Enjoy this 11-minute read or let me read it to you via the recording at the beginning of the post on my website.
Three years ago, I moved to Marin for an apprenticeship in nature connection. A year later, I had learned to camp solo in the wilderness, guide others to open their senses to the wild, and facilitate council sharing. I was also binge-eating, battling suicidal thoughts, and diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder. Some days I was so exhausted I had to take nap breaks in my car and I once lay down on someone’s lawn while taking a walk around my neighborhood because I just couldn’t hold my body up anymore.
What happened? Isn’t nature connection supposed to be good for your health?
What I’ve learned in my two years of coming to terms with living with chronic illness is that spending time in nature isn’t the most important thing. I can be in pristine wilderness, breathing the fresh air and bathing in pure rivers and be actively poisoning myself from the inside.
The way I was connecting with nature was an adrenaline-fueled crusade to prove to some formless entity that I was worthy of divine intervention. When I camped, I snuck into areas that were off-limits to sleep tent-free under bushes to avoid being noticed. When I hiked, I left the trail and took off straight up the steep slopes through tick-infested grasses and past snake holes, and stumbled down alone in the dark with the sounds of wild animals around me. When I listened to my muse, she had me stripping down to forge a swiftly moving creek along a major highway.
All of this made me feel alive. I grieved hard. I felt ecstatic. I felt, heard, and saw things in the wild and deep within myself that left me humbled and in awe. And I felt certain that my bold abandon was proving I was committed and hardcore enough for Mystery to open doors for me. But even when opportunities appeared, I was too physically exhausted to follow through. And the deeper my spiritual experiences were, the more I resented having to leave the hills and climb back into sterile buildings with glaring lights and robotic work. I knew I wasn’t the sort to leave it all behind and live in a tent in the woods, and I began to hate myself for it. And that resentment spilled over onto my whole life, my community, and humanity itself.
Now that year feels to me less like a genuine experience of nature connection and more like an addict hitting rock bottom, running themselves ragged in pursuit of some elusive fulfillment or redemption. I hated where I was, I didn’t know how to deal with my pain, and I was convinced I had to sacrifice everything to be worthy of rescue. In an ironic and totally unexpected way, that’s exactly what happened. Only it wasn’t some prophetic dream or perfect job or well-networked mentor. It was my own body.
Nature, as it manifests in the soil of my flesh, taught me that what I was doing was not the way. It gave up and shut down. I spent almost two years doing everything I could to try to get my body back on-line, so I could get on with everything I desperately NEEDED to do to redeem my mistakes, live up to my potential, feel safe and secure, and soothe the shame of feeling my life fall apart. But when my symptoms just got worse, I finally gave up too, and let my body lead. As much as it terrified me, my life had to be about today – today and only today – and my willingness to face into whatever challenges it had for me, and seek out whatever pleasure I could.
Living with chronic illness means that some days, I just feel super shitty for no reason. Some days, I have to show up for work or a creative project that gives my life meaning and I’m operating at 10%. It’s not like having the flu when rescheduling for later means I know I’ll feel better. This my life. Deciding to commit to something, anything, is like getting married because I’ll have to show up for it no matter how I’m feeling. I don’t have the luxury to feel sorry for myself or angry with myself – or anything for that matter. Anger and despair take too much energy and only make me feel much, much worse. I have to accept what I’m able to give in each moment, show up as best I can, and rest when I can. I have to appreciate the shit out of myself at every step and fully inhale every little moment of relief and beauty that comes my way.
Through this process, my sense of the spiritual is changing. It’s not something out there to prove myself to, to gain attention from or to impress. As I’ve been practicing self-love in myriad forms, I’ve started experiencing a sense of presence and tenderness simply in being with myself, regardless of my opinion of what’s happening, what I’m doing, or how I’m feeling. There’s a sweetness to just being here, with me, in my body, with nothing to achieve or change. I start to wonder if whatever’s out there, whether I call it God or Nature, looks at me the same way. The former hierarchy begins to break down and we are just co-existing together, regarding each other.
I’m not able to go out into nature as I once did. It triggers heart-break and a trauma response in my body. The exertion of moving across the landscape is too difficult. But surprisingly, I don’t mind. Nature is my body. There is literally soil in my gut, a forest in my lungs, electricity in my brain, mountains in my bones, and rivers in my arteries. They are building, breaking down, exchanging nutrients inside of me. Most of the cells in my body aren’t even mine, but belong to visitors: bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites.
As Gabor Mate says, we misunderstand illness when we think of it as separate from us, as an invader to be ousted. Disease happens in my soil, my water, my air. There’s nowhere for it to go but back into a more balanced rhythm. And are we, as humans, not the same? We are not alien viruses on the planet, some scientific experiment gone awry. We are part of a system that is trying to reincorporate us into a more balanced rhythm. The way I heal my body is the way the earth heals itself. Slowing down, listening, stretching, redistributing resources, culling and building. I can do this willingly, with listening and intention, and rediscover grace and wonder. Or I can fight back, become cynical and defensive, and speed my separation from this world: metaphorically and literally.
I do not believe we can really be in nature, let alone be in life-affirming relationship to it, if are unable to be in our own bodies. Connection starts with digging my roots into the soil of my own body. As I have sunk deeper and deeper into my own skin, I am much more easily able to feel myself inside another. When I can feel what it is to be that tree, to be that raven, the conversation and understanding becomes profound, far more transformative than speculation on sustainability or morality. When I contact what is essential and unchanging at the core of both me and that tree and raven, our relationship shifts from being between two independent physical forms to communion with what it means to be alive and sentient – with vitality and consciousness that permeates this entire planet in endless diversity.
I can be in the most beautiful landscape in the world and be cold and untouchable if I am dissociated from myself. And I can be in an ecstasy of interconnection in the center of a high rise in New York if I can settle into the movement of the breath, blood, and ether through my own form. I experience directly the inherent beauty of what it is to be me, and each and every creature. In this space, I realize that I cannot harm something I feel myself to be a part of – whether that is my own body or another’s.
I invite you to feel yourself inhabiting your own skin right now. Put your hands on your hips and see if you can feel the subtle vibration between them in the center of your pelvis, deep in your core. Feel for a sense of warmth in your chest and see if you can feel it radiating out the back and the front. Look for the pea-sized point in the center of your head, right between your ears. Not your crown. Not your third eye. But that point resting on the inside, right in the center. Hold those three points simultaneously in your awareness. As you practice more fully inhabiting your own body, you may experience yourself becoming more capable of feeling what it’s like to live inside of anything you see.
What would it be like to live from this place?
Nancy
Thanks to Judith Blackstone and the Realization Process for giving me the words to describe and deepen the sense of presence I’ve always felt. And to Somatic Experiencing for gently reintroducing me to the experience of being safe in my body.
Join the discussion on what it means to connect with nature in genuine, meaningful, and creative ways at 10am PT each Saturday on Zoom. Learn more and sign up at www.InnerWoven.net/Wild.