The Four Fields: An Introduction

The Four Fields are an ecological and socio-political context for contemplative practices. Instead of separating "internal" mindful and psychological methods from "external" ecosystems, social movements, and political practices, the Four Fields invite them to cohere together in a contemplative ecosystem. They go beyond the duality of inner and outer. By including the openness and freedom of spacious awareness alongside reverence for this earth, the Four Fields approach invites steadfastness in facing climate chaos and social injustices. Cultivating the Four Fields in our everyday lives supports us in loving this world­—to love the world so much that we invite all things to be fully what they are, to love what we are losing as climate mutations and extractive economics ravage the planet, and to let things be so completely that we love new worlds into being.  

Together, these fields include the elemental reality of this earth and our biological bodies (Mossrock) as well as our emotional and meaningful experience (Wildfire). This includes the subtle vast mind of profound contemplative traditions (Lit Ocean), as well as the formless emptiness of things beyond concepts (Space). All four of these fields cohere together as a contemplative ecosystem that supports ecological and cultural renewal.

When we encounter the Four Fields, we are not being offered new ideals to chase, but an invitation to relax back into the uncanny abundance that is already here. These Fields are present realities—arising as the existential tissue of things, as breath and bones, as the scorching emotional dynamism living within climate catastrophe and authoritarian politics, and in the contemplative quiet of snowfall. They are the ordinary texture of experience, and the unfolding of collective freedom. The Fields are already what is.

Although they are ordinary and available, these fields introduce the wonders that traditions such as Buddhism call “awakening” or “enlightenment,” what Daoism may call the natural way, the awe mystics and poets express. Yet in our historical context today, we are introduced not only to an individual spiritual experience, but also to ecological and socio-political realities—the communication of this earth in a time of fear and renewal, awakening a response to dominant systems and planetary desecration. Such response can unfold from a natural attunement to what is already easily and humbly here. This response is to love this world.

For decades, I have taught meditation practices rooted in Tibetan Buddhism. I have seen how modern spiritual schools often refuse to go to the roots of the devastating ecocide and social traps that characterize our world. The Four Fields emerge precisely in that gap: a set of interwoven worldviews and practices that confront climate chaos, techno-authoritarian capture, and widespread fear—and discover within them a path of personal, cultural, and more-than-human cultivation. They rest in this gap without the habitual, righteous aggression— with a loose and caring style, open to mystery. 

To cultivate wonder and courage in response to planetary upheaval, contemplative life today must reverberate with at least these four aspects of existence:

1. ecological and embodied,
2. psychological and visionary,
3. meditative and aware,
4. being and emptiness.

These are the Four Fields. They are happening now, and they are happening all together.

These Fields are pathways for response and maps of methods. They gather contemplative practices that sustain a wild love of this planet alongside heartbreaking biodiversity loss and socio-political dead ends. They offer emotional support during times of extinction and unraveling old stories, now being captured in totalizing, authoritarian technological control. They invite ways of living in which freedom arises through intimate saturation and a full allowing of what is.

Yet this full allowing can slow, heal, and neutralize the relentless violence of a runaway civilization. This includes deactivating the systems that control and optimize, the imposition of surveillance and distraction, the tightening grip of identities manufactured by market or machine, the constructed enclosures of extractivism. I would like the Four Fields to help loosen those knots. They map a contemplative life for our damaged planet—ways of being that are open to the ongoing communication of the biosphere, empathically attuned to our emotional and spiritual lives within times of radical metamorphosis.

