The Strange, Beautiful Logic of Pair-Bonding

Last weekend, I did something I’d never have predicted in four million years:

I helped a friend, who lives on the southeastern coast of the United States, develop a practice for communicating with one specific, very special tree in a park near the city of Vancouver, where we once explored the mushroom realm together.

(Hahaaaaa yes, this one is going to some strange places. Buckle the fuck up.)

Life has tipped me down some fascinating rabbit holes lately.

One of which has been the seemingly inexplicable, invisible threads of connection that can exist between one human and another, or a human and an animal—also known as mammalian pair-bonding, something ~9% of mammals have capacity for. 

This is the same bond that lets mothers know their baby is crying or about to cry, even when they’re not within earshot, or even in the same part of the world… 

The same bond that triggers when two wild animals recognize each other as mates… 

The same bond that can inexplicably inform you that someone you love is experiencing some form of emotional high or low, or physical pain or danger.

These “knowings” are your nervous system responding to the imprint of a person, animal, or tree on your deepest plane of awareness. Your body remembers their presence and infers their input, rather than literal communication.

Physical proximity is irrelevant to this kind of connection, albeit helpful in formation.

For these bonds don’t form psychologically, but somatically: living deep in the body, somewhere between the subconscious and unconscious levels of awareness.

(This kind of bond is rare and not the norm for human attachment, but is possible.)

You don’t have a say in whether or not this bond forms.

These bonds form between bodies, not minds.

And only if these prerequisites are met:

Foremost, there needs to be undeniable mutual recognition of “this person is deeply special, meaningful, and important to me.” Which doesn’t require, indicate, or trigger love, but does often come with the territory. This bond won’t activate just because you want it to—only when both sides are feeling and mirroring the recognition.

Second, both poles need to be energetically and emotionally open. Your heart needs to be open enough to receive and transmit the connection. Not in a spiritual, new age, or woo-woo sense, but literally: your nervous system cannot be any degree of braced, frozen, shut down, armoured, or collapsed. Given how closed off our hearts have become as a culture, reaching the depth of openness needed is very rare.

Finally, you need to be able to let go of the mind’s whirring insistence that a “connection like this isn’t possible.” Again, this is not a psychological connection.

We’re dealing with animalian nature of humans here—not the thinking mind.

Which will resist, struggling to comprehend this depth of connection.

This isn’t surface-level “ooh boy thinks girl is cute and vice-versa…”

Or “wooooow I love this cat to the moon and back.”

Or “this tree seems abundant with wisdom and knowledge…”

Again, we’re talking about sub/unconscious mammalian pair-bonding.

There's a literal nervous system imprinting that occurs, after which you carry the presence of the other inside you, which will quite literally change you in subtle ways.

This doesn’t mean you’re thinking about them all day. Instead, your body remembers the trace of their imprint on you—in the same way you might feel the imprint of someone dying, whose death you felt intuitively before you ever told.

If you’re fortunate enough to experience this kind of bond, with a human, animal, or a particularly special tree, with practice, you can communicate through this bond.

However!

Important to recognize is the fact that you’re not actually having a conversation.

What happens is:

You enter the field of awareness where this bond exists. For this to happen, you must be deeply embodied, and you need to ‘drift.’ Think of the state when you’re zoned out, half-asleep, meditating, in flow. That’s where you need to be to enter the bond.

Once inside, yes, you can speak, aloud or internally… and you will receive responses. 

But what you receive isn’t the other person or animal or tree sitting there, tuned into the bond at the same time, holding up their end of the dialogue and returning fire.

Instead, what you express ‘bounces’ off the other side of the bond in the form of electrical impulse, voltage, and frequencies: which is nervous system language. 

Instantaneously, your mind translates those signals into sentences.

This is no hallucination either. The mechanisms at play are mirror neurons, co-regulation, nervous system imprinting, limbic system resonance, and memory.

…

…

I can’t believe I find myself writing about and sharing this.

Yet here we are.

We’re not dealing with hocus-pocus magic, fantasy, or projection.

Everything I’ve shared is woven from biology, intuition, and somatic resonance.

This kind of connection is very, very real, even if mind-bending to comprehend.

So far, I don’t think we have any say in who or what we form these bonds with.

Equally, if you’re not open enough for this kind of connection to ignite, you could be standing next to a being this connection could exist with, and never know.

(If you and a human, animal, or tree are open enough, you’ll know without doubt.)

Setting childbirth aside, which obviously comes with a cocktail of hormones carefully concocted to form this deep connection between mother and child, this kind of bond only becomes possible for you after tending to the entirety of your inner world.

And not a moment sooner.

You must be living from a place of embodied truth, emotional integrity, and nervous system coherence. The baggage has been let go. Your ego no longer runs the show.

Which is absolutely a place worth striving for.

With love from the forest,

~ Alexander

P.S. If you’ve ever experienced a bond like this—whether with a person, animal, tree, or something else—and you’re open to sharing, I’d be delighted to hear your story. I’ve lived these connections with a dog and a cat so far, and even though the bond was undeniable, talking about these “what the fuck” moments helps the mind catch up to what the body knows, integrate, and settle.