Self Transformation through a Relational Lens

Shaping Habits Together: On Modern-Day Changelings

Modern-Day Changelings

A guest post on Wayshaping to accompany Episode #63 of Love & Philosophy

Changelings of Old

In the 1600s the term changeling was introduced to describe someone who was fickle or changed their mind a lot. Many of us today can identify with this state of being, at least in certain areas of our lives. For some of us, this fickleness is spread thick and it leads to persistent feelings of dissatisfaction and a sense of having no real grip on the world or a clear place within it. Nothing sticks, nothing persists, and although one is always ‘changing’, nothing ever really seems to change.

In the 17 and 1800s, this term, changeling, took on a more supernatural and sinister tone. A changeling was someone inhabited by a spirit or something otherworldly. It was typically a child, one that was suspected to have been swapped out and replaced by a malevolent entity, a fairy or a demon. The changeling was to be feared, hated, and somehow banished, if not simply killed.

The last known instance of this brutality occurred in Ireland, where a young woman named Bridget Cleary was murdered by her own community. This happened as late as the 1890s in County Tipperary, not too far from where I was born. I once played the role of her father in a play. It was a harrowing story where in snowballing fits of hysteria, assuming something wicked had taken hold of her and that she could not be saved, her community, with the encouragement of her husband and the eventual sanction of her father, burned her alive.

The logic of the changeling myth functioned in two primary ways.

More commonly, the changeling was something less able than the person whose place it was suspected to have taken. It was viewed as more feeble and incapable of doing what was expected of it. Based on what we know today, it is widely assumed these were likely children who had fallen ill or who had a physical or mental disability that the community could not comprehend.

In some instances, however, a changeling was something much more able, given what was thought to be normal for a child of the time. We might now understand these individuals as neurodivergent and perhaps, in some cases, possessing savant-like abilities.

Either way, the term "changeling" was a label for someone who deviated from norms and expectations in ways that were unsettling to those around them.

Photo by MARIOLA GROBELSKA on Unsplash

Modern-Day Changelings

My cousin Tom put on some weight recently.

I met him while he was doing some work on my parents’ house, and he appeared a little embarrassed and defensive about the matter. He was half-apologising for it, maybe trying to pre-empt any comments I might make. Whatever the reason, his defensiveness also gave him an opening to share that his weight gain was the result of having given up smoking a few months prior.

Tom, now in his mid-forties, had been a heavy smoker since his early teens. He had tried quitting any number of times before, using every trick in the book. Nothing worked, despite some real effort – not even after a minor stroke in his late thirties.

This time, things were different, and he had no insight into why. He just quit. That’s how he experienced it.

“I’ve no idea how it happened,” he said. “I just said ‘NO. NO MORE!’ And that was it.” Laughing and shaking his head, he added, “MAD! Isn’t it!?”

I agreed it was mad and left it at that, resisting the urge to give him my spiel in the middle of his workday. Had I done so, however, it would have included some version of what follows.

This kind of change, which is extremely common by the way, is mad if we assume ourselves to be rational agents, capable of deliberate transformation at will. When we actually attempt to change, reason and knowledge alone rarely shape the outcome. What we find instead of a wilful subject rationally dictating our actions on cue is something else entirely – something quite strange. On one hand, we often find a version of ourselves that is less able, like Tom in his previous attempts to stop smoking. On the other hand, we find one that is much more so, like Tom in his recent transformation, where he exceeded even his own expectations.

What we find, in other words, are changelings. In this sense, we are all modern-day changelings.

Encountering ourselves as changelings can be unsettling too – it evokes fear, denial, we attempt to discipline, to banish. We concoct all sorts of rites and rituals to convince ourselves that we are, in fact, the rational, wilful subjects we believe ourselves to be. We look for recipes that, if followed faithfully, promise actions that perfectly reflect our intentions. Then we punish and castigate ourselves when things don’t go according to plan. This shame and frustration fuel defeat and negative self-narratives, and we learn to avoid trying to make such changes again in the future.

But before we get the matches ready, perhaps we can ask if there is a conceptual framing through which to understand these apparent inconsistencies. Just as our awareness of illness and disability massively diminished the tendency to interpret a sickly child as a changeling, perhaps there is a lens for our modern-day changeling that leads to more understanding and less fear and banishing.

Is there a lens that makes sense of the fact that we are sometimes less able than we intend, and sometimes mysteriously more so? A framework that can also explain why when one habit changes, other behaviours shift along with it - as in Tom’s case with quitting smoking and eating more. And what if it could even help out that frustrated figure from the 1600s that is still with us today: the fickle changeling, always in flux, but where nothing of substance ever seems to stick.

