[Simka]

I’m sixteen years old, sitting under a tree in the New Mexican mountains, damp and cold and hungry, picking the bark off a stick and waiting for sundown. I’m out here to do a quiet sit, fasting and sitting alone from dawn till dusk. But I’m doing a terrible job, and I know it.

I just can’t get my head to shut off, my senses to open, my body to be still. I feel sullen, fidgety, on the verge of tears. I’m supposed to be out here having some profound experience as the others at camp no doubt have had, but instead I’m angry at the proof that I wasn’t ready for this. I’m surrounded by nature, and I can’t connect with it.

No surprise, really: I grew up with immense anxiety, the youngest and most troubled member of a family consumed by the beauty of intricate ideas. My anxious brain was constantly striving to prove myself, get it right, be on a par with the others.

Although we spent a great deal of time in wild, rural, and natural spaces, it is interesting to realize that I have vanishingly few childhood memories of a sense of ease in or connection to nature (though the memories I do have of such an experience stick out more vividly than any others). I know there were many more times where I enjoyed myself or found beauty outside, but my focus was nearly always on doing something, knowing something, or achieving something in those natural surroundings.

Very occasionally, the door to real connection opened: in a thunderstorm, an intense bond with a Ponderosa pine that gave me shelter; the exuberance of a tree’s experience of summer reaching me through the pulsing scent of orange blossoms late one night; the alien universe of wasps unveiled to me by my entomologist great-uncle on a trip to Tel Aviv. But the door always closed again, and I couldn’t find the key to unlock it — leaving me disappointed, confused, and angry like I was on my quiet sit as a teenager.

In my early twenties, I began to address my anxiety through somatic practices. Yoga, bodywork, breathwork, body scans, and more opened up a world of simply being that I hadn’t previously known existed. Through these practices, I learned to let go of analysis, explanation, and striving, letting my curiosity roam through noticing and greeting instead of parsing and fixing.

That was exactly my experience in those rare, fleeting moments of connection with nature as a child: a deep, wordless sense of being, of mutuality, unfurling in me. Except now I could return to it, again and again, through my somatic practices. I began to feel and attend to the subtleties and nuances of my sensations, alarm calls, longings and needs, rhythms — not through words, but through awareness and presence.

I learned to drop into connection to the nature of my body. My anxiety faded; I stopped having panic attacks, stopped taking medication.

***

In his classic and influential work I and Thou (1923), Martin Buber proposes two attitudes of existence: the first, ‘I-It,’ is an attitude of objectivity, of experience or use. The second, ‘I-Thou,’ is an attitude of relation, a wholeness with a ‘Thou.’ He describes this latter attitude as follows:

“But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation and the tree ceases to be an It…. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it — only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.” (p. 58)

It is this relation and reciprocity described in the I-Thou attitude that I believe is at the heart of nature connection. Indeed, Young, Haas, and McGown describe nature connection in terms of relationship in Coyote’s Guide: “When we say connection, we mean a familiarity, a sense of kinship, just as we experience with our human family. The goal includes knowledge and skills, but ultimately relationships restore our bond to nature” (p. 30).

So what is that ‘joining of will and grace’ that elicits this state of relation? I believe it has to do with letting go of striving towards knowledge and control. In a recent episode of For The Wild Podcast, Dr. Natasha Myers talks about an ‘ethic of not knowing’ that allows us to open up our hearts, minds, and sensorium to other sensibilities and ‘ways of doing life’. By laying aside our colonial preconceptions about what can be knowable, she says, we can focus our attention beyond what we’ve been taught matters, and fully be in the presence of another being.

This doesn’t have to be a conscious, brainy practice, however. My fleeting childhood experiences of true connection with nature were all prompted by a momentary lowering of my defenses against the unknown: the intense power of a thunderstorm; simple boundless joy of summer scents; a new country and new relationship with a relative. Although I normally clung to knowing, prediction, and analysis as methods of maintaining a sense of safety through control over the unknown in my environment, these pieces of wildness nudged me into letting go, even if briefly, and enter into immediate, timeless relationship.

Similarly, when I later learned through the practice of yoga to drop in to the unexplainable, irrational, unparseable realm of my own body’s nature, I began to inhabit myself, partnering with my body in a kinship and healing that went far deeper than words.

When we enter and, with that joining of will and grace, sit with wilderness — be it bodily or external — we experience a wholeness that, as Steven Harper notes, “is perhaps the most healing experience available to us” (The Way of Wilderness, p. 196).

***

As I’ve gotten older, my ability to connect to the wildness of my body has extended to ease in connection to external wilderness, too. Over the course of the weekend intensive, I was often surprised by how easy — and how deeply fulfilling — it was for me to open myself to nonstriving wandering or simple sitting; I hadn’t tried these things often since I started somatic practices. Gone are the fidgeting and waiting and shame over my lack of expertise. But it’s not that my tendency for getting lost in my head has simply vanished. The exercises of the intensive reminded me that stepping out of knowing and into relationship keep me grounded and, more than that, continually renew my wholeness. It’s a continual process of “facing the shadow of wild nature at its source,” as Harper puts it, which allows me to reclaim and reintegrate the incomplete and dark sides of my being (p. 194).

