#63 Shaping Habits Together: life's changes and challenges with cognitive scientist Mark Michael James

 Andrea in conversation with fellow cognitive scientist Mark Michael James, highlighting his journey from understanding patterns of being to shaping habits and realigning health. Mark shares his experiences from Ireland, his academic pursuits, and his present work at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. This episode delves into synchronicity, embodied cognition, and the philosophies and practices of the arising 'school of way' of practice and philosophy which includes 'wayshaping' and 'waymaking' and pertains to a paper Mark has recently written with Mushfiqa Jamaluddin, Tom Froese, Aisha Belhadi, Anna Panagiotou, and Dave Snowden. It all ties back to practical applications in health, navigating complexity, and striving for a dynamic balance in life. Mark's personal stories and reflections make this a must-watch for anyone interested in cognitive science, philosophy, and the art of living well.

00:00 Introduction to Unexpected Contributions
00:35 Exploring the Concept of 'Craic'
00:56 Welcome to Love and Philosophy
01:02 Introducing Mark Michael James and His Work
02:23 Discussion on Synchronicity and Relevance Realization
06:47 Mark's Journey to Okinawa
12:39 Navigating Personal and Social Patterns
51:23 Health Challenges and Personal Stories
55:06 Sensory Irregularities and Scripts
56:21 Breaching Experiments and Sociological Insights
57:13 Cultural Patterns and the Irish Concept of 'The Crack'
01:03:26 Health, Habits, and Personal Transformation
01:08:05 Philosophical Reflections and Practical Applications
01:19:49 Wayshaping Framework and Multiscale Health
01:27:57 Personal Reflections and Future Directions

Wayshaping paper

Waymaking

OIST

Mark's website

Transcript

Wayshaping & Patterns of Being Together

Mark James: [00:00:00] What can you bring to a situation that would not have been expected within these conditions? And, and I, I think that's an interesting. Uh, way for a culture to really organize itself. When, when you're looking for coincidences in the world and you, you respond to your own excitement, you know, when you say something like that, I feel excited because it's like, okay, this is on the right track.

Uh, I don't know what you would call that, but it feels like a kind of a, kind of a aikido with, with the world. My experience of what it means to love, I think is very much aligned with this engaged stance of letting be. And crack. Do you know the term the crack? Um, the crack. Like C-R-A-C-K? No, CRAI. We spell it in Ireland.

Oh, okay. If you've ever met, they might have people say, how's the crack? Where's the crack? Who's the crack? You know, it's kind of like, what's the story? What's going on? Ah, okay.

 Hello everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. [00:01:00] This is Andrea Hiott. I'm glad you're here. I'm also excited to bring you this conversation with Mark James, a friend and a fellow seeker and philosopher. 

 He's a cognitive scientist too, working at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, we had this conversation over a year ago. 

And at that time he'd been working on the Paper Way shaping, which he's still working on now, but he published The Preprint, so it will be coming soon. He's collaborating on that with a lot of very interesting people. 

 such as Moka, Monica, Jamal, Luin. who also wrote a blog post with Mark that's coming soon on love and philosophy about all of this. It's really wonderful. Keep a lookout for it Also.

Dave Snowden, 

Aisha bti. I think Mike Levin is even on the project.

Tom Froese. Who's the PI for Mark? it's not private investigator, it's principal investigator, which is just the head of a lab basically. 

 and I'm gonna link to that paper. It's [00:02:00] about way shaping, and you may notice this word way. There's a lot of way philosophies rising way making is what I talk about here.

And we talked about way fairing with Tim Ingold. Mike Levin is talking about navigation in similar ways, 

And Mike and I have talked about that, or similar topics, I think three times now on this podcast, so this conversation is about that in many different ways. We start out talking about synchronicity and relevance realization and developing sensitivities, and then we move into this philosophical realm and start to discuss some work that Mark has been doing for many years about.

Patterns and how those relate to our behavior. Mark and his colleagues put all this together in their paper. And they've been taking issues from complexity and trying to think about them in everyday life and bridging into new behavioral realms. Not an easy project, especially in academia, but one that is very worthy in the sense [00:03:00] of really trying to help people make sense of their life and to apply some of these ideas of com that we.

Talk about a neuroscience and cognitive science to our everyday life, which I know is something a lot of you're interested in The paper itself has to do with asking what if it's complexity all the way down? It would take me an hour to try and explain all that here.

So I will link to a lot of places where you can read more. You don't need to know any of it to listen to this conversation. As I said, it happened a year ago when we were working out ideas, so it's quite a little inside view, just hearing some things that you can then go and see in the papers in different ways, The paper's coming from the tradition of embodied cognition, phenomenology, ecological dynamics, and of course all these other ideas of complexity. All the stuff you hear talked about here, whether you've heard those specific terms or not, it's all subjects that you've probably heard.

If you've listened to [00:04:00] a couple of episodes. the paper also discusses way making, which is the philosophy I've been building . So every episode I talk about some part of this, if you wanna know more, just look at the links below Have a look for sure. At Mark's work, there's a lot of wonderful ideas in that paper. Scaffolds and shocks and dynamic structural models and seed habits and stepping stones. It's really crossing a lot of lines in terms of disciplines.

So I think there's something for everybody there, he's very, welcoming of ideas and. It would be wonderful if you have, have a look at the paper and think about some of this and see how it relates to you and your own life so that we can find even better ways. You know, this way philosophy that's building here is one that's a common philosophy for everyone.

It's not something that's owned. also, it's funny because Mark and I start out talking about synchronicity and just one little synchronicity I have to share with you that I just realized is at the end of this episode. My delightful dog, who [00:05:00] I got while I was doing the Peace Corps in Mongolia. Her name is Hollywood. She was named for me.

Holly appears again in the video and if you're keeping track, she just appeared in the very last episode for the first time, just kind of by accident, the one I did with Jessica. So Somehow Holly has made her way into two episodes back to back. 

Even though those two episodes were recorded almost a year apart, so that's interesting. I also want to say thanks to Mark because he tells a lot of personal stories In this episode. We talk about the academic papers, but we also talk about it in the context of real life and mostly his real life, though I also ramble on about my life a bit too.

But I just wanna thank Mark for being so open and sharing this. I'm really sure there's something here that someone needs to hear.

 so I hope you're having a good day, a good evening, a good week, a good month. I hope this is gonna be a good year somehow, and that however you're making your way, [00:06:00] you are finding ways to live into life that you might not have expected. New sensory experiences, new opportunities for connection, new ways of being at peace with yourself, but excited about being alive.

Being here, it's really pretty amazing that we're here. Communicating. Life can get super stressful and it's hard to hold all this in mind, but we can always just take a minute and realize it. You know, every day we can take a minute or two and just realize what it is to be a body. Sensing the world and maybe it'll help us deal with all this other stuff that's so hard sometimes.

Alright, thanks for being here. Here we go.

Hello, Mark. It's so good to see you. I'm so excited to talk to you today.

Me too. Absolutely. 

Andrea Hiott: Hello all the way to where are you? Maybe you should tell everyone. 

Mark James: So I'm in Okinawa, which is a Japanese island, I [00:07:00] think it's about 400 miles south of the lowest island on the mainland.

Maybe people know, it's famous for a couple of things. It's famous for being the site of some pretty horrendous battles during World War II which the kind of legacy of remains here today because it's basically a kind of a outpost for the U. S. military in the Pacific. And it's also famous for having the most centenarians in any place in the world.

Yeah, so it's one of the blue zones if there's some relationship between those two things, I can't tell you, but it's very interesting, complex beautiful, it's absolutely beautiful. It's kind of subtropical island. 

Andrea Hiott: Where are you from, and how did you end up there, in that place? I'm trying to get a sensory feeling for what it's like there, and I imagine it's different from where you began your path, but is it? 

Mark James: Yeah, it certainly is. The kind of proximal story is, is that my PI got a position here.

My PI is someone called Tom [00:08:00] Froese and he was very influential and still is in the kind of space of embodied cognitive science and activism in particular. And he, his work was very influential to my own PhD work, which I guess we'll talk about later. And there was some set of coincidences where he had reviewed a paper and then we ended up meeting at a conference.

And then he was telling me about this fantastic, fantastic new university that had recently opened and there was high trust funding and all these resources and it was tucked away in this little island. And and he mentioned the island and I had actually heard about it. Having had some interest, in the general.

sphere of health and health interventions and all that kind of stuff. So I'd heard about it from the blue zone context. And then when I was coming towards the end of my PhD, I started reaching out and talking to people and talked to Tom, was one of those people, and he asked me to submit something and we submitted [00:09:00] something and got, got a fellowship, ended up here.

So yeah, that, that's the kind of proximal story. But there was an interesting wrinkle along that path where it was actually, it was COVID at the time, so me and my friend we're chatting a lot during COVID about fermented foods and everybody was doing I don't know if you remember, but people got really into making sourdough bread.

Do you remember that? 

Andrea Hiott: yeah, so that's, I do remember, I remember everyone in New York at least making kombucha for some reason.

But yeah, the sourdough thing I remember was a thing too. 

Mark James: Yeah, where the stories start to intersect here, but my. I guess our conversation I did not have. Well, I have had for a while some issues with my gut and stuff.

So we're talking about fermentation. And he was really getting, getting into making sourdough. And then we were throwing around ideas for like, what would be a good business under the context of COVID and maybe some sort of fermentation store would be like actually really valuable, right? It ticks all the [00:10:00] boxes because we're thinking, you know, it speaks to the ecology and it speaks to the health and it speaks to the kind of.

Andrea Hiott: Do it yourself kind of feeling 

Mark James: yeah, like a maker, you know mentality and I think I still think it's a nice idea, but One day I had the idea that I don't know. It just came to mind that it was like some sort of Accumulation of ideas, but it was like maybe we should make like a fermented turmeric tea, right?

It was all these things coming together And I rang him up and I was like, fermenting turmeric tea. And I was like, let's go. This is the thing. So he was like, okay, search it. Just see if anybody's met it already. So I typed it in and it came up like a local, you know, traditional drink in Akinoa. And I was like, Oh, Oh, maybe there's something there.

That's kind of interesting. So I allowed myself to believe that there was some import in that coincidence and then kind of followed that. 

Andrea Hiott: It's a kind of pattern, isn't it? I mean, do you believe in these kinds of signs? I know it's a loaded question because there's no good answer, but I mean, I feel like we all kind of look at them and, and take them seriously to some extent, and then.

And [00:11:00] also I don't know, there's these patterns, recurring patterns, and they seem like they, they, they are telling us something. 

Mark James: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have believed in them to varying degrees at different stages in my life. And I realized when I'm looking for a sign, right, that often I will find it. And maybe there's some things in which, you know, you're also participating in the generation of that sign.

that's definitely true. once you've 

Andrea Hiott: focused on something, you see it more often and all that too. 

Mark James: Yeah, well, there's a kind of process of relevance, realization, and, you know, sensitivity towards that, which expresses your cares and concerns, and then you become a kind of conduit or a true push for the types of things that reflect that.

So I don't know whether or not I, I believe in them in the sense of like, is every time something like that happens, is it worth paying attention to? No, but can they be helpful in some way if you're in the right state of mind? I think so, you know, much like a kind of tarot deck or something can be helpful if you approach it in the right way.

Andrea Hiott: That's a good way to say it, because it almost [00:12:00] just tells us something about what patterns we've been participating in and noticing.

