Creative Mindfulness in Nature

What does it mean to be connected to nature? Could it also mean a deeper connection with ourselves?

As a child I remember wandering a forest path at a place my family would go for outings. There was a path made from stumps and what seemed like enormous trees all around. Something about it felt magical, otherworldly, like a dream of imagination that I hadn’t created in my head but that was revealing itself around me, creating me, like I was the dream. Though I hadn’t the words to describe it, there was a sense of wonder, of possibility and inspiration, and a feeling of awe that there was something intangible and yet familiar. Like just behind what I could see as different forms was a thin veil where there was just layer after layer of aliveness, of beingness and oneness that I too belong to.

As years passed and the self-conscious concerns took over, I retreated more and more into the world of thoughts and perceptions and, as a result, felt much less of that magic and connection. As my sense of self developed and solidified, it seemed like there was only one thing certain: that I was here, stuck inside this body with a mind, and that everyone and everything else was out there, separate to me. That feeling began to dominate so much that it became a framework through which the whole world was interpreted. As if every thought and situation could only signal one thing, one emphasis that was always underlined: separate me over here and everything else out there. It was a frightening feeling, one where I felt there were things to figure out but I was so confused, that there were things to be afraid of and I could never be sure what.

Some years later, in my twenties, I began practising meditation. I was living in Korea at the time and sitting on the porch of the house I lived in, in the countryside, with wild forest and rice paddies all around. There was a storm with heavy rain, and I was just sitting there with my eyes closed. I went inside to take a break or get something, and when I came out there was a frog sitting on the chair that I had left. The wonder of it took me over in that moment, like something was reaching out to me from outside as I reached into myself. To let me know it was okay, that I belonged here, that I was in the right place. As if going inward meant also connecting with that which appears to be outside.

That feeling, though not with me in every moment, has also never fully gone away. The sense that connecting with my own beingness, the aliveness that lives in me, was the same as connecting with the trees and the birds and everything else, everyone else, until at times it was difficult to discern where inside ended and outside began. The belongingness came as such a wave of relief in that moment that I’ll never forget it. Like I was glimpsing back into a truth I had seen as a child. There was nothing to be afraid of, as everything, everywhere is made of this same beingness and aliveness as me, not different and not separate.

That is one of the reasons that I believe meditation and mindfulness practice hold some of the keys to help human beings heal their relationship with the natural world. It is in remembering who we are that we are able to remember that we belong, that this earth is not a foreign landscape but the place where our ancestors lived and our bones and sinews and blood and DNA have formed, and that every living creature is our kin. One with us through the ages, our companions, our friends and adversaries, our relatives, and above all sharing our aliveness.

The preciousness of this as a gift feels even more relevant in today’s world than when I was a child. It’s something that we have to work more at to recognise in one way, and yet in another way it is always just an arm’s reach away, or just a mind’s intention away: the intention to come home. To come home to this moment means to come home to the body and the earth. The earth is our larger body.

I believe that these practices can help each of us not only to heal our relationship with ourselves, but also with each other and the planet. How can we hope to do anything in life if we don’t even know who we truly are? That must be a starting point: the remembering. When we learn to listen and sit, to be with how we are and how the world around us is, we recognise that these thoughts and emotions and sensations are movements of the earth and belong to nature itself more than they belong to me or you. They are movements of nature, arising and ceasing according to conditioning, finding their way like rivers that rise before meandering to the ocean, in their own time. We learn to be with experience as it is in meditation instead of taking it so personally, striving to get rid of or hold on to that whose nature is to arise and cease in its own time.

For each of us there is a calling that we have on the earth according to our own nature, and to find that we have to first go within. It’s not always about grand gestures or making the whole world right. Sometimes it’s just the intention to hold the moment as it is, to feel the feet on the ground, to put your ear to a tree and listen. Listen as intently as you would to the thinking mind, with the same kind of reverence and care and belief that it’s going to give you an answer. Maybe the answer comes in a different form than words though, up through the roots and into the fibre of your bones. Maybe it comes in the form of the nervous system recalibrating gently back to homeostasis, no longer caught in the “what next” mind but imbued with the qualities of a tree. The knowing that the millennia are passing by slowly and the seasons are changing and we are all in an endless cycle of emerging as seeds in the Spring and returning to the earth when our final Winter has passed. So what really, when you look at it, is there to be so stressed about? Isn’t it all just nature unfolding and unravelling according to the season? Do you not belong here as you are in this moment?

