A poem coming out of it is the best outcome I could ask for, Karin. Belonging is the movement I find hardest to write about directly, since it refuses to stay abstract and keeps insisting on a particular tree in a particular field. Poetry may simply be the better instrument for it. I would like to read it if you write it.
Rebecca, thank you. I am glad the written version found you where my spoken one did not, which tells me something about how this practice wants to be handed over and how I am still working through it.
What has changed in me is mostly speed. I used to go outside to get something, and now I go out to be in the company of beings that were already there and did not need me to arrive. It took me a while to move that from something I believed to something I do.
The less flattering part of the answer is in the post itself. I have been teaching this for a while and I still walked past that tree several times without seeing it. What changed is my sense of how much I miss, and that awareness is what invites me to slow down now.
For everyday life, start with whatever is closest to your door. What is nearby that you already pass every day?
Oh, I think I received it today because I was more in the proper head space! I was literally sitting under a tree when I read this and found myself feeling grateful for the shade and way the breeze moved its leaves. I felt comforted -- like I had company, which is something I am seeking more of these days. Your practice teaches me how to find that in the natural world ... when I am receptive to it.
So I guess -- if I were to put a finer point on the question -- what I am wondering is, do you feel more accompanied and comforted and met in your daily life, now that you no longer limit the beings who can co-create those feelings within you to the human kind?
Rebecca, you were sitting under a tree while you read it. That is the whole practice, and you did it without needing me.
What has changed is that I am now noticing how often I am being invited. The shade, the breeze in the leaves, the crow that stays on the branch when I stop walking. Those invitations were always being offered, and for most of my life I walked past them at speed. The practice did not add anything to the world. It made me available to what was already extending itself toward me.
So the answer to your question is that I am met more often, though meetings were never in short supply. What changed is my willingness to accept.
This has not replaced human company, and I would not want anyone to hear that it could or should. What it has done is widen the circle of who counts as company, which is a different thing from filling a gap.
You said you are seeking more of this lately. The tree you sat under is still there. Perhaps you can return to that one rather than look for a better one?
Hi Jeffrey -- I'm not looking for a "better one" 🙂 -- (not sure how you read that out of my comment)? (I actually moved because the tree and I were sharing the space with too many biting bugs – which took me to the limits of my ability to receive!)
If anything I am seeking to tune more into the abundance around me. More, not "better." 🙂 (drawing my own boundaries around my willingness to be consumed by biting insects.)
Plants, like animals, offer sheer presence unmediated by their own ego needs. The needs and barriers of human egos can make it difficult to rest fully in the comfort that fellow humans can offer. I am wondering how the natural world provides a much more vast and limitless context for the sense of connection we all seek.
I started two years ago. I make them small -- no more than two or three other people (like the Camino you just led!). Any more, and it gets too social.
I create a threshold with a stick as we formally begin the walk and it is so poignant to me that as we end, people really hesitate to cross back over the threshold and formally re-enter "the world." It's so easy to feel so distant from nature and I remind people that the peace they hopefully found in our little suburban forest is still available to them whenever they can find the time. A lot of people se surprised to discover that. It's poignant to me.
Two years in, you have arrived at something many guides take much longer to notice, which is that the return matters as much as the setting out. A stick laid across the path is such a simple marker, and the hesitation you see at the end tells you it is doing exactly what it should.
What moves me most is the surprise you describe. People so often assume that what they found has to stay where they found it or is somehow not theirs to connect with. Reminding them that the peace is waiting in their own small suburban forest, whenever they can get there, may be the kindest thing a guide can offer anyone.
lol, thank you Jeffrey! Thus far, the practical considerations and responsibilities of having another pet have outweighed the desire for connection and joy that result from the assumption of those responsibilities. But given my new awareness and evolution (and desire/need to better weather the local human weather), the balance is starting to shift.
I am thinking so much more about tuning into nonhuman sources of companionship since our retreat. I had a moment on my first Camino when I fully perceived that I was the place where spirit and Earth connect -- through me, my body. I want and need to work more consciously with both realms now. That is a "steady place to stand" and i could do with less desperation and pain (which externally manifests as being closed off, as you observe.)
That perception arrived mid-walk, Rebecca, unasked. Whatever put it there is portable.
On the dog. A dog costs money, time, and a decade or more, and companionship from the more-than-human world does not have to arrive with a vet bill. Seek out a tree on a route you already walk and greet it every day for a year. By next September it will have your seasons in it, and you will have done nothing harder than pass another living being on purpose.
Working with both realms sounds large. Most of what I have found came from the weather and light, and whatever was growing nearest my door.
