Mycelial Matters

Part One

Hello friends, and happy darkness season.

For this season’s offering, I am returning to some mycelial research I began a few years ago. I love mushrooms for so many reasons and find them inspiring in this season, as they eat death (so metal.) I find it aspirational when everything is in a state of rot to fulminate downwardly. This is a two-part series: an essay and a yoga nidra practice informed by mycelial methodologies. The nidra will be in your inbox on the winter solstice. I hope you enjoy.

In Western thought, we manage our alterity through familiar narratives: body as house that needs cleaning out, body as vehicle to be fueled and tuned, body as project to be exercised, to be exorcised. But what counternarratives, what alternate fictions, what decolonial imagery might make space for presence in racist, heteropatriarchal systems?

This question has led me to fungi. Not to the colonialist project of identifying, harvesting, and utilizing mushrooms for medicine, but to the process of relating to fungal lifeforms as a way of generating language for being in relation to reality. Mushrooms are subtle—the vast majority of what a mushroom is cannot be seen, cannot be named, and cannot be controlled. They are neither plant nor animal, gendering in dizzying diversity, ancient beyond measure. In their radical alterity, they offer us new ways of thinking about bodies that refuse categorization.

According to philosopher George Lakoff, “The mind is inherently embodied. Most thoughts are unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.” If this is true—if neither mind nor language are abstract but embodied—then how we metaphorize our bodies matters politically. The work is not to replace one fixed metaphor with another, but to proliferate possibilities, to generate counternarratives capacious enough to hold what Judith Butler calls the repetitions that inscribe and reproduce experience.

Intelligence as Relationship

Beneath our feet, mycorrhizal networks connect 95% of all plant life in collaborative intelligence. Tree feeds fungus carbohydrate translated from sunlight; fungus extends tree’s reach to underground aquifers, to minerals embedded in stone. This is not metaphor. This is matter conversing with matter, making meaning through touch. They communicate through chemical signals and electrical pulses. They remember. They make decisions. They have been doing this for 600 million years.

Feminist physicist Karen Barad offers language for this: we are not discrete forms interacting, we are made from intra-actions. The smallest unit is not the individual organism but the phenomenon—entangled forms expressed through co-creative relations, ecologies. Tree and fungus do not exist as separate entities who then choose to collaborate; they are constituted through their relationship. The mycorrhizal network is the smallest ontological unit we can name.

Suppose intelligence is defined not by individual cognition but by collaborative knowledge-making, by the capacity to respond rather than merely to react. In that case, mycorrhizal networks are among the most intelligent beings we’ll encounter. This is intelligence-as-relationship: distributed, decentralized, fundamentally collaborative. No single organism controls the network. Information flows through touch, through chemical exchange, through need.

And we are already part of this conversation. The temporary home of the body is always transcorporeal. The human body is mostly not human cells—we are bacterial colonies, viral remnants, fungal mycobiome. Many species make a body: from fungal networks in our ears to the demodex mites who crawl out from their eyelash burrows to romp on our faces at night. The human and non-human are deeply co-imbricated. We have never been singular or autonomous. We are intra-viduals.

The 267 species of fungi living in our gut, on our skin, in our eyes were passed to us through our mother’s birth canal, carried by her mother, back through generations. You are embodied ancestry, inheritance made flesh. The fascia that holds your muscles is structurally identical to mycelium under microscope. Your breath happens autonomously, the way mushrooms fruit: as symptom of life, as sporing through temporary form.

Why Embodied Practice? Proximity & Abstraction

But how do we access this knowledge? Why does collaborative intelligence feel so distant, so abstract, even when it lives inside our own guts?

Construal Level Theory offers one answer: we think differently if we perceive things as up close or far away. What we perceive as being distant in time we also perceive as being far away in space. The further off a thing is, the more abstract our thinking about it, the more crude, and the less likely it seems to matter. When we think about things up close, we use details. What is closer feels inevitable, what is further feels less likely.

