True Devotion: when belonging creates the desire to give back

What if devotion were not fear, debt, or obligation, but the natural impulse to give back when the body feels it belongs?

The word “devotion” is often associated with religion, promises, sacrifice, or obedience. It can carry the idea that when we receive something from a higher force, we must repay, prove, or compensate. But there may be a deeper and healthier way to understand devotion.

True devotion does not arise from guilt.
It arises from belonging.

This became clear in a simple conversation. A friend, feeling anxious, said he needed to do something great because he had received an inspiration, a gift, something good that came from unexpected encounters in life. When asked why he felt he needed to do something, he replied: “If I receive a gift or an inspiration, I must make a devotion to God.”

Behind the anxiety, there was something true: when the body feels it has received something good, it wants to give back. The problem begins when this desire becomes debt, pressure, or fear. Inspiration, which could open the body to gratitude, can be captured by Zone 3 and turn into urgency and obligation.

Decolonial Neuroscience must look at this carefully. The point is not to reduce spiritual experience to brain activity, nor to deny its value. The point is to recognize that spirituality also passes through the body. When someone feels inspiration, beauty, care, protection, or belonging, the body changes. Breathing changes. Attention changes. Posture changes. The sense of self changes.

Contemporary research on gratitude supports part of this intuition. Gratitude is associated with prosocial behavior, well-being, mental health, and greater willingness to help others. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis found that gratitude-based interventions can increase gratitude and improve mental health outcomes.

This is close to what we call true devotion.

True devotion is the moment when the body, feeling benefited by life, wants to participate more deeply in it. It is not “I must pay back.” It is “I want the flow to continue.” It is not debt. It is circulation.

The distinction is decisive.

Debt contracts the body.
Gratitude expands the body.

Debt creates fear of not fulfilling.
Gratitude creates the desire to contribute.

Debt seeks settlement.
True devotion seeks continuity.

In our language, debt tends to push the body toward Zone 3: anxiety, urgency, obligation, and defense. Gratitude can open the path toward Zone 2: presence, fruition, metacognition, creativity, and cooperation.

This is why the friend’s story matters. He was feeling something great, but his body interpreted that greatness as demand. Inspiration became task. Gift became burden. Belonging became obligation.

This is common in societies shaped by fear, guilt, and scarcity. Many people cannot receive something good without immediately feeling they must compensate. The body does not rest in the gift. It turns grace into debt.

From a decolonial perspective, devotion can be restored to another place: not submission, but living reciprocity.

In Andean worlds, the relationship with Pachamama involves gratitude, offering, and reciprocity with the Earth. These practices are not simply “religious” in the modern sense. They are territorial. One gives thanks because one knows life comes through land, water, mountain, food, ancestors, and community.

Here we see the difference between colonial devotion and devotion of belonging.

Colonial devotion can be used to generate fear, obedience, and guilt.
Devotion of belonging arises from reciprocity with life.

When someone gives thanks to Pachamama, APUS, territory, or dEUS, the central issue is not paying a metaphysical debt. It is recognizing that life does not arise alone. Food comes from Earth. Water comes from cycles. Inspiration comes from encounters. Consciousness comes from the body in relation. The self is born within many selves, many bodies, and many beings.

This is the bridge with dEUS.

In the previous blog, dEUS was defined as the moment when the selves stop competing and begin to compose. True devotion is one consequence of that composition. When the Tensional Selves stop fighting for command and the body begins to feel belonging, a natural desire to care, thank, and give back emerges.

This impulse also connects with Jiwasa. In a healthy collective, people do not contribute only because they fear punishment. They contribute because they feel they are part of something. “We” creates responsibility, but a different kind of responsibility: embodied responsibility, born from bond.

Thus, true devotion is a form of Jiwasa.

It says:
“what I received does not end in me.”
“the gift must circulate.”
“inspiration asks for care.”
“the life that crossed me can also cross others.”

Relational neuroscience and hyperscanning research help support this view. Studies show that cooperation, trust, shared goals, and empathic interaction can produce synchronization between brains and bodies. Science calls this coupling, synchrony, or social coordination. In our reading, it is also the body finding a field of belonging.

When there is trust, the body synchronizes better.
When there is gratitude, the body opens to the other.
When there is belonging, contribution stops being a burden and becomes flow.

Recent interoception research also shows that listening to and trusting internal bodily signals is linked to psychological change and mind-body integration. This reinforces the idea that devotion cannot be analyzed only as belief. It must also be understood as embodied experience: the body perceives, receives, regulates, and responds.

The question is no longer only: “what do you believe?”
It becomes: what does your body do when it feels it has received life?

If it enters debt, perhaps it is in Zone 3.
If it enters care, perhaps it is in Zone 2.

This distinction matters politically.

A society based on permanent debt produces anxious bodies: financial debt, moral debt, religious debt, productivity debt, performance debt. The person lives as if they are never enough. Never did enough. Never gave back enough. Never deserved enough.

This destroys true devotion because it turns the gift into charge.

A society based on belonging asks a different question: what conditions allow people to give back with joy, creativity, and care? For this, we need territory, time, health, education, safety, food, bonds, and future.

This is where DREX Cidadão appears as social metabolism. If money is born only in debt, it reinforces collective anxiety. But if it is born in the citizen, as minimal energy of belonging, it can reduce survival pressure and allow contribution to arise from another place: not fear, but participation.

True devotion does not need to be grand. It can appear in simple gestures: caring for a child, planting a tree, teaching someone, conducting research, protecting memory, organizing a community, creating music, writing a blog, defending territory.

What defines true devotion is not the size of the gesture.
It is the bodily state from which it arises.

If it arises from fear, it becomes burden.
If it arises from belonging, it becomes care.

Perhaps the friend’s sentence can be reorganized:

“If I receive a gift or inspiration, I do not need to become indebted before God. I can care better for the life that passed through me.”

That is the turning point.

Inspiration does not need to become anxiety.
A gift does not need to become obligation.
Gratitude does not need to become guilt.

True devotion is the body saying:

I belong, therefore I want to contribute.

And perhaps this is one of the most beautiful forms of Zone 2: when the life received does not remain trapped in the self, but circulates through Jiwasa, APUS, Pachamama, and dEUS.

References

DAMASIO, Antonio. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021.
Foundational for understanding consciousness as embodied, interoceptive, and situated.

KRENAK, Ailton. Futuro Ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
Helps frame belonging, ancestry, care, and continuity of life.

ESCOBAR, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.
Supports thinking about territory, pluriverse, and relational modes of existence.

D’ARCANGELIS, Carol Lynne; QUIROGA, Lorna. “Cuerpo-Territorio: Towards Feminist Solidarities in the Americas.” Revista Eletrônica da ANPHLAC, 2023.
Connects body-territory, Indigenous feminisms, reciprocity, and resistance to extractivism.

DINIZ, G. et al. “The effects of gratitude interventions: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” einstein, 2023.
Shows positive effects of gratitude interventions on mental health and well-being.

HAZLETT, L. I. et al. “Gratitude and Prosocial Behavior.” 2021.
Links gratitude, prosocial behavior, and physiological responses related to threat.

SCHUMAN-OLIVIER, Z. et al. “Change Starts with the Body: Interoceptive Appreciation…” 2024.
Shows the importance of listening to and trusting internal bodily signals for psychological change and mind-body integration.

AP NEWS. “Burnt offerings, whispering to mountains: Inside Bolivians’ rituals for Mother Earth.” 2025.
Reports contemporary rituals of gratitude and reciprocity toward Pachamama in Andean traditions.