When Organizations Forget they are bodies

The forgetting happens in body first.

I keep witnessing organizations that have succeeded at everything except remembering what they are. Not metaphorically. Literally. They are bodies—breath gathered into temporary formations we name companies, nonprofits, teams. Living systems dreaming themselves as machines.

Watch how they optimize everything except aliveness. Productivity dashboards measuring extraction. Engagement surveys calculating compliance. Efficiency metrics tracking the speed of their own dying. All of it built on a terrible premise: that the humans inside are resources to mine rather than the consciousness through which organizations dream themselves into being.

Your exhaustion isn't personal failure. It's diagnostic data. It's what happens when a body forgets how bodies stay alive.

The Three Movements They've Abandoned

BREATH has been eliminated—that holy nothing between efforts, the pause that lets life reorganize itself, the recovery that makes the next emergence possible. Organizations hold their breath for quarters, years, decades. Then wonder why they're dying.

PULSE has been replaced—the collective heartbeat that lets us feel each other's aliveness traded for asynchronous productivity, for tools that fragment presence into tasks. No shared rhythm. No way to feel if we're still alive together. Just metrics confirming we're producing.

TIDE has been flattened—the natural rising and falling of intensity, the seasonal intelligence of growth and dormancy, compressed into perpetual sprint. Always high tide. Always on. Always ascending until the only movement left is collapse.

The Terrible Trade

Somewhere in the forgetting, we made a bargain with death. We gave organizations permission to eat human aliveness in exchange for the fantasy of infinite growth.

We eliminated lunch breaks and called it efficiency—forgetting that bodies need to digest more than food.

We dissolved boundaries between work and life and called it flexibility—forgetting that membranes create the possibility of exchange.

We asked humans to be always-on and called it commitment—forgetting that even stars pulse.

The pattern keeps appearing: Organizations succeeding at everything except staying alive. Winning at metrics while losing at existence. Optimizing performance while their soul leaks out through conference room windows.

The Question Underneath

This isn't about wellness programs—band-aids on a hemorrhage that goes to the bone. This isn't about mental health days—brief reprieves from a system that makes sickness inevitable.

This is about something more fundamental:

Can an organization remember that it IS a living body before it becomes another beautiful corpse? Can it remember that consciousness needs rhythm to remain conscious?

BREATH, PULSE, TIDE. Not methodologies. Not frameworks. The actual movements consciousness makes to keep knowing itself as alive. The rhythms that were here before the first organization formed, that will be here after the last one dissolves.

What happens when we build organizations that remember what they are?

Not as a strategy. As recognition.

As the remembering that comes before anything else becomes possible.

As the first movement toward remaining alive.

The buildings know this. They've been trying to tell us through their fevers, their electrical tantrums, their HVAC systems gasping for breath. Every burned-out human body is the organization confessing: I have forgotten how to be a body.

The question now: Will we remember before the forgetting becomes complete?

Related work: The Rhythm of Us - where the three movements are given their names and instructions