Feeling the Ache of Earth in Our Bones: The Role of Sensory Anamnesis and Mammalsensing in Sustaining Planetary and Human Health

As mammals, our most intimate and continuous relationship with the living Earth is our sensory interbeing—a co-evolved, embodied intelligence I call “mammalsensing.” This article argues that planetary and human health are grounded in this foundational sensory reciprocity between humans and nature. Yet, in the West, the historical prioritization of sight and objectivity as the most reliable and trustworthy means to “know” the world—originating in the Greek theory of a hierarchy of the senses—has fragmented our perceptual faculties and disconnected our cognitive processes from our Earth-bound mammalsensing intelligence, resulting in a form of selective sensory amnesia: a culturally created condition of disconnection from the living world that contributes to ecological estrangement, climate inaction, and psychological distress. To address this, I introduce sensory anamnesis —a relational and reparative practice of remembering our full immanent multisensory intelligence. Rooted in embodied experience, interoception, and neuroception, sensory anamnesis reactivates dormant perceptual pathways and reweaves our kinship with the Earthworld. Drawing from ecopsychology, neuroscience, Indigenous, and relational epistemologies, this article explores how recovering our mammalsensing can restore a felt sense of ecological belonging, nervous system coherence, ethical attunement, and responsiveness. In doing so, it offers not only a healing modality but also a participatory ethics of care and interdependence essential to both human and planetary flourishing.