I should say that I’m keenly aware of the limits of intellectual knowledge. In my own life, I’ve noticed that while new ideas can be mesmerizingly beautiful, they remain impotent until they seep into the marrow of my lived experience. With this in mind, many wise teachers counsel students to avoid theory and focus instead on transformative practices. According to the indigenous elder Martín Prechtel, for example, new worldviews don’t enter through our minds and then percolate down into our bodies. Instead, they enter through our hands and only later bubble up into new thoughts.

While I bow to the wisdom of this perspective, I also believe that — for some of us — new ideas can illuminate previously unimaginable possibilities. In some cases, ideas can act as lures, drawing us past the borders of our habitual patterns and thereby making new practices possible. In turn, of course, those new practices will then generate new ideas, which hopefully lead to new experiential possibilities, and so on. For myself, I’ve found that there’s something immensely generative about this recursive interplay between ideas and practice. Like two entwined snakes birthing each other, new theories and new practices have propelled me towards ever deeper depths of intimacy with existence.

Similarly, I’m animated by the hope that coming back into intimacy with a living world does not require us to jettison the mind. In contrast to those who see the intellect as a ruinous obstacle to communion with the cosmos, I intuit that wholeness and belonging can be made accessible to the mind. Even more radically, I suspect that the mind might be an indispensable ally on the path of cosmological homecoming.

With this in mind, all YourCosmos classes include experiential exercises that help ground new ideas into the body — turning theory into lived experience.

• What embodied, experiential education looks like
• The power of my artistic background