[Rachel Thor]

I think there are SO many ways to answer this question, and there is particular lens sticking out strongly to me now. “To be connected to nature is to be in intimate relationship with the unknown.” Let me unpack that idea.

In Wilderness as a Healing Place by John Miles, Ph.D, researchers Stephen Kaplan and Janet Frey Talbot outline the three psychological benefits they found to spending time in nature. I will argue that these are psychologically beneficial because they have been – or are still – also evolutionarily beneficial.

Being in nature gives people a sense of spiritual connection and purpose. When you are fully immersed in nature, what you need to do to survive (eg build a fire), what you want to do for fun, flow states, or community, (eg build a fire), and what you are skilled to do through your learned strengths and intuitive pull – which may lead you toward the right flint stone or dry wood for the job – are all aligned toward the same thing – building a fire. I believe and have felt personally that this simple alignment of our wants, needs, and skills creates tremendous satisfaction, gratification, and a sense that we are exactly where we belong.

Kaplan and Talbot call this feeling competence or fascination. Csíkszentmihályi calls this alignment, in different terms, Flow. For him it’s the sweet spot where our skill sets and our challenges match each other appropriately. And according to positive psychology’s definition of happiness, it’s one of the 3 forms of happiness required for a holistic happy life. The three forms of happiness per the APA (positive psychology) are hedonistic, engagement, and altruistic. The idea is to have a relatively balanced world of all three.

1. Hedonistic is the happiness that results from pleasure: having sex, buying new shoes, or having a fun time. My opinion is that this form is talking very specifically about a certain drug that’s released in your brain’s reward center – dopamine. A hit of dopamine, directly created by a hit of cocaine or sugar for that matter, is a hit of hedonic happiness! Pleasure all the way (and mmm it feels good). We have traced most of our addictive behaviors back to dopamine addiction, and we can track dopamine hits back to our evolutionary roots – of our brain wanting to reward us for eating the right things and procreating.

2. Engagement is the happiness that results from flow: playing a piece of music that simultaneously challenges you yet you can succeed at, or focusing so intently on creating something – art, spreadsheets, sports strategy – that you lose track of time. This is an activity where your skill set meets the challenge at hand and you are getting immediate feedback along the way to know how well you’re doing at the task. Your brain and body are in the zone and chemicals fly. This is the first form of happiness I see Kaplan and Talbot talking about when they point to our wants, needs, and skills while living in the wilderness being aligned.

3. Altruistic is the happiness that results from acting on behalf of something larger than yourself: this type of happiness may actually come in direct conflict with the pleasure kind, but it doesn’t HAVE to. (aka this could mean you giving up your warm lunch to the homeless person on the street, so now you have less but you feel happy that they have more. But this also could mean that you use your gifts of art to create beauty for someone who is sad, thus you don’t lose in order for them to gain, it gets multiplied) This type of happiness refers to feeling like you have a generative purpose in the world, that you contribute, that you are making the world better for others in some way. Whether it’s created through a larger shared religious or spiritual narrative, or found through some other form of giving, I believe that this happiness comes from our evolutionary basis as a hive species that thrives on indirect reciprocity. (If we all give to the person in front of us, we can trust someone will give to us when we need it, doesn’t have to be tit for tat when we are all collaborating. – Read more about this concept in an awesome book called Super Cooperators.) This is the second form of happiness I see Talbot and Kaplan describing and I’ll explain why next.

Someone with their wants, needs, and skills aligned in the wild (what the researchers discovered to be true), will have a self that feels more integrated. This sense of belonging creates more spaciousness for inner reflection to be positive (stronger internal connections), and for deepened relationships with nature and other humans to be more healthy and mutual (stronger external connections). According to Kaplan and Talbot, “This can further create a sense of connection with something much larger than themselves, of vast size and high importance – a spiritual transcendence.”

