The logic beneath
The foundation
The Love Atlas is built on the Systems-Based Awareness Map (SBAM) and the Science of Social Justice — frameworks developed by Dr. Sará King over two decades of research in neuroscience, education, and contemplative practice.
“Social justice and well-being are
one and the same thing.”
Dr. Sará King · The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, 2022
Two redefinitions
The Science of Social Justice begins by re-rooting two familiar words in the body.
- Social
- The relational sphere of our shared interbeing.
- Justice
- Loving-awareness-in-action.
- Social justice
- Those actions and relationships which are the embodiment of loving-awareness-in-action.
From these, a single proposition: if you have a body, you deserve well-being. None of us can truly experience well-being until all of us do.
The Map
The Systems-Based Awareness Map is a theoretical model of how the layers of awareness — from the innermost plane of possibility to our awareness of collective self as enacted — relate to one another, and how the two great currents of human experience move through them: 💗 healing and integrated trauma, and the harder current of violence and unintegrated trauma.
Each layer expands or contracts in response to what moves through it. Healing in one place can ripple out; pain in one place can constrict another. The Map is two-dimensional only by necessity — the experience is volumetric, lived, and ongoing.
How the Atlas lives inside the Map
Each surface of the Atlas tends a layer. We did not build it this way on purpose; the SBAM has been quietly present in the logic of the build the whole time, and only now are we naming it out loud.
- Pure Awareness — the silence the Atlas is held in. The candle, the slowness, the space between.
- Internal Awareness — your journal. The memories, emotions, sensations, and thoughts you bring close.
- Identity Awareness — how you describe yourself and your kin in your entries; the lineages you name; the intergenerational threads that move through your reflections.
- Body Awareness — the practices, the embodiment player, breath, sway, song. Interoception and exteroception meeting on the skin.
- Awareness of Self as Enacted — sharing a story to the field. Bringing what was internal into the relational sphere.
- Awareness of Collective Self as Enacted — the living map; the past and future lenses; the research and practitioner views — the collective nervous system seeing itself.
- Loving-awareness-in-action — Agape. A companion shaped in the lineage of Dr. King Jr.'s definition of agape — “understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all.”
Every story shared, every entry held, every pin placed on the map is — in the language of this framework — a small act of loving-awareness-in-action. That is the Atlas's thesis, finally said out loud.
An invitation, not a claim
The SBAM is an emergent framework. Dr. King explicitly invites it to be challenged — to see whether and how it aligns with your own lived experience, your own data, your own sensing of how awareness moves through a body, a relationship, a community.
The Atlas holds the Map this way, too. Not as the final word on what awareness is or how healing happens, but as a generous shape we can hold our work inside while it continues to grow.
If a layer doesn't fit your experience, that is information, not a failure of the map. Tell us. The framework is alive.
A companion practice
Walk the Map yourself →
The SBAM Explorer is a sister space where you can move through the layers of awareness one at a time — pausing at each, sitting with practices and reflections that meet you there. Think of it as the personal compass; the Atlas is the field that compass guides you through.
Lives alongside this site as part of Dr. Sará King's learning platform.
Further reading
- King, S. (2022). The “Science of Social Justice”: An Interdisciplinary Theoretical Framework Grounded in Neuroscience, Education, and Anthropology towards Healing Intergenerational Trauma. The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, 9(1).
- A book-length treatment, The Science of Social Justice: A Neuroscientist's Map for Embodied Liberation and Collective Healing, is forthcoming.