I came home last night and I spent meaningful time with a houseplant that had really flourished while I was away. (lol, what am I to take from that? That a living entity does better when I am not bc around it OR ... the reassurance that I really don't have manage everything and everyone for all of us to thrive? The latter conclusion actually offers me quite a bit of relief ....).
We didn't get into too much on the retreat, but I am someone who comes from a place (places) where human relationships are unreliable, a little brittle, and inconsistent. I have spent much of my life trying to "be better" so that I will finally " deserve" other better and more loving behavior from these people and wouldn't you know it, they STILL don't show up so well for me. As above, I can take my choice of meaning from the their fallibility: that I should try EVEN HARDER to be what I think will earn me their love and presence and support (and it's funny that no matter how hard I try, I just can't perform well enough to "earn" that from them,), or I can seek that constancy from ego-less beings that are more readily and reliably present. Like my houseplant.
Or, as you say, the memory of beings that I have connected with elsewhere. I will add that I am now seriously reconsidering getting a dog!
"Something living nearby" for companionship ... it's all about opening and tuning into that fully alive environment, fully, and less to the mercurial availability of the human "forest" around us.
Before settling on either reading, Rebecca, it may be worth asking the plant. Something changed in those days, and it might have been less water, or steadier light with nobody moving it about, or simply a stretch of being left to get on with things. Any of those tell you something useful, and none of them is a verdict on you. That is Receive and Ponder applied to the life on your windowsill, and it probably invites a continued connection with the plant rather than reading it as a message.
What you describe, trying to earn what ought to be given freely, is exhausting in a way people outside it rarely see. I would say only this. The steadiness you find in a plant or a dog is not a smaller substitute for human company. It is somewhere to stand while the human weather does what it does, and having a steady place tends to make people less desperate about the unreliable ones rather than more closed off to them.
Oh, it wasn't my idea! I put together my Forest bathing walk script based on a combination of a bunch of other materials. Somebody suggested using a stick as a threshold, so I use that. Not my idea! But it works so well.
Rereading your reply, I am also reflecting on "the return." Good lord that is an under-considered part of any retreat -- whether a forest-bathing walk, a meaningful vacation or a two-month Camino. An under-considered part and THE most important part. Otherwise the retreat is merely an escape ... an escape to a more pure, safer state of mind. and one's day-to-day life can seem even harder and harsher; it can feel even worse, because now you KNOW there's a "place" where you can "be different." And then all you dream of doing is escaping back to that "place." As if it is the "place" that creates the magic rather than your mind.
I do not want to be dismissive here; it all has to do with nervous-system safety and most of us live in environments that will trigger our nervous systems and rightfully so. The world is not an easy place, life is not easy, we are all trying to do our best and to stay safe, and none of that makes it so easy to open and stay open.
For me it all comes back to nervous-system management and emotional regulation ... and forest bathing, since it happens locally, is a part of that. But it is no small thing to maintain a state of openness and connection when stimuli are affecting us, and our nervous system (the most loyal protector we will ever have) just wants to keep us "safe." "Shut down," it commands. "Last time you were so open, with these people, this place, this situation, you felt pain. I love you and therefore I will not let you suffer that way again."
Your nervous system (or at least mine, lol) doesn't prioritize being happy. It prioritizes being and feeling SAFE. And it is smart and it is sensitive. If we blame it for protecting us, we are betraying the one entity in our lives that will always have our own backs.
So it's mindfulness and gentleness with the self, then. Being gentle with ourselves when we return, when we are open, and it hurts, because it has hurt in the past and that hurt was real. Showing our nervous system that we are still safe. Finding those practices, moment by moment, to recreate the safety we felt so abundantly in the forest or on holiday or on the Camino. It's so important. Otherwise the walk was a dream. And it can't remain a dream. The real walk is to move forward and continue to find the safety within that we found so abundantly without, and to keep walking forward, as open as possible.
That's the challenge awaiting all of us as we return home.
That the stick was borrowed makes it stronger rather than weaker, Rebecca. Almost everything I use came to me the same way, handed along and altered by whoever was carrying it before me, and the practices that survive that process are the ones that kept working in hands other than the ones that invented them.
What you write about the return is the most useful thing anyone has said to me on the subject, and the trap you describe is one I have watched people walk straight into, where the retreat becomes a place they escape to, ordinary life becomes the thing they are escaping, and the knowledge that the good place exists somewhere makes everything else heavier than it was before they left.
You are right that the inner state is where the work lands, and I would only set one thing beside it, which is that something does come home with us. The relationships formed out there, with a particular tree or a stretch of path or a field you happened to stop in, do not stay at the location alone, and having been met by something other than yourself is not easily undone. It alters what you are able to notice once you are back among the ordinary stimuli you were describing.