Mycorrhizal networks feel abstract. Fungal intelligence in our microbiome feels theoretical. The mycelial structure of our own fascia—invisible without microscope. All distant. All abstract. All easy to ignore.

The immediacy of bodily sensation might draw us back from this abstraction. We do not stand outside of fungal intelligence, we are not passing through it, we are not in control of it. We are phenomena of collaborative making. The question becomes: how might we thicken our attention to what is already here?

Feminist scholars Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker propose a temporal frame of “thick time” for precisely this task, which they define as “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives and as making future possible.” Our bodies are not merely “in” mycelial networks: we are of them, we make them. We are intra-active agents, our bodies ongoing, ephemeral archives of what is here and what has been.

This is where somatic practice becomes epistemology. We need embodied methods to access what we already are.

Yoga Nidra as Portal

Yoga nidra—sometimes called “yogic sleep”—is a threshold practice between waking and sleeping, a systematic method of inducing complete physical, mental, and emotional relaxation while maintaining awareness. Unlike meditation, which often aims toward focus or clarity, yoga nidra cultivates a state of profound receptivity. In this liminal state, the body releases habitual patterns of holding while consciousness remains present.

This practice trains us to thicken our attention, to slow down enough to take in details, consider multiple perspectives and species. It is a technology for proximity—for drawing the fungal near, for making mycelial intelligence felt rather than merely understood. We need presence practices that thicken our attention to complexity, that allow us to stay with the trouble. Yoga nidra offers precisely this: a way to sense ourselves as already collaborative, already mycobiome, already net.

In the liminal space of yoga nidra, we can imagine ourselves as mycelium: spreading through dark soil, touching root systems, transferring nutrients across vast distances. This is not escapist fantasy but a literal rehearsal of what our bodies already do—our fascia spreading information, our gut mycobiome metabolizing the world, our breath exchanging gases with the atmosphere. The practice makes proximate what scientific language renders distant.

Identity as Adhesion

Fixed identity—the project of maintaining boundaries, of knowing definitively where “I” ends and “other” begins—operates as a kind of adhesion. It is the insistence on separation as foundational, on discrete forms as primary. This adhesion must be loosened to allow collaborative intelligence.

The work is not to erase identity but to recognize it as process rather than possession, as verb rather than noun. Achille Mbembe writes of nonlinear temporalities, of ways of being in time that refuse the forward march of “progress” and “development.” Mycelial time is precisely this: simultaneous, cyclical, without clear beginning or end. A mushroom fruits, releases spores, dies back into the network, fruits again seasons later. Where does one generation end and another begin?

When we insist on discrete, bounded selfhood—when we operate from a paradigm of separation—we cut ourselves off from the collaborative intelligence that makes life possible. The mycorrhizal network cannot function if each organism insists on autonomy. The forest breathes together or not at all.

Mothering as Mycobiome Transfer

Psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche teaches that the unconscious is deposited through acts of care—an intergenerational transmission carried through touch. What does that touch put into us? The mycobiome you carry—267 species of fungi in gut, on skin, in eyes—was carried by your mother, her mother, back through generations.

We cannot touch without also being touched. Touch is an accumulation. It goes both ways: we are touched into existence. It is the body of others that constitutes the site of the self. The mycobiome is material proof of this: every body is made up of other bodies, inheritance made flesh through the simple act of being born.

This is matter conversing with matter across generations. Climate, microbiome, fascia, breath are co-creative relationships between bodies: a thickening, an accumulation. We belong to mycelial time—stretched across present, future, and past—whether we acknowledge it or not.

Conclusion: Feeling as Knowing

If trauma cannot be spoken or symbolized, perhaps it can be felt through other registers—through breath, fascia, mycorrhizal networks connecting us to more-than-human intelligence. The work is not to master this knowledge but to feel it, to let it reshape the metaphors that make our bodies.

Fungi teach us that intelligence is not what we possess but what we participate in. That knowledge is not extracted but exchanged. That the body is not a discrete form but an ongoing collaboration across species and generations.

The question is not whether we are already fungal. We are. The question is: can we feel it?