Our body is nature


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For a long time, I thought of nature as just a nice place to be in, and it felt good to be in the forest or by the sea, but I didn’t pay much more attention than that. Now though, after immersing myself in many ways of reconnecting with the natural world - I sense there is a whole lot more to our relationship with nature that connects with the practice of Focusing.

We talk of listening to the body in Focusing, but what is the body?
Our human bodies are nature of course, how strange that we often speak of nature as one thing and us as another! We have co-evolved with millions of species of plants and animals, grown up together if you like, over many millions of years. When we turn our attention to the body, we are tuning into not just one separate body and its inner feelings but to a body that senses all its environment, that has evolved to live embedded into a living world. A body that carries the collective wisdom of all that living and evolving. A body that belongs to the natural world, is interwoven with it in every second of our days.

As Eugene Gendlin said “Your body is not a machine, rather a wonderfully intricate interaction with everything around you, which is why it "knows" so much just in being."

Just as our sensitive and responsive body holds deeper knowing about life, so do the many organisms in the more than human world share a similar knowing. We are not the only wise ones. Can we listen to what they know? Yes! With and through this responsive and resonant body. There is profound intelligence in the community of trees that we call a forest - they know a lot about living well. What about the birds and mammals that live here too. What of their wisdom? What do they sense and know of us? Being more connected to the natural world brings many things: a sense of groundedness and being held, a sense of belonging to a larger system, a way of being connected to a teacher that holds many lessons and mysteries.

For me, the journey of coming home to the body, is inseparable from the journey of returning home to our place in the natural world.

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