That is what makes the return less lonely than it can look from inside it, since we move back into our lives with more company than we left with, and the kinship carries on wherever there is something living nearby to carry it on with. Your suburban forest is one of those places, and I suspect people settle there partly because something is genuinely present and partly because they now know what being received feels like.
Yes ... good point about seeking the "ideal" connection rather than accepting the connection as it is offered. When we are holding out for the ideal, we are often left standing alone.
And yes -- the mosquitoes did create a boundary, for me and the tree (and them! Though I think the mosquitoes would have wanted more connection with me had I obliged!).
I lead forest bathing walk occasionally, as I know you do too. And what I've noticed on mine, is how, as we sit and open our senses, it's not so much about reaching for the natural world, as much as it is becoming quiet, and realizing how much of it is there for us, even reaching toward us, if I may say, when we stop to slow down.
The smells of the forest waft up to my nose. The sounds of the forest reach my ears. And As I focus my eyes on a living thing, I notice more and more its intricacy and complexity. I imagine you might take issue with the notion that the forest is "reaching toward" us, but I'm just struck by the fact that I don't have to do much for the stimuli to reach me. Just stop. Whether that's me becoming still, or the forest finding a way to work its way into me, I don't know. Just opening. That seems to be the key.
Rebecca, I do not take issue with "reaching toward" at all. That is closer to what I believe than the alternative, and it is the premise underneath the whole practice for me. The scent really is being released. The birdsong really is addressed to someone. You are describing something that is happening, not projecting onto it, and I think you already know that, or you would not have risked the phrase.
The one word I turn over is "for." There is a version where the forest is there for us, and a version where it is simply there and we are inside it. I lean toward the second, mostly because the first quietly puts me back at the center. That may be a distinction only I need.
What you said about not having to do much rings true to my own experience. Just stop. Just open. I am not able to tell you whether that is me becoming still or the forest finding its way in, and your not knowing either is oddly reassuring to me.
I vaguely recall you mentioning guiding forest bathing walks. How long have you been leading them?
“The tree had not changed. My pace had.” 🙌🏼
Wonderful insight - I feel the kernel of a poem in the belong section and thank you for that inspiration.
A poem coming out of it is the best outcome I could ask for, Karin. Belonging is the movement I find hardest to write about directly, since it refuses to stay abstract and keeps insisting on a particular tree in a particular field. Poetry may simply be the better instrument for it. I would like to read it if you write it.
Beautiful, Jeffrey. I didn't quite grasp this when you explained it to me but I think I do now. I want to bring this practice into my everyday life.
What I find myself wondering is how has this practice changed you?
Rebecca, thank you. I am glad the written version found you where my spoken one did not, which tells me something about how this practice wants to be handed over and how I am still working through it.
What has changed in me is mostly speed. I used to go outside to get something, and now I go out to be in the company of beings that were already there and did not need me to arrive. It took me a while to move that from something I believed to something I do.
The less flattering part of the answer is in the post itself. I have been teaching this for a while and I still walked past that tree several times without seeing it. What changed is my sense of how much I miss, and that awareness is what invites me to slow down now.
For everyday life, start with whatever is closest to your door. What is nearby that you already pass every day?
Oh, I think I received it today because I was more in the proper head space! I was literally sitting under a tree when I read this and found myself feeling grateful for the shade and way the breeze moved its leaves. I felt comforted -- like I had company, which is something I am seeking more of these days. Your practice teaches me how to find that in the natural world ... when I am receptive to it.
So I guess -- if I were to put a finer point on the question -- what I am wondering is, do you feel more accompanied and comforted and met in your daily life, now that you no longer limit the beings who can co-create those feelings within you to the human kind?
Rebecca, you were sitting under a tree while you read it. That is the whole practice, and you did it without needing me.
What has changed is that I am now noticing how often I am being invited. The shade, the breeze in the leaves, the crow that stays on the branch when I stop walking. Those invitations were always being offered, and for most of my life I walked past them at speed. The practice did not add anything to the world. It made me available to what was already extending itself toward me.
So the answer to your question is that I am met more often, though meetings were never in short supply. What changed is my willingness to accept.
This has not replaced human company, and I would not want anyone to hear that it could or should. What it has done is widen the circle of who counts as company, which is a different thing from filling a gap.
You said you are seeking more of this lately. The tree you sat under is still there. Perhaps you can return to that one rather than look for a better one?
Hi Jeffrey -- I'm not looking for a "better one" 🙂 -- (not sure how you read that out of my comment)? (I actually moved because the tree and I were sharing the space with too many biting bugs – which took me to the limits of my ability to receive!)
