Welcome to episode 4 of the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about the project, listen to earlier episodes and read articles about embodied permaculture, visit beingearthbound.substack.com/t/embodied-permaculture.

Episode 4: From Masking to Mutuality

What happens when we loosen our need to manage, fix and control, and allow ourselves to meet each other more openly?

In this episode, host Johanna McTiernan explores embodied relating as a pathway from masking and self-protection towards greater authenticity and mutual presence. Participants reflect on how early habits of fitting in, editing themselves, and seeking approval can become so automatic that they feel natural, even when they are rooted in tension and fear.

As the conversation unfolds, we hear how embodied presence can soften these patterns. Participants describe feeling safer in their own skin, communicating more openly, and relying less on external validation. There is a growing sense of permission to enjoy life, to value one’s own voice, and to care for others without disappearing in the process.

The episode then turns toward changemaking in polarised social fields. Rather than meeting opposition with more force, embodied relating offers a way to find common ground beneath positions. By resting in grounded presence, participants describe becoming more available to others and more able to hold difference without losing themselves.

A simple embodied practice returns from the early sessions of the project: “down and in” — bringing attention into the body, softening the face, and settling with the breath before engaging. From this place, listening deepens and connection becomes more possible.

One participant shares how this practice supported him to hold space for his wife and family when war broke out in his wife’s country of origin. Instead of rushing to solutions, he describes a growing capacity to stay present, grounded, and emotionally available.

In the second half of the episode, the focus shifts to control and agency. Through a guided inquiry led by Dan, participants explore what they are — and are not — in control of in their lived experience. Questions arise around fixing, improving, and outcome-attachment, and how much suffering is created when reality does not match imagined futures.

Participants reflect on fear, grief, resistance, and relief, as well as on the difference between power over and power with. The conversation gently opens into the possibility of participation without domination, choice without illusion, and action without guaranteed outcomes.

Throughout the episode, listeners are invited to notice their own relationship with control, agency, and trust, and to sense what becomes possible when effort softens into presence.

Coming up next

In the next episode, we explore what emerges when layers of resistance fall away, and experience is allowed to be as it is, touching into wholeness and deep belonging.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.