I don’t want to take Christmas away from anyone.
I just want to light one more little light on the inside.

The Feeling and Knowing Taá of Christmas

I remember the heat sticking to my skin, cicadas singing, the sky exploding in blue — and on TV, snow, fireplace, and European pine trees.
My body said: summer.
The images insisted: winter.

Right there, without anyone explaining it to me, there was already a conflict between what I felt and what I was told to believe.
That is Taá: feeling before knowing.
And it is also the point where, very often, faith is invited to be quiet in order to fit the norm.

When I look at Christmas today, in First-Person Consciousness, I notice two things at the same time:

• A legitimate desire to celebrate love, birth, care.
  
  

• A heavy package of colonization of time, body, and spirituality — mixed with profit, consumption, and climate impact.
  
  

I don’t say “you”; I say “we.”
Because I too was trained to celebrate a winter boy from Europe under the scorching sun of the southern hemisphere, without ever asking anything.

Before Christmas, there was already celebration

Long before Christianity, peoples on all continents looked at the cycles of the Sun and Earth and did something very simple and very profound: they celebrated the movement of the sky in the body.

• Winter solstices: the shortest day, the time when light seems to almost die in order to be reborn.
  
  

• Summer solstices: the longest day, the peak of light and heat.
  
  

• Equinoxes: balance between day and night, passage, transition.
  
  

Each culture created rituals for this.
It was not “religion” in the institutional sense — it was Body-Territory feeling the cosmos: cold, heat, shade, dawn, the smell of rain, the ripening of fruit.

When Christianity expanded, it did not erase these rituals; it fit itself into them.
In the northern hemisphere, Christmas took the place of winter festivals: light in the midst of night, hope in the midst of cold.

The problem begins when this European winter calendar is imposed as universal — including in places where the body is living summer, rain, fruit, beach, sweat.

In the southern hemisphere, especially in Latin America, the body is saying something else:
“I am in a time of expansion, of heat, of long days, of summer.”

But the images, songs, symbols, and theology repeat:
“Imagine cold, snow, reindeer, pine trees covered in ice.”

This mismatch between body and narrative is a small laboratory of colonization:

• colonization of time;
  
  

• colonization of the season;
  
  

• colonization of sensation.
  
  

When faith is asked not to feel

Faith is not the problem.
The problem is when faith is trained to be blind to the body and deaf to local experience.

In the Damasian Mind, consciousness is born from the dialogue between interoception (feeling from within) and proprioception (feeling the body in space).
When I’m asked to live a winter Christmas in a 35-degree summer, I am being asked, without words, to:

• de-authorize my interoception,
  
  

• delegitimize my Body-Territory,
  
  

• trust the imported image more than direct experience.
  
  

This is a piece of Zone 3:
when narratives, ideologies, and markets hijack feeling, and I start to doubt myself.

Blind faith does not come from the Gospel itself; it comes from the combination of:

• theology that does not accept questions,
  
  

• colonization that presents itself as “single truth,”
  
  

• a market that takes advantage of the vacuum to sell meaning in the form of gifts, feasts, and decorations.
  
  

Christmas, profit, and climate: when the nativity scene walks into the mall

If I look at Christmas with Taá, I also see:

• encouragement of excessive consumption,
  
  

• pressure to buy gifts no one needs,
  
  

• too much food, throwaway items, lights on for weeks,
  
  

• transport, production, and waste accelerated in a very short time.
  
  

All of this has an energetic and climate cost.
The feast of the “birth of the Child” has been used as an engine of:

• profit,
  
  

• accumulation,
  
  

• social comparison,
  
  

• exclusion of those who cannot consume.
  
  

From the point of view of DANA — the intelligence of DNA that only wants to keep life going with the least possible suffering — this is absurd:

• sacrifice of forests, rivers, climate,
  
  

• an explosion of consumption on an already exhausted planet,
  
  

• in the name of a celebration that, in discourse, speaks of humility, simplicity, a manger.
  
  

The contradiction is so great that the body feels it;
but Zone 3 trains us not to listen to this discomfort.

The Feeling and Knowing Taá — opening a crack for the decolonization of Christmas

I also notice that even my way of celebrating has been colonized.
That the calendar I use to mark the sacred was shaped to distance me from the real sky above my head: to reduce my body to consumer, my mind to year-end schedule, my spirituality to retail campaign, and my politics to credit card balance.

That is why so many Christian communities have difficulty asking:

• “Does it make sense to celebrate a European winter in our Latin summer?”
  
  

• “Does it make sense to turn the birth of a master of simplicity into a shopping race?”
  
  

But when I feel my body before I think — when Taá manifests — I realize there is no separation between Neuroscience, Politics and Spirituality (Utupe, Xapiri, living memory).
My body tells me that a summer night asks for another kind of ritual, another intensity, another rhythm.

