Disorientation and “Lingering Co-Expression”

I argue that mental health is not a property of individual minds but emerges in the shared space between embodied beings. Drawing on Dōgen’s account of unbroken continuity, I propose that interbodily mental health depends on cultivating ma/aida (間)—the in-between through which we relate to one another across differences. Against approaches that seek to normalize “unhealthy” minds by making them conform to majority standards, I argue that healing requires attending to the relational field itself. I argue that what Ahmed calls disorientation—feeling unsettled when differently orientated others occupy a shared space—is the felt property of the shared field, which we should look after, if it is injured by projected separations. Bringing Dōgen into dialogue with Ahmed and autistic authors, I develop the concept of lingering co-expression: a practice of patiently attending to others’ expressions without reducing them to habitual categories, allowing responses to emerge as co-expressions. Exemplified through Yergeau’s spinning pinwheels and Dōgen’s twirling flowers, lingering co-expression describes a continuous practice through which the field of relations is cultivated. Finally, I reinterpret autistic meltdown not as a pathological event but as a painful form of radical openness that reveals the transformative potential of in-betweenness itself.