My collaborators and I believe there is. Embodied cognitive science (ECS), we argue, can provide novel, naturalistic foundations for understanding the processes of personal change. It offers insights into all of these phenomena, and can help us to both understand and cultivate change without having to assert absolute control or assume we are perfectly rational agents.

An Ecology of Embodied Minds

ECS, at its core, seeks to dissolve the old dichotomy between mind and body. But perhaps its most interesting idea for our purposes is that we as individuals are better understood as complex forms of collective intelligence. The role our microbiome plays in shaping our thoughts and feelings is now a familiar example, but an even richer story can be told.

That story is about how, at every level of our being – biological, psychological, social, and existential – we are comprised of nested intelligent, autonomous agents. These agents are constantly coordinating, collaborating, and competing to maintain a dynamic working harmony, but not always successfully.

The Biological Level: Recent experimental work reveals that our cells possess a problem-solving intelligence so adaptive it invites us to see them as agents in their own right. When cells come together as tissues, they scale up that intelligence to solve new problems and enable way-making in new spaces. This process continues for our organs and the larger bodily systems they help comprise, with each level building on the intelligence and cognitive capacities of the one below it.

The Psychological Level: This biological foundation underpins our psychology, where our minded behaviour emerges as feeling-laden patterns of sensation, anticipation and action. Left to themselves, these patterns - our habits - manage our way-making through familiar environments and support it when we go off track. Strange as it might sound, in this view these habits are also seen as agents of a sort. No habit is a perfect repetition and, as such, these are not mere automata. Rather, they are attuned to situation-types and can adapt to small changes without our reflective intervention. Moreover, they coordinate with whole ecologies of other habits with great fluency, and over time, can integrate into complex identities with their own adaptive strategies for managing the world.

The Social Level: Entangled with all this are our capacities for language. This allows for the emergence of narratives about who we are and who we are not, who we were, and who we will be. These also become habitual. As individuals and in groups, we find ways to align our stories, making the group’s story our own and vice versa. In doing so, we gear into these larger social bodies, playing our role in many collective intelligences, much as an ant sustains its colony.

The Existential Level: Atop of all this, we have developed reflective capacities. We can turn our sensory, emotional, and linguistic apparatus back on the patterns that arise from them. We can have thoughts and feelings about our thoughts and feelings, take actions relative to our actions, and tell stories about the stories we tell. It is with the emergence of this existential level that our capacity for intentional change emerges… and so much of the trouble begins.

Coordination and Congruence in the Self-Collective

Given the nature of these levels and their relative autonomy, they don't interact directly. They communicate by constraining the possibilities for action in each other's spaces, where each becomes an environment for the others and makes some outcomes more or less probable.

Consider, for instance, a social system seen in its fullness. It might resemble an oceanic or atmospheric flow: a dynamic pattern shaped by countless individual movements but relatively independent of any particular one. From our vantage point, we rarely perceive our role in these structures or the ways in which we re-attune to them as they shift. Instead, we experience our emotions, narratives, and actions as our individual responses to social events, not as the very parts that constitute the pattern or allow it to settle into new configurations. A change in the social pattern deforms the possibility space for the individuals who enact it without directly dictating their behaviour. It becomes, in a sense, the new environment within which the agents at the individual level must negotiate to adapt or resist.

The relationship between these levels is a bit like the strings of an instrument, each one attuning to the others, collectively seeking harmonic resonance without a single root note to reference.

When we place this nest of agencies – coordinating across space and time, and alongside our vast microbial ecologies – into a changing world full of similarly constituted beings, the anomalies we started with begin to make sense.

This framework explains why the changes we wish to make are often so resistant. Resistance, like Tom felt for years, isn't a failure of willpower or knowledge, but of coordination. The current ecology of our habits and identities is simply unable to negotiate the formation of a new, better-attuned pattern that is recognised within the self-collective as being more appropriately attuned, given the negotiated needs of the whole. In short, any attempt to change disturbs a pre-existing harmony, evoking a host of competing needs that resist the new order.

When we experience "sudden gains" akin to Tom’s success with quitting smoking, they are likely not sudden at all. Rather, they are likely the result of prolonged, subconscious negotiations and processes of maturation that have finally reached a threshold of alignment.

And when one habit changes, the ‘spill over’ effect is inevitable. Any change deforms the entire ecosystem, shifting the pressures on all other habits, which must then evolve toward new stabilities. Returning to our instrument metaphor, if a dominant set of strings finds a new resonance, it puts harmonic pressure on the others to find consonant tunings, pushing them out of old relationships and into new arrangements aligned with the novel chord.