The “spiritual path” used to feel “out there” to me, something external or higher to seek. But more and more I am unpacking its overlaps with our natural evolutionary needs. It makes sense that we feel an extra strong evolutionary chemical reward when the things we desire match the things that help us survive, AND that lead us to the ultimate bliss, which we know as transcendence. Our evolutionary history LIKES IT when we get all these things aligned.

So what I’m saying is that ultimately, as soon as we put ourselves back into nature, the place we derived from in every way and the place our evolutionary feedback loops are all programmed to work in conjunction with, we pretty immediately see the natural implications of at least the two most important of the three types of happiness.

We find our engagement happiness – our flow – where nature provides us challenges we can learn to meet and excel at (albeit I think this is one of the biggest reasons why we need skilled guides and mentors who still know the skills who can teach them again.) We also find our altruistic happiness – our purpose. It becomes easy to feel a sense of belonging, and therefore a deep desire to connect to and support all things both inside and out. These are the raw experiences and beliefs needed for that spiritual transcendence. (I’d also argue that nature meets the first form of happiness too. That once someone goes through a hedonic detox from TV and doughnuts etc. that their brain would being building new brain patterns for different pleasures, ones found in nature, like seeing tracks, hearing bird calls, or discovering fruit. I feel like I experienced those pathways growing just from our intensive week!)

So why don’t we just go back to nature immediately if it fulfils our needs for pleasure, flow, and transcendence, if it will make us happy in all these important ways? I believe the answer to this is stunning. Because we hold an illusion of control over our lives that we are afraid of losing.

In coaching skills on page 6, Rogers says “all clients fear two things: vulnerability and a lack of control”. Kaplan and Talbot iterated this with their second benefit for people spending time in nature: Increased self-confidence and tranquility by letting go of the illusion of control (my words).

“People realize by the vastness of the wilderness that they cannot control their settings, and paradoxically, this allows them to relax and trust themselves to handle whatever situations arise within the nature context.”

I think for so many of us in so many walks of life, we live this life of teetering on the edge of what we’ve built, pretending it’s stable or predictable, but as soon as we look up and out, we see a much wider world. That big world, whether it be leaving an old relationship or starting a new career or moving cities or literally taking a wilderness trip, is an invitation to cross the threshold of the illusion that we can control the larger outcomes.

It can be a shaky process I think, and indeed moreso because we are so culturally afraid of the unknown, but once someone has crossed that plane and has spent time getting their feet under them in the new world, the natural world, they can start to see that yes, they don’t control it, but they also work within it, and it’s not something they need to be afraid of.

The “unknown” itself is the natural state of unfolding that’s all around us, it IS nature. And yet, we find that nature is far less scary than we thought it would be as soon as we start spending time with her, especially with someone we trust who knows the ways of the her already. The more someone feels at ease in the unknown of the wilderness, the more known and comfortable the vast changing landscape becomes, and the more intimate a real relationship and a true connection can be. I believe nature is the sole (and soul) threshold we are wanting to cross back to, but this process can play out in any area of life for a client as mentioned above.

So I think that as a coach, the more comfortable I become with the skills and beliefs needed to be settled in a world of unknowns, the more competently I can trust joining the unknown of my clients. Likewise as a guide, practicing those same skills and maps makes me more capable of guiding someone into and across a threshold of unknown terrain, because ultimately one of my goals is to give other humans those very skills and beliefs they need to traverse the wilderness of their internal landscapes with curiosity and ease – the same unknown that lives “outside our houses” lives inside our hearts – because we are nature. To be connected to nature is to be in intimate relationship with the unknown, which includes the vast and mysterious depths of our own souls. And that is why I love coaching!

[Rachel Thor]

just noticing next Wednesday is valentines day – if we still have the call early in the day like same time as today I can definitely make it! Not evening though

[Rachel Thor]

WOW I have loved catching up on these. I should have checked this discussion before I sent that email but oh well, I’m caught up now 😉

You are all so beautiful and pouring so much heart and soul into this life and this community and this vision, I am incredibly inspired.

