Nature Summit – Grow Mindfulness

Developing a Reciprocal Relationship with Nature – Nurture and Stewardship

In the recent Nature Summit, Roshi Joan Halifax –writer, teacher, artist and activist – stressed the need for a reciprocal relationship with nature. She suggests that too often mindfulness practitioners focus only on the nurture that they can obtain from nature but overlook the “imperative to steward where we are’ – to look after, and care for, nature in our immediate environment. Joan contends that this reciprocal relationship is critical in our current challenging times when we are confronted by the devastation of climate change simultaneously with the ongoing global erosion of mental health.

Experiencing nurture in nature

Joan mentioned that she is “restored in the natural world” but not in the “constructed world” of cities. However, she counsels against despising or devaluing the constructed world. Nature surrounds us wherever we are. Joan mentioned seeing a hawk nesting on the edge of a building in New York and visiting Central Park. While these experiences of nature in the built environment are part of restoring our spirit, the depth of nurture achieved through immersion in the natural environment is of a different order and more pervasive and lasting.

Joan explains that in nature we can recapture the silence that the busy world of today has taken from us – we can access the power of stillness and silence to cultivate our creativity and our resilience. Joan describes her mindful practice in the mountains of “just sitting in choiceless awareness” and gaining the restorative benefits of nature through this goal-less approach. She explains how she sees mountains as “places of meditation’ and has learned to value “solitude in nature”.

Joan discussed how her work through the Nomads Clinic (a form of socially engaged Buddhism she established in 1980) brought her into contact not only with the Himalayas but also the people of remote places such as Nepal and Tibet. She describes the Himalayan mountains as “very raw, very tough, very dangerous” and the people of these remote communities as “fantastic people, very robust, with a wonderful sense of humour”. She acknowledges that the mountains and the mountain people have taught her much about “humour and resilience”.

Many mindfulness authors such as Louie Schwartzberg highlight the power of nature to stimulate wonder and awe in us. Louie, in his Wonder & Awe podcast, shares the recent research of Michelle Shiota, that demonstrates that we become “better thinkers when we are feeling awe”. In his talks and films, Louie stresses that nature induces healing and helps us to develop a sense of gratitude and appreciation that lead to happiness, health and profound joy.

Pamela Anderson, in her memoir Love, Pamela, describes nature as her friend and teacher. She states that she is “always curious and wants to know what nature is trying to teach” because to her “everything is a clue or a sign”. Nature had always been a part of her life growing up on Vancouver Island and for her birthday each year she asked her two boys to volunteer with her at the California Wildlife Center – which involved cleaning birdcages and feeding birds and squirrels. In line with this work Pamela and her family cared for a possum as well as pelicans and seals, even undertaking a marine mammal rescue course together.

At one stage in her performing career she was exhausted in “mind, body and soul” and decided to spend a month reconnecting with her adult sons in Malibu and with nature. She found that connecting with nature (including during her five-mile daily walks), along with Pilates, enabled her to reconnect with her body and detox both physically and emotionally. When she was at Café Sénéquier at Port de Saint Tropez in France (where she went to recover from an abusive relationship), she watched the sunrises and yachts in the harbour, while “luxuriating in my own blossoming life” – nature again elicits gratitude and appreciation.

There are many ways to engage the nurturing power of nature, to understand and appreciate our interconnectedness with nature and deepen our relationship with nature. Louie Schwartzberg reminds us that we are able to widen and deepen our perspective on nature beyond our unique childhood experience and understanding. One way to do this is to adopt the mindset of stewardship of nature.

Stewardship of nature

Joan Halifax stressed the “moral responsibility” to undertake stewardship of our immediate natural environment – in her words, “to steward, protect and restore”. She argues that it is important to plant diverse species because diversity is “essential for the health of any ecosystem or social system”. Her interviewer and founder of the Nature Summit, Mark Coleman, stated that we are currently experiencing “a painful time of degradation, loss of species and places that we love”.

Stewardship can involve many different environmental caring actions such as:

Composting
Planting trees
Caring for pot plans (both exterior and interior plants)
Growing herbs
Planting native trees that attract birds and bees
Providing shelter for birds and possums
Creating gardens of diverse species
Trimming dead leaves or branches
Enriching our soil
Cultivating worm farms
Conscious consumption.