What colonizes is not just history:
it is the calendar, the advertising, the symbol that does not speak to the ground I stand on.

Every time I have the courage to listen to this strangeness and ask “why?”, a crack opens in Zone 3 and my body goes back to being what it has always been: a living territory of possible worlds, including a less destructive Christmas that is more coherent with life.

What if Christmas were remade by the Damasian Mind?

This is not about “ending Christmas,”
but about asking:

• What would a Christmas that respects the Latin summer look like?
  
  

• What would a Christmas that reduces consumption and increases care look like?
  
  

• What would a Christmas be like where Jesus, if he were here, would not serve as a poster boy for home appliances, but as an inspiration to redistribute, welcome, and reduce climate damage?
  
  

We can imagine:

• smaller, simpler meals,
  
  

• gifts that don’t pass through the mall (gestures, time together, something handmade),
  
  

• rituals that include the body: walking outdoors, feeling the warm night breeze, looking at the sky, giving thanks for the Earth,
  
  

• communities using this moment to think about social justice, the climate crisis, care for the most vulnerable.
  
  

This is a Christmas Zone 2:
not the rigidity of Zone 3, nor the automatism of Zone 1.
It is the space where I can feel, think, believe, and act with coherence.

It’s not against faith — it’s in favor of a faith that feels

What I propose is not abandoning Christ,
but letting him leave the mall and walk barefoot again in the dust of our Latin ground.

A faith that feels:

• recognizes the violence of imposing winter on a body in summer;
  
  

• recognizes the absurdity of associating holy birth with uncontrolled consumption;
  
  

• recognizes that the planet is in emergency and that our celebrations also need to convert.
  
  

If I let Taá guide me, the question changes:
it is no longer “Can I celebrate Christmas?”, but:

“What kind of Christmas can my body, my community, and the planet sustain without getting sick?”

When this question rises from within, metacognition awakens gently.
Not as accusation, but as invitation.

And perhaps this is the possible miracle of our time:
a Christmas in which, finally, the Latin body is also born — with the right to feel, think, and celebrate in its own way, without fear of displeasing those who have grown used to deciding even our seasons of the year.

When Two Brains Receive the Same World - Cooperation, synchrony, and the shared rhythm of attention

Embodied Singing -Voice, interoception, and Body-Territory in vocal expertise

Pleasant Odors and the Breath that Organizes Us - How smell organizes brain–body coupling

Architecture That Thinks With Me - Turning corners and the attentional cost of built environments

Auditory Approach Bias From Birth - How newborns and adults code the desire to listen

Beta Waves and the Moment I Truly Decide - The prefrontal cortex as the space where "feeling" becomes "choosing"

How My Brain Encodes Voice in Midlife - F0, listening effort, and the vitality of human hearing

Learning Beside Another Brain - Hyperscanning and the pedagogy of co-presence

Reproducibility in fNIRS - When can I trust the hemodynamic curve I see?

HRfunc and the True Shape of the Hemodynamic Response - Why every brain breathes light in its own way

Mixed Reality and Decision-Making - How the brain evaluates prototypes and hybrid worlds

Intense Exercise and the Awakening of Zone 2 - The hemodynamics of effort and the body that generates intelligence

Buttoning a Shirt - Everyday actions as windows into attention, gesture, and consciousness

Depression, tDCS, and the Prefrontal Cortex - Reigniting silent circuits

Designing fNIRS Studies in Real-World Environments - Why science must step outside the laboratory to exist

Transformers and Virtual Short-Channels - AI cleaning brain signals and retelling hemodynamics

Mental Fatigue and Performance - When the head gives up before the body

Cold Water and the Brain - Oxygenation, cold, and the consciousness of the limit

Walking After Stroke - Cognitive–motor interference in everyday life

Balance and the Cerebellum in Parkinson’s Disease - Movement, tensions, and reorganization of the Body-Territory

Freezing of Gait and the Loss of the Body’s Own Quorum - When the body stops trusting the next step

Children With Cochlear Implants - Learning to hear through the brain, not just the device

Emotional Processing in Children With Oppositional Behavior - Regulation, conflict, and the birth of Tensional Selves

Mild Cognitive Impairment - Early hemodynamic signs and presence in the world

Pain, Apathy, and Depression in Dementia - When feeling and thinking stop walking together

Cognitive Load - How much does fNIRS really feel my mental effort?

The Brain in Daily Life -Assisted horsemanship, sport, and embodied enjoyment

Linguistic Jiwasa - When language thinks the world

Dialogical Multiplication and Indigenous Psychology - How to let psychology listen without erasing the Other

The Feeling and Knowing Taá of Christmas 

Republican Capitalism of Spirits without Bodies

NIRS fNIRS EEG ERP Multimodal NIRS-EEG

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#Neuroscience
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