In these fields, I bring together a confluence of various contemplative traditions—Dzogchen, Daoism, Indigenous spiritual warriorship, Zen, apophatic mysticism, and nondual perspectives—inviting them to speak within the challenges we face today. I have been influenced by insights in psychology, somatic-practices, and deep inquiry, and I join them together to work alchemically with grief, denial, anxiety, trauma, and overwhelm. My deep gratitude for the guidance of land-based practices, ecopsychology, elemental teachings, outdoor quests invites these traditions into the fields. Animist, radical ecological philosophies that challenge human-centered myths open support for and from our planet. My study of theories of cultural capitalism, technology, as well as political and contemporary philosophy flow into this confluence. Because this range of influences can seem overwhelming, I have gathered these many perspectives into four accessible fields that we can cultivate in our everyday lives. Let’s explore each field with more depth. We call each field by a mythopoetic name:

Mossrock: The Field of Earth and Embodiment

Connected with the earth element, the Mossrock Field calls us back into elemental, geophysical life—the material, evolving earth. Here we ask how to dwell in the web of life (and death). What is a natural spirituality today, and how do we understand “nature” in an era of plastics, climate chaos, and geoengineering—an era in which human actions are a geological force? Mossrock practices attune sensually to the somatic within the ongoing communication of place, slowing down to learn from the elements and seasons, as well as our plant, fungi, and animal kin within the forests, deserts, mountains, grasses, and waters. Bearing witness to toxicity and heartbreaking ecocidal loss, we practice with fracking pads, energy-sucking data centers, and petrochemical plants. Guided by the ways that ecosystems are responding to climate mutation with feral creativity, we explore ecological gestures of rewilding, urban farming, ecological design, and bioregional protection. This field opens new meanings for ecological spirituality. We open to materiality as a teacher.

Wildfire: The Field of Psychology and Patterns of Consciousness

Connected with the fire element, the Wildfire Field sparks an open-ended exploration of our emotional landscape—our heart, psyche, dreams, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Because our times can be so exhausting, destabilizing, and overwhelming, inquiry practices support us in skillfully metabolizing our full range of experiences: the grief, guilt, anxiety, and powerlessness, as well as the fierce love and inspiration.

Unresolved personal patterns flare up within social destabilization, viral mentalities can block our hearts, and if we suppress those blockages, they will only return. Attuned, emotional work supports collective liberations. This helps people be less mean, softening hearts. We begin to see how modern technology, pervasive cultural messages, and violent anthropocentric, economized, racialized, and gendered ideologies have shaped our sense of self, often trapping us in narrow definitions and expectations.

Wildfire is like an alchemical, transformative flame that liberates such identities as an ongoing practice. This ignites visionary subjectivities. With imaginal practices, we unlearn habituation and imagine new worlds, kindling a wild dynamism untamed by capitalist optimization, technological determinism, and relentless achievement. With humility, we can receive ancestral wisdom still flowing through our cultures. This alchemy transmutes crisis into initiation. The Wildfire field opens new meanings for psycho-social transformation. We open to the patterns of experience as a teacher.

Lit Ocean: The Field of Boundless Awareness

Connected with the water element, the Lit Ocean Field shifts attention from these patterns of self and emotion and relaxes back into the boundless, nondual awareness that allows for all experience. This can nourish and heal, offering a reservoir and sanctuary. We cultivate the meditative rest that lets be in naturalness.

Within this ocean of effortless sensitivity, we explore cognition itself. This field encourages us to ask whether the deep, patient expanse of unconditional awareness can be more than a simple escape from ecological and social turmoil. Here we look at our own attention, noticing how it’s captured by speed and digital algorithms, yet how it can also release into a replenishing pool, enveloping crisis without either panic or denial. Within the slippage of multiple, overlapping experiences of time that pour like liquid from things, time itself relaxes back and back into deep timelessness. Lit Ocean flows with gestures of relaxed, effortless action that suspend and deactivate capitalist speed. This field opens new meanings for meditation. Here we open to awareness itself as a teacher.

Space: The Field of Emptiness and Unconditional Freedom

Finally, connected with the space or air element, the Space Field is the profound openness at the heart of all phenomena—the mystery beyond conceptual thought, the silence before the foundations of any civilization or religion. In this space, it becomes clear that there is no Space Field, and no fields altogether—or perhaps there are more fields, or less!

Here we explore the groundlessness within which all things, all institutions, and all societies arise and dissolve, a vastness that can feel both terrifying and liberating. We ask foundational questions about being, non-being, as well as civilizational collapse. Exposing our conceptual attachment to dominant stories and ideologies that shrink reality, we turn toward the silent mystery that has no name or guarantee—the empty dark openness that forgets all names yet makes everything possible.

