[Jen Medrick]

Hi all,

I have been having a hard time for the last few weeks on multiple fronts, feeling a bit like I am drowning. I’ve had moments of sheer joy, clarity, and wonder, but also been walking with overwhelm and grief. I feel a bit like I’m in a (seasonably appropriate) place of freeze and thaw. I apologize for my absence from this discussion until now. I am deeply committed to this work and to this rich circle of community and am seeking support so that I can continue to show up.

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Here is my belated response to the question:
What does it mean to be connected to Nature, and how can that relationship support your coaching?

Steven Harper in the Way of Wilderness mentions learning that there is no word for wilderness in the Okanagan language. When I consider what it means to be connected to Nature, this feels so resonant. For me, being connected to nature is an ongoing coming home, a re-membering or returning to our essential belonging. We are nature. I am nature. Not separate, woven in. The wilderness is not out there, it is the pulse of life and form through all things, including me! When I am in contact with what is natural and wild in myself, in another, and in the world, I come to my senses. Literally. I am simultaneously the center of the world, this unique individual expression (Soul) having an experience, and one with the larger collective unfolding of Life, of All That Is. I simultaneously matter and don’t. I find this freeing. And it allows me to invite this same experience in and for another.

We are made of sunlight and soil, of minerals, of all the body’s salty seas. We share breath with trees. Our homes are made of sticks and stones, warmed by fires from burning fossils or the lightning of electricity. We eat the energy captured by green plants and woven into flesh and form. Like all the other beings, we live and grow and procreate and learn and die. The very ground beneath our feet is formed from the bodies of all the life that has come before, including our ancestors. Our minds evolved through generations of interactions and explorations. Our language arises in direct relationship to the world. Our very beingness arises from our interdependence with Nature.

We can forget however, both individually and collectively, that we belong. And this forgetting leads to so much of the “dis-ease” on physical, emotional, energetic, intellectual, and spiritual levels that besets our human experience. Reconnecting to Nature means expanding our awareness, stepping outside of the narrow and artificially limited ways of being that our culture or family may have taught us, dropping the illusion of our separateness. For me, coming back to my true nature is the most important work I can do. This is true on the personal level and on the larger collective level. It is a path, a practice, a deliberate engagement. I have been blessed to be raised by a father who walks this path himself.

Harper speaks to how wilderness or nature itself is the teacher… I might expand this to say that nature is also the companion, the territory, the healer, the mirror, even the beloved. In contact with the world, I gain perspective. I often get direct feedback on my impact (concentric rings!), my capacity, my deeper needs. I am impacted. I belong. I am met, nourished, challenged, ignored, seen, stalked, swept away, moved, held. I take up space, leave footprints, startle the hawk from the tree, cause ripples in fields of prairie dogs, successfully climb the tree or traverse the ravine. I drink in the coolness of water, taste the tart sweetness of raspberries, breathe in the crisp clean scent of sage. The sunset drenches my eyes with color – is that color for me or are my eyes for that color, that light? Gravity pulls me to the Earth, an embrace. The sun warms my skin. I meet my own edge as I walk the line of a ridge or explore balance crossing a swift stream on shifting stones. There is room for grief, joy, rage, curiosity, laughter, play, desire, fear… Emotions can move through, like water or clouds flow. There is an immediacy, a now-ness, to nature connection. Embodiment happens. Aliveness happens.

In connecting to nature, within and without, I start to see patterns, metaphors, and conceptual possibilities. I reflect on the seasons and rhythms of life, the ebb and flow of being. As a woman, my body has mirrored the waxing and waning of the moon. As a mother, I have carried an ocean in my womb that brought forth new life (like the primordial waters where all life arose). Like Summer, my daughter is moving into her own ripening, puberty a rite of passage. My parents are in the Winter of their lives, things falling away, slowing down, dying. Perhaps I am in the Autumn, harvesting where I’ve been and flaring up in new brilliant colors. There is grief and wonder, promise and hope, in these patterns. Life gives itself to Life (including through death). Spring stirs and sings and rises again after the freeze or inertness of Winter. The dawn bursts forth anew each day even after the longest night. This happens within me as well as without.

Nature connection is a relationship. I have cultivated this particular relationship throughout my life. Sit spots, wanders, solo quests, and ceremonial marking of seasons and cycles have been ongoing ways I’ve nourished connection. I have gone to both inner and outer territories for renewal, for resource. I have been welcomed as I am through the grief and rage of my divorce, crying in rain and snow and wind. I have walked my talk, trying on how I would move if I were confident, if I belonged, if I had purpose, if I we’re a coyote or a raven, if I were fierce or in love. I have sung, laughing and crying with wonder, to drifting clouds, soaring hawks, rising cliffs, bighorn sheep. I have carried pebbles and sticks and the occasional bone home when they spoke to me of my path and asked to slip in my pocket. I have simply gone out to meet my kith and kin as neighbors and friends – listening to the whispers and rattling of the wind through the Cottonwood leaves or speaking greetings to the prairie dogs or cawing in raucous delight to the crows or ravens wheeling and tumbling through the sky. All these beings are going about their own lives and paths. My life makes more sense through contact with all the others with whom I / we share the world. I expand beyond the smaller self. My mind quiets. I am filled with reverence and awe, curiosity, and a sense of mutual responsibility for the well-being of the world to which we belong. Indeed, that reverence and responsibility become part of my purpose, my soul calling.