If anything I am seeking to tune more into the abundance around me. More, not "better." 🙂 (drawing my own boundaries around my willingness to be consumed by biting insects.)
Plants, like animals, offer sheer presence unmediated by their own ego needs. The needs and barriers of human egos can make it difficult to rest fully in the comfort that fellow humans can offer. I am wondering how the natural world provides a much more vast and limitless context for the sense of connection we all seek.
I started two years ago. I make them small -- no more than two or three other people (like the Camino you just led!). Any more, and it gets too social.
I create a threshold with a stick as we formally begin the walk and it is so poignant to me that as we end, people really hesitate to cross back over the threshold and formally re-enter "the world." It's so easy to feel so distant from nature and I remind people that the peace they hopefully found in our little suburban forest is still available to them whenever they can find the time. A lot of people se surprised to discover that. It's poignant to me.
Two years in, you have arrived at something many guides take much longer to notice, which is that the return matters as much as the setting out. A stick laid across the path is such a simple marker, and the hesitation you see at the end tells you it is doing exactly what it should.
What moves me most is the surprise you describe. People so often assume that what they found has to stay where they found it or is somehow not theirs to connect with. Reminding them that the peace is waiting in their own small suburban forest, whenever they can get there, may be the kindest thing a guide can offer anyone.
I would love to know how you came to the stick.
lol, thank you Jeffrey! Thus far, the practical considerations and responsibilities of having another pet have outweighed the desire for connection and joy that result from the assumption of those responsibilities. But given my new awareness and evolution (and desire/need to better weather the local human weather), the balance is starting to shift.
I am thinking so much more about tuning into nonhuman sources of companionship since our retreat. I had a moment on my first Camino when I fully perceived that I was the place where spirit and Earth connect -- through me, my body. I want and need to work more consciously with both realms now. That is a "steady place to stand" and i could do with less desperation and pain (which externally manifests as being closed off, as you observe.)
That perception arrived mid-walk, Rebecca, unasked. Whatever put it there is portable.
On the dog. A dog costs money, time, and a decade or more, and companionship from the more-than-human world does not have to arrive with a vet bill. Seek out a tree on a route you already walk and greet it every day for a year. By next September it will have your seasons in it, and you will have done nothing harder than pass another living being on purpose.
Working with both realms sounds large. Most of what I have found came from the weather and light, and whatever was growing nearest my door.
I came home last night and I spent meaningful time with a houseplant that had really flourished while I was away. (lol, what am I to take from that? That a living entity does better when I am not bc around it OR ... the reassurance that I really don't have manage everything and everyone for all of us to thrive? The latter conclusion actually offers me quite a bit of relief ....).
We didn't get into too much on the retreat, but I am someone who comes from a place (places) where human relationships are unreliable, a little brittle, and inconsistent. I have spent much of my life trying to "be better" so that I will finally " deserve" other better and more loving behavior from these people and wouldn't you know it, they STILL don't show up so well for me. As above, I can take my choice of meaning from the their fallibility: that I should try EVEN HARDER to be what I think will earn me their love and presence and support (and it's funny that no matter how hard I try, I just can't perform well enough to "earn" that from them,), or I can seek that constancy from ego-less beings that are more readily and reliably present. Like my houseplant.
Or, as you say, the memory of beings that I have connected with elsewhere. I will add that I am now seriously reconsidering getting a dog!
"Something living nearby" for companionship ... it's all about opening and tuning into that fully alive environment, fully, and less to the mercurial availability of the human "forest" around us.
Before settling on either reading, Rebecca, it may be worth asking the plant. Something changed in those days, and it might have been less water, or steadier light with nobody moving it about, or simply a stretch of being left to get on with things. Any of those tell you something useful, and none of them is a verdict on you. That is Receive and Ponder applied to the life on your windowsill, and it probably invites a continued connection with the plant rather than reading it as a message.
What you describe, trying to earn what ought to be given freely, is exhausting in a way people outside it rarely see. I would say only this. The steadiness you find in a plant or a dog is not a smaller substitute for human company. It is somewhere to stand while the human weather does what it does, and having a steady place tends to make people less desperate about the unreliable ones rather than more closed off to them.
A dog would be lucky to have you.
Oh, it wasn't my idea! I put together my Forest bathing walk script based on a combination of a bunch of other materials. Somebody suggested using a stick as a threshold, so I use that. Not my idea! But it works so well.