Costa Georgiadis in his book, Costa’s World, suggests that we take up gardening “for the soil, the soul and the suburbs” – in his view, nurture through nature and stewardship of nature are not discrete activities, they occur together. He encourages us to be mindful of our immediate environment and get to know our microenvironment.

Pamela Anderson stressed her sense of being responsible for stewardship of nature in her home environment. She luxuriates in her garden developed when she returned to Vancouver Island in her latter years. Her first garden involving “five thousand feet of roses and vegetables” (planted by seed by herself) grew impressively. She developed solar energy, a sustainable water management system and set about “re-wilding” her property – a concept involving complementing the natural environment and protecting what already exists. She immersed herself in her “Garden of Eden” and the “salty, earthy fragrance” of the sea. Pamela attests to Costa’s perspective that nurture and stewardship go hand in hand and complement and reinforce each other.

Reflection

In his book, Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zin urges us to develop mindfulness through our senses. He talks of the immediacy of our external environment – the soundscape, the touchscape, the tastescape, the smellscape and the sightscape. Joan Halifax reminds us that nature provides the whole sensory experience – we can hear birds, touch plants, smell aromas from trees, taste native fruits, see the beauty and wonders of nature and feel the strength of the wind and the pressure on our bodies.

By spending time in nature and stewarding our immediate natural environment, we can grow in mindfulness and experience happiness and joy, peace and tranquility, gratitude and resilience. Nature has many gifts to offer but it needs to be visited and cared for. Micah Mortali offers ways to connect with nature in his book, Rewilding: Meditations, Practices and Skills for Awakening in Nature.

________________________________

Image by AndreasAux from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Widening and Deepening Our Perspective on Nature

Louis Schwartzberg, in his presentation for the Nature Summit, reminded us that each of us has a unique perspective on nature shaped by our childhood experiences, our environmental influences and our culture. In referring to his grandchildren, Louie argued that they viewed nature with “their eyes wide open”. They asked basic, taken-for-granted questions like, “What is air?”, “What is water?” I recall my very young granddaughter sitting on rocky ground in a parkland area studying the lizards and bugs around her in minute detail. She spent an hour in her observations while the rest of us played tennis on a cement strip nearby.

Louie suggests that we need to develop our own “pathways of exploration” to widen and deepen our perspective on nature. This pursuit taken with wide-eyed curiosity will open the world of wonder and awe that is readily available to us. Louie’s macro, micro and time-lapse photography expands our visual capacity when viewing nature. He not only accentuates the expansiveness of nature, makes visible the unseen but also contracts time by taking us on a “journey of time and space”. His film, Fantastic Fungi: The Magic Beneath our Feet, takes us underground to explore the internet-like network of Mycelium that lie beneath the mushrooms that are visible to our naked eye. We are guided on this journey by Louie and world-famous mycologist, Paul Stamets, along with other highly informed commentators.

Louie maintains that the perspective of white Caucasians on nature is very different to that of indigenous people who grew up in an environment conscious of nature’s interconnectedness and educated to understand, respect and value nature.

An indigenous artist’s perspective on nature

In her presentation for the Nature Summit, Seeing Through the Lens of an Artist, Camille Seaman explained that very early in life she was taught that “we are connected to everything, that everything has a life force”. Camille is an indigenous photographer who “focuses on fragile environments, extreme weather, and stark beauty of the natural world” with the purpose of demonstrating that humans and nature are not separate. Her photography is a call to understand and value our connectedness to nature and to take “ responsible action” to restore and preserve our increasingly fragile ecosystems. Camille has specialised in polar photography and has provided several TED Talks on topics such as The Last Iceberg.

Camille explained that in her early childhood, her Grandfather taught her so much about an indigenous perspective on nature, on connectedness and on respect. He would reverently refer to trees as relatives and would introduce her to each of the trees in the woods while she placed her hands on the tree. When Camille would unnecessarily break branches from trees he would say to her, “If you think you are separate from the trees, see how long you can hold your breath”. He highlighted the fact that you “cannot harm it [the tree] without harming yourself”.

Camille spoke of the interconnectedness of nature in many ways. For example, she indicated that clouds bring rain which provide water for plants which, in turn, feed animals. She maintained that storms give new life and energy to the ground and help us to appreciate that all life is transitory. She tells her own life story and development as a bi-polar photographer covering Antarctica and Artic Poles in a TED Talk titled, Connection and Purpose: Tales of a Polar Photographer.