Mark James: let me say one thing on the coincidence thing I think there's a sense of if you experience one of these things and you're excited about it by it, there's something in that excitement that you should pay attention to, We do also experience it a lot of the time and just dismiss them. And like we're happy to dismiss them because maybe they signify or could signify something we're not that, we don't find too appealing or something. Well, actually this whole discussion, I think gets into maybe. what will be the later parts of our discussion around way shaping and so on.

Yeah, exactly. Is developing these sensitivities that is part of the process. 

Andrea Hiott: it's also about your awareness and that gets into the more therapeutic or, or side of things which we'll come to, but It's interesting to think about all this relative to your work in a way too, because I mean, one thing we connected on was talking about habits and patterns and, and things in Heidelberg at a conference that Thomas Fuchs put on, and yeah, so that thesis I really love because you, [00:13:00] you talk about patterns of being together.

That's the phrase. I think I say it right. I want to think about patterns of being together and where, in your trajectory, in your life, you started thinking about patterns in that sense.

I don't know which one feels like you want to start out first. 

Mark James: Yeah, maybe, I mean, maybe it isn't easiest for me in terms of my, say, let's say, academic trajectory to do it in something of a chronological fashion. I should just say I was, I was, I'm preparing a talk for a unit review, this five year unit review.

So some of this is kind of fresh in my mind because I've been trying to tell myself the story. I ask myself, what is the story, right? And finding myself telling a different every time, but I have 

Andrea Hiott: something. 

Mark James: Loaded up a little bit. So, 

Andrea Hiott: good practice too. 

Mark James: Yeah. Thank you.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 

Mark James: So I mean, we talked a little bit about this at my podcast last time, but like, you know, growing up occupying very different, [00:14:00] say, Family relationships, friend relationships, even community relationships. Always finding myself say divided between different types of practices you know, entertained and say drawn towards different types of social norms and cultures and, and doing a lot of traveling after I left school, moving around quite a bit and continuing in that exploration.

I somewhat started to kind of see myself as this kind of like, like a kind of large hydron collider for cultures, right? Like I'm just going to mix these things together in me and see what happens. And I think the desire to do that came from an artistic desire to, to, to, to write interesting things and produce interesting music.

Cause that's what I was doing at the time. And I had maybe felt that my upbringing wasn't sufficiently interesting to actually do it without doing all this travel and, and engagement and, and and all of that kind of thing. And anyway, at some point, [00:15:00] I think I started to become more and more interested in, let's say theory and ideas and, you know, started to recognize because it wasn't obvious to me, I grew up very rural and, you know, not immersed in, 

Andrea Hiott: where were you?

For those who don't know. 

Mark James: West of Ireland, County Clare on a peninsula, right on a peninsula in effectively agricultural land between two towns, Kilrush and Cookie. Very interesting places which we could talk about, but Interesting in, in their own way, let's say. Yeah. Very interesting settings and 

Andrea Hiott: very different kind of patterns, but yeah, we did talk about it and I thought about in, in reading your work, I think about it now too, this, that you were very interested in music and reading and you were already finding a lot of different patterns as we talked about together before that didn't quite fit in with those patterns there.

So yeah, you were negotiating all that. 

Mark James: Yeah, that's definitely true. And

yeah, also, I guess when you tell these stories, right, you realize that they're going to be, you're also telling, you're telling your story, but you're inviting other people to participate in that story. And there's important [00:16:00] parts of, I guess, my story that are maybe important to larger ongoing stories that maybe I should share.

So, you know, another challenge as part of that was was, was my sexuality, which was slightly awkward, let's say. I, You, well, I would say I identify as straight and I still do and have relationships with women and I have a female partner. But I was also attracted to trans women and that wasn't something that was very obvious or easy to navigate.

And even to get exposed to, or to, you know, to, to meet people I was just 

Andrea Hiott: thinking, how did, did you even have that experience 

Mark James: I think it started seeing stuff on TV, you know, which it probably does for a lot of people. And 

Andrea Hiott: like you said, it wakes you up or something, you know, this kind of bodily. 

Mark James: Yeah, precisely. Right. And then maybe you hear there and have that same kind of bodily resonance that maybe you were surprised by somewhat.

Right. And. I think for me at that time, it was [00:17:00] very confusing, right, because in Ireland at that time, there was a kind of a awakening and you know, acceptance of gay rights and there was a kind of a referendum around gay marriage. There's a lot of big things in Ireland that kind of led to, you know, very radical transformation of that society over the last 20, 30 years.

Mm 

Andrea Hiott: hmm. 

Mark James: But this was certainly one part of them and yeah, for me at the time, I didn't feel so much a part of that because I didn't identify as, as, as gay as such. But I, I thought there was something weird going on with me. Right. And I think in some way that became I, I guess a lot of the exploration became also intertwined with this sense of, okay, well what is this thing that's going on?

And who, you know, who am, who am I, what am I mm-Hmm. How do I deal with this? And, and in some sense, I'm still dealing with, with this, the, the kind of conversation where Evan now is, is also part of that. And, and maybe I feel kind of, the conversation around this, I mean, there's a lot of conversation around trans rights [00:18:00] and rightly so and all of that.

But people coming out and saying, I'm also part of this conversation is not that common. And I think there's a lot of men in my situation, right, who've not participated in this 

Andrea Hiott: I think it's scary, but why is it scary? even when you're talking, I'm wondering why, why did you feel weird about that?

in a sense, it's your body just reacting. So we don't feel weird when we, you know, in other situations where our body reacts, we even say, oh, it must be natural and all this. And then, but it wasn't because of course we have now this kind of awareness of self, which is also related to your work in a way that, you know, You become aware of your own patterns or habits or whatever, but was it that at that age as a young guy, you just didn't see anyone else having that reaction?

Was it something like that? Or, you know, like, what made you feel weird? Or was it people saying, this is weird, and, and you, and you thinking, actually, I think it's kind of cool, like, or I don't know, do you remember any? 

Mark James: Yeah. I mean, I can speak to certain incidences, but I think there's a kind of a set [00:19:00] of incompatible kind of regulatory demands going on in my body, right?

This one strong attraction and another that doesn't want that to be true, right? That is like, you know, well, if this is true, what do I have to accept into my life? And what does that mean? And like, I'm going to have to divulge this to people. And what does that mean? And I guess what I'm trying to 

Andrea Hiott: so you, you just felt it in your setting that that was not going to be an easy thing to divulge. Yeah. Yeah. 

Mark James: So I think that's true, but then, you know, yeah, if you think about the kind of norms of the place that I was growing up in, I mean, so even there to, to come out a gay as gay at that time was hard, but there was people doing this, but there were still kind of ostracized and maybe you know, I mean, yeah, let's say somewhat ostracized but there was just no discussion around trans people at all at that time.

And 

Andrea Hiott: it's 

Mark James: a lot easier to have that discussion now and even to acknowledge my relationship to that. But I, I do think that yeah, the kind of set of difficult, incompatible [00:20:00] regulatory demands that I was trying to navigate and make sense of. I was curious anyway, and I probably would have done all the traveling regardless, but yeah, I think I've started to become very sensitive to where these kinds of conflicts existed, and maybe where some of the social norms were coming from, you know, and you know, why do I feel like this about myself in this context?

And why do I feel less like, like, like this about myself in this other context? And starting to appreciate that, you know, when I am around certain groups for a certain period of time and we interact, that I start to absorb some of the patterns of that group and not only, you know, not in a disingenuous way necessarily, right, that my accent starts to change, my gait starts to change my affectations and sensibilities and preferences and all of that starts to change and trying to understand, okay, well, how much of this is changeable and how much of this is not changeable, right?

What, what exists within the space of possible change and, [00:21:00] and what, what is outside that? And I never really had the sense of wanting to change my sexuality as such but just had a lot of say confusion around it. So yeah, I was traveling around and, and, and meeting with all these, different people and everything.

Andrea Hiott: did you go to like Dublin or something? Or where was the kind of, 

Mark James: So, you know, the day after I finished school, actually, I went to live in Holland, like, literally the following day. 

Andrea Hiott: Okay. 

Mark James: And I didn't stay there very long and stay there and intended to go and work there and, and live there. But, I wasn't fit for it. I don't think it was just, it was too intense.

And I was comfortable to go back home after about two weeks. And then I kind of built back up the courage and tried to move to Holland again and got these tickets through this guy online. Well, no, not online. It was through the newspaper back then to go and do something. And when the tickets came in the post, there were actually tickets to Germany, not Holland.

And I was like, okay, and I lived in [00:22:00] Germany, didn't know what I was going to do work ways. Some guy picked us up at the airport. All I knew was his name was Mark too. So we met this guy, Mark sat in the back of the car is like, okay, what are we doing? And he was like you're, you're basically doing, doing this landscaping work.

So we ended up landscaping for a while and there's lots of stories to tell. I'll just touch on the beats, but we can come back to any of it if you want.

I spent a few months in Germany, moved around a little bit then I went to the United States. UK, eventually I lived in, in, in Spain and Australia. 

Andrea Hiott: Was this all doing some kind of work or was it just work a little and get the next ticket and this kind of thing? 

Mark James: Yeah, it was all mostly working while I was in those places.

Always with the sense of, I'm kind of working here just to pay my way and see what this is like and, and, and experience some of this 

Andrea Hiott: Did you notice did it seem like the patterns you threw yourself into were really different from the ones you'd known before?

I'm wondering like your expectation of it, how it ended up feeling in terms of the way the setting felt for [00:23:00] you. 

Mark James: Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, definitely, definitely. There was so much divergence, but I was, again, again, I think I was following this artistic impulse, right? I was trying to find.

the outer edges of whatever it was that I was capable of and capable of experiencing in some sense. And travel seemed like a kind of a relatively surefire way of doing that in a way that's also say relatively safe. 

Andrea Hiott: you have to confront yourself when you travel. I mean, 

Mark James: yeah, absolutely.

Andrea Hiott: Were you writing music and stuff too and reading 

Mark James: writing a lot of songs had my guitar on the time. But there was a sense of.

Maybe it goes back to that sense of having grown, I felt I grew up in a kind of boring place. Now I don't think that, right, but I just couldn't see the kind of charm and the intrigue and mystery of it all. And you know, when I write nowadays if I write short stories or songs or something, it's [00:24:00] very rooted in the place I come from, which is interesting.

So yeah, there was, there was another, I guess, a part of me with this artistic kind of uh, And I was, I was striving ultimately to be, to be an artist.

That was the kind of longer, you know, trajectory I was assuming. But the yeah, I think there was a self destructive dimension to that too. You know, when I was growing up, I read a lot of work of, work by and of people who were probably quite self destructive, you know, Shane, Shane McGill, or. Or Cobain or people who kind of, push the boundaries for their art and, and, and, you know, brought something back.

And, and, and so I kind of embraced some of the, let's say I don't know, tougher dimensions, even of the work, you know, like some of the jobs I worked were really, really difficult. But there was something about it that I could, you know, maybe like a writer, you know, it was all material, you know, it all felt like some sort of material for me.

And and I, I think that's gone on to be true, even though let's say I'm not an artist, I think it's [00:25:00] all philosophical fodder in some sense. And yeah, to, to kind of bring this back around to where I entered academia, you know, at some point, when I said I was living. I was living remotely. I'd gone back to, to, to study music for a while and songwriting.

And then after that, I, I moved to a remote location to, to write and I just stayed there. And I was there for a few years and somebody had stayed with me during that period. And she was the first person I, I'd really encountered who had read a lot of Chomsky and, difficult works and was somehow like acknowledging that type of, say, interest or potential in me and would share these books with me and everything.

