be insufficient.
Technology requires pacing consideration. The question is not whether to use it, but whether its structures support or override developing temporal regulation.
The Larger Frame
Chronosomatic Intelligence is one piece of a broader theoretical architecture I am developing—an attempt to understand how meaning forms, how it degrades, how patterns of attention become gravitational, and how the body's wisdom can be honored rather than overridden.
This work emerges from thirty years of embodied practice, independent study in developmental psychology, and the daily labor of teaching—at the barre, on the land, in relationship. It is tested in studios where children learn to hold a balance and on farms where they learn to hold uncertainty.
I am interested in collaboration—with researchers, clinicians, educators, and anyone working at the intersection of embodiment, development, and the sustainability of human attention.
The Inner Gravity Theory
How Meaning Organizes Consciousness and Collective Reality
The Inner Gravity Theory is a conceptual framework for understanding how meaning organizes human experience—psychologically, culturally, and collectively. It proposes that belief is not merely something we hold, but something that holds us: an organizing force that shapes attention, identity, and the realities we inhabit.
At the center of the theory is a simple structural claim: meaning functions like gravity. What is believed to matter gains weight. What gains weight bends perception, behavior, and shared reality around it. Over time, these gravitational centers stabilize myths, identities, institutions, and social worlds.
The Inner Gravity Theory integrates insights from myth studies, cognitive science, depth psychology, and systems theory to explain how symbolic centers form, how they weaken, and how new ones emerge during periods of cultural transition. It reframes myths and prophecies not as stories or predictions, but as orientation technologies—symbolic architectures that help individuals and societies maintain coherence when inherited narratives no longer suffice.
Developed in response to contemporary conditions of narrative fragmentation and technological acceleration, the theory offers a language for understanding symbolic saturation, collective pattern-seeking, and the reorganization of meaning in the absence of a unifying myth. It also provides a framework for the intentional design of future symbolic systems that integrate embodiment, interiority, and technological intelligence without sacrificing human agency.
The Inner Gravity Theory is intended for scholars, educators, clinicians, artists, and cultural thinkers working at the intersection of meaning, identity, and collective reality.
The Origin Drift Model
Meaning degrades predictably as it moves through culture. What begins as direct lived experience (Zero) becomes interpretation (Mirror), then abstraction (Echo), and eventually empty performance (Mimic). At each stage, vitality is exchanged for transmissibility—until systems become self-referential and lose contact with their own origin.
This drift explains why therapeutic practices harden into jargon, why spiritual traditions collapse into performance, and why institutions come to serve procedure rather than purpose. This is not corruption or failure; it is gravitational drift within complex systems.
The model offers a way to recognize when action is emerging from origin versus echo, and to restore contact with source rather than continuing to iterate on copies.