Paul McNamee

Often when we approach mindfulness or meditation, we do so from the tendency to want to be something that we believe we aren’t. However, instead of starting from an idea or concept of ourselves that we are not mindful and need to become a mindful person, we can explore bringing our attention to the natural state of being and awareness that is always here and accessible in this moment. This can be summed up in the reflective question ‘What’s already here’? Therefore, we are learning to see practice as a movement of interest towards what is already here in this moment rather than something that we do now to become peaceful or ‘better’ in the future. However, to do this we need to begin to gain perspective on the mental frames, beliefs or attitudes that are already arising in the mind that are framing how we see life and may be preventing us from noticing this natural state of being.

The Shift from Doing to Being

One of the most challenging aspects of mindfulness is to find ways to work with the habits of our thinking mind and the frames we tend to put over experience that condition how we see ourselves and the world.

One such frame emerges from the tendency to be busily engaged with tasks and actions that revolve around ‘me’ and ‘getting things done’ and the actions that we need to take to keep our lives running smoothly. At the centre of all of this is often the sense of ourselves and things in general not being how they should be.

Therefore, over time a sense of being the ‘doer’ of life becomes a conditioned way of relating to all experiences. So much so that when we practise meditation, we can see ourselves as the ‘doer’ of ‘awareness’ or even the ‘doer’ of ‘being’. This is the perception that we are trying to bring attention to and question.

Is ‘being’ something that we do? Or is it a natural state of presence that goes overlooked as the mind is engaged with beliefs, preoccupations and perceptions?

This frame if not seen for what it is, can act both as a distraction with thoughts such as ‘’There are more important things I need to be doing than sitting here doing nothing’’ and as a self-judgement ‘’Oh my mind has been wandering, I’ll never be able to do this mindfulness thing right’’. Beneath all these beliefs is the subtle perception that mindfulness and presence is about getting somewhere or getting something done - ‘I’m getting my practice done so that I’ll be peaceful’’.

The difficulty with approaching meditation from this position is that it creates a perception about being and presence that it is something to do with personal effort and time and not a natural and always accessible reality of this very moment.

Ironically this can place the present moment as being about the past and the future. That I must practise now to be more present in the future or I should have practised more in the past to be more present now.

However, if we investigate this frame, we being to question: How could being in this moment be dependent on the past and the future?

If we try to think about meditation practice as this or that, we're creating an image that we're trying to realise, rather than just trusting in the attentiveness of the mind, in mindfulness; letting go of the desire to find or grasp anything……There is still consciousness, sensitivity, but it's not seen in terms of being a person… there is just awareness of what is happening - what the feeling is, the mood, the atmosphere that one is experiencing in this moment. We can call this intuitive awareness. It is not programmed and conditioned by thought or memory or perception. Ajahn Sumedho

So how do we work with this process?

Firstly, we establish an attitude of noticing what is already here in the mind. For example, if it is present in the mind we can bring awareness to this tendency to want to do or achieve and see it as a conditioned thinking pattern arising and ceasing rather than to fight against it.

Instead of trying to stop anything, get anything or become anything we practise bringing the attention to the natural awareness of the moment to what is present as it is and not so we can change it. Then we gradually and kindly shift the focus and attention away from the frames of perception and towards the natural expression of the heart/ body/mind in the present moment.

Noticing Being Itself

As we continue this process we can even go one step further back and begin to notice the awareness itself. Is being always here? Is awareness always here? Can we notice what it feels like to bring attention to this sense of open knowing. What better way to receive the beauty and wonder of this moment?

Meeting thoughts, emotions and sensations as part of nature.

“In this moment, everything belongs.”