And, and, and, and, and, And I started to get excited by ideas and, and I think in a sense, I always had been right. All my music had always been super lyrical and oriented around ideas rather than stories, let's say. And even if the stories were [00:26:00] sometimes sharing ideas 

Andrea Hiott: patterns too of searching, you know, this.

There's something about that that's very idea oriented that, the way you've described it so far, you're kind of looking like, why is this like this? you're thinking critically about this in a way. 

Mark James: Yeah, definitely. And I think, yeah, so after, you know, when you have, when you come back and see your own place anew, right, you also see.

What the others maybe take for a little bit for granted or can't see outside of in a way and then you can kind of see their construction and how you had been constructed in that way. Anyway, so I was getting into ideas on one hand and then I was also get doing a lot of, let's say, kind of, contemplative practice.

So I was kind of developing this kind of, I was, let's say I was rational, but developing a kind of rational stance or something in that direction. Right. But I was also like engaged with a lot of communities around different practices. And I got engaged with one for a [00:27:00] period of time and so yeah, it was something called it was, it was, it was called Rathubagas bioenergy shaking.

And it was quite interesting. Now you can look it up in line, the, the, the kind of head of the practice. There's a guy from Bali, this guy right, I guess. And somehow this practice made its way to Ireland, and there was a few little corners of people doing this practice. It was quite, it was quite, quite, quite interesting, like ecstatic movements.

It looks. It looks all a bit wild and scary to anybody who's not an initiate, I'd say. Anyway, I got involved in this and pretty heavily at the time because I was having my own health struggles too, I would say, at the time. With your 

Andrea Hiott: stomach and stuff? Or with, I mean, it's all related, of course, but.

Mark James: Yeah, I think it's all related, but I had a lot of OCD and living isolated on my own, that got a bit worse. And yeah, my stomach was bad and. The interaction between those two, and I, I didn't really know how to look after myself at that time, but I started to get in, involved in, in these in these, in this group and.

[00:28:00] I both really got a lot from it and was like uber critical of the way they were constructing knowledge within the group, right? It was just obvious to me how badly they were doing a lot of that. I could really see it, right? I could see somebody enter this space and start to take on the norms in a very kind of prescribed way.

And, and then see things through those norms that they wouldn't have previously seen or they wouldn't have understood in a certain way. And I could almost watch the kind of you know, the, the, the kind of a train of people coming through being indoctrinated in, in some sense. And I don't think, like, it wasn't like a heavily indoctrined.

Indoctrinal, say, cult or something, but it certainly had some of those dimensions. And yeah, I was a bit frustrated with the desire both to, like, experience this practice and gain some value from it, but also getting frustrated with this kind of you know, very obviously poor thinking, let's say it lightly.

Andrea Hiott: I just, cause you [00:29:00] have this, the way you're describing that you were able to kind of, a lot of, there's a lot of like stepping back, of course when you had these kind of bodily feelings that didn't really fit with what the norms you were told were, you know, but there's this kind of way in which your perspective taking or, I don't know, I just wonder how you learned it.

I think, maybe you just came into the world like that. I don't know. But there's a kind of cause you know, sometimes we're just. All in, and we can be reckless just doing the things you're describing, but not quite aware that we're doing that or maybe you could be really critical of this organization, like something turns you off about it, even as you really want to be part of it, but not really thinking about it.

But it sounds like you already had this kind of, I don't know, any idea where that came from? Or do you remember like always having that? Or was that coming from the travel? Oh, I 

Mark James: heard you. There's an Irish American author, John Patrick Shanley, and he describes himself as a member of the jury who refuses to return with a verdict, and I feel like [00:30:00] that's a good characterization of, of my character.

I, I don't know, to be honest, Andrea, I, I think like when you say it, and, and I ask myself maybe where does it come from, if it is a skill maybe, It comes from, well, my mother used to she used to say faster for short periods children with different types of disabilities when we were, when we were very young.

So there was always a you know, different kids coming through the house for, for periods of time. And they would all have different, very different challenges. And I really remember quite distinctly having to kind of learn to reckon with their different characteristics. And like, you know, this person is doing this thing, which seems wild and, you know, it's not something I've experienced before.

And then I, you know, I distinctly remember my mother talking me through these types of situations. And like, you know, this person has this needs and they're a bit different. And I think maybe some of it comes from there. Because I don't remember having it before that situation. Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: No, that makes a lot of sense to me because that's definitely a way as a child [00:31:00] or a young person that you realize, you start to realize what, what we're talking about, that there's so many different ways of being in the world.

There's not just one way of being in the world, which we assume, all of us assume the way we are is the way everyone else is up to a point until, you know, maybe we start to read or all these things happen that we're talking about. I think on a very physical level, I've, I've had people in my life who have different ways of being in the world in the same way that you describe, and you really do have to kind of take, do exactly what I was saying, take a step back and go, oh, okay, so they're doing this, and there's another way of doing it.

So actually, thank you for telling me that, because that actually fits very well with that pattern that you, of just taking a minute and looking at what's really going on here. 

Mark James: Yeah, to be honest, I hadn't really thought about that before, so thank you. Yeah, 

Andrea Hiott: no, it's interesting. It's also this individual, I don't know if you've ever heard me talk about edge work, but it's the kind of thing I was interested in early on.

What you kind of said earlier about pushing yourself into new [00:32:00] places and I was thinking Hunter S. Thompson when I was a kid, and not really liking him, but he, he came up with this edge work, or putting yourself in situations where you absolutely must kind of transcend your own uh, abilities, and that can be very destructive, and it can be very creative, and, You know, it's not a linear at all.

But it's that when you were talking to, you know, there's this individual social thing, which I think is very connected to Edgework where you're kind of pushing yourself out of your normal patterns and places. and it can be too solitary, right? It sounds like you, Because it's scary to do that.

when you do start opening to all these other worlds and realizing there are all these other ways to be in the world in different cities or through books or music or relationships, you can start to feel like what's who am I and what's the balance. And it's a lot to struggle with.

And if you're not. part of a community or a group or a good group of friends, which we often aren't if we're just solitary nomadic travelers searching, it can be really hard and it can be really dangerous even for our health because we don't, if we don't know [00:33:00] how to deal with it. So I can really understand how you found that group which instigated a physical change and also a kind of community.

And then also that you would. Because you had this solitary stuff be questioning it at the same time just throwing that out there. What does that make you think of? 

Mark James: Well, I'm curious about the edge work. So for Thompson, it was.

In his writing or like in his experiencing in his journalistic work or just everything. 

Andrea Hiott: he actually uses the word edge work. And he talks about people who know the edge or You only know where it is if you've gone over it or something. I was never fascinated with Hunter S. Thompson, but I, when I read that word edgework, I understood it because uh, a lot of my own stuff was pushing it. What I thought, what people told me were boundaries or even my own emotional and physical Something about working at the edge felt very alive to me, and I was actually a good kid I wasn't like doing crazy stuff, but [00:34:00] more even getting out of what or exploring worlds that people around me weren't exploring And so it wasn't really Hunter S. Thompson so much as that he coined that term, because it was the first time I heard edge work. And for me, that was about, that, other people have used it another way. There's a psychologist, Stephen Lang, who took up that idea of edge work and wrote about it, which I read back a long time ago too.

And then of course, in complexity science, we have edges and edge work, and there's a lot of different ways people talk about it now, but he was the one who first said the word that I, that I thought of. Did it make sense to you, edge work? 

Mark James: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the idea you're describing, absolutely.

I think in a way it was maybe my kind of modus operandi for a long time. And I think the challenges that also come with it are familiar to me too. The sense of continuing the search, right, is one challenge, but also not feeling sufficiently rooted anywhere that you can kind of find that ease and comfort, comfort and safety.

And I, I think my, my work, let's say personal [00:35:00] work relational work, interpersonal work in the last few years has been kind of rerouting in some sense. And, you know, trying to, trying to maintain whatever the kind of insights, principles, dispositions tendencies that were gathered from the edges but somehow can now be more productive when they're brought into some sort of coherent integration.

And I do think that's very possible and I'm, I'm definitely witnessing it as part of my own, say evolution of my identity, you know, finding kind of roots in, in music again, really. And like I described to you, you know, in some of the kind of affectations of the places in which I grew up and you know, things as simple as, as like singing in my own accent, which is not something I ever did.

Right. And like, wow, why did I never do that? And then finding that when I sing in my own accent, another kind of a sense of rootedness accompanies that. Right. And. Yeah. That's very beautiful. 

Andrea Hiott: That's very beautiful. it just feels like, you got to a place where you're at peace with who you [00:36:00] are in a sense, which doesn't mean you've defined who you are, you're some static thing, but I am again projecting my own life, but I rejected a lot of the kind of small townish stuff that I came from But once I started feeling more comfortable with just my own self and like I had kind of looked at who I was and. Then, my setting and my childhood and everything, then it looked completely different to me.

I don't know if it's similar for you, but. 

Mark James: Yeah, no, no, definitely, definitely, yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: But singing in your own voice, that's really a physical, embodied, powerful, I don't know, there's something really powerful about that. 

Mark James: Yeah, what's interesting about that, too, is it's not that it just comes, right, it has to be You, you do have to find it again or find it for the first time, even like, you know, it's your own accent and it's your own intonation and it's your own turn of phrase and everything.

But there's a sense of kind of ownership and association and, and, and kind of, you know, the, the word authenticity is difficult, but it's not nothing in some sense. [00:37:00] It floats around there and we have to engage with it and, and there's something I think, you know, part of that does actually come from like, maybe this is like tied in some sense to a notion of wisdom or something, but, you know, when you move around and you encounter so many different spaces and groups and norms and, and you start to kind of sense, okay, which, which, which, which parts of me.

Working across these situations, which parts of me are more portable and, and I'm happy to express and I would happily have other people know and, and, and can I be comfortable with those parts of myself. And once you can start to do that more and more, you do start to settle into those parts of yourself, I think, and and, and, and kind of wear them and express them.

And and, and there's something then in music or in the, in the constitution of art or in the production of a piece of art in which you're also doing that right. In a, in a kind of microcosmic way, you're kind of reaching out into these ideas and possibilities. And, and, you know, whether it's in the form of rhythm or intonation or words, some sort of accent on your singing Like, there's some way in which the resonance of [00:38:00] that and the resonance of this higher order kind of integration I was talking about start to align.

And then that is a kind of like, you know, we talk about finding our voice, right. But I do think that's kind of what it's getting at in some sense. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And this makes me think of your thesis work too, because maybe we can bring it in a little bit. This patterns of being together. I know it's impossible to give a summary of a thesis, but you could maybe help people better understand, but that's the phrase I always remember.

And also it's connected to habits. It's connected to embodiment. It's in a philosophical and scientific way. So as to better understand it, but one thing I wanted to bring up was patterns of being together and patterns of being Alone or solitary are those you play with a lot with the solitary individual Thing too, but we tend to think of them as this linear either or one thing I like a lot about here to later work in We'll get to it with the way shaping and all this that's coming now, is you talk about more like, these things as nested and not linear habits.

I think you get, you start with Dewey's idea of that [00:39:00] and that's kind of true about patterns of being together too, in terms of where the individual is and where the social is and if it's more that we're calling it those words depending on what we're trying to kind of understand and assess much rather than it ever actually being only one or the other.

You have this great quote, I can't remember who said it, but about being embodied is never a private or something. 

Mark James: Yeah, okay, so in all of this story, we're just telling right at some point you, you have an experience and I think this experience is common where you suddenly find yourself presented with say two groups of people or two people with whom you have some sort of mutually exclusive history of interaction. And suddenly you can't act in the way that you normally do in front of either because there's some sort of betrayal of the other, right?

