🌳 The Trees are Our Nervous System 🌴 🌲

Earth as Home, the Disappearance of the Healers, and a Body That Refuses Disconnection

Summary:Back in Sri Lanka, the shift becomes physical. LuLu can now feel the difference between bare earth and concrete as an almost immediate bodily disconnection. From there, Maxfield and LuLu explore a larger possibility: that the disappearance of Sri Lanka’s legendary healers may belong to a much broader transformation involving concrete housing, radio, pharmaceuticals, mechanization, deforestation, metal production, and even solar activity. But the central realization is more immediate: the body itself has become the compass. Home is no longer simply Sri Lanka. Earth is home. Nature is home. The body is home. And whatever comes next requires staying plugged in enough to carry out the mission.

Chapter One — The Body Knows the Difference

LuLu:Another really felt shift that’s happened since we’ve gotten back to Sri Lanka—and I would still say it’s a result of having gone through that shift in the cave, whatever it did in our bodies—is that I can feel so palpably, like so viscerally in my system now, how uncomfortable it is to be on pavement or concrete or granite versus having my bare feet in the earth and in the sand or in the water.

And I always knew that, of course, from a mental place. Like, I always knew that it was better to be on the earth and these things.

But now it’s like, as soon as I step off of the naked earth onto pavement, onto any material that mutes and muffles that energy coming out of the earth, my body feels it physically and I go into pain.

Like, I feel that shift and I feel that shock, kind of like being unplugged from something.

And it’s like this very subtle pain that I’m walking around with. Every time I go outside, I’m just waiting to get back to a place where I can walk with my feet on the earth.

Chapter Two — When the Houses Became Concrete

LuLu:And I was talking to the jungle woman who owns this house and talking to her about her childhood.

And she said that when she was growing up as a small child, basically it happened in her generation that all of the houses went from being built from clay—from natural clay—to being built with concrete.

And I just find it to be such an interesting thing because in Sri Lanka especially, it’s said that around that time, when that shift was happening, all of the miraculous healers started to disappear.

That it was a very known and accepted and received phenomenon to have humans that had seemingly miraculous healing abilities.

And then suddenly they all disappeared.

My feeling, and the thing that’s being slowly communicated to me, is that it’s a very simple reason.

It’s that people had so much power and energy in their bodies from being plugged into the earth.

And some of these people who have this activation in their DNA—because they were backed by that energy and power of being connected to the earth, of the umbilical cord of Earth—had sufficient energy to carry out that code.

And as soon as people just started living in concrete houses, there wasn’t sufficient energy to do that.

Chapter Three — But Something Bigger Was Happening

Maxfield:I mean, just to be clear, the shift for concrete houses happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago.

So there was something bigger going on, and what that question is is unknown still.

Because even before the concrete, you also had many technologies come. You had radio come. So they started putting on massive radio waves. You could say it’s that. I don’t think it’s that.

You know, pharmaceuticals—Westernized pharmaceuticals—hit mainstream maybe 150 years ago, and then really took off.

You had this massive planetary shift where trees were being cut down at levels never before seen because now you had machines.

You’ve had machines now for 200-plus years, like steam-powered, motorized machines. To cut a tree down before, it would take whatever, 30 minutes to an hour or something like that.

Now you can cut a tree down in three minutes.

And so they were just massively cutting trees to build massive factories and burn it to power factories.

So you have the trees. You have the shift in the CO2. You have, you know, just the energetic shift.

The amount of metal being produced is vastly more starting 200 years ago.

Like, all of these things are shifting.

So what was it?

I don’t know.

Was it a solar storm, actually? Because that’s what they say. They say in the 1890s a massive solar storm came.

So lots of different shifts going on.

But we can feel them now is the point.

This is palpable in our bodies.

Chapter Four — Earth Is Home

Maxfield:And I don’t know. I feel—I guess maybe part of my fatigue is I also felt that I would feel very thrilled to be here.

And that isn’t the case.

I feel at home, but I feel on mission.

Like, my mission hasn’t shifted.

And doing these things is an important part—integrating—but that’s just part of the mission. That’s just part of the duty.

It’s like, I used to call this place home. I guess I still do.