As a coach and guide, my own belonging, my own familiarity with and recognition of this territory, is essential if I intend to invite others into their true nature, their fullness of being, their belonging as one exquisite expression of All That Is.

In Coaching Skills, Jenny Rodgers speaks to coaching being about closing “the gap between people’s potential and their current state.” As coaches, we hold that our clients are resourceful and capable, that our relationship is one between equals. This relationship between equals also extends to our client’s engagement with the world as well – we can invite them into their own deep connection to nature and soul. We support our clients in becoming self-aware and intentional, able to explore, imagine, and choose new ways of being and behaving in line with their own goals, needs, and intentions.

As a guide, because I have found my own way into relationship with nature, I can invite clients into direct contact with themselves and the world in an immediate and visceral way. I can invite clients to notice their own sensory awareness, to be struck by a moment of beauty, to explore fear or discomfort, to listen to (or not) the impulse to go one way or another, to stretch out and take up space, to be startled or joyful or angry, to meet what arises within and without… In the same way that I have carried my questions, doubts, longings, curiosity, and feelings into the world, I can invite my clients to do the same and to listen to the responses that arise through this exploration. The practices of nature connection that live in me, that I have tended myself, become the invitations I bring as a coach to my clients.

As John Miles discusses in Wilderness as a Healing Place, so much happens in this place of embodied and visceral contact. Physical health increases, awareness expands, contemplation emerges. A collaboration between guide, client, and nature can open all of our eyes to something new. Our relationship to the multilayered world unfolds as a reciprocal engagement, a conversation, that can inform all aspects of our lives.

Being connected to Nature is about being in contact with the full range of our actual experience, about recognizing our inherent belonging to and arising from the living world all around us. It is about coming to our senses, expanding our awareness, recognizing interconnection, being impacted by our connections and interactions, (re)inhabiting our bodies, deep listening, exploring new territory, expanding our choices, being held in the community of life, and stepping into our soul callings and knowings… and these are core elements of the what coaching is about as well.

The same awareness and wonder, the open-minded beingness, the flexibility and intention that I bring to my own connection to nature are also what I bring to my clients. As a coach, it is a privilege, an exquisite honor, to support people in their thriving. And this is what we need, now. People who are thriving, who are enlivened, connected, embodied, reverent, and purposeful, in whatever way is uniquely theirs. Bringing nature and coaching together is a natural path of transformation that can enhance wholeness, resilience, adaptability, creativity, and other qualities of our full potential as members of this collective unfolding.

[Jen Medrick]

Hi everyone,
I joined the upcoming January 2021 NCC cohort this week and am jumping into this course to get the ball rolling. I missed last week and hope to catch up quickly. Excited to meet you all!

I am an intuitive mentor and guide from Boulder, CO. I’m at the threshold of launching my own private practice after years of working within other people’s organizations and visions. I work with people to heal, transform, and integrate places of pain and contraction, claim the resilience, capacity, and joy of their own wild aliveness, and explore and develop their sense of purpose and soul calling. I’m interested in expanding my toolset for supporting people in claiming their embodiment, their belonging in this exquisite living world, and their sense of the Sacred. This work is a path, not a destination, and my desire is create ripples of interconnection and well-being everywhere I can. I believe that enlivened, connected, and inspired people will be available to co-create a more beautiful world in which we ALL thrive.

Previously I’ve been a web developer, a bookseller, and a wandering wench. I have deep roots in the natural world and am only now really seeking to weave what brings me so much personal gratitude and resource into my professional life. I’m also mother to an astounding, fierce tween daughter and live with two adolescent feral kittens.

[Jen Medrick]

Sue, I am struck by the clarity and strength of your description of the whole arc of how wilderness and nature connection can evoke growth, transformation, ceremony, self-worth, personal discovery, and more. I particularly resonate with your repeated emphasis that the shifts arise from WITHIN in contact with what is without. I’m curious how you personally engage with this in your own experience. What places or practices have met you in such a way that you are changed? That give you that feeling or living in alignment and embodying your knowing? I’d love to hear more!

[Jen Medrick]

Rachel, I love hearing about how you already work with your clients in the natural world and the inquisitiveness you bring to your engagement with their unique experience. I know you have been out in the field (not sure when you return)… I’m wondering how you personally respond to the “confinement of being indoors and the lack of spaciousness” when you return? Is that your experience too? I am always curious how others make sense of the idea that being out in the wilderness is the primary place to contact nature. It is certainly deeply profound and has all the ceremonial marking of severance / threshold / return (incorporation) as well as the removal from the habitual patterns and contexts in which most of us live. And, I feel a deep commitment to remembering and connecting to nature everywhere, including indoors or in the flow of life – even the grocery store! 😉 How do you help your clients with re-entry? How do you tend yourself here? I’d love to hear if sharing feels good.

Also, having been a recipient of the words and insights that simply come through you when you slow down, tune in, and listen, allowing your inherent nature to speak through you, you already share this naturally with others (me!) and it is such a gift!