Like if I do the thing that I normally do with you, it doesn't look good to this other person. And you suddenly find yourself caught like, who am I? Who, who is this? Like, who am I when I'm with those people? Because, you know, I never felt weird until this moment. And I always just felt myself. [00:40:00] Totally. We all know 

Andrea Hiott: this, but just, for example, you have some People who study philosophy and you're a certain way with them, and it's a bit different than the people you might play volleyball with.

Could all be the same people but often in our lives we're in these different groups and you bring them together and it's almost like you feel a kind of dissonance of the patterns or something. 

Mark James: That's exactly one of my favorite experiences. I don't know why I love this so much, but I think it highlights this kind of construction that we've been talking about.

So that was the starting point for my PhD, that type of experience and to say, okay, well, okay, those patterns, let's say it could be higher order, conceptual patterns, like people with political beliefs around something or religious convictions or they could be also like norms of volleyball, right?

It could be, say, constructed at different I don't know, orders of complexity, let's say. So when, when I, when I, when I was in university and having these these experiences and trying to make sense of them and seeing the kind of social constitution of our minds and how we could be drawn [00:41:00] into it in interaction, and we could so in a way that's maybe, you know, not not say consciously orchestrated, but just through the dynamics of our embodied embodied interaction.

Yeah, I started to ask, Okay, well, how do we make sense of this? And the kind of existing models that say word. Derived from cognitive psychology around, say, memory and visual spatial sketch pads and, you know, computational processes that were, they just didn't seem to kind of add up to and capture the types of phenomena that were interesting to me, right?

There's something about that inter bodily coupling or that situation that I described that, that speaks to an inter bodily coupling. Your body is doing it before you even think to engage in those patterns. Mm hmm. It's kind of habituated to the other person in a certain way. So when I, when I did my master's, I eventually came across the work of Mars Maurice Merleau Ponty and his notion of intercorporeality.

And this speaks directly to this idea, right? That in some sense, the [00:42:00] primacy of our being in the world is a world in which we are with others. All right. in a kind of pre reflective manner already attuned to them, to us and our interests, as has been shaped through those relationships, and so on. Some, some people have recently written a philosopher and colleague, Anna Ciacuna uh, with Michael Levin, I believe, have written about In, in the womb.

We we're already establishing this kind of a set of, let's say participatory frames is what I like to call them which are these kinds of OST Terry rhythmic dynamics that allow us both to make sense of each other and the world in a way that expresses the fact that I have this relationship to this other person.

So. The language of intercorporeality, and then let's say the 4E cognitive science, which comes along with, you know, coordination dynamics and dynamical systems and complexity theory, and actually kind of starts to [00:43:00] help us make sense of this type of stuff in a formal way, I found very appealing. And yeah, my, my, my question was, well, can we make sense of this kind of cultural reproduction and production true embodied interaction using these kinds of lenses?

And, and in a sense, that's what I set out to do. But the question about the kind of individual and the social is kind of, In the background there and in a sense that the story I'm trying to tell in my PhD is to soften these types of divisions, right? And I think there's good reason to do that. Just for our own, say being in the world, but also, you know, a lot of political divisions on kind of organizes around these kind of bifurcations, you know, on the one hand, you have the perfectly responsible autonomous individual who needs to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just get their act together.

And on the other hand, you have, you know, an all determining [00:44:00] system which, you know, you can't help but be organized by and, and. Maybe this goes back to my experience again, but my sense is neither of those are entirely correct. And although you are constrained and organized by the systemic dimensions, you also have some, some, some modicum of agency and you can better resource that in ways if you can kind of figure out how it's kind of, kind of constructed in those relationships.

You know, I don't speak about it much in the thesis, but part of my interest there too was like how even when I'm apart from these social relationships, is it that I'm organized to see the world in a way that gears me back into the social relationships, right?

So I appraise the world and make judgments. True kind of lens, right? Or a sense frame, as I call it that is somehow valuable to me in relationship that I'm not presently acting within. And I think that's very interesting. Because then we can really see the extent to which you know, we're, we're socially constructed even if we still retain some sort of, I would say, I, I do think we retain [00:45:00] some strong sense of agency, even, but you know, it's, it's very hard to, you know, to escape or evade that kind of social construction too.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, agency is a important word in a lot of your work and in all of this, of course. I want to get kind of messy with this a bit because it's something I often try to figure out how to articulate. Maybe you can articulate it better, but this linearity or this dichotomy that you were just touching on a bit really guides so much.

and it's understandable because we are connected. We are the patterns, right? But to, to kind of develop and survive, you know, our parents call us a namer or caretakers, and they kind of divide us off from that, in terms of the way we began to. And our language and our, the way we interact with this kind of third space of representation, like through language, where you know your parents begin to call you certain things and your caretakers and your teachers and all these people.

And these You're sharing all these patterns, but at the same time, you're learning that you need to make your own kind of patterns, and other people see you as a certain kind [00:46:00] of pattern, and that develops into this solitary feeling or, or individual, but it's really us just doing the same thing we do in all the other patterns of the world, which is you know, deal with that encounter as best we can but somehow this one feels special because it, it does start to develop a kind of agency In the sense that we, by becoming aware of our own bodies and our thoughts, which aren't separate, but that, that becomes part of it, we do begin to notice the patterns, I guess, of ourselves and of the world.

And there is this agency there that you I think that you're kind of illuminating. But then once we've gotten to that point, we feel separate. You know, because we kind of had to learn that in order to get here, it reminds me a little bit of leaving home to come back to home and know it.

There's a similar movement going on there in terms of developing a sense of a solitary self in order to kind of then realize you're not solitary. maybe that's getting too far out, but what do you think? 

Mark James: I think that the metaphor with the, you know, the returning home is, it's fascinating.

I think you're onto something there. Yeah. [00:47:00] It'd be something to explore. Yeah, that's super interesting. I think there's a sense in which maybe like we can say, challenge the kind of boundaries of that let's say more atomized self a little bit true. So, so, you know, you recognize the individual and you empower them in some way.

And maybe this speaks a little bit to, to, to my more recent work, but through the, through the recognition of the the kind of scaffolding in which that individual is maintained or, or reproduced you, you can start to see that self as, say, dependent on certain kinds of Available resources in the environment to to be maintained as that self, right?

And then I think that has the kind of potential to kind of redistributed redistribute the kind of sense of self, even if the sense of agency might even grow in that context, right? The more I understand the extent to which I can [00:48:00] resource my own agency through my environment. I both do resource that agency, but also better acknowledge my dependencies right on the environment and, and the extent to which I am interdependent with the, the, the, the, the scaffolding is there.

in, in a sense that kind of recognition is where I think some of this discussion starts to enter the, the kind of conversation around health. I mean, it could be a conversation about art also, or education or, you know, Whatever domain within which we seek to navigate right to make our way.

I just for my own interests and intrigues have tended to try and focus these things on questions of health. And I think health is obviously a very, very important thing. broad term and art and spirituality and all of those other things that I [00:49:00] mentioned also can kind of fall under. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, to stop just for a second because that's, those also aren't separate from each other, right?

The health is connected to all these other things too. because we're assessing when we're using all this third, this language and this space where we're communicating, we're trying to kind of understand and assess. And so we have to kind of orient which patterns are we looking for because everything is not linear, right.

There's multiple patterns that we're part of at all times. and just by the fact of noticing the pattern we're in a way leaving Kind of, we're not freezing it, but we're looking at it in a way that's a little bit different from how it actually is, because it's a process, it's dynamic, I know you like whitehead a lot, and there's this, you know, ongoing movement, which we can't actually ever freeze and study, but through something like looking at the patterns, we can enough, because we look at the statistical regularities and so on and so forth, but to get to health, right, so maybe we can connect to your personal stuff and to the work a bit, because all of this for you, this Finding new patterns, learning how to balance, and find the refrain and the [00:50:00] harmony and all those patterns was a matter of health too, wasn't it?

And it was, that's not like there was the health of your body and this. It was all at the same time. But did turning your attention specifically on this idea of health show you some way to look at those patterns differently that was helpful? Or, I don't know. Yeah, 

Mark James: It's I'm, I'm hesitant to even start talking because I know I'll just start rambling in some direction.

Rambling 

Andrea Hiott: is good. This is a perfectly great place to ramble, as I've already demonstrated. 

Mark James: So, I do, I do like, I, I like to tell stories with this kind of work because, you know, you can re read my work and it's, you know, technical and abstract. And I try and work a few stories in there because when you're talking about something like health there is a broader audience that I have in mind and, and I, I want people to be able to connect with this stuff and I don't know if I do a good job of doing that, but, you know, I'm working towards doing a better job of doing this. So forgive me for telling stories and so on, 

Andrea Hiott: Mark, I think you connect very deeply with people. In a way, just in the sense that [00:51:00] you've described, you connect with them by being present with them.

And this is all about trying to articulate how to kind of Um, narrate that so stories are actually probably the most helpful thing just from my point of view. So anyway, 

Mark James: okay, I'll stop apologizing for myself story culture, a culture of apologizers. 

Andrea Hiott: Okay, okay. 

Mark James: So, so yeah, my, my own journey around health, let's say has a, has a few particular treads some of which I've kind of gestured to.

And as you say, it's a broad category and it could include all of these things, but there's maybe some more well defined elements of that, that are more obviously health related. And one is that I've had some sort of chronic health condition for a very long time. Not very well understood and to this day, not very well understood.

But basically on occasion, I would lose the coordination in, in my body. And it, and it could last up to three or four days and it would be quite mild, [00:52:00] like a mild ataxia or, you know, if you see somebody at the end of a marathon, right. Struggling to kind of coordinate their life. Like a very mild version of that.

But if I was taxed with any sort of you know, exercise or, or, or doing anything stressful, I would just completely shut down. I say, can I tell you a funny story? 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, please do. Although that's a very deep thing. I, I just taking a minute to take it in. Cause that's a, that must've been a lot to go through. But yes, now I'm ready to laugh. Better be funny, .

Mark James: Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. Thank you very much, being seen and, and heard.

Thank you, . Once we were in. Holland, actually, 

it was late at night and I was in what I call the zone, right? Where I'm in this kind of wobbly space and I can't coordinate very well. And it was very late at night and I was stressed and tired and I just wanted to get home.

And we were on a alley side alley and walking along this alley and on the corner where two guys kind of hanging out five o'clock in the morning, [00:53:00] didn't look super friendly. Anyway, we rounded the corner and they started talking to us. And we just kept walking and then maybe 50 yards up the road I noticed that they were following us and one of them started shouting and as I, as I said, when I got stressed, my body would just shut down entirely.

So, as he started shouting and getting closer, my body started slowing down more and more. 

Andrea Hiott: And by 

Mark James: the time he got to me, I had just like stopped and I had to like just sit on the ground. I don't 

Andrea Hiott: know why this is funny, but okay, it is funny. It's almost like I'm seeing it in a cartoonish kind of way, you know, where you need to speed up, but instead you slow down.

Mark James: Yeah, yeah. I remember it in a kind of cartoon vision too. Like by the time it got to me me sitting on the middle of the road had like transformed the situation so much that he couldn't comprehend. And he was like, Whoa, it's like, dude, what is going [00:54:00] on here? And then the other guy who was with him was kind of trying to continue the robbery and he's like, Fuck's sake, man, can't you see there's something happening here?

So, he asked me if I needed an ambulance and he was just like, heroin? It must be heroin. I was like, no. 

Andrea Hiott: The guy who was probably gonna take your money or whatever asked you if you need an ambulance? 

