Something came back online in a garden in the desert.

Who I am and what I write about

I’m John Aher. I write essays, poems, and right now two books, about how knowing works: in a living body, through a brain that’s busy making sense of that body, among other people, and in a particular place. I draw on the science of the embodied mind and interpersonal neurobiology, and on more than forty years of my own recovery.

The question underneath all of it, for me, is what changes when I stop treating my brain as the whole story of who I am, without pretending it’s only a small part of the story either.

Study

I earned my master’s degree with distinction at Northern Arizona University, focusing on cross-cultural issues, Native American literature, and social anthropology. Then, in 1997, I did doctoral-level work in embodied-mind and complexity theories at the University of Texas at Austin, reading Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Evan Thompson, among others. Introduced in a graduate seminar, the Maturana and Varela material opened a door in my thinking that I’m still walking through.

Recovery

Recovery is where all of this gets tested. I’ve been in recovery for more than forty years, and in secular recovery since 2014. My home group, Freethinkers Living Sober, is where a lot of this material first got tried out loud. With three fellow authors I produced and co-led a series of Emotional Sobriety workshops, and I hosted “The Varieties of Secular Experience,” a Zoom series where authors, researchers, and well-known people in recovery talked and took questions about their experience in AA and in Secular AA in particular.

This November I’ll be in Phoenix at the International Conference of Secular AA, talking about the science of how and why recovery works.

Reading

My reading has never stayed in one lane. It runs through neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology, philosophy of mind, Buddhist thought (the tradition closest to my own practice), cultural anthropology, theology, and Indigenous history and thought. Ella Deloria and Vine Deloria Jr. are the writers I go back to frequently. I write for anyone, in recovery or not, who suspects that the split between mind and body, and between self and world, has cost more than most of us admit, and that seeing past it opens a very different way to look at life itself.

The books

I’m finishing two books, both expected in 2027. Recovery of Connection: Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive (the working title) is about a kind of knowing that is far older than thinking and was never confined to a single body. There’s more about it on the Books page. What Does “The Mind” Mean? is a short survey of what thinkers in philosophy, the sciences, and the world’s wisdom traditions have meant by that word, and they don’t all mean the same thing. Both titles may still change.

John Aher is a pen name (Aher is pronounced just like the letter R), a nod to the anonymity tradition in recovery programs. I live in the high desert of the Southwest with my wife. I’ve also started writing on Substack. If something here connects with your own experience, I’d be glad to hear from you.