So how can all of this support my coaching? The short answer is that I’m not yet sure. I hesitate, somehow, to say that I would like to explicitly bring the kind of healing I myself experienced to my clients; after all, I’m not a therapist. That said, only a tiny minority of my experience of somatics was given to me in the context of therapy, and I know firsthand the healing power simply being in wilderness can have, when one feels invited to lower one’s grip on control and knowing. So it seems to be more a question of holding space for that invitation, while weaving techniques and practices of connection, both somatic and external, into my coaching, as a way of empowering and guiding my clients towards wholeness.

What I do know for sure is that my ability to coach effectively relies on my being whole, which in turn relies on my ability to be in an I-Thou relationship with my environment and clients. I find it telling that Jenny Rogers points to Carl Rogers’ concept of ‘unconditional positive regard’ towards the client as the cornerstone of successful coaching (Coaching Skills, p. 24). Rogers was deeply influenced by Martin Buber, comparing his person-centered therapy to Buber’s I-Thou relationship due to the reciprocity and mutuality of connections with clients. Just as I hope to show my clients ways to become whole through somatic and nature connection techniques, I’m recognizing it’s vital that I continue my own nature connection practices as a coach to stay in a state of humility, intentionality, and reciprocity with myself and my clients.

[Simka]

Erin, thank you for taking us on this descriptive journey of your experience! I particularly love the trust in yourself, your senses, and your intuition that I hear in your writing. I really resonate with your sensory connection to the ocean. Your description of diving into how it feels, not just ‘how it would be like’ but how it feels in terms of energy or the senses, to be another being, is really beautiful. There’s moments when I quite spontaneously get pulled into this as well (oddly enough, usually focused on insects – maybe because their realities seem to be in some ways so similar and in other ways so alien to our own). It’s a beautiful experience, but your writing inspires me to do it more intentionally as well.

[Simka]

Hi Greg,

It’s cool to hear your enthusiasm for everything you’re learning coming through! Your description of sitting on the beach particularly resonated with me. I know that sense of calmness that you mean (and I miss it a lot now that I don’t live anywhere close to the ocean anymore). I like how you say that you flowed like the waves and slowed down like the sunset. To me that sounds like how Michael was describing dropping into baseline and how you get assimilated into it, similar to neurofeedback – your internal frequencies end up synced up with the external frequencies.

I’m curious if you have other spots where you live now where you can find that calmness too? Personally, sometimes I struggle with dropping into a new baseline, especially because I make deep connections with particular places, like the ocean on the West Coast. But once I give it some time and finally do manage to drop in with a new place, it’s such an incredible feeling! I wonder if that resonates with you as well.

[Simka]

Julie, I love that you bring up connection as a spectrum. I think people have a tendency (I certainly do) to think of things in binary ways – either I’m connected to nature or I’m not – but as you so eloquently point out, that’s not true. I love the image of our relationship as roots, that continue to exist whether or not they feel lost or untended. There’s such a tenderness and gentleness in that, which feels really important. Especially in the case, as you mention, of losing our sense of connection or failing to maintain it, and the grief that comes with it, this gentle idea of rootedness in relationship feels like it can go a long way towards healing the loss. Thank you for your reflections!

[Simka]

I’m touched by this tender discussion of wondering about/wanting to be saved by a guide. I think you’re so right, Erin, that the real strength and learning happens in saving yourself. In fact I wonder if one person can ever really ‘save’ another, at least emotionally – maybe the only thing that’s truly possible is to facilitate someone else saving themselves (otherwise perhaps it devolves into a kind of unhealthy codependence?). That seems to me to be the most powerful thing about guiding; just like you noted, Lilia, as a guide you never have to have the answers, you just hold the space for their own self-discovery.

Which is none of it to degrade the wondering if a guide would have saved you. I’ve felt that way too in hard moments. But I’m just musing… to me it sounds like nature acted as your guide in those moments, doing exactly that thing of holding space for your self-discovery. I think it’s kind of a beautiful idea – that we might have clients who want us to save them, but instead of trying to swoop in and be a savior, we can reciprocate with nature by holding space for our clients’ saving themselves, in exactly the way nature held space for us when we needed it most.

[Simka]

Lilia, I love the depth and thoughtfulness of your post. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. A couple of things really struck me…

I was fascinated by your description of the expansiveness of time that you felt in the Bornean rainforest. I’d love to hear more about what that was like, if you feel like sharing! I think I’ve experienced flashes of this quality of time myself, but really only fleetingly. I find it so interesting that you say it’s something you seldom experience on your daily walks. I’m curious if you have thoughts on why that might be, what the difference was in the rainforest that brought it on in such an exciting way?

I’m also really curious about your discussion of reciprocity, especially about how you relate it to spirit and the self. Do you think it’s something about the act/relation of reciprocity that sparks the sense of union, inspiration, self-epression and purpose that you (and others) describe feeling in nature? I’m also curious about how reciprocity looks for you. You describe trances, hallucinogens, and offerings as ways of establishing relationship and reciprocity with nature in other cultures, but if you have your own ceremonies or ways of being in relationship with nature I’d love so much to hear.

I also just wanted to say I appreciated your mentioning of the anima mundi a lot, I had completely forgotten about that as a concept. I find it fascinating that it dates back to Plato, which is some solid proof that even the ancestors of white western folks (both intellectual & blood-related) thought of the world as having a soul at some point – something we often ascribe only to indigenous folks!