Mark James: Yeah, yeah, there was some, somehow like this whole, just 

Andrea Hiott: switch the whole pattern. 

Mark James: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I find that an interesting story because it speaks to the kinds of things I'm also interested in, right?

Like that there are these patterns that are organizing the robbers on the street, right? But they don't know about, and if you kind of destabilize the pattern, it also disrupts. 

Andrea Hiott: Exactly. I think it's so powerful. I am really glad you told that story because I've thought of that a lot of this. And again, it's these dissonance of patterns or you've talked about frames or we've mentioned the word scripts and you also mentioned, I mean, a lot of that, that terminology tends to get thought of in this traditionally mental way, or we're thinking about our thoughts [00:55:00] or scripts.

But as you said, you know, the body is also. These aren't separate. This is why I keep pushing at this linearity. The body is, is engaged in dealing with sensory irregularities and scripts. It's how we survive. And it's really fascinating when, I don't know if it comes back to presence and awareness too, but, Everything does shift if those scripts suddenly get interrupted in the way that you completely interrupted the about to be robbed script, you know?

It's fascinating. It's almost like time stops or something. 

Mark James: Right, the fact that the body is self organized within constraints To say, enact these scripts, right? If the constraints radically shift all of a sudden, it doesn't have the same scaffolding within which to, to, to enact that. So like you destabilize the scaffolding, you destabilize the, the kind of structural coupling that, that is present in the body to express that.

Andrea Hiott: And then you literally changed the person's kind of goal or behavior or sense of self. you don't change it, but everyone's. It all changes [00:56:00] together, I guess, in the sense that it's kind of illustrated by that story. And also which touches on what we've been talking about too, about us being different people in different situations, right?

Because that's kind of just a setting of particular patterns that we're all kind of playing out together in a certain way. 

Mark James: Yeah, there was a set of sociologists in the, I think 70s, 80s, who maybe didn't have the same language that we're using right now, but had some sense of the kind of power and, and almost, you know, almost determining power of these patterns.

And they would practice so called breaching experiments where they would do things a bit like this, right? So they'd go into the store, place a pint of milk on, on on the counter, whatever, and then try and like haggle up, right? Like, no, I want to give you more. Just see what happens. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, that's wonderful.

Mark James: The students respond to their parents. Reminds me of Lucius Burckhardt, 

Andrea Hiott: who I like a lot, who taught, it's more with the kind of city work that I think about it, which are also kind of scripts in this way, but, and I think of it a lot with your work, by the way, [00:57:00] with patterns and stuff, but that would be another conversation.

But yeah, he talks about interventions where. You intervene in what people are normally expecting in a city and stuff. And of course, I think there's a lot of art that plays on this too, but it's a very fast, it's very fascinating. Also, it makes me think of Fred Cummins, who we should mention, right. Who was your supervisor and yeah.

Joint speech and certain kinds of joint action and things like this, but also the, the power of that, but also the power of when that shifts. I don't know. Yeah.  

Mark James: Yeah. I think there's a, I mean, it's in, it's in all cultures, I think, but in Ireland in particular, there's I don't know if you know this term, the crack.

Do you know the term the crack? 

Andrea Hiott: The crack? Like C R A C K? No. C R 

Mark James: A A C K, we spell it in Ireland. Oh, okay. If you've ever met an Irish person, they might have I just mentioned it to but people say, how's the crack, where's the crack, who's the crack? You know, it's kind of like, what's the story, what's going on with derives, you know, from the kind of traditional English word [00:58:00] crack, like a crack in the plate or something.

Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: I think I got too caught up with cracking. It's like K A R A K E N. That's what I came to mind. But anyway. Yes. Okay. No, I don't know. That's thank you for. Filling me in on something I didn't know about. 

Mark James: The term is is very, very common place in Ireland nowadays. But, but I, I think it really like it's maybe a bit quaint to say, and you know, Irish people are often stereotyped as kind of being fun and funny.

You know, I don't know if that's a bad thing, but you know, stereotyped has been the kind of song and dance man, let's say and it's not altogether untrue. I think within our culture, we do celebrate that type of thing a lot, but there's a kind of a, you know, speaking of participatory frames and so on, the dominant frame in Ireland really is is let's say the crack, right?

So. You know, what can you bring to a situation that would not have been expected within these conditions? And I think that's an interesting [00:59:00] way for a culture to organize. So it's, you know, really organize itself. around surprising itself, around being adaptive, around you know, any social interaction that might take place can always be improved by the presence of something that you did not expect to, to take place within that social, social setting.

Andrea Hiott: That is fascinating. I hadn't, I did not know that. Now I'm trying to think about the history of Ireland, but anyway, okay. 

Mark James: I think there's yeah, I mean, these are just my ideas around this, you know, someone else might disagree, apparently, but there's a text recently by an Irish author and journalist Fintan O'Toole, who's maybe kind of one of the most articulate, say orators of the contemporary Irish story and the book is called We Don't Know Ourselves.

And in Ireland, we have this this phrase, like, you know, we, we got the new television and we didn't know ourselves or like, you know, since Marty got his new car, he doesn't know himself. And it, it kind of speaks to this idea of like, [01:00:00] you know, he's been transformed by the or the bathtub or whatever it is, right?

And. The guy who sat down in the 

Andrea Hiott: middle of the street when I was about to Yeah, yeah. 

Mark James: Suddenly didn't know ourselves, right? But O'Toole kind of speaks to this idea that you know, the Irish culture, given its history and given it been pulled between Britain and America and having all these allegiances, but also been kind of its own thing, right?

It wasn't part of the Roman Empire. It had a very different kind of version of Christianity rooted in paganism and that kind of thing. It's, it's quite a unique culture. What he kind of characterizes the culture is of being this ability to shift and move and adapt and welcome the surprise and lean into the surprise when it serves us.

And, and I, I can't help but think that there's something about this idea of the crack being central to Ireland. That's also reflected that this macro [01:01:00] scale and how we've kind of navigated our relationship to the world around us. it resonates. 

Andrea Hiott: When you say it, it really resonates. I mean, having lived in, or been in Ireland a bit with my dad when he worked there and stuff and loving Yeats.

And there's a lot of things that you, in the history, when you said that, it. It makes sense. Yeah, there's a pattern. 

Mark James: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think is a pattern, and in a way it's the kind of pattern I've I've saw manifest in myself too, right? This kind of, you know, fragmented looking for things, whatever, whatever.

But it's a kind of 

Andrea Hiott: superhero ish thing too that to be able to do that, to be able to Take that stance. I mean, that's actually a pretty remarkable thing to have that awareness of what's the thing I don't know being ready for what you don't expect at the same time that welcoming or opening to it That's a paradoxical strange thing that summarized very easily in that what you just said that that crack, you know Like to get that idea just it's not an easy idea for people to get in life [01:02:00] 

Mark James: But yeah, I hope in Ireland, we're not losing that.

I mean, some of the kind of recent news headlines about intolerant responses to migrants and so on is a bit troubling. Oh, 

Andrea Hiott: goodness. Everywhere is, but that would be another conversation. But it does, it does remind me of the abyss or something or different things in philosophy of that, yeah, there's, there's a lot of what we've already been discussing and that we don't, This moment of not knowing yourself and how, in the way you described it just now, which I hope Ireland isn't losing to, I'm sure it's not, it'll come back to it but that ability to be okay with not knowing yourself or something, even to use it as a positive thing.

Mark James: Yeah, and that's actually what O'Toole you know, kind of plays on this phrase. We have, we don't know ourselves and says actually, you know, allowing ourselves not to know ourselves and to be shaped and to, to kind of continually find and re find ourselves is, is part of it. And I mean, this speaks directly to the questions around health, because as you say, there's a kind of [01:03:00] adaptability.

You know, we talk about balance and metastability and all of these ideas, I think, speak to this dual capacity for navigating agency, true expressing some agency, but also are navigating complexity, sorry, true expressing some agency, but also been continually responsive to what might emerge along the path, right?

You know, what, what, what is required to navigate complexity is this dual sensitivity, I think. 

Andrea Hiott: So having to do with awareness, cultivating awareness, you said you did a lot of practice early on and I mean to move, we don't have to move anywhere. I do want to talk about the shaping part and how you got from the patterns into the, the way shaping.

But it keeps making me think, like, what's the, what's the, what's the thing that's happening when we're noticing patterns and when we're learning to harmonize or we're finding ways to do what we're saying here, be ourselves. And at the same time, not really. Know ourselves and know that we don't know ourselves and and all all of this stuff and [01:04:00] related to health I think it's very important because a lot of health issues Whatever wherever you want to say like in the in the body physical Traditionally physical but also traditionally mental it's about trying to think there is a way you're supposed to be instead of that feeling of openness or there's many different ways of being and feeling a lot of stress that you don't fit in or trying to fit in.

And the same with the body, you know, and the body, like. Taking a certain kind of medicine or having a certain prescription that's supposed to fit to the body, which as if there's kind of one way of being a body and yeah, I mean, you're kind of opening starting to open up that space. But yeah, I don't know.

Mark James: I think that's a, that's really profound. Maybe, maybe it's, we can come back to the question about well, maybe I'll go back to the story I was telling about health and so on

circle background to these things.

Yeah. So yeah, so this coordination disorder and, you know, this kind of thing happened in [01:05:00] Amsterdam. Mm-Hmm. . But this went out for years and I didn't really understand it. And actually it was the same woman who gave me the, the books that I talked about previously. In that house at that time, the Trump ski who I was chatting.

Yeah, Chomsky, who I was chatting with at some point, and I think she maybe saw me in this kind of wobbly mode and I had presumed this was just something that people experienced from time to time for years and never really had confirmation otherwise. And she was like, no, that's definitely not a normal thing.

And you should probably take that seriously. And, uh, 

Andrea Hiott: you just hadn't,

you just thought everyone had that or something. So you hadn't really even, you just went through it silently when it happened more or less. 

Mark James: Yeah, I went through it silently, I would say, for years. And maybe I expressed it to people in words that didn't really articulate what was going on for me, and yeah, never, yeah, I didn't, I didn't convey it to the extent that somebody else recognized it not as part of their life, [01:06:00] and something particular to what was going on with me, and I, for whatever reason, I guess I was inspired just knowing that to, to resolve it.

And I guess it was whatever was going on at the time. So long story short, I became very interested in paying attention to how different things in my environment were interacting with my body and, you know, to the point where I became kind of obsessed and writing it down and trying to look at the time scales.

And I did this at this time, became kind of really attuned. and developed a lot of sensitivity about how I was responding to certain situations or foods or even people and started to get kind of better and better at say, positioning myself relative to things that were serving me and, and, and avoiding those that weren't.

And within that started to kind of, grok on to this notion of habit as also serving this type of, of interest, right? So I could see how habits were unfolding in my kind of social constitution of my mind, but also that I could kind of, if I could gain control or [01:07:00] somewhat steward or, or, or steer my habits or manage them in some way that.

I could address some of these health issues that I was experiencing. And that I kind of just played around with in the background for years until relatively recently where there was a situation in which suddenly kind of the value of life was presented as something not to take likely just a with a colleague who got quite sick.

And A lot of us, I think we're forced into a re reflection on, you know, what is it that we really want to be doing and focusing our time and attention on. And this particular interest in kind of shaping habits for health behaviors and so on started to kind of represent itself as the thing that maybe I should be focusing on.

So since that time I kind of, redirected a lot of my research resources in that direction. And I've been lucky to be in OIST where I am and supported by Tom, because he's been [01:08:00] very supportive of it. So, you know, I shared some ideas. 

