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Field Notes #4: The Law of Pulsing

To imagine healing as a straight line (which we tend to call ‘recovery’) is, I suggest, a form of distortion that reduces our natural vibrancy to a kind of machinic quality: start here, do this, expect that: clean, sequential, and full of expectation.

But nothing alive—nothing—not your body, not the trees, not the wind, not the waters—works like that. Nothing alive works in linearity.

The Tyranny of Progress Narratives

We’ve inherited a civilisational progress narrative framework. The same logic that produced the plantations, and then the workhouses of the industrial revolution, and then the industrial capitalist system, tends to produce ‘healing’ as some graph, trending upwards, and always in response to our instrumentalist agency. But the logic of assembly lines is catastrophic for working with intelligent living assemblages such as your body.

The problem isn’t just that this model is wrong conceptually—that it just doesn’t fit reality—but that because it is unfitting (literally), it creates suffering. When someone frames an ebbing motion in their wellbeing as a kind of falling backwards after ‘progress’, they frame that as a failure. This ‘backward’ movement gets framed as evidence of brokenness, rather than being a pattern of natural in-breath and out-breath in the way in which natural change actually works.

The Slow Violence of Misalignment

But there’s something deeper happening here, isn’t there? Something structural? The common demand in healing communities for linear progress towards some goal imagined to be ‘recovery’ (a return to some kind of ‘before state’) doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It’s embedded in wider systems that have been severing humans from natural rhythms for generations. It’s a kind of structural framing that primes us for linearity.

Consider what industrial capitalism did to time itself. It took the pulsing rhythms of agrarian life—work and rest following the seasons, days shaped by light and dark, bodies moving between intensity and recovery—and flattened these temporal rhythms into the linearity of clock time. What was once a seasonal, circadian flow of pulsed days respectful of bodily needs became forced into rigid work patterns of eight hours, five days, fifty weeks, with the same output expected regardless of season, regardless of biological cycles, regardless of bodily needs and intelligence.

This is what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’—not a spectacular explosion but the gradual attrition, the grinding away of what makes living assemblages viable. And slow violence is always profoundly uneven in how it lands. There is a predictable, patterned, and well-rehearsed tilt to it. Socio-economic patterns, patterns of gender and race, all these are visible in the predictability of the distribution of health and illness, of flourishing, and of the grinding pressures of economic struggle. If you have wealth, after all, you can buy back some measure of natural rhythm. You can afford therapy that doesn’t demand instant results. You can take sabbaticals when you need to integrate. You can work from home when your body needs rest.

But what if you’re working two jobs to survive? What if you’re navigating systems that were never designed in a way that suits your biology or embodied needs? What if your healthcare depends on demonstrating measurable progress within insurance-approved timeframes? What if there is a rush for linearity of performance, in which the complexity of your complex fatigue (as one example) simply defies the workplace framework of understanding and expectation? I think a lot of us have been there, right? So, the demand for linear healing isn’t just wrong—it’s another form of structural violence.

What Pulsing Looks Like

I’ve started calling our bodily non-linearity, and the non-linearity of nature’s wider patterns of emergence, the ‘Law of Pulsing’. ‘Law’ might seem like a rigid word, but I think pulsing is actually a kind of law-like (normative) invitation to ‘get with the program’, to live in actuality, to stop imposing a cultural myth of linearity on our very own natural life. Healing moves in waves. Healing moves in spirals. Healing moves in rhythms of approach and retreat. So does human performance, learning, and other practices of excellence and developmental growth.

Watch how a child learns to walk if you don’t believe me. Children don’t progress linearly from crawling to walking. They pulse. They pull up, fall down, crawl some more, pull up again. Each return to crawling isn’t regression—it’s integration. The body is consolidating what it’s learning, building capacity in the spaces between attempts. Each step is a kind of lurch into a new unknown, which, once integrated, becomes the stepping out point for a greater capacity.

This isn’t inefficiency. This is how it works. This is how nature works—and we ARE nature.

The Wisdom of Retreat

In nature, nothing grows in a straight line. Trees don’t just extend upward—they pulse outward in rings, each year’s growth building on and around what came before. Rivers don’t flow in straight channels—they meander, creating oxbows and eddies, their very non-linearity creating the conditions for life.

The retreat is as essential as the advance.

In the pulling back (our tidal ebb), we metabolise.

We integrate.

We let new neural patterns settle into something stable enough to build on.

Can you see that?

Working With the Pulse

So, what might it mean to work with pulsing rather than against it?

First, it means recognising that apparent regression is often integration in disguise. When someone returns to an old coping mechanism after weeks without it, they’re not necessarily ‘back to square one’. They’re unconsciously testing whether their system still needs it. They’re unconsciously comparing the old way to the new, and in the process, gathering more information about what actually serves them.

Second, it means creating space for the full cycle. Not just for the expansion but for the contraction. Not just for the breakthroughs but for the plateaus and even for the apparent setbacks. The rhythm needs the whole wave, not just the crest.

Third, it means trusting the organism’s own wisdom about timing and pacing. The human body—or any other living entity or assemblage—’knows’ when it’s ready to go deeper and when it needs to consolidate. Our job isn’t to force ourselves forward but to create conditions where natural pulsing can happen.

But—and this is critical—we do need to recognise, even as we allow for this pulsing as best we can, that structures can prevent that from being accessible to some in our societies. Sometimes, when someone can’t rest, it is because they’ll lose their housing, or because their work-based health insurance ran out, or because they have three small children at home.

Another weakness of linearity is the closely associated tendency to individualise pathology and to talk about things as if they are merely a personal choice. But, in thinking about how healing could also be collective, we need to ask ‘who gets to pulse’? ‘Who gets time to integrate’? ‘Whose non-linearity is honoured, and whose is pathologised as dysfunction’? Do we pathologise our own pulsing as dysfunction too? Why? What are we internalising when we do?

Rubbing and Friction—Vital for Change

There’s something else in this pulsing that matters—the rubbing together of old and new, the familiar and the emergent. Each time we return to a familiar place in our unfolding as human beings with new awareness, we’re not just repeating. We’re rubbing new understandings against old patterns, creating the friction that allows for real change. The rubs, the frayings, the iterations—they accumulate. They become transformation.

Invitations to Reality

This isn’t just philosophy. This is reality. The invitation here is to celebrate the returns as much as the advances. Not pushing forward and ‘fixing’, but attuning to the pulsation of our own natural ebbs and flows in a process of becoming.

Plan for integration time. Release timelines. Fall back into the relaxation of simply allowing the pulsations of becoming.

There’s a particular aliveness in honouring the pulsing. When we stop trying to force linearity, something relaxes at a very profound level. And paradoxically, this is often when the deepest changes happen. Not because we gave up our aspiration for change, but because we stopped interfering with a deeper, more organic process of transformation.

The law of pulsing isn’t an obstacle to healing. It is healing. It might just be time to stop mistaking natural rhythms for failure. It might be time to stop pathologising the wisdom of the organism. It might be time to start building conditions—individually and collectively—where bodies can move at the pace that transformation actually requires.

What patterns are you pulsing with right now? What old ground are you returning to, and what’s different this time? And what conditions would need to shift for you to pulse more freely?