Building Natural Relations
Often people hear me talking about sit spots and how important they are to me and my practice. I often suggest for people to do this simply as time for themselves and to slow down. It also helps you in a small way to build relations with your natural world.
I find that by visiting the same place everyday; I get to know each element so well. I can learn to nurture and love each plant and sentinel being around me. The little spider that lives on the tree and often creates the most intricate and delicate webs that glimmer in the sun. Or how the leaf changes colour through the seasons of time, each tiny new growth or how a bud begins to grow. Likewise to tender my little area with kindness and attention.
Simply noticing and caring for everything around me, helps me grow within.
When I was doing my training with the ANFT one of the ways that being a Nature & Forest Therapy Guide was described, was that It offers a path for growing into a life in which we can fully embody our own unique wholeness in relationship to the world.
This statement lit me up from within and one that I endeavoured to hold in my focus through each and every step of this training and beyond.
I was already a life coach, mindfulness teacher and a holding space facilitator, group facilitation and therapeutic writing. I have practiced and am a certified facilitator of red thread ceremonies, Shinrin-Yoku practitioner … the list goes on and on…. so why another course / certification.
Most of these courses have been for me. They have been to enrich me and deepen my practice, digging deep within my own layers and darkest shadows. Many of these have run for 6 - 10 months so have been on one level or another a continuum of personal development through , wow what will be the last nearly 30 years now.
So finding a training that would take me to a place where I can fully embody my own uniqueness and relations with the world…… well this just lit my soul and belly with a fire.
The path to restoration extends from our heart to the heart of sentient beings,and that path will be different for every person.
- Paul Hawken
I love this quote, much of my inner work and offering over the years have been about coming home to yourself, through loving yourself, taking down the armour that often surrounds our hearts and being true to ourselves in our thoughts and in our actions and words.
Building relationships with nature also builds a relationship with yourself. One can not be without the other.
Its gentle, it unfolds in the time and space it needs and it feels peaceful and serene.
I encourage you to find yourself even one plant to begin with and visit it everyday, care for it, notice the uniqueness of it, the changes and the transformations that it offers…. Just one plant and just a few minutes a day and simply observe what happens.