Andrea Hiott: I meant to say it earlier. I, he's, you know, doing great work and, and stuff.

So you've had some really cool people in your life to work with. Yeah, but this. This is, I want to try to pull this stuff together because it, so a lot of your work was relative to patterns of being together and this goes into what you were just saying about the, what do we really want to do with our lives and thinking about health and

so you, you were, all of this was together for you. It became your academic. Output in a sense, you know, things you're writing about and giving to, to us. At the same time, you know, you have your own life where you're literally sort of trying to negotiate and figure out which patterns lead to more, you know, optimal isn't a very good word, but to you feeling the way that you want to feel in life, your health.

Yeah. So how does it connect for you? I wonder, like when you think about the patterns of being together and the, all the study, the academic study that you've done and. Because a lot of that is we put it into academic language, but a lot of it is a similar search to the one when you're writing down all the details of your day and trying to find your health, you [01:09:00] know?

I mean, in a way we're trying to do it as individuals, but then in social groups. We're trying to find ways to think better and act better and, and so on. So have you thought much about all these connections in terms of the patterns of being together and then now we'll move towards the, the shaping of those 

Mark James: patterns?

Yes, definitely. I mean, that's, I would say at the kind of core of the effort that we're trying to Absolutely. Articulated is to say, even if you are focusing as an individual on your own processes of change, you're always already invested in you know, the mediation of change at other scales. And. There's a question about being both responsible towards that and, you know, the ethics that comes with that, and also like better leveraging those relationships, right?

If I understand the extent to which I'm nested you know, and helping comprise larger systems and comprised of smaller systems, and there is this kind of [01:10:00] multi-scale competency architecture as, as Mike Levi might talk about it. Mm-Hmm. . How can we engage with that architecture at different scales in service of the needs that we have and that we negotiate with ourselves and with each other?

And, and, you know, part of that is also to, to get back to the kind of, the language that we have and predominates around health, Of the individual again, just kind of like, you know, kind of walls off the individual again to the, you know, they might say, okay, there's this hierarchy of needs and everything, but actually it's a, you know, kind of hierarchy of relations and and flows and dynamics.

It's not just that you as an individual person have these needs is that you are invested in these sets of relationships and they also depend on you in certain ways and. you know, we can go into the specifics of any of this if you like, but I would, I would definitely say that the approach we're trying to develop has this kind of you know, [01:11:00] sense of interdependence in the background.

And there's a sense in which my hope is that when you practice the redirection of your own habits, Through the kinds of ideas that we're presenting and trying to articulate that it is a practice in establishing a better sense of these relationships, right? So you may have came with this individual desire to just, I don't know, do this.

You know, I don't know, make your, I don't know. you know, act more hastily towards your success, whatever you define that as. And in practicing through the tools we provide, the hope is that you cannot help but start to see these relationships and how that you, how you are both, you know, being served by them and serving them and, you know, whether or not you're doing that well also becomes apparent.

And I think, you know, there's a kind of ethics. That emerges from the practice rather than, you know, saying up front, here's the ethics of our practice. Although we might have that in the background of our, you know, design of the, the kind of approach, the ethics we hope kind of emerges from it. And it's not to say that it itself is [01:12:00] some sort of you know, value structure or set of values.

I think you could take it and, you know, practice it within a set of values that, Me personally, I'm not aligned with but I do think there's something of a kind of bulwark against the kind of isolationist values that we tend to live in. By default at this point in time. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think that's why I brought up that individual social, because it feels like there's a way in which we start to talk about just, just becoming aware of patterns in this way and linking it to habits.

I'm not entirely sure how you connect patterns and habits necessarily. Maybe you have something to say about that, but it's all, it's all very connected, right? That our individual, the patterns we find ourselves within, the habits we create. And, and how those are always also creating social patterns and habits at ever more scales and all directions.

And when we just think of something like philosophy, to go to kind of on your thesis and you're, you're speaking to a particular [01:13:00] community and in a sense you're, you have this way in which you're doing what you do in your normal life because you don't just choose embodied, radical embodied cognition or mind and life or You know, I mean, you're, the free energy side, I mean, you're, you're in a way looking at all those different ways of being in this philosophical world.

And you're saying, Hey, look, it shares a lot of regularities and we can depending what we want from this, we don't necessarily have to choose one or the other. At the same time, we don't need to smush them all together and say everything goes. So there's, there's a richness in that. And I'm trying to see if, you know, then, so that's in a very social, big.

big and specific space of philosophy. And, and you, your scholarship is great on that. And then now I feel like it's coming. So how do we, you've gone there, you've learned that, you've developed that skill for something similar to the way you developed your, in your life to be able to handle all those patterns and be okay with it, part of all those worlds.

And in so doing becoming a kind of resonance within them all. So now it's, it feels like to me in a bit with With [01:14:00] great way shaping and I don't know, you keep saying us and our team, but I'm not sure who exactly that is, but you seem to have a community where you're trying to now take all this scholarship and everything you've spent so much time because it's a lot of work reading and knowing all these things, thinking through them, writing, and then, you know, I don't know if it happened when your friend got sick or what, but it's like, what am I really doing with this?

And actually it does have practical there's something very practical, practical might not be the right word, but we can use this to improve or help us get through our challenges on all these scales. does that seem a little bit fair? What I just said? Is it a kind of, bringing it?

into the realm of health at a different level now that you've gone through all the scholarship at, at that other level? Is it almost like a practice, like a behavioral practice and? 

Mark James: Yeah. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 

Mark James: No, that's exactly what I think about it. I mean, I, I think in a sense, although I expressed my interest is in, is in ideas.

 Growing up, my, my dad, another [01:15:00] story, right? But growing up, my dad was a fitter, fitter welder. And, 

Andrea Hiott: what kind of welder? 

Mark James: So it basically worked in a power plant. I don't know if you know anything about fitter welders, but they're, they're kind of interesting group. They have a certain type of type of magic.

They they basically tend to say any of the machines, but also the structural dimensions of a plant, let's say. So, I think what's interesting about them is that they, there's a kind of everything is is is available for refashioning and remodeling, right? So fitter welders are notorious for like building tools out of other tools.

And, you know, you see their toolbox and it's all tools welded together because they had to fashion something on the fly for a very particular job. That was only, only ever happened once kind of thing. Oh, that's 

Andrea Hiott: great. So he's thinking across categories too, like what of this could make this work and so on in terms of the mechanics.

That's cool. 

Mark James: Exactly. Exactly. My dad brought home some of that interest at some point to just to make extra money. And we started a kind of crafts business. [01:16:00] And as part of that, we were doing kind of, sculpture, but it was always very practical. It was always very pragmatic. So it was like.

Candlesticks or lamps or staircases or, you know, chairs or things like that. And yeah, I was obsessed with it. And, you know, something I did for a long time, I guess was my original artistic kind of expression. 

Andrea Hiott: Wow. That's super cool. Makes sense too, because it's also about seeing things from different perspectives and, you know, like not just thinking because it's been called a chair and people only sat in it, that's all it does or something.

I mean, there's a lot of connection here. Yeah. I see. Between all the 

Mark James: Definitely, definitely. And the sense was, I think You know, this possibility of recombination, but towards a particular end, there was always a sense of, well, it's practical, right? You know, we can, we can justify it because it serves some end.

And I mean, in a sense, that made sense in the place where I grew up, surrounded by construction workers and [01:17:00] agriculturists and, you know, these are the kinds of things. It was, these were our, our customers at the time too. So, so your 

Andrea Hiott: dad was doing that. He was doing what I described in a way, sort of, but in real, in a factory.

Mark James: Yeah. So, well, he was doing, so he was working in a power station, but we were doing this kind of more artistic endeavor at home. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I understood that. I was just trying to figure out how it relates to like your work in philosophy and now your shift to the, 

Mark James: Yeah, yeah. It's a 

Andrea Hiott: similar, yeah, both of those, the art at home and the work that he was doing is, yeah.

Anyway. Thanks. 

Mark James: I think part of me has always had this kind of teleos towards the practical, you know, so, even when I, when, when I was doing my PhD work, it was to help me understand my relationships to the people around me. There was something very practical about it and to be able to communicate to others and maybe, you know, mitigate some of the tensions that arise because of conflicting norms and that kind of kind of thing.

So the, the, the philosophy I've, I've done has always been [01:18:00] channeled in the direction of something quite, I mean, you said pragmatic, but I like that term. I think there's a kind of pragmatism to, to, to what I do. And, 

Andrea Hiott: I like it too. It just sometimes has different connotations for different people.

Some people, you know, integrated might be better, or, you know, there's a lot of different ways of, yeah. But I guess what we mean is. It's, your, your life and your work are not separate which it feels like a lot in academia. So this is, for those who aren't in academia, this might feel very familiar, but if you're in academia, it often, especially if you're in some kind of specialized neuroscience something or cognitive science, you can feel like everything you're doing all day, you can't even explain to normal people because they wouldn't, not that they couldn't understand it, but they would have to take time to read a million books and know all the special language and references and so on.

And you just start, it can feel very isolating, you know, and I guess what I'm hearing you say is your work has always been practical and integrated in the sense of, it still relates to the life that is [01:19:00] shared across kind of disciplines or different groups of people. But this way shaping really brings it home in a different way for me.

I mean, it's. 

Mark James: I think that's true. Yeah, I think that's that is the effort in some sense. So if it feels like that, that's good, right? And there's a sense in which I'm, you know, like, like we said earlier, when, when you're looking for coincidences in the world and you respond to your own excitement, you know, when you say something like that, I feel excited because it's like, okay, this is on the right track.

And people do respond to it in a way that maybe they don't to some of the more abstract stuff. And certainly some of the, you know, the ideas that might be interested in, but don't so much work on. Yeah. I 

Andrea Hiott: feel like you're still all finding the language and the way to express it, but there's, it's there.

It's in it. I mean the way making part, I, We don't want to need to talk about that's part of it because people hear enough about way making probably but In that sense I understand because it's about [01:20:00] all these different levels that we've been talking about It's not it's health and many different kinds of landscapes depending on Which patterns you have in those and looking at them and so on and then there's the way finding which you might want to talk about, which is a wonderful scholarship that I, I'm just discovering recently.

And then the shaping part too. To close I just, we can touch on the way and the shaping of way shaping, which is what you're working on now, and there'll be more to come, but I guess to lead into that, it's Are you, we've been talking about patterns a lot, are you trying to help people learn what their patterns and habits are and to understand them almost in this musical or dancing or continuous sense and reorient?

Is that, is it a kind of practice that you're really developing with things like the seed habit you talk about and self scaffolding? There's some real terms there, I don't know what to compare it to. I mean, logotherapy or something, but there's, there's a way in which there's a philosophy and there's a practice emerging out of it.

Is that fair? I'm just setting it up for you to say [01:21:00] whatever you want, but that's how I'm having just looked at it. It feels like that. 

Mark James: I think in a sense, I'm still, we're still figuring it out. And so, so when I say there is actually a team so I should name them. So Tom is part of this in the background.

Somewhere. We also mufi Monica Jamal Luden a Aisha Ti and Dave Snowden is also a collaborator from afar a little bit. But actually this work is kind of also framed by a broader, a broader framing in what we call Multiscale Health. And, and, and we're doing that work with Fernando Rosas and Michelle Mays and John Sykes and and Michael Levin and Tom as well.

And there we're trying to we're trying to look at how misalignments across scales, both spatial, let's say D domains are spatial and temporal are, our disorders are characteristics of these misalignments are characterized by this types of misalignments and within that [01:22:00] context if it's, let's say, okay, the broad strokes, if it's true that disorders characterized by misalignment well, then say prevention of disorder or restoration towards health requires some sort of, say, realignment, let's say, broadly, broadly speaking, and the Primary say means by which an individual can serve their own realignment is true.

