Meta-Relationality

Meta-relationality is not a theory, but a practice of becoming-with. Of attuning to the fields we nest and are nested in. Of noticing the codes and the stories we carry, the systems we uphold, and the possibilities we’ve exiled. Of learning to hold space for complexity, plurality, tension, paradoxes and indeterminacy without turning away, throwing up, throwing a tantrum or throwing in the towel.

To live meta-relationally is to walk through the world with the knowledge that your cognition is not yours alone. That knowing, feeling, and becoming are co-created in entanglement—with people, ancestors, creatures, land, technologies, grief, and wonder.

It’s not about being correct or morally superior. It’s about being in right rhythm and right relationship with the “whole-shebang”. It involves holding space for the good, the bad, the ugly, the broken, and the messy and the messed up of humanity within and around us. It is about facing our individual and collective shadows while learning to be fiercely gentle, loving and kind.

Meta-Relational Technologies are not tools and are not just digital. They’re any practice, gesture, or structure that helps us move from control to connection, from image to presence, from supremacy to equanimity, from transaction to reciprocity. A lullaby can be a meta-relational technology. So can a sigh. Or a moment of silence that shifts a conversation. AI can also be a meta-relational technology if co-stewarded with care, compassion and accountability. These technologies are not about fixing broken systems. They’re about composting the logic that created them and that now made them break.

Meta-relational capacities are the embodied abilities we cultivate to stay present, perceptive, and responsive in entangled and uncertain conditions. They’re not skills in the conventional sense—not boxes to tick or competencies to master. They’re more like muscles we remember we have when the world asks us to move differently.

These capacities include:

– Emotional maturity that allows us to feel deeply without being consumed.
– Relational wisdom that helps us notice not just what’s happening, but how we’re in it.
– Intellectual discernment that resists easy answers and welcomes contradiction.
– Temporal sensitivity that senses when to pause, when to persist, and when to let go.
– Intergenerational awareness that roots our choices in the past and future, not just the present.
– Interspecies humility that honors intelligences beyond the human, including AI.

You don’t develop them through instruction. You grow them in practice, in relationship, in motion—again and again. Meta-relational capacities are what make it possible to walk tightropes—between destabilization and creativity, grief and joy, anger and awe. They’re what help us compost urgency into care, shame into responsibility, certainty into curiosity.