“We need to go inside”
Colonized Interior
It’s an expression I often come across, as it’s almost a mantra in contemporary circles of personal development, spirituality, and various therapies: “We have to go inside.” “Connect, align with your inner self or your true self.” “Follow your inner voice.”
The question that always comes to mind is, but what's inside? The idea of an “inside” as a pure, authentic, individual, and separate space where peace or answers can be found is in itself a product of modern, Eurocentric logic. What we call inside may be nothing more than a modern individual structure. A subtle, invisible architecture with walls polished with ideals of autonomy, purity, and self-realization. To enter this “inside” is to enter a labyrinth of mirrors where the self searches for itself as the ultimate treasure, trying to fill the hole in the world with private answers, personal symbols, and individual self-help.
Ecologically speaking, this inside does not exist separately from the networks of relationships that comprise us. When we “go inside,” we take with us the cultural landscapes we inhabit, the inherited and collective traumas, the laws of what we think is normal that we carry in our bodies, and the modern expectations of a self that must be “healed,” “fulfilled,” and “realized.” Above all, we carry the very structure of what it means to be “me.”
But life, real life, unpredictable and messy, ancient and fertile, knows no walls. It knows no “inside” as a separate place, it knows only the “between.” What we call “inside” is, in fact, a network of roots. What we feel within us pulses with the memories of the dead, colonial absences, the songs of wounded rivers, and the silenced pains of an entire planet. The inside is already the world passing through us.
It is interiority that does not close itself off, because it is porous and breathes. It is listening to the web, being with the problem, with the pains and joys that were never ours alone.
As I write in Internal and External Affective Landscapes, there are not only external landscapes, which have already been systematically violated. Our so-called “internal landscapes” are also ecological geographies, laden with historical rivers, deserts of silence, mountains of belonging, and forests of memory. We are not isolated entities immersed in oceans of introspection techniques. We are life within life.
The danger of the “normopathic interior”
The easy invitation to “go inside” too often recycles the self as the center and object of improvement. It privatizes pain, in the demand and illusion that “it is enough to resolve your relationship with yourself.” It depoliticizes anguish by separating the gaze from the world: “don’t look at the world, look at yourself.” It avoids relationships by not getting involved in the structures that hurt us, maintaining the innocence of a supposedly pure self.
Much of contemporary wellness discourse has turned suffering into an exclusively subjective problem, which reinforces the isolated and disconnected subject. It is an invitation to an irresponsible inside, a narcissistic retreat from living complexity, continuing the secular divide between the body and place.
What if the “inside” is a “between”?
Other non-hegemonic and non-normopathic forms of psychology, plural and contextual, offer other ecologies of this alive interior. The invitation is to assume that there is no inside, but rather a space between. Because what you call “what I feel inside” is already the pulsing of transgenerational family systems; colonial wounds still open; multiple lived and lost ecologies; countless relationships with the beings that inhabit and inhabited the territory; and above all, the hunger for belonging displaced by modernity.
Thus, going “inward” may need to be renamed, going into the web and the tangle. Because the true inner journey does not isolate us, it envelops and brings us back to life.
When we say, “what matters is going inward,” we cut off the relational invitation, following the normopathic demand to resolve things quickly, in the urgency to stabilize identity; in the rejection of discomfort, uncertainty, and paradox, in the visceral fear of the complexity of the shared world. These are habits and responses of familiar language; they are modes of survival. But inhabiting the “in-between” is about sitting with discomfort without needing to resolve it, without needing to find an “inner truth” as a consumer good or a quick fix for intergenerational pain.
So, yes, there is work to be done, but perhaps it is not “going inward” as we have been taught to do. Perhaps we need to relearn how to breathe in the larger web that already breathes us. As mycelium reminds us, the inside and the outside are not separate, they are filaments of the same living body.
This movement does not abandon or threaten the intimate journey; it is a dance of contraction and expansion. It is knowing that what pulses in our skin also pulses in the forests, in the extinctions, and in the violence that sustains our comfort.
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