Space helps us to release the tight, familiar grip of control and fixed expectations about the future, revealing that the absence of both hope and fear is fearlessness. Here, we practice embracing not-knowing, allowing boundless simplicity, releasing in indeterminacy. This field opens a silence beyond meaning making altogether. We open to emptiness itself as a teacher.

You already know these Fields. You are these Fields. You are a living body unfolding from and utterly inseparable from earth—the flesh, bones, and skin of Mossrock. You spark with feelings, dreams, identities, and images—Wildfire. You possess an effortless capacity for awareness—Lit Ocean. You exist in empty, groundless mystery—Space.

Practicing within the Fields means freeing, protecting, and celebrating these elemental dimensions, listening to their ongoing teachings. They are not something to be added on to your life, nor distant states to be achieved. They are the basic conditions in which we already find ourselves—ordinary and profound. They are the context of living and dying, the elemental ecology of experience, materially and effortlessly present, saturating existence. As your eyes naturally have their color, you are naturally these Fields. Earth is solid, water is wet, fire burns, and you are the unfolding of these Fields—woven through biological and emotional being, social life, aware presence, and open emptiness.

There is no hidden state to reclaim and no final destiny to chase. Even our searching arises from the ground we seek—the wave resolving back into the sea. There is no self, separate from this unfolding; there is only the continuous invitation to participate more fully, to notice what is already singing through our skin, breath, culture, and perception.

The Four Fields do not presume the dualisms that have long governed Westernized modern thought: human vs. nature, inner vs. outer, spiritual vs. material, contemplative vs. political, ancient vs. modern, personal vs. collective. The fields begin otherwise, from a different starting place, from fields.

The word field implies an expanse that permeates both inside and out, bridging the so-called internal psyche with the external environment. Imagine a wildflower meadow packed with asters, butterfly weed, and echinacea blooming from the soil of your skin as well as the soil beneath your feet—a pervasive field germinating beyond inner or outer.

Mossrock expands beyond “Man versus Nature.” Wildfire dissolves the binary of inner personal work versus outer social movements. Lit Ocean moves beyond willful striving and peaceful denial. Space swallows any attempt to lock reality into a single story. The Fields are not here to unify these opposites into a new synthesis, but to retire old terms, and allow them to play in spontaneity—plural, fluid, ecstatic.

When these four cohere, they form a contemplative ecology for our times—a reweaving of spiritual, ecological, and ethical life that does not retreat from planetary crisis nor trap us in anxious reactivity and attack mindsets. Instead, the Fields support gestures of responsive loving action, nourished by stillness and mystery. They invite us to recognize that climate chaos, cultural breakdowns, and artificial intelligences are not only sources of fear, but also teachers—initiations into a vaster, shimmering, symbiotic reality.

Rather than being ideals we must reach, the Four Fields offer a way of walking now—a living, ecological style of being that stretches from bones to breath to biosphere to the abyss. They are equally primary or, equiprimordial: no one Field is more original or real than another. While many spiritual or philosophical traditions elevate one domain (pure awareness, or matter, or psyche, or emptiness) as ultimate, the Fields affirm the play, strife, and coherence between all four.

We often journey through the Four Fields in a certain order—starting with Mossrock, then Wildfire, followed by Lit Ocean, and finally Space. This sequence begins with the most concrete and accessible (earth, embodiment, material economies) and moves toward the most spacious and abstract (emptiness, mystery). But this is not a progression or hierarchy. There is no ultimate Field. We could start from within any Field. They arise all at once, right here and now, each equally real. Their relational unfolding is plural, contradictory, and shimmering—welcoming the scientific and the spiritual, the modern and the ancient, the engaged and the effortless. We can suspend and liberate the worldview that carved these categories into silos.

I have been learning from these Fields and offering teachings drawn from listening deeply to their communication, gathering maps and methods along the way, collecting practices and perspectives from fellow wanderers. Welcome into the play of these Fields that you already are.