This decentering of the rational self is not a reason for despair and certainly does not reflect a loss of agency. Quite the opposite. Just as a better understanding of neurodivergence empowers us to work with the realities it presents and helps us avoid the kind of harmful mislabeling we saw with the changelings of old, so too can understanding ourselves as self-collectives help us better understand our agency (and its limits), thereby negotiating it more skilfully.

This brings us to the idea of wayshaping – an intentional approach to navigating change by engaging with these different layers of agency.

Wayshaping

Wayshaping, at its most basic, is the practice of preparing ourselves here and now to meet our needs there and then. This typically happens in environments that we revisit or anticipate returning to. When Hansel leaves the breadcrumbs to find his way out of the forest, or Tom Sawyer unfurls the line of his kite to retrace his steps in the cave, they are wayshaping. When we pack for a trip or set a reminder to do our laundry, we are wayshaping.

As a practice, wayshaping is about learning to shape the various levels of our being by modifying our environments, both internal and external. We do this to create opportunities for realignment, where incompatible agencies resolve into novel forms, enacted as thinking, feeling, and acting. These enactments, in turn, can stabilise as habits, identities, and narratives more aligned with our individual or collective needs.

There are two core tools for this: scaffolds and shocks.

Scaffolds are material and symbolic supports that put productive stress on a living system while also giving it something to organise its behaviour around. They can be temporary, like training wheels on a bicycle, or permanent, in that the new pattern depends on the ongoing presence of the support. The examples are nearly infinite, from a simple table that scaffolds our ability to write, to a mantra that scaffolds our ability to focus attention. When used effectively to enable change, scaffolds place us in a state of optimal tension, inviting us to reach into our ‘adjacent possibles’ – the capabilities we can realistically evolve towards from our current configuration. The skill of wayshaping entails discovering, designing and configuring scaffolds that work for us in our particular context.

Shocks, on the other hand, are stresses that push us well beyond our comfort zone for a short period. A core hypothesis is that shocks can play a generative role by momentarily breaking up existing stabilities, allowing the system to reconfigure into novel arrangements. This echoes Nassim Taleb’s notion of antifragility, which argues that some systems don't just survive stress but are strengthened by it. We add to this, suggesting this works through a process of multiscale realignment, and that our personal transformation is no different.

Consider once more the metaphor of the stringed instrument. A shock is like suddenly loosening all the strings at once, dramatically increasing the likelihood that the instrument will resettle into a new harmonic configuration when re-tuned. We see this in our own lives when we travel and our routines shift around, or when we recover from an illness and find that something about our behaviour has changed on the other side of it, for better or worse. These are multilevel, realignments, where the agents at each level renegotiate within their own space to settle into new configurations and produce novel patterns without necessarily having a view of the whole order. No one level is in complete control. What results is emergent and would have been impossible to predict in advance.

Shocks become particularly powerful when intentionally coupled with skillfully configured scaffolds. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is a canonical example: the substance induces the shock, while the therapeutic context – the mindset (set) and environment (setting) – scaffolds the experience, making positive outcomes more probable. This is like loosening the majority of the strings whilst tuning a few to each other and having another instrument nearby play a clear, resonant chord as the strings are re-tuned again to find the novel harmony. The slackened strings are "entrained" by these scaffolds and guided to settle into a new, more desirable harmony.

Whether we recognise it or not, these dynamics are happening all the time. Wayshaping simply hopes to make them explicit, increasing our agency within them while knowing that absolute control might not only be impossible but counterproductive. As such, wayshaping is as much about the craft of shaping our lives as it is about learning to tolerate and even embrace a necessary degree of uncertainty, ambiguity, and dissonance, even while striving for coherence. With practice, we learn to trust in our abilities to resolve competing regulatory dynamics and deepen our commitment to trusted paths, whilst also staying sensitive to their limitations.

This brings us to one final crucial point to emphasise, i.e., wayshaping is always a relational process. The changes you make aren't just shifting the possibility space for your own habits, but for the habits of the people around you and the systems you're a part of. Just as the world scaffolds your possibilities for change, you scaffold the world’s right back. This means we can recruit others to support our own transformation, and that we must be sensitive to the fact that our actions have spillover effects on the lives of others too. This creates a sense of shared agency, helping us shape not just our own lives, but also the communities and systems we’re part of – without assuming we know exactly what that should look like in advance.

Wayshaping, then, empowers us to respond to the demands of our lives in more aligned ways, and it also empowers us to recognise and shift those very demands, should it be needed.

Embracing the Changeling

Having somewhat demystified the modern-day changeling, does that mean we have banished it altogether? Perhaps not.

