What is Ecological Digitalism?
There's a way to be online that doesn't cost you your lifeforce, your soul, and your body.
Most of us don't know this yet. We've been taught that "screen time" is inherently draining, that digital space is where we go to escape our lives, that being online means leaving our bodies behind. We talk about "digital detoxes" and "unplugging" as if the internet is a toxin we need to periodically cleanse from our systems.
But what if the problem isn't digital space itself? What if the problem is that we've been taught to treat our digital lives as separate from—or even opposed to—our physical and spiritual lives?
What if there's a way to inhabit digital space while staying rooted in your body and the earth?
This is what I call Ecological Digitalism.
Three Dimensions, One Coherent Life
Ecological Digitalism is a philosophy and practice of bringing three dimensions of existence into coherent relationship: digitality, physicality, and animism.
Most of us have been conditioned to see these as separate—or worse, hierarchical. Physical life is "real." Digital life is "virtual" (meaning not quite real). Spiritual life is somewhere off to the side, reserved for meditation cushions and ceremony spaces.
But the truth is simpler and more integrated: Your digital life impacts your physical and spiritual (soul-animate) life. And your physical and spiritual life enriches your digital life.
I’m not necessarily talking about balance here, though. Balance implies two opposing forces that need to be managed or kept in check. What I’m talking about is coherence, which is about recognizing that all three dimensions are alive, interdependent, and capable of nourishing each other when we're in right relationship with them.
Why We Lost Coherence
The split between digital and embodied life didn't happen by accident. It was built into the technology (see “instagram is a crazed bazaar”)
Early internet culture celebrated "cyberspace" as an escape from the limitations of the body. You could be anyone online. You could transcend geography, identity, physical appearance. The body was seen as the thing you left behind when you logged on.
And for a while, that felt liberating.
But then the platforms changed. Social media stopped being a space you visited and became a space that visited you—notifications, push alerts, infinite scroll designed to keep you enraged engaged. The business model shifted to extraction: your attention, your data, your life force became the product being sold.
And somewhere in that shift, we lost the ability to come home.
We started living in a constant state of half-presence—physically here but mentally elsewhere, scrolling while eating dinner, checking our phones while in conversation, never fully in our bodies because part of our attention was always tethered to the digital.
This is where the exhaustion comes from. Not from being online, but from being split between two dimensions. From trying to exist in two places at once without any coherent relationship between them.
For sensitive people—empaths, healers, ceremonialists, practitioners—this split is especially devastating to our sensory system. Your work depends on your capacity to be fully present, fully embodied, fully attuned to the animate world. When you're constantly pulled into digital space in ways that disconnect you from your body, it can feel like you lose access to your medicine.
Going Into Town
Here's a different way to think about being online:
Imagine that going online is like going into town.
You don't go into town and get absorbed into the personal world of every person you pass on the street. You don't lose yourself in the inner lives of strangers in traffic. You go into town with intention—to socialize, to work, to shop, to connect. You have a purpose. You stay focused.
And when you're done, you come home.
You return to your house, your body, your private life. You don't carry the town with you everywhere you go. You don't replay every conversation you overheard or worry about every stranger's opinion. You were in public space, and now you're in private space. Both are real. Both are necessary. And the boundary between them matters.
This is what it means to be online while rooted in body and earth.
It's okay to have a strategy. It's okay to know why you're going online before you get there. It's okay to focus on your purpose and not get pulled into every passing distraction.
It's okay to wander. Sometimes you go into town just to see what's happening, to browse, to be in the flow of collective energy. But even wandering has an endpoint. At some point, you come home.
And it's essential to come home. Both literally—logging off, stepping away from the screen—and energetically. Not carrying the overwhelm of the digital bazaar in your nervous system after you close the laptop.
This is the practice of Ecological Digitalism. It is not another set of rules or nice-to-do rituals. It is not a screen-dogma that poo-poos the digital world while actively benefitting from it. It is a way of moving between dimensions with intention, awareness, and embodiment.
Bi-directional Enrichment
Here's what becomes possible when you practice Ecological Digitalism:
Your embodied life enriches your digital presence. The wisdom you gather from your healing practice, your walks in the woods, your time in ceremony, your conversations at the dinner table—all of this becomes the material you bring online. Your digital presence isn't something you manufacture or perform. It's an extension of your lived, embodied, animate experience.
Your digital life enriches your embodied experience. The connections you make online, the ideas you encounter, the conversations you host—these feed your thinking, your creativity, your sense of belonging in the world. Digital space stops being a distraction from your real life. And it becomes one of many dimensions of your real life, when approached with coherence.
This is the key insight: Digital space is real space. It is not separate from the earth. It’s not even separate from the body. It is not separate from spirit. It's a dimension of existence that we're learning how to inhabit consciously.
And like all living systems, digital ecosystems can be extractive or regenerative. They can deplete us or nourish us. The difference isn't just the technology itself, but it's the quality of relationship we bring to it.
What It Feels Like
You know you're practicing Ecological Digitalism when:
You can tell the difference between being online while rooted and being online while dissociated. One feels grounded, focused, intentional. The other feels scattered, numbing, like you've left your body behind.
You have clear boundaries between public and private space. You know when you're "in town" and when you're home. You don't carry the digital world with you into every moment of your embodied life.
Your digital presence reflects your actual medicine, not a performance. You're not trying to be someone else online. You're not carving yourself up to feed the algorithm. You're simply extending the world you already tend into digital space.
You come home. You log off. You return to your body. You walk outside. You cook dinner with your full attention. You're not half-here, half-scrolling. You're fully where you are.
This Is the Foundation
Ecological Digitalism is the philosophical foundation that makes worldbuilding possible.
You can't build a sustainable digital presence—a world that people want to inhabit—if you're not rooted in your body and the earth while you do it. You can't tend an online ecosystem if you're constantly dissociated, scattered, or performing for an algorithm that doesn't care about your well-being.
The work we do in Worldbuilding School is built on this foundation. We don't teach you how to "show up more consistently" on social media. We teach you how to build a world—a meta-world within the digital landscape—that you can tend from a place of rootedness, coherence, and sustainability.
We walk through the 6 Phases of Visionary Praxis: from clarifying your medicine to building the momentum that sustains your business. And we do it together, in a way that honors your nervous system, your sensitivity, and your need to stay connected to the animate world while you build.
Because your business isn't just an online presence. It's an ecosystem. And ecosystems require tending—not extraction.
Learn more about Worldbuilding School here.
Your digital life, your physical life, and your spiritual life are not separate. They're dimensions of one coherent existence. And when you learn to move between them with intention, everything changes.