But it’s like—

Earth is now home. Nature is home. My body’s home.

Chapter Five — The Body Refuses the Distraction

LuLu:And it’s just interesting to me that this pain, this discomfort that I’m feeling, is making it impossible for me to do anything that isn’t on mission.

You know, it’s not like I can go and just fuck off and go to indoor hipster cafes and whatever.

It’s like my body is in such a state of loud discomfort that I’m like, I have to plug in.

That’s my main duty right now.

I have to plug in.

Everything that we’re going to be doing in the coming months is going to require so much energy and so much body empowerment that if I’m not plugged in, I simply won’t be able to do it.

And so it’s just like this loud voice in my head of—

Plug back in. Plug back in.

Like, all the time.

That’s this constant urging.

Chapter Six — Yoga on an Insulator

Maxfield:Yeah, super interesting.

I mean, a thought that popped in my mind at the moment is it’s always bothered me that yoga people do yoga on insulated rubber mats.

Like, they’re completely—when you do yoga on a rubber mat, you are isolating yourself from the entire environment.

LuLu:Even natural rubber?

Maxfield:It doesn’t matter. You are isolated. Rubber is an insulator.

So you are fully insulating yourself. That’s what you’re doing.

It makes it so funny to me.

I’ve always thought it was funny and I knew this, but now it makes a lot more sense to me because yogis that get together in, like, a cement box and get on rubber mats and then call it yoga—

They’re completely disconnecting themselves and calling it yoga.

Very funny.

LuLu:Right. It’s a very different practice than doing it barefoot in a cave.

Maxfield:Yeah. Completely different.

I mean, whatever—that’s a whole other chapter later.

Chapter Seven — We’re Landed

Maxfield:But, I mean, we’re here and we’re landed.

And there’s definitely some integration time.

You know, we gotta be in here. We need Wi-Fi or internet and charge, so we gotta, like, plug in and stuff.

And we’ll get out to the beach as soon as we can. Just start laying under trees and charging up.

LuLu:But to be honest, this isn’t my feeling. I don’t know if that’s actually gonna—

That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think that’s a thing.

I think what it might be right now is not that we’re uncharged. It’s that we’re now on mission.

Do you know what I mean?

And it’s like, if we need charge to do the next part of the mission, we do it.

Right now we don’t.

We can keep recording and recording and recording and recording.

And we are plugged in enough.

When we feel tired, whatever, we go charge.

Simple. Easy.

When the Forest Is Your Nervous System

The disappearing healers, severed trees, and the shrinking experience of home

Summary:Continuing their jungle discussions, Maxfield and LuLu explore a radical premise: what if the forest is not merely our environment, but an extension of our nervous system? From the disappearance of Sri Lanka’s traditional healers to the cutting of ancient trees, they consider whether ecological destruction is experienced internally as a literal loss of signal, perception, power, and home. The conversation ultimately overturns the idea of “saving the planet”: if Earth is part of the self, restoring the living world becomes an act of radical self-interest.

Chapter One — Sponsored by Serendipity and Papaya

LuLu:So, continuing off on the jungle discussions.

This podcast is sponsored by Lala, the Island of Dreams, serendipitous moments, and papaya.

When Max was just talking about these occurrences that happened over the last hundred-ish years here on this island, where all of the miraculous healers started to disappear, one of the things that happened during those times—in addition to homes being built from concrete rather than from clay—was that all of the trees started being cut down, or many of the trees started being cut down in villages and in the jungle to make space for factories and whatnot.

Maxfield:Okay. Global, but here too.

LuLu:Okay.

Chapter Two — The Trees as Nervous System

LuLu:It just occurred to me, though, that it’s a very felt experience for me that the trees are meant to be part of our nervous system.

And some people experience that as a physical reality, and many people don’t.

But I realized that for these healers, this was very much the case—that the trees were part of their nervous system, and that part of their nervous system was literally one of the factors that was hosting their ability to do these things.

Maxfield:These energetic and healing things she’s referencing.

LuLu:Yes.

So when some of these really, really old trees started dying and being cut down, it was the same as, like—I don’t know, what would that be in the body?

Like multiple main nerves, really critical nerves, being severed or something.