Interestingly, the figure of the changeling has been reimagined in a more positive light in recent accounts. Seen as an entity occupying a liminal space and providing a bridge between worlds, communing with the changeling invites us into a space of curiosity, potential, and transition, of letting go and letting be. As such, we submit that the changeling may be a figure for our times – for us as individuals, and as a planetary species in a period of many converging crises.

When we look more closely at ourselves, we unveil the strangeness that lies underneath. We are not the rational individuals of the post-enlightenment liberal order, but collective intelligences we are only beginning to understand. This shift in our self-understanding may also reflect an ongoing transition from a human-centric view, in which dominance and control are often emphasised, to a posthuman one that decenters the human and emphasises relationality and balance.

As changelings, we can learn to embrace these relational dimensions of our being: the fact that we are always making (sympoiesis) and doing (sympraxis) with others, even in the production and reproduction of ourselves. Change, through this lens, is a matter of exchange, between the parts of ourselves, and between us and our worlds. When we engage in wayshaping, we are not only practising our transformation but also practising seeing through these lenses.

The tools and techniques we employ in service of this are always informed by our present context and our personal and interpersonal histories and aspirations. As such, wayshaping is not a series of prescriptions, but something like a frame to help us discover the tools and techniques that work for us.

Two decades ago, the philosopher Mark Bickhard wrote that “The development of self-scaffolding skills is a fundamentally important field of development, a kind of development that is at the core of essentially all domains … In this respect … the scaffolding of the development of self-scaffolding skills, should be a primary goal of education.” Despite recognising this centrality, Bickhard set this puzzle aside and went on to other things.

In our work, we did not set out to address this puzzle either. Instead, we were trying to account for the dynamics of stability and change from a multiscale perspective and draw some practical insight from that. It may be, however, that in attempting to solve this latter puzzle, we also arrived at an answer to the first one. For, in line with Bickhard’s call, perhaps the most parsimonious means of describing wayshaping is precisely the scaffolding by which we develop self-scaffolding skills.

Accepting this, however, entails accepting the strangeness at the core of our being, that we are collective intelligences, that we are modern-day changelings. In the absence of this acceptance, it is almost inevitable that we will continue to work against ourselves, misunderstanding our processes of stability and change and our struggle to bring coherence to our action.

We come full circle, then, to find that a salve for the fickle self is not to banish the changeling and assert control, but to embrace it. In doing so, we may open the way to deeper alignments between our individual and collective needs and the actions we take to satisfy them.

This piece was authored by Mark M. James, with feedback and edits from Mushfiqa Jamaluddin.

Some stepping stones

In the podcast I recorded with Andrea, we only skim the details of wayshaping, and focus mostly instead on the multiscale dynamics that form much of the conceptual background to our account. If these ideas sound intriguing, however, we invite you to engage further. Of course, when we practice wayshaping we have our own preferred tools and techniques that we feel to be well-aligned with the ideas themselves, and we tend to share these, but only ever as a starting point for your experimentation.

To explore the theory more deeply, you may value reading our recently published preprint here.

If you want to put these ideas into practice directly, my collaborator offers 1:1 coaching using the principles of wayshaping; you can reach out to Mushfiqa at mushfiqamonica@gmail.com to arrange an initial consultation.

For updates on new offerings – e.g., experiential learning labs, self-directed learning materials, or customised retreats – email Mushfiqa or me at markmichaeljames@gmail.com

Coda:

What is Wayshaping?

Wayshaping, at its most basic, is the practice of preparing ourselves here and now to meet our needs there and then. This typically happens in environments that we revisit or anticipate returning to. When Hansel leaves the breadcrumbs to find his way out of the forest, or Tom Sawyer unfurls the line of this kite to retrace his steps in the cave, they are wayshaping. When we pack for a trip or set a reminder to do our laundry, we are wayshaping. But as a formal practice, wayshaping is an intentional approach to change grounded in the idea that both we and the world around us are always already changing, and we are always already adapting to that change. Rather than imposing change from the top down, wayshaping helps us notice and work with the patterning processes that stabilize us. These processes manifest across biological, psychological, social, and existential dimensions in the form of our habits, identities, narratives, norms, environmental settings, and designs. It offers tools to engage these multiple layers so we can better attune our personal, collective and ecological needs. Drawing on complexity science, embodied cognition, and ecological psychology, wayshaping treats sustainable change as something that emerges through ongoing negotiations and realignments across these nested layers. It helps us recognize where change is already underway, what’s holding current patterns in place, which constraints we can influence and which we can’t, and how to seed and cultivate new habits in ways that resonate with the possibilities of the systems we are working with. In short, both conceptually and practically, wayshaping scaffolds our capacity for self-scaffolding.