In her Nature Summit presentation, Camille emphasised the need to spend time in stillness and silence before taking a nature photograph so that you can be truly immersed in whatever you are viewing and bring a new perspective to what you are seeing. She maintains that stillness in nature enables you to dissolve “the veil of separateness”. She stated that amazing synchronies can occur in this stillness, e.g., animals may come out from their hiding place. Intriguingly, not long after I was listening to her presentation, I was in the backyard weeding our rock garden when two birds flew down and sat beside me – a mother and her young bird. They started singing and responded when I (hoarsely) attempted to whistle in return.

Reflection

Nature is all around us and in constant motion and transition – most of which we are totally unaware of. Photographers like Louie and Camille bring this movement and change to life so that we can see things that we would not normally notice, experience emotions often hidden from us and value our connectedness with nature. As we grow in mindfulness, we can expand and deepen our perspective on nature and value our connectedness, leading to wise and purposeful action to preserve it.

_________________________________________

Image by Andrea Spallanzani from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Developing a Relationship with Nature

Louie Schwartzberg reminds us that nature is a source of wonder (exploring and admiring) and awe (questioning the “how”). In his view, nature effectively represents the intersection between art and science. Art explores the “why” and generates admiration and inspiration through demonstrating the interconnectedness of everything and exposing nature’s beauty, even in the mundane; science, on the other hand, encourages questioning with curiosity and openness while exploring the “how”, e.g., how do nectar feeding bats pollinate cacti and create milk to feed their young?

It is particularly apt then, that Louie’s podcast is titled Wonder and Awe which explores the intersection between art and science through interviews with musicians such as Lisbeth Scott and scientists like mycologist William Padilla Brown. There is so much of nature that is unknown and invisible to us and these artists and scientists along with Louie’s time-lapse photography help us to deepen our relationship with nature.

Developing an intimate relationship with nature

Louie offered his perspective on the need for an intimate relationship with nature during his presentation, True Romance: Falling in Love with Nature, at the recent Nature Summit. He highlighted the fact that the pandemic has created a “mental wellness barrier” for a lot of people and that nature has a healing quality. He is now creating digital nature imagery for use in hospitals as a healing modality. This “visual healing” has been scientifically proven to achieve “shorter length of stay in hospital, increased pain tolerance and decreased anxiety”

The pandemic has created opportunities for people to appreciate what they normally take for granted – the ability to go for a walk in nature, to connect with friends and family, to spend time alone away from the “madding crowd” and associated noise. It has helped us to be more introspective and value what we have, as so much and so many have been lost.

Louie maintains that if we can develop an intimate relationship with nature through frequent mindful visits to natural environments and personal research (including videos, podcasts and articles), we can begin to care about the sustainability of our planet. He pointed out that while a lot of scientific research has helped us understand the threats to our natural environment, the wealth of data has failed to achieve any appreciable shift in people’s behaviour in relation to nature’s fragility.

He points out that our capacity to view nature is considerably limited – effectively we are able to view the equivalent of one octave of an eight-octave scale. Through his photography he makes so much more of the beauty of nature visible to us – by filming at 1,000 frames per second he can enable us to see something that happens in one third of a second, actually 15 times longer. Hence, he helps us to “explore beyond the one octave”.

Louie contends that the heart has greater influence over behaviour than the head – when our relationship with nature is one of loving and appreciating it, we are more inclined to engage in caring behaviour towards it. We will be more careful about our paper use (because of its impact on trees), we will avoid plastic bags as much as possible (because of the impact on our oceans and marine life), we will plant a vegetable garden (because it provides us with a closeness to nature and fresh, uncontaminated food).

Reflection

There is so much to learn about nature and our interconnectedness with it – it is a lifetime pursuit. We can grow in mindfulness as we spend more time in and with nature and adopt nature meditations. Another way into building our relationship with nature is participating in mantra meditations that incorporate wonder and awe of nature such as Lulu & Mischka’s “Stillness in Motion” filmed with the whales in Byron Bay, Queensland.

Artist, David Hockney, reminds us:

The world is very, very beautiful, but you’ve got to look hard and closely to notice that beauty.

(Source: The Art of Living, Martin Gayford, The Weekend Australian, pgs. 10-12)

_________________________________________

Image by Bessi from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Enriching Your Life Through Nature

Over the past few days, I participated in a number of sessions of the online Nature Summit (11-17 May 2021) and found it very inspiring, enlightening and encouraging. I subsequently upgraded from the free version and gained lifetime access to the 30+ presentations (both audio and video versions) as well as extensive bonuses. The bonuses included access to the 35 sessions from the 2020 Global Summit on Mindfulness and Compassion together with other resources such as meditations and mindfulness practices.

