Ecospirituality Is Not What You Think
It’s not worshiping nature. It’s remembering you were never separate from it.
You may already be practicing ecospirituality without realizing it.
If you’ve ever felt more yourself on a forest path than in a meeting room. If you’ve noticed that walking calms something that meditation apps cannot reach. If you’ve sensed that the trees outside your window are paying attention, even when you can’t explain why. If you’ve grieved for melting glaciers or burning forests as though losing family members.
You’re not imagining things. You’re remembering something.
What Ecospirituality Is Not
Let me clear away some brush first.
Ecospirituality is not worshiping nature. It’s not replacing one set of deities with another. It’s not a return to some romanticized past or an escape from the complexities of modern life.
It’s not performative environmentalism dressed in spiritual language. It’s not another wellness trend to optimize your morning routine. It’s not something you can accomplish by buying the right products or posting the right content.
It’s also not opposed to existing traditions. You don’t need to leave your faith to practice ecospirituality. You don’t need to adopt someone else’s faith either.
What you need is the willingness to listen. To let your heart be broken open by what you encounter, the way it breaks open every time you fall in love. This was developed in a fascinating book that Victoria Loorz, a mentor of mine, explored, developed, and taught in her work Church of the Wild.
What Ecospirituality Actually Is
Ecospirituality is direct, embodied relationship with the living Earth.
Not Earth as concept or metaphor. Not nature as backdrop for human drama. But the actual plants outside your door. The birds on your morning walk. The particular soil, water, and weather of the place where you live.
It’s the practice of re-membering ourselves back into intimate, sacred relationship with the rest of the living world.
This is the approach I teach in my work as an ordained Wild Guide and as a Chaplain at New York University (NYU) for nature-based spiritualities. Rather than working primarily with established ritual systems or formal magical correspondences, ecospirituality focuses on your specific place. The landforms and seasonal cycles of your bioregion. The more-than-human beings who share your home terrain.
You learn to listen to the land itself and allow spiritual practices to emerge from these living relationships.
This matters because it’s accessible. You don’t need a plane ticket to sacred wilderness. You don’t need extensive training in someone else’s tradition. You need attention, patience, and willingness to be changed by what you encounter.
The scrubby oak tree on your block can teach you. The crows who watch you walk to work have something to say. The changing light through your window marks a liturgy older than any human calendar.
Why This Matters Now
All December, I’ve been writing about climate grief and body wisdom. About nervous systems that stay activated with what we know about the world. About the myths that keep us paralyzed. About winter darkness as teacher.
What I haven’t named directly until now is the container for all of this.
Intellectual understanding of the climate crisis is not enough. Reading more articles won’t save us. Knowing the science doesn’t heal the grief or direct the response.
We need practices that restore relationship. We need ways of being with the Earth that go deeper than data. We need what ecospirituality offers: not just information about the world, but intimacy with it.
This is why my body’s collapse this week felt connected to the season. The Earth moves through cycles of descent and return. Winter teaches release, stillness, trust. When we try to override these rhythms with productivity and push, something eventually breaks.
Ecospirituality attunes us to these patterns. It teaches us to live inside them rather than against them.
The Practice, Not the Belief
Here’s what I want you to understand: ecospirituality isn’t something you believe. It’s something you practice.
You practice it when you pause to notice what’s growing near your doorstep. You practice it when you acknowledge the land you’re standing on and the peoples who tended it before you. You practice it when you let the season’s rhythms shape your energy rather than fighting them. You practice it when you grieve ecological loss as real loss, not abstract concern.
You practice it when you remember that your body is made of Earth, breathes Earth’s air, drinks Earth’s water, and will return to Earth when you’re done.
This isn’t new. Every culture, until very recently, understood this. We’re not inventing ecospirituality. We’re recovering it.
An Invitation
If something in this resonates, you’re not alone.
A growing movement of seekers is finding their way back to Earth as sacred ground. Wild churches are gathering under oak trees. Eco-spiritual directors are helping people tend their grief and wonder. Practitioners are learning to listen to the land itself.
This is why I became an ordained Wild Guide.
This is the foundation of what I teach in Rewilding the Soul, a year-long EcoSpirituality certificate that guides participants from disconnection to deep belonging through direct relationship with their local landscape. The next cohort begins in March 2026. If you’re curious, I’ll share more in the coming months.
But you don’t need a program to begin.
You can begin today. Step outside. Notice what’s growing. Feel the temperature on your skin. Ask the simple question: What is this place trying to teach me?
Then listen.
Not for words. For presence. For the quiet knowing that arrives when you stop treating the world as backdrop and start treating it as kin.
The Earth has been waiting for you to remember.
What’s one way you already practice relationship with the living world around you, even if you’ve never called it ecospirituality? I’d love to hear.
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Walking beside you,
~ Jeffrey
Thanks, Jeffrey!
My friend, colleague, and Wild Guide Martha said I would appreciate you. And I do!
I am glad to read your perspective on our kinship with all life around us.