Rereading your reply, I am also reflecting on "the return." Good lord that is an under-considered part of any retreat -- whether a forest-bathing walk, a meaningful vacation or a two-month Camino. An under-considered part and THE most important part. Otherwise the retreat is merely an escape ... an escape to a more pure, safer state of mind. and one's day-to-day life can seem even harder and harsher; it can feel even worse, because now you KNOW there's a "place" where you can "be different." And then all you dream of doing is escaping back to that "place." As if it is the "place" that creates the magic rather than your mind.
I do not want to be dismissive here; it all has to do with nervous-system safety and most of us live in environments that will trigger our nervous systems and rightfully so. The world is not an easy place, life is not easy, we are all trying to do our best and to stay safe, and none of that makes it so easy to open and stay open.
For me it all comes back to nervous-system management and emotional regulation ... and forest bathing, since it happens locally, is a part of that. But it is no small thing to maintain a state of openness and connection when stimuli are affecting us, and our nervous system (the most loyal protector we will ever have) just wants to keep us "safe." "Shut down," it commands. "Last time you were so open, with these people, this place, this situation, you felt pain. I love you and therefore I will not let you suffer that way again."
Your nervous system (or at least mine, lol) doesn't prioritize being happy. It prioritizes being and feeling SAFE. And it is smart and it is sensitive. If we blame it for protecting us, we are betraying the one entity in our lives that will always have our own backs.
So it's mindfulness and gentleness with the self, then. Being gentle with ourselves when we return, when we are open, and it hurts, because it has hurt in the past and that hurt was real. Showing our nervous system that we are still safe. Finding those practices, moment by moment, to recreate the safety we felt so abundantly in the forest or on holiday or on the Camino. It's so important. Otherwise the walk was a dream. And it can't remain a dream. The real walk is to move forward and continue to find the safety within that we found so abundantly without, and to keep walking forward, as open as possible.
That's the challenge awaiting all of us as we return home.
That the stick was borrowed makes it stronger rather than weaker, Rebecca. Almost everything I use came to me the same way, handed along and altered by whoever was carrying it before me, and the practices that survive that process are the ones that kept working in hands other than the ones that invented them.
What you write about the return is the most useful thing anyone has said to me on the subject, and the trap you describe is one I have watched people walk straight into, where the retreat becomes a place they escape to, ordinary life becomes the thing they are escaping, and the knowledge that the good place exists somewhere makes everything else heavier than it was before they left.
You are right that the inner state is where the work lands, and I would only set one thing beside it, which is that something does come home with us. The relationships formed out there, with a particular tree or a stretch of path or a field you happened to stop in, do not stay at the location alone, and having been met by something other than yourself is not easily undone. It alters what you are able to notice once you are back among the ordinary stimuli you were describing.
That is what makes the return less lonely than it can look from inside it, since we move back into our lives with more company than we left with, and the kinship carries on wherever there is something living nearby to carry it on with. Your suburban forest is one of those places, and I suspect people settle there partly because something is genuinely present and partly because they now know what being received feels like.
Yes ... good point about seeking the "ideal" connection rather than accepting the connection as it is offered. When we are holding out for the ideal, we are often left standing alone.
And yes -- the mosquitoes did create a boundary, for me and the tree (and them! Though I think the mosquitoes would have wanted more connection with me had I obliged!).
I lead forest bathing walk occasionally, as I know you do too. And what I've noticed on mine, is how, as we sit and open our senses, it's not so much about reaching for the natural world, as much as it is becoming quiet, and realizing how much of it is there for us, even reaching toward us, if I may say, when we stop to slow down.
The smells of the forest waft up to my nose. The sounds of the forest reach my ears. And As I focus my eyes on a living thing, I notice more and more its intricacy and complexity. I imagine you might take issue with the notion that the forest is "reaching toward" us, but I'm just struck by the fact that I don't have to do much for the stimuli to reach me. Just stop. Whether that's me becoming still, or the forest finding a way to work its way into me, I don't know. Just opening. That seems to be the key.
Rebecca, I do not take issue with "reaching toward" at all. That is closer to what I believe than the alternative, and it is the premise underneath the whole practice for me. The scent really is being released. The birdsong really is addressed to someone. You are describing something that is happening, not projecting onto it, and I think you already know that, or you would not have risked the phrase.
The one word I turn over is "for." There is a version where the forest is there for us, and a version where it is simply there and we are inside it. I lean toward the second, mostly because the first quietly puts me back at the center. That may be a distinction only I need.
What you said about not having to do much rings true to my own experience. Just stop. Just open. I am not able to tell you whether that is me becoming still or the forest finding its way in, and your not knowing either is oddly reassuring to me.
I vaguely recall you mentioning guiding forest bathing walks. How long have you been leading them?