Listening to Nature - Part 1
Meditation is a kind of deep listening. It’s allowing yourself to be completely open and receptive to whatever is arising within your experience, a tending to what’s demanding your attention. Increasingly through your meditation practice, you can start to perceive that your own well being is inextricably bound up with the well being of others, and with your natural environment.
One silver lining of the global pandemic is that increasingly large numbers of people are remembering the importance of spending time in nature. People are starting to recognize the basic truth that being attuned to nature is being attuned to one’s own needs. In recent years, scientific studies and medical journals have highlighted the positive impact of nature on physical and mental health.
But you don’t need scientific studies to remind you of these basic truths about your core needs. At least not when listening deeply. Most of us live very busy lives in big cities where we are cut off not only from our natural environment but from our own basic needs.
To put it simply, we live from the neck up. We’re cut off from our own bodies.
As people, we DO need reminders about what’s essential.
If you’ve grown up in a big city, or if you've been living in one for a long time, it’s easy to become disconnected from how essential nature is, unless you’ve been making a concerted effort to staying connected to it. Urbanization has a way of erasing this essential need from our memory: that human life is deeply interdependent with nature.
Meditation begins as a technique, but ultimately it becomes more of a way of Being.
It’s a kind of coming home to oneself, to one’s true nature, which different traditions call by various names. Awareness or consciousness being two of the more common, secularized versions of this truth that is ultimately mysterious and which can only be pointed towards, not grasped by the thinking mind, the ego.
One increasingly sees that one’s true nature, as well as this physical form, this body-mind, is not separate from nature itself: from the Earth, from the Universe. It never was and it never could be. Thus to come home to oneself, is to come to nature, for they are one the same.
We can recall this basic truth in many ways: like when we finally take the long walk in the woods again. Or as we go deeper into our meditation practice or down a spiritual path generally. Or when we take some sacred medicine, like psilocybin or peyote or ayahuasca, in a supportive context with the right intention.
Occasionally, this disruption happens on a macro level and can arouse the collective consciousness from its slumber. That’s what the coronavirus is doing right now; many people are feeling this disconnection all at once and on a very visceral level.
As I watched the way people flocked to parks in dense urban areas, from New York to Singapore,
I’m hopeful that people are reawakening to how essential nature is to their own well being.
I pray that this moment leads to a significant shift in ecological awareness, for the well being of our planet is tied up in the well being of each of its inhabitants individually. Hopefully, people will start to care more about the integrity of their natural environment as they realize how their environment is separably related to their own mental and physical health.
As I started practicing meditation with more regularity, perhaps the biggest shift was that I felt a very strong push to leave the big city and live more closely aligned with nature. What’s abundantly clear to me now, is that a connection with nature is the foundation for everything else in life.
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy plenty of the trappings of modern society - in technology add a lot of value to our lives. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying these fruits of modernity as long as we can keep things in perspective and the first principle of that larger perspective is that in the final analysis, human beings do not control nature;
ultimately nature is in charge
Like all forms of listening, meditation cultivates a sense of humility. From the limited perspective of our individual journey, developing a deeper relationship with nature and opening to what our natural environment has to teach us is extremely important. Usually, people are drawn to spiritual practice because they are looking for a way to cope with their own suffering; basically, they feel bad and they want to feel better.
Meditation doesn’t appeal to most people when times are easy; it just seems boring.
Typically on some level people are looking to heal. Increasingly as we start to spend more time in nature, we’re reminded that to be in nature is healing.