The kind of shaping of their own patterns so as to situate themselves in the world relative to flows that serve their needs, right? So like, what is a habit? In a sense, it's the means by which you couple to a regular flow in your environment, right? And ideally that should serve your needs. And, you know, to the extent that you can orchestrate or shape or architect or design your habits in ways that does that over some period of time.

relative to different needs, right? You're better [01:23:00] able to kind of, let's say, maintain this kind of sense of health and adaptivity and resilience that we kind of gesture towards. And what I love 

Andrea Hiott: too is that it's not, you say realignment, I just want to stop for a minute because it almost sounds like there's one alignment that's right and you've got to get into it.

But you do talk about Dewey as I brought up and about not thinking linearly about habits and not thinking that there's just one kind of alignment or that. maybe you are saying, but you and your team are going to help people align and then they're just going to be aligned and everything is, you know, it's not that kind of a alignment, is it?

Mark James: So so we have a kind of working definition of health as advantageous alignment relative to negotiated needs, right? So it's a dynamic alignment that shifts around, given both your available resources. So that's bodily, environmental, you know, interpersonal. And the kinds of demands and needs that you have.

So it's a very, and say, say what in a given system, you might have some [01:24:00] dimension of the system that's healthy in another dimension. That's that's not, let's say it needs realignment. So, and, and again, that realignment is going to be contextual. So it's trying to take all of this kind of You know, inter scale or multi scale understanding and and leverage it in some sort of service of how we kind of understand how things kind of go wrong in some sense and lead to disorders of different types, whether those are kind of, of the obstructional, you know, type, right?

There's something in the path that I can't get around or I just can't see the path because it's a bit obfuscated or a bit ambivalent. In a sense, right, you could think of those as you know, the types of challenges we run into with our, let's say, mental health um, often are characterized in those terms, right?

There's something stuck or there's something that I can't find or make my way towards. And, you know, the, the kind of general multiscale health framing looks at how different types [01:25:00] of disorders at different scales have similar characteristics and how if we just, in some sense can maintain certain types of dynamics within these systems that tend to, say, orient around health and You know, then the kind of way shaping stuff acts in service of that.

Now, this is all, let me say, not validated work, right? This is like, 

Andrea Hiott: No, no, it's early, early stages, but there's a lot of work behind it already. I mean, a lot of the scholarship that you're coming out of is, I mean, it's, it's, it has long trajectories. You mentioned a lot of it already. And yeah, but, but how you're going to articulate all this is still.

Mark James: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's, that's kind of where we're at. I mean, we have like elements of, let's say the practice. We have some of the kind of theory and organizing principles and and then, you know, there's a lot of effort to put it in language that actually works with people and clients.

So, you know, some of the collaborators. Earlier, actually psychiatrists and organizational designers [01:26:00] and, and coaches and working with clients and trying to, you know, put this in a language that resonates with them. And, you know, they don't have to understand everything that kind of exists in the background, but our hope is that when people are informed by this language that it's both more effective in some regard, but also like that there is a kind of you know, in, in engaging with this kind of scaffolding in service of your own change, you also like start to incorporate the scaffolding and, and with time just start to become a kind of a way maker, way shaper, a way finder, that's more in tune with the kinds of needs that you wish to express.

That's beautifully 

Andrea Hiott: said. Yeah. I think it's very, you know, there's a reason a lot of us use these, these You know, Michael and Tim and me and so many people, like the idea of the way and this, these landscapes, and it helps us to be able to understand, I guess, some of the most positive feedback I've gotten has been from people more trying to [01:27:00] find a way to articulate what they're going through in terms of some kind of individual or so called traditionally mental complication.

And just being able to think of it as. where you can understand there's not just one landscape, but you can understand it as landscapes and all that you bring with you. So you think of it as a trajectory and that's not only yours. I like that multi scale alignment and thinking of all that has gone into your path and is still going on.

It's alive, you know, it's this phenomenology that you talk about a lot, the embodied lived experience. it is a practice, right? and this feeling of what I think you're really, from what I've read, you're really trying to, you're not like trying to pin things down, but keep it this live, lived experience, dynamic, while at the same time having these markers.

So yeah, you're still working on it, but it's great that you have a good group of people and that you have that vision and that you have all this input. It's, I find it very exciting. 

Mark James: Oh, thank you. And I 

Andrea Hiott: wonder how it's, How has it affected your [01:28:00] own life? Have you been, because you know we learn what we teach, we teach what we learn, and as we're creating papers and you're creating this now with all these people and I wonder is it changing your own patterns and habits?

Is it continuous from what we've been describing about when you were taking the notes and dealing with your health and all that? Is it? Do you see this as, you know, this is part of that flow for you, or how's that? 

Mark James: You know, it's, I mean, maybe not as much as it should, but I think good to be honest. I think there's so maybe a skill that I think has emerged for me in this that I, that I can acknowledge and recognize is a, is a, is a kind of ability to, to let things move through me in a way that's helpful.

So, I don't know what you would call that, but it feels like a kind of a a kind of a Aikido with, with the world. Right. And 

Andrea Hiott: Love you said? Did you say love? Because I was just about to ask you about love, and so I heard you say the word love, but did you [01:29:00] really say the word love? 

Mark James: I didn't, but it's in that direction.

Because 

Andrea Hiott: I was about to ask, I thought you said, I don't know what you think love is, because I was about to ask you, I was thinking, but it's a kind of a keto with the world, because I was trying to relate this, you know, I wanted to ask you about your own practice, you can please continue, but also just, yeah, this love and philosophy is the name of this, and I can't help but always introduce that word at some point.

And we've already been talking about it, but. Yeah, keep going, please, with the Aikido. What were you saying was the Aikido with the world? I heard love, but what did you say? 

Mark James: Oh, I'm, I'm actually glad you, you brought that up because I do think this is where this connects. I think this is exactly so whatever that kind of a stance towards the world is or towards yourself or towards the situation where you both say Respect, respect your kind of agency and trajectory, but also stay sensitive to the possibility both that you might have been wrong or that there's something else might emerge that we don't know yourself 

Andrea Hiott: or, or what's the phrase?

We don't know ourselves. Yeah, [01:30:00] 

Mark James: we know ourselves. Yeah. I think so we, you know, as in the practice, we do kind of gesture in the, in the direction of the idea that. Let's say as a practitioner, whether it's you engaged in the practice yourself or serving somebody else as a kind of facilitator, that the stance is one of a kind of engaged letting be.

So this is a German term Gelassenheit, I think I pronounced that right. Sounds good, right? , this, this is so means engaged, letting be, but I don't know if you know, Hannah de Jaegher work. She has, has this She talks about the nature of the relationship between knowing and and loving.

And she talks about uh, uh, knowing in a, in a kind of. way that, like knowing well, let's say is a kind of loving, right? And, and what that entails is a kind of letting be, right? I'm present to the thing. I'm kind of [01:31:00] there as the scaffolding it needs, if it needs it. But I'm also letting it do what it needs to do and express its own autonomy and agency and individuality.

And, you know, and she uses the example of romantic love as, as a kind of. way to attune ourselves to that type of stance towards the other or towards the world. I also think, you know, a parent, I'm not a parent, but I expect parenting can be in its finer moments, very much like that where there's neither desire to over determine or under determine the other, right?

But let them kind of unfold and present themselves to you. And I do think That is, so when I, when I first encounters Hannah's work, I could see this from my contemplative standpoint as some set of skills I might want to develop. And there's something to that. I do think there's a kind of possibility of refining those skills.

And I think our work is somehow [01:32:00] in this mix of the types of skills that are refined therein, but I think she's right. My experience of what it means to love, I think, is very much aligned with this engaged stance of letting be. And yeah, I think maybe, You know, that extends not just to

you know, to the other, right. But the parts of ourselves that maybe require or deserve this. And, you know, when I, when I think about way shaping as this kind of engagement with ourselves and our environment and trying to understand the relationships. And like what is open for change and what is not and what is resistant to change and how given the available resources in our environment we might say nourish or resource ourself in the direction of some desirable outcomes such that we are getting our needs met in more regular ways.

That really does feel like. expressing a love towards myself. And if we include others as part of that, you know, there is [01:33:00] going to be a negotiation there. So it is going to be a set of negotiated needs that we are orienting towards and, you know, kind of refiguring and reconstituting and relearning as we move towards them, because there's always novelty kind of entering upon that relationship too.

Andrea Hiott: That's really beautiful. It makes me think of intention and action, which we didn't talk about, but comes in a lot. This idea, I think you say in some of the early writing about wayshaping about, gosh, I don't know if I'm going to get this right, but that we are not, the things we care about, we don't actually often care for or take care of is what you mean.

I think it's like this, I mean, you're not the first, this idea of what we really care about. We don't actually end up spending the time and energy to kind of take care of it or care. Or I don't know, maybe you can help me. 

Mark James: Yeah, well, this is something Monica speaks about a lot, the idea that, and I talk about too, but the idea that yeah, we don't often care for the things we care about and that, you know, trying to bring some sort of alignment Between those two things is often very challenging.

And, you know, and, and say in, in kind of tradition, [01:34:00] more traditional psychological terms, we might say there's a discrepancy between our intention and our action. And then we kind of beat ourselves up over the fact that I just can't realize this intention. What is it about me in particular? Right. That I can't realize I'm such an idiot or whatever.

And we were hard on ourselves. But actually in this kind of embodied approach, right. We would. First of all, acknowledge that in some sense, our intentions are distributed through our environment. So is our environment set up in service of those intentions already? And if it's not, I mean, we're really kind of working against the energy gradients that already exist there.

Oh, that's 

Andrea Hiott: so wonderful. Yeah. I have to stop that in just a minute. Cause we do think that there's our intentions, but just to go back to even where we started with, even with our conversation we had on your podcast, like, how We are different people in different situations and the intention and the action changes too.

So it's beautiful that you just, it can seem so simple, but to realize that, that what are you, what's the setting that you're putting yourself in and what inner trajectory are you bringing [01:35:00] to that and, and all of this, just to have some way to think about that. It's so important. 

Mark James: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in a sense, what we're trying to do is develop a language to think about that.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Cause it's, it's hard. It seems simple. Like a simple act, but it's, it changes so much and it's actually so nuanced and and, and that gets to the practice too, because you don't just do it once and then it's done. It's a kind of, you learn, it almost becomes a habit or a pattern at the same time that it's coupled with awareness and presence.

It's not just that you're taking it for granted and it's still, we're still all trying to figure out how to put language on that and that's, you know, part of what you're trying, we're all trying to do, I guess, with this stuff. 

Mark James: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm glad that some of it is landing, at least. That makes me happy.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it is. And yeah, I think it's, it's it seems like what we need to, to be thinking about and doing and bringing it together, you know, in the sense that you're, you're trying to do so. I'm glad you're doing it. 

Mark James: You know, we, we termed [01:36:00] the framework for the time being, at least way shaping in no small part inspired by your work.

So thank you very much for the broader framing here. I really do see this as a kind of a. You know, a kind of manifestation of way making in some ways and, and maybe the attempt to distill some of that into a, into a practice of sorts. You know, when we bring our, when we bring intention to our way making and we add some sort of a shaping element to it, you know, we can navigate you know, the kinds of trajectories that we, we might want to more intentionally, I would say.

