See What You Have
Every day is a learning day.
The Nature of Nature
Ever changing. Is that it? Pretty much. I was reminded, very recently, that we are 'as players' as Shakespeare pronounced. Nothing reminds me of this fact like spending a chunk of time in the natural world. Recently, I was lucky enough to spend nearly three days in some woodland, guiding a nature connection retreat, sharing an experience with some fantastic people who opened up to the natural world in their own beautiful ways. It's so simple, opening up. And that's where the 'as players' part comes in. When we surrender ourselves...No, hang on. I can only speak for myself, here. When I surrender myself to the situation, what I get feels earth shattering, it's like the cogs of my understanding of how things work slowly come to a rusty halt and start going backwards, or better yet, start sprouting shoots and bursting into life. Time becomes relative and I sink into the feeling that the bigger picture is actually something that contains me - not something I am constructing for myself.
Just to step away a little for a moment: Often, we believe that life is a certain way (i.e. the way we believe it to be) and if we keep doing the same stuff all the time we can control it. So when weird stuff happens it can be groundshaking, we can fall into denial, disbelief or worse! I know this because I was like this for a long time. I thought I could control, predict and be accepted because I was so great at knowing what people wanted. I thought I had people figured out, and I behaved in ways I judged would make me more acceptable to them. Of course it was all a load of shit (I say this in a compassionate way, I had my reasons for it) - I had built my belief system on lies and judgement, which made me depressed and miserable. When I started to shed my old belief system I decided to open up to more possibility - to just be as open and non-judgemental as I could be, in my every day. Of course there are still millions of ways I can't see, but the principle is there.
So..back to perspective shifts. I love embodiment. Embodying feelings. That feels so powerful. The deepest inspiration is always felt, not thought of (alarm bells going off in the left brain now...shiiit! No way of evaluating this!! Right brain is expanding into the experience of newness, of not knowing. Of feeling. After that, the thoughts come in. Wow, this is what's happening here, I am actually part of some ever changing, shifting, moving theatre of beauty and surprise. And then, another, deeper tug, a feeling of realness that evokes a little fear, a sense of awe and is ultimately a humbling sense of 'otherness' - words are a shockingly poor substitute for the feeling of being moved through a scene, instead of moving through it, being held by the world instead of walking upon it. Or, being held in the jaws of the wolf, ground up between the rocks and trees, pulled underground, into the night-dark unknowing - it's the realm of the spirits, the inexplicable forces that we succumb to in that situation. Ted Hughes sometimes says it, in his own, possessed sort of way. Many writers speak of this magic, stories grow up around these connections and in so many ways, we have evolved through connecting and knowing places as us, as living through us. The language changes with the experience.
Endangered Soul
I look for ways to put this into words, to share this with more people, in a world we have become too big for, too clever to know. Too clever to know ourselves or listen to the grinding of our inner world, begging for release through connection in simple and noiseless ways, whose voices then can shock and change and reveal us back to ourselves.
The beginning of this journey, for me, is time. To go from heavy to light and into the daze of something real and unknown, means making some space for the quiet. A reintroduction, like how we might bring an old species back from the brink, we gingerly step into a new/old way of listening. Like the zoo'd beast, we still function but there's something dead behind the eyes. We feel in control of a world we have made fit to our plan, not the other way round, as our lives were, in the wild. We are never truly going back there, but the wild is part of us, it's for us to rediscover, consciously, going forward. It is saving our world.
The point is, let's go some way toward experiencing this again - meeting the child to whom time does not speak - we have to go back there, to work towards that place, where magic lies and is truth.
Life is Your Experience
Only you can know yourself and the world around you. This is a thing I say to people I work with, all the time. Your experience is unique and beautiful, there is nothing else like it, from the magic and chance of sperm meeting egg - what are the odds? The odds that you are alive in the first place are almost immeasurable. It's a stupidly massive number. Too big to ever understand. Then, there's the uniqueness of everyone's life experience - each of us a completely different make up and life experience - billions of experiences and reactions that go into making us who we are.
I want to help people experience the world around them in a different way. Because I see that we forget and our world becomes small. Just like mine did for decades. I did an interview recently with Liz Gleeson of Shapes of Grief. She defined my experience as 'disenfranchised childhood grief', because my sister was put in a home and left the family when I was three. We all have our traumas and 'stuff' but it doesn't need to define who we are. We can choose our life, our freedom.
The New
I'm in the process of making new learning experiences for people. I'm excited. All these words stem from that excitement. I'll be starting the "Meeting Our Nature" course in September/October. It's all about how we begin to connect with the natural world and our inner world, at the same time. Finding balance for ourselves. It's about taking a good look at what we feed ourselves and making space for exploration through the openness of the natural world. It will be happening online and will be a powerful experience. And at the same time it will be an introduction, a first shift. From there we can take it deeper.
The world needs us to connect - openly, consciously, with more awareness and less fear. That's it!
If you're interested in this next course then let me know.
In the Meantime, Get More Grounded
Grounding is the 'root' of my well being, to put it one way.
Grounding through walking (or just standing there!).
1. Go for a walk!
2. When you're out there, feel your feet on the ground, as in, when you take a step, notice how your foot meets the ground underneath, notice the solidity of the ground and know that, as long as you are alive the ground will be there, under your feet.
3. With this in mind, contemplate the supportive nature of the world. You can rely on it. This is an important point, because, pretty much everything we are 'sold' in this life, claims to be supportive - stuff we buy, things we are told will help us - all of this, in a sense, can feed into a feeling of lack, like we're chasing after something that will help change us.
4. The ground is ALWAYS underneath you and IS supportive. The ground will NEVER try to sell you stuff or leave you feeling empty or dissatisfied.
5. Consider, that with every step you take you are connecting with a part of yourself that is also solid and supportive, reliable and nourishing, that you have this within you, on tap, whenever you need it. THIS is meeting your nature - reclaiming your connection to YOURSELF through nature connection and 'inner awareness'
with love and connection
Alan X :-)