Addicted to Data

May 8

Bioweaving: Reclaiming the Intelligence of Living Systems

The times are urgent, let us slow down.” — Bayo Akomolafe

We are drowning in information and starved for wisdom. As data drives our days, from health trackers and sleep apps to social media stats and performance metrics, we are seduced by the promise of precision and optimization. Yet, in the relentless pursuit of quantification, something vital is being lost: our direct experience of life.

We’re not just living, we’re tracking it. Monitoring ourselves has become a surrogate for knowing ourselves. And this is where Bioweaving begins: as a courageous act of re-membering what it means to be alive, beyond the numbers.

The Digital Mirage: Knowing Without Connection

As Zach Bush, MD observes:
“We have become data consumers instead of soul participants in the miracle of life. We trust screens more than sensation, analytics more than intuition.”

This detachment from embodied intelligence isn't accidental, it’s cultural. The Enlightenment’s mechanistic worldview, which Charles Eisenstein calls “the Story of Separation”, taught us to divide the body from the mind, nature from self, and the measurable from the meaningful.

“Science as we know it has led us to a point of planetary crisis,” writes Eisenstein. “What we need now is a return to a way of knowing that is relational, not reductionist.”

Bioweaving: A New/Old Intelligence

Bioweaving is the art of returning to relational intelligence. It is a living practice that invites us to listen deeply, sensually, cyclically, to tune our nervous systems to the living frequencies of Earth. It is a technology of reconnection far older than smartphones: the technology of touch, breath, rhythm, and reverence.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, offers this reminder:
“To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. I don’t mean grammar or vocabulary. I mean the intimate vocabulary of the land, the rustle of leaves in fall, the smell of wet earth.”

Bioweaving invites us into that vocabulary. It teaches us to listen to the wind as guidance, to track emotions through sensation rather than spreadsheets, to court presence as an act of resistance.

Data Addiction as Cultural Symptom

The addiction to data reflects something deeper than technological overuse, it reflects an erosion of trust. We no longer trust our inner compass, so we outsource it to gadgets and graphs.

As Stephen Harrod Buhner writes in The Lost Language of Plants:
“The intellect is only one way of knowing. The heart, the body, and the Earth have their own forms of intelligence. But we’ve been trained to ignore them.”

Bioweaving is a practice of radical re-attunement. It doesn’t reject technology outright but insists that tech must serve life, not replace it.

Practices for Reconnection

Bioweaving invites small, consistent shifts that restore wholeness:

Tactile time: Replacing screens with touch—earth, bark, bodies.
Body-led movement: Letting the body guide instead of choreographing it.
Non-linear timekeeping: Living by moon cycles or plant rhythms, not clocks.
Sabbaths of stillness: Unplugging regularly to let silence speak.

As Joanna Macy teaches in The Work That Reconnects,
“The most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully present to what is.”

Presence is the portal. Bioweaving is the practice.

Reclaiming Indigenous Intelligence

At the root of Bioweaving is the restoration of indigenous, place-based, embodied knowledge—what Tyson Yunkaporta calls “kinship mind.” In his book Sand Talk, he writes:

“Indigenous thinking is not about knowledge. It is about relationships. Knowledge is not something you hold. It is something you are part of.”

Bioweaving invites us to unlearn the supremacy of intellectual knowing and reenter the sacred field of relational intelligence, where plants, animals, wind, water, and even the stars are not objects to be studied, but kin to be communed with.

This stands in stark contrast to the colonizing gaze of data extraction: always mining, measuring, and dissecting. The practice of Bioweaving asks: What happens when we stop trying to know life, and instead participate in it?

A Culture of Disembodiment

The chronic dependence on data stems from a deeper malaise: a collective dissociation from the body. In The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes:

“Trauma is not just an event that took place in the past. It is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”

Our cultural addiction to metrics may be seen as a trauma response—trying to regulate our safety by controlling variables, by externalizing authority. When sensation feels unsafe, numbers feel soothing. But healing will never be found in the cold precision of a graph. It will be found by daring to feel again.

Bioweaving is not comfortable, it is transformational. It invites us to return to the soft animal of the body, to trust its tremble, its pleasure, its intuition, its timing.

The Feminine Thread

Bioweaving is inherently a feminine act, not in gender, but in archetype. It is cyclical, intuitive, life-giving, and rooted in Earth’s body. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in Women Who Run With the Wolves:

“We are all filled with a longing for the wild. It is the part of us that connects with the cycles of life, the instincts of the body, and the soul’s need for freedom.”

To weave ourselves back into life is to step out of linear progress narratives and into organic time—moon-blood time, seasonal time, breath time. This is the sacred time of regeneration.

From Extraction to Reciprocity

In a data-driven world, everything becomes a resource to be mined—even ourselves. Our attention is extracted. Our identities are tracked. Our relationships are “quantified.” But as Daniel Christian Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures, says:

“The shift from sustainability to regeneration requires a transformation in how we relate to life, not as managers, but as participants.”

Bioweaving is regenerative culture in action. It asks not “How can I extract more?” but “How can I listen more deeply?” How can I become a steward of wholeness in a fragmented world?

A Tending Practice

Bioweaving isn’t a one-time intervention. It’s a lifelong tending—a slow, rhythmic ritual of returning to what’s real.

Some ongoing invitations:

Walk barefoot. Let the soles remember the soul.
Cultivate “felt-sense literacy”: not just what you think, but what you feel.
Sit with a tree. No goals. Just presence.
Reclaim ancestral practices: song, story, ceremony, dance.
Let your body be your oracle.

As Malidoma Somé teaches, “Ritual is the technology of the sacred.” In a world of digital devices, our true technologies of connection are gathering dust. Bioweaving dusts them off and brings them back to life.

The Art of Re-membering

To be addicted to data is to suffer from a kind of amnesia: a forgetting of our original instructions as Earth beings. Bioweaving is the art of remembering not with the mind, but with the body. With the breath. With belonging.

As V (formerly Eve Ensler) writes in The Apology:

“The body is a sacred text. We must return to its wisdom.”

And in the words of bell hooks:

“To be in touch with the sensual in our lives is to be connected to our capacity for joy.”

In an era of over-information and under-integration, Bioweaving is a quiet revolution. A weaving home.

Lorenna Kacera