And, yeah, I do think like there's, it's, some of it seems so obvious, right? When you say it, but it's like, but it wasn't obvious until it was said in a particular way. And I feel like there's, there's a lot of that kind of thing emerging in, in, in this work and surrounding work. And one thing we're thinking about a lot recently is, If you think about, you know, this multiscale or health [01:37:00] idea and you know, what's, what's necessary if you have all these scales and domains what's necessary, or at least one dimension of that is, is like adequate and distributed communic cation across those scales, right?

If you don't get that, you don't have the ability to coordinate in a way that you know, can respond to the resources of the world and in a way that serves the body and identity, let's say, and personality and everything. So like, one thing we've been thinking about is how, like, all disorder Is in some sense a manifestation of too fast, too slow, too much or too little, right?

So like there's a scale at which something is happening and the other scales cannot absorb or accommodate or metabolize whatever has been produced from that higher or lower, lower scale. And that results in some sort of disruption and tension and Something that needs to be resolved. Right. That to me has been so helpful recently, but I never, I never put it in those terms before.

And then once I did, it started to kind of make sense of a lot of. I really 

Andrea Hiott: know what you mean. I mean, I wrote this master, it's more hippocampus based, but it's more or less [01:38:00] how to understand thinking as way making, but I don't use the term, but I use like navigability because I'm thinking about the hippocampus and I worked with this lab.

Georg Nortoff, who has this whole thing about temporospatial neuroscience, which, I mean, yes, it can go a little kind of into the ether, but he's, what you just said is, what drew me to that is, is really thinking of understanding, because I have, a lot of my motivation for doing a neuroscience degree was literally that I wanted to understand people I saw in pain from mental health, mental, I mean, physical, bodily, and it really motivated me to want to study it in the sense that you were motivated. I mean, it came out of this real life thing and a lot of it is exactly what you said. Once you start to look, someone's living in a slower space or a faster space or, there's just the alignment issue. Not only in, yeah, I mean in the embodied experience is somehow something is, is different there.

And they're trying to fit into some kind of setting. You talk about setting and place a lot. We wouldn't have time to get into it, but that those [01:39:00] themselves can be like the kind of containers through which we grow and change. And when these people are experiencing this pain and discomfort, often it's.

It's a misalignment with those settings and their own settings. It helps me a lot to think of it like that and you can see it in the research too in neuroscience and in other sciences, but 

Mark James: yeah, no, I really do think the kind of a unifying vocabulary that's, well, you know, you have to be dangerous or you have to be careful with unifying vocabularies, but like, sets of ideas and principles that are, you know, yet to be extracted or made sense of or refined that will help us think about these things so much better.

And I'm excited for that. You know, I think takes to the, you know, most of us, most of the time have good intentions. It's, it's hard to realize. Yeah, it's how to act 

Andrea Hiott: together to help each other because often we're also doing similar things but we're calling it different words or we feel like we need to be in competition like you know coin this or do this or instead of oh actually we're [01:40:00] all doing this together you know.

Mark James: Yeah, I agree with that. 

Andrea Hiott: But I think that's why I like this framework because a lot of, it can incorporate a lot of people who are doing a lot of things similar. It's just trying to find this. this practical level of what to do with, with, with it. It's a lot of work, but I think it's yeah, I don't know.

I'm just saying thank you for doing it and I wish you a lot of luck with it. And I'm here to help. And anyway, I've thought a lot about the practice of way making too. So at some point we should, I should look back at all that writing that's from a while ago see if any of it even Maybe it connects somehow.

I don't know. 

Mark James: No, it'd be awesome to meet. Well, actually, I'm in Europe soon. I don't know if I have the chance to meet up, but it would be awesome for us and people who are similarly interested maybe to organize something around this and sit down, walk ourselves away or open ourselves up or whatever we have to do.

But, you know. Kind of, see where this whole thing is [01:41:00] at and where it wants to go. I think that's a 

Andrea Hiott: good idea. As I was reading your work too, I was thinking we, the, the, there could be some kind of a, I don't know what, like a colloquium or a club or a forum or a, I don't know, some way of sharing among all these people.

I guess in a way I'm trying to do that with this, that's what this all started as, but I meant it more specific for your, or what you're trying to do. Because it is, It feels like it has, like, important practical and something that needs to be done right now in terms of helping us find our way, make our way, shape our way, reorient.

Is there is there anything we haven't talked about that you want to, I just realized it's been like a couple hours and it's getting dark there, so I don't want to, you know, you need to have your evening, but is there anything we haven't talked about that, you know, is kind of on your mind that you.

Would like to say or just anything that pops into your mind. 

Mark James: I mean, I think we could keep talking, but, you know, what's, what's pressing [01:42:00] 

Andrea Hiott: or we can keep keep going. A 

Mark James: lot of technical things and everything I would love to share with you at some point, but maybe they're not that interesting at the moment.

So, yeah, I think we've covered good ground and we've been gone for a few hours. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, we can always talk again about other stuff, but it's just nice to connect with you again. And I guess the last question is, are there any. Patterns or habits that you've, and you don't even have to answer this question, but I thought of it a few times as we were talking, like, I wonder how hard it is for you to change your patterns and habits and to realign and to keep in mind this dynamic lived experience as not static.

I mean, one thing I struggle, or I think we all kind of struggle with is mistaking the map and territory or whatever. And yeah, understanding, keeping in your white head kind of mindset or. this is a process and even as we study it and create these practices, they will all, all of that will still be changing.

I just wonder, here's the question, how hard is it for you and your own, in your own experience of, of patterns and [01:43:00] habits to kind of reorient or realign or, or think of it? Has it become easier doing this? 

Mark James: Yes. Definitely. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. 

Mark James: I mean, you know, I, I, I'm kind of like proud to say yes, and I do like use some of these ideas and, and the intuitions that I've, I've derived from them.

I think it, it's always surprising me and, you know, there's always blind spots and, you know, I don't think we're ever going to capture the full complexity of how we make our way in the and, and I, I kind of, you know, it would be boring if we could just shape ourselves. So perfectly in line with whatever intention that, you know, all the kind of mystery and surprising crack was going out of it, but definitely, definitely become better at being able to, like, situate myself relative to the kinds of flows that are serving my needs.

And, you know, there's a sense in which. Over time, the feeling of needing to change in a given direction has definitely lessened because I guess I am maybe feeling more rooted at [01:44:00] whatever those sources are, and I'm returning to them often enough that the kind of frequency and amplitude of throughput is met in some way that does satisfy my present needs.

But you know, yeah, this still challenges. I'm trying to like. make my way within academia and, and shape my way within academia at the present. And, you know, we're, we're trying to me and my partner are trying to find a place that we can be together. She's in the States at the moment and 

Andrea Hiott: that's, yeah, 

Mark James: some of the Come come in useful, but also, you know, they have their limits and I'm finding my limits there at the moment.

So, 

Andrea Hiott: yeah, well, maybe it's time to that those ways will form another way. I mean, it's like we were saying at the beginning, you know, once you start. Getting kind of clear on the patterns that you, that you resonate with, you start to see more of those patterns and those paths do start to open. [01:45:00] And it's not mystical or anything, it's just that's what's happening and that's what we're trying to understand.

So yeah, as someone who's had a lot of long term barred distant relationships, but recently kind of did what you're saying, I settled and came together. In one place, it, when it's time, it's it really works well, so, yeah, I'm sure it'll happen in the right way. My dog is needing to go out, I think. Yeah, Margaret's, I really, yeah, go ahead.

I 

Mark James: was just asking, who's your dog? 

Andrea Hiott: This is my dog, Holly. Want to come say hi, Holly? She's been trying to jump on my, guess where she's from? Mongolia. I'm going to say her 

Mark James: name, just the way you asked me. 

Andrea Hiott: Here's Holly. Hello! Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. She's from Mongolia. Mongolia. Mongolia. Oh, cool. I saw your cat walking around in the back.

Oh, you have to say something. So it comes on my camera. 

Mark James: Oh, 

Andrea Hiott: cute. [01:46:00] Other beings, what making way are important. They help us. 

Mark James: Yeah. Yeah. And there's, I mean, you know, the frames that we talked about earlier, there are present in those interspecies relationships too, you know. Absolutely. Patterns. I rely on and she relies on and, you know, I expect to be present and if they're not there, there's something wrong.

And, you know. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, so true. I often yeah, I mean, I think of that a lot in the way, like walking the dog and stuff, the way that she makes her way and all these patterns that it changes the way I see the world and make my way. And the reason I asked you about, you know, the patterns and stuff being hard for you is because, or what's hard for you or if it's changed you is because I feel like we're getting to a point where we're trying to really live our, our, our work in a sense, or in the way all we've been talking, all this creation of this philosophy or not even bringing this montage together into a framework and articulating, clarifying, it changes your whole way of being in the world, you know?

And Yeah, in the same way we've been talking about you can't really distinguish all these beginnings and ends anymore. And it does get hard with academia of [01:47:00] where's the right space to be living in that kind of experience in that world that can not, that sometimes is not, you know, Yeah, 

Mark James: yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I will, like, you know, kind of professionally speaking, I think this stuff might struggle to find a home because, because the boundaries aren't so easily defined and, you know, when I look at the kind of existing space of behavioral science there's a certain rigidity to it and a, and a certain, it has a certain aesthetic and, like, a set of affectations that accompanies that.

You know, almost at times seem antithetical to it and that's not to say are antithetical to some of the work that we're trying to do, but that's not to say there's not good work there. I think there's a lot of good work there. I just think, you know, we have our critiques of that and I think they're pretty robust, robust critiques and, you know, I'd be happy to talk about them at some future point.

But I think. You know, in short, the critique is it's helpful, but it's kind of limited and you know, not acknowledging those limitations and kind of, pushing through, I think, can be destructive and you know, hopefully not too destructive before we [01:48:00] figure out how to reorient again, but. 

Andrea Hiott: No, I agree.

And I do think there's a lot of people in academia who are trying to do that. I think it's shifting. And a lot of the, when I think of different theories and practices that I would kind of connect somewhat in the tradition of where way shaping is going that they've made a huge difference and they weren't all really easily accepted in academia at the beginning.

So there's some, there's some, there's, I feel there's a lot of worth cause what I'm doing too is always kind of at the edges of everything, but there's some worth in being in academia and trying to you know, having your ideas tested, being with this group is really thinking critically, and at the same time being able to hold those other spaces like we talked about at the beginning where maybe this is going to have its first resonance in different areas that aren't traditionally kind of fitting into that.

academic trajectory, but at the same time you, you still respect it all and let it be. And I think it also helps to shift academia too and what, what people want and what they, what they do from it. So all to say, I'm very grateful that you're, you're doing all this. And I look forward to like talking about it more and hearing more as it develops.

Mark James: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for [01:49:00] having me on. I've really enjoyed this. I said to before we came on that I was, I was kind of excited to have this conversation because it felt like I was going into a kind of safe space and it was going to be comfortable and chill and chat and I feel like it has been all of those things.

So I appreciate making that space. 

Andrea Hiott: Well, thanks for being here. I think you've, I mean, you've shared a lot that I definitely will take with me, and I think other people will too, that is really helpful. And thank you for being open and, and and sharing that stuff. It really makes a difference. I can tell you just from hearing some people who write, and there's one little thing that someone shares that no one's ever heard anyone else share before.

And it might even seem small to other people, but to that one person, it, It does open them to a path they needed to open to. So, I feel like you've done that. Who knows in what way, but thanks anyway, however you've done it. And have a good night there. Do something nice, I guess. But now it must be almost eight or something.

Okay. [01:50:00] All right. We'll have a good evening. Hi to the cat and bye to the cat.