Understanding the Union Between Ecology, Mind, Body & Spirit

Mental health is not accurate. Meaning: It is your complete health: mind, body and spirit rolled into one thing with your environment also acting as a contributing factor in your overall “state of being.” We cannot be separated from mind, body, spirits or environments. We form a union.

In fact, a union suggests two or more different things coming together to form a whole. More correct would be to say: it is all one thing because we are not combining different things. It is all one thing all along. Mind, body, spirit, environment, other people. All one thing. It is all affecting and reacting and responding to itself.

“All is One,” starts to have a grander meaning. An all encompassing meaning. I cannot say “I am working on my mental health,” specifically. What I am really doing is working on my mental health, my physical health, my spiritual health, my immediate surroundings, my interaction with other people, and the weather. Everything. My environment affects my mode and view of reality and point of view, to a large degree. But if I try to only adjust my environment to suit my needs, I will neglect all the other contributing factors.

It’s hard to be calm and receptive to the miracle when you fill your belly with KitKats and Mountain Dews. That poor fuel, if consistent, will wear down our internal “filter” organs. In turn those “filtering organs” will fail and start backing up into the “nurturing organs” clogging their ability to function. Internal organs do not speak conventional languages, they speak a much more ancient, brutal tongue.

The language of chemicals and hormones is as direct of a language as you can get. The language of adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, histamine and cortisol. The central nervous system truly is the Tower of Babel, receiving, secreting and sending chemical signals throughout our bodies. Freeze or fight. More or less. Too much or too little. Hot or cold. Moods eventually become modes of behavior, patterns of behavior which will then interact with the “outside” world affecting our environment and its interaction with “us.”

You see the great mistake we keep making is thinking that mind, body, spirit, and ecology are separate departments—like offices in a government building. Psychology down the hall, medicine upstairs, spirituality in the basement, and nature… well, outside the building altogether. But that’s not how reality works at all.

The universe doesn’t come in pieces. It comes as events.

Now, that sounds poetic, but the danger of poetry is that it can obscure causality. People suffer in very concrete ways—depression, anxiety, addiction. If we say everything is one thing, how do we avoid dissolving responsibility or precision?

Ah—but precision doesn’t require fragmentation. In fact, fragmentation creates confusion.

Take the body. You don’t have a body—you are a body, in the same way a whirlpool isn’t something added onto water. It’s a pattern the water is making. The mind is the body thinking. The spirit is the body feeling its own depth. And ecology—well, that’s the body extended outward until it includes the air, the soil, the trees, and other people.

You can’t draw a hard line and say, “Here the person ends and the world begins.” Where exactly does breathing stop being you and start being the environment?

The individual is embedded in a system, not isolated from it. That aligns with evolutionary biology and systems theory. But suffering still manifests locally—in a nervous system, in a family, in a culture. What happens when that system becomes pathological? Then treating only the symptom is like trying to smooth a wave without moving the ocean. If someone is anxious, we ask, “What’s wrong with you?” But a better question is, “What kind of world is this nervous system responding to?” A body living against its own nature will produce a mind at war with itself. A mind severed from meaning will generate symptoms the way a forest generates smoke when it’s on fire.

Trauma, for example, is not merely a memory—it’s embodied. It alters posture, breath, attention, even immune function. And often it emerges from chaos in the social or ecological environment.

The psyche is not floating in a vacuum—it’s swimming in culture, myth, diet, architecture, economics, family stories, and landscapes.

We modern people live as if we are brains driving meat vehicles through an external world, but that’s a hallucination encouraged by language. Nature isn’t something you’re in. Nature is something you’re doing.

When the rivers are poisoned, the psyche becomes poisoned.
When meaning collapses, the body tightens.
When the body is chronically tense, the spirit feels trapped.

It’s one continuous movement. Thus, the idea that you can “fix” the mind without addressing the body—or the body without addressing meaning—is fundamentally flawed. Trying to fix one part in isolation is like polishing a single gear in a broken clock and expecting time to resume.

Healing is not repair—it’s re-alignment.
It’s remembering that you belong.

Belong to your breath.
Belong to your body.
Belong to your community.
Belong to the living planet.

Which implies that responsibility isn’t just personal—it’s ecological and moral. How we structure society, how we treat nature, how we tell our stories—these shape mental health as surely as neurotransmitters. And when you finally see that, you stop asking, “How do I control life?” And start asking, “How do I participate in life skillfully?”

Because you are not a thing in the universe. You are something the universe is doing—right here, where you’re sitting.

And when you realize that—mind, body, spirit, and ecology stop being problems to solve… and start being a dance you learn how to move with.