I’ll add my contact info again here
954 Grace St.
State College PA 16801
814-575-0851

[Rachel Thor]

Zak, awesome and insightful post. I love your voice (in person and in writing) because I always feel a sense of that depth of connection that’s been well integrated into “this world”. concise and poignant, and very meaningful. I just wanted to say thanks for living your life as a bridge!

My favorite quote from your post is this: “This heightened sense of awareness and personal connection to self and soul, allows me to speak and act from a place of authenticity. I’ve always believed that as an instructor or guide, I cannot lead someone someplace I have not been and experienced firsthand. As I continue to connect and explore the underworld of my soul, I am creating a detailed map that I will then be able to use in assisting clients in their journey to soul.” I LOOOVE this and agree a lot. I resonate especially with the metaphor of the map.

Gabrielle Roth says that “between the head and feet of any person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness.” It seems to be the more we explore our own wilderness, the more we become equipped to “track” our internal selves, our souls, which helps us help others in their exploration too. Such an honor to be guiding in this life with you!

[Rachel Thor]

Mandy it’s so sweet to read your post. I resonate SO MUCH with many aspects of it.

First of all, your quote, “We often engage with the outdoors in the same manner we engage with the rest of our lives — in a hurried, outcome-oriented, agenda-oriented, and sometimes controlling manner. This is in stark contrast to being connected to nature.” is brilliant. I feel that pull between BE-ing and do-ing when it comes to cultural nature norms. I remember taking nature/rec studies classes in undergrad and the class being asked “what’s your favorite thing to do in nature?” and people’s answered varied from one exciting thing to another, rock climbing, mountain biking, adventure racing… I felt a little embarrassed at the time that my “favorite thing to do” was -nothing-. That I loved nature the most when I was doing nothing. I didn’t have the words or confidence to stand for that relationship yet, but I do now! I think we all do a little better because of each other 🙂

Your next quote, “this is the gateway to begin to move through the healing process from a place of not belonging towards a place where one values oneself enough to recognize that they have unique gifts to bring forth into the world.” is exactly WHY doing -nothing- is my favorite thing. An incredibly gifted friend of mine once told me (and I’ll never forget it) that healing happens at the pace of nature. So profound for me. What an invitation to slow down and be. an invitation that BE-ing itself is the healing process. Thanks for sharing such wonderful insight and inspiration.

[Rachel Thor]

Hey Kent,

It was so lovely to read your post. I felt so many similarities ringing true for me. I loved following your story of the pendulum swinging between the natural world of flow and the structured world of civilization.
These words stuck out along that journey:
“I couldn’t see how these two, seemingly opposite, existences could ever come together.”
“Coyote teaches me balance and how to walk the edges of the worlds I find myself in.”
and especially
“The role of a coach/guide is one who is walking these edges; running a private practice business and all of its modern trappings, while tapping into soul and primitive instinct/awareness.”

I literally stayed up til 1am working on my website last night because it felt right. Then this morning I felt anxious about needing to finish (my brain had swung from integration to entrapment). After I taught yoga, I came to my desk and decided to listen deeply to nature and myself, and let everything settle again, to let everything be okay again. And my soul whispered to come read your posts! So that phrase especially is tickling me – that is totally where we’re at! How do we listen, slow down, then get it done when the timing calls for it, then remember to slow back down again!? This is the path and I’m so glad to have fellow travelers on it!

It also reminds me that I think this level of the two polarities, the “battle” as it were (David I know you called it this way) the two extremes on the pendulum of our natural ancestry and all the advances of our technological society… they have been so at odds for such a long time, and I think that we are CULTURALLY starting to bring the two sides together into integration. More execs are realizing they need nature and mindfulness, more hippies are learning how to walk in the world of business. I used to want to run away to the woods and forget it all too, but I am so thankful we have all decided to keep journeying up the mountain and then back down the mountain to bring the gifts to our people.