Praxis

Practicing Being a Holobiont

Praxis – Practicing Being a Holobiont

In my Ecopsychology sessions, I have been emphasizing the importance of praxis: that continuous dance between theory and practice, where what we do is transformed by what we know, and what we know is transformed by what we do. It is not about applying ready-made concepts to life, as if we were slapping new labels onto old practices.

It is about allowing concepts to stir us from within, to reorganize our attention, our gestures, our listening, and the way we inhabit the world.

That is why changing the metaphor changes the practice. When we shift from “connection” to “metabolism,” we stop imagining the Earth as something external to which we need to return, and we begin to feel that we breathe, eat, excrete, fall ill, and regenerate within living meshworks. When we shift from “relationship” to “entanglement,” we stop thinking of two separate points coming together, and we begin to recognize that we have always been woven into the web. We’ve always been blood-sap and bone-rock with the Earth.

One of the living concepts that runs through this path is the holobiont, a term associated with the work of Lynn Margulis and the science of symbiosis. The holobiont reminds us that no body is merely an individual body. We are walking ecosystems, composed of human and non-human cells, bacteria, viruses, fungi, memories, territories, food, water, fears, inheritances, and atmospheres. In the meta-relational field, this is not merely a biological description but an ontological image: we are composite, permeable, unfinished beings made of co-emergent relationships.

In contrast to the modern, autonomous, separate subject—owner of self and master of the world—the holobiont restores to us a more ancient and humble dignity; that of being many, of being traversed, of always existing with others.

Pain is not mine alone; it also belongs to the field in which I exist. Desire is not born in isolation within me; it is shaped by the forces that traverse me. Identity is not a fixed thing; it is a dance situated between presences, absences, and porous interdependencies.

A recent study by Robinson, Robinson, and Barrable, published in 2026 in the journal Ambio, reinforces the pedagogical urgency of this movement—and yes, I’ve been overly excited and happy about this paper, for it underlines what I’ve been trying to seed! The research indicated that literacy regarding the holobiont—that is, understanding humans as multispecies symbiotic assemblages—can increase the sense of belonging and connection to nature. More than just a curious fact, this confirms something profoundly important: that concepts were never neutral. When they remain abstract, intellectual, and disembodied, they can become dense, distant, and almost decorative. But when they descend and pulse in the body, when they change the image we have of ourselves, they can open up new capacities for relating to the non-human.

In a modern culture trained in separation—between human and nature, mind and body, individual and community, health and territory—reviving living concepts like that of the holobiont is also to revive possibilities for care, responsibility, and belonging.

We are not trying to reconnect broken wires. We are reminding ourselves, against modern forgetfulness, that we were never outside the living meshwork.