The themes of the Nature Summit included developing mindfulness and deep listening through nature; finding wellness, healing, and creativity in nature; nature-based leadership; and protecting the environment. The Summit provided a holistic approach to the beauty, wonder and power of nature.

Becoming grounded in nature

One of the key speakers was Kaira Jewel Lingo, mindfulness teacher, educator and editor for Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, Planting Seeds: Practising Mindfulness with Children. Kaira focuses heavily on mindfulness in education and shares the wisdom of her 20+ years of mindfulness practice including years spent in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery as a Buddhist nun where she developed her commitment to his tradition of Engaged Mindfulness.

During the Summit Kaira discussed how the earth engenders a sense of belonging and connectedness. She shared Thich Nhat Khan’s daily practice of a one-hour community walk in nature, interspersed with a 20-minute sitting meditation. She explained that the communal walk done slowly with full attention and with “loving steps on the earth” brings awareness of a perspective that is larger than ourselves. Kaira maintains that this close engagement with the earth takes us outside ourselves – outside self-absorption, the busyness of daily life and the afflictions of modern living.

Kaira also discussed the mindfulness practice of lying prostrate on the earth. Through “touching the earth” we can release our suffering and frustrations and imbibe its energy and resilience. She suggested that this practice can also connect us to the healing power of nature. One of the interesting exercises she does with school children is to have them touch a tree while blindfolded, then run and locate the tree without the blindfold, but relying solely on their sense of touch. Kaira laments how under-utilised our senses are, especially our vision which accounts for “80% of attention”.

Caring for the environment

Jane Hirshfield – poet, editor, translator, and author – in her session during the Nature Summit, discussed how nature engenders “a creative awakening”. Jane, as an internationally acclaimed poet, has become widely known for “working at the intersection of poetry, the sciences, and the crisis of the biosphere”.

As a trained Zen practitioner, she has a deep commitment to pursue mindfulness through nature. Her daily “trundling” in nature reinforces her view that the “natural world is the first field of [mindfulness] practice”. She argues that our environmental crisis has arisen through a lack of adequate mindfulness, of awareness of nature and our co-dependence. She maintains that “awareness is the ground for change”. Appreciating nature, its energy and beauty, develops the desire to protect it.

Jane indicated that after the election of Donald Trump, she took political action every day to protect the environment through her poetry, essays and writing letters to people in power. Donald Trump’s actions on the fifth day of his presidential office inspired a ground-breaking poem, “On the Fifth Day” that went viral and was read out by Jane at a protest march for scientists and the environment. On his fifth day as President, Donald Trump had ordered the removal of any reference to climate change from the Government’s website and forbade environmental scientists employed by the Government to speak in any public domain about climate change. Jane spoke about the resultant rise in “eco-poetics” and “poets for science”.

Jane explained that she writes her poetry not as a political action but more as a person finding her way in life and trying to meet daily challenges. However, given her focus and standing, she has been cast as a climate change activist who is grateful to the natural world for enabling her to pay attention, to achieve balance in her life and to see reality as it really is. While she is an extreme introvert, she engages in extroverted activities such as public speaking to communicate the urgency of the message about avoiding extinction that will occur if we keep destroying our planet. Jane suggests that we each need to go outside our comfort zone and contribute “one small decibel in the chorus of sanity” – to add our voice and skills to achieving balance on a personal and an environmental level.

Reflection

There are many ways to discover the benefits of nature. The Nature Summit provided a wide range of meditation and mindfulness practices that centred on nature. Many of the presenters noted that if we really appreciate the beauty of nature, we will be moved and motivated to protect it. As we grow in mindfulness through nature meditations, mindful walking, and other mindfulness practices, we can experience the healing power of nature, our connectedness to every living thing and gain the courage and resilience to adopt a form of Engaged Mindfulness that utilises our core competencies and the learning from our life experiences. Jane’s latest book of poems, Ledger, is a call for “personal, ecological and political reckoning”.

Growth in awareness of nature and its beauty will motivate us to protect the natural treasures that we are able to enjoy. Meditating on the elements of nature can bring equanimity to our lives despite the turbulent waves of our human existence.

________________________

Image by Valiphotos from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.