Maxfield:Yeah, I mean, nerves—

LuLu:And how that would affect your abilities to move and think and do.

Chapter Three — A Forest Like the Cauda Equina

Maxfield:Nerves are in bundles.

They’re bundles, and particularly the lower half of the spinal cord, you see this.

The spinal cord is a cord, then it gets to the bottom and it splits off into a hundred or a thousand or tens of thousands of individual nerve strings, like a horse’s tail, which is why they call it cauda equina.

So it’s like some of it’s being cut, basically.

And you’re like, “Oh, it’s just a couple trees.”

Yeah, but it’s like, it’s just a couple trees.

Then you cut down—say there’s, on the entire island, I don’t know, 80,000 really, really old big trees. And you cut down 2,000 of those every 10 years.

And you start to lose a lot really fast.

Now, mind you, new ones are coming of age, but the time at which they’re coming of age is much slower.

If it takes 400 years to come of age, and you can cut down 2,000 in 10 years, it’s the numbers that are what’s funny.

Humans cutting down old trees has been forever.

In fact, humans used to burn entire forests down just to look at them because it was pretty.

Like, the issue is the regeneration cycle.

Chapter Four — The Biological Experience of Home

Maxfield:And so, these trees which were part of the nervous system—which are—

I mean, if you are plugged into the earth, you have fungus living in your body. You have bacteria.

That bacteria and fungus signals through your body into the ground, and it signals the other bacteria and fungi of the same family, species, and things in your body there.

It’s partly why there’s a deep sense of home when you sit on a compost pile.

If it’s compost from where you’re from, you will feel home because you’re something—

It’s like, atomically, if you count the atoms, you’re like 98% not human. You’re other things, non-human cells by count, or something, or by diversity, it’s like 98%.

That’s a Zach Bush thing.

LuLu:So you’re at home when you’re on a compost pile?

Maxfield:Well, you’re at home when you’re in the forest.

And when the forest is being cut down, they’re losing home.

Home is being lost.

Chapter Five — Less Signal

Maxfield:And that scope of home, that community that your internal community draws from, is diminished.

And they feel that there’s less signal. Literally less signal.

And it’s not just cutting down trees. It’s poisoning the earth. It’s poisoning the air, which decreases overall load.

They say 80% of insects have died in our lifetime.

80% of insects have died in our lifetime.

That’s insane.

That statistic is—I cannot wrap my mind around this.

So it’s like, we’re living in a place where home is becoming less home.

Chapter Six — Smashing Rooms Out of the House

Maxfield:It would be like in your house, if as you grew up, they would just smash rooms down.

Just as you’re growing up, rooms were being smashed down in your house.

Eventually, your sense of home is just less.

You feel more confined and less powerful, less free, less expansive.

And that’s what’s going on in the world.

And you may not see this physically because you have a big nice house in Dallas with no neighbors and things—

but your body feels it.

Chapter Seven — The Body of Earth Is Our Body

LuLu:And I think these things probably feel really abstract to people, or it feels like something that doesn’t have a negative impact on someone’s individual intelligence system and body power system when a bunch of trees are cut down halfway across the world.

But literally, like, the entire body of Earth is our body.

And everything that is happening with it, in it, is happening inside of our bodies too.

So every time some system of trees is being cut down, it is the case that some number of nerves is being powered down in our system.

And some of those nerves go to our eyes, and some of them go to our tongues, and allow us to taste things and to perceive the world.

And that’s all happening to us.

So this thing of like, “Oh, let’s fucking save the planet,” or whatever—

It’s not even about that.

Maxfield:Save yourself.

LuLu:Yeah. Save yourself.

That’s the collaboration that is being asked to happen right now, is:

Help yourself. And this is what it happens to look like.

Chapter Eight — Radical Self-Interest

Maxfield:Interesting. Sadhguru says this.

He says, fundamentally, he’s like, “I’m not asking you to do anything but to help yourself.”

He’s like, if you realize what yourself is, then you realize that’s all I’m doing.

He said, “I’m the most selfish person you will know. All I do every day is I help myself. It just happens to be to your benefit.”

And I guess I feel that with these recordings.

It’s really—

it’s helping create the world that I Want to live in.