Waking Up to Nature as Teacher
When the eyes and ears are awake, even the leaves on the trees read like pages from the scriptures.
— KABIR
Nature is a supreme support for developing mindfulness. Mystics and meditators for millennia have sought refuge in the mountains of the Himalayas and in desert caves, in the serenity of lakes and streams and in the stillness of forests. These are places that help awaken our minds and hearts. People tend to naturally be more attentive when outdoors. Nature allures our curiosity. Our sensory awareness becomes more awake in an aromatic rainy forest or by the crashing waves of the ocean. Nature is one of the few things that can pull us away from our screens, out of our thinking minds, and into the present moment. Think about the last time you were really present. Did it involve nature? Perhaps you were watching a beautiful sunset, listening to morning birdsong, swimming in a lake, tending to flowers in the garden, or playing with your cat. It becomes easier to cultivate mindful presence when our attention is allured fully in the natural world.
The body and its senses are always in the now; sensory stimuli are portals to present-moment awareness. Our homes, offices, and cars are designed to reduce external stimuli. They temper the extremes of heat, cold, wind, and rain. Living indoors, our sensory awareness can go to sleep, since there is minimal input from fragrance, breeze, movement, or sound. To compensate, we watch action movies and high-drama TV to stimulate our deadened nervous system.
How different it feels when we step out of our air-conditioned office and take a walk in a park. The fresh oxygen literally wakes our brain cells. We inhale the fragrance of the trees after a recent rainfall and feel the humidity moisten our skin. A north wind blows, ruffling our hair, and we feel a refreshing cool breeze on our face. The sun peeks out from behind the clouds and drenches us in warm light. We step out onto grass and feel the soft ground underfoot. A cacophony of chirping arises as a flock of starlings takes flight in unison. A gray squirrel busily scurries around oak trees collecting acorns. How easy to pay close attention to this rich tapestry of experience.
Not only does nature support awareness, she offers a doorway to insight and understanding. It is hard to walk for more than a few steps without seeing signs of the reality of change. Plants, grasses, and trees are emerging, flourishing, decaying, and slowly becoming nutrients for the soil. A hillside of flowering lupines includes some in full bloom and others already withered, full of their own unstoppable decay. Impermanence, the truth that every living thing is transient, broadcasts loudly as we stroll outdoors.
In nature, no two moments are the same. Something always changes: a shift in sunlight, a breeze rustling leaves overhead, a bird’s song rising and falling. We are often mesmerized by changing landscapes, gazing for hours at the restless ocean as waves perpetually crash and recede on the shore. We can lose ourselves in the vast cloud-filled sky. I personally relish watching the rain sweep across the hillsides or the wind blow tall grasses in the valleys of Northern California. With intimacy and insight, we dwell in the naturalness of transience, part of the fabric of life, and are invited to release rather than hold experience, which continually slips through our fingers.
Similarly, we encounter the naturalness and beauty of death everywhere we go. Even in death, an old oak tree, leafless, its dignified, sturdy trunk soaring to the skies, retains its gracefulness. Perhaps we encounter a bleached deer skull lying in tall grasses and are reminded that death’s hand is never far away. Similarly, when I teach retreats in Baja, California, the coastline is littered with the skeletons of crabs and starfish, a graveyard of bones from countless sea creatures. Life’s transience is everywhere, inviting us to wake up to each precious and passing moment.
As we live our individual lives, cut off from one another in our cars, cubicles, and condos, it is easy to feel distant from the truth that our lives are intimately interconnected. In the outdoors, however, we can sense the matrix of life, in which everything is interwoven with everything else.
When I take groups to Alaska on a kayaking retreat, we swim in an intact ecosystem, where humpback whales, herring, bald eagles, spawning salmon, and black bears interact as they have for millions of years. We are at risk of destroying such ecological balance through pollution, the use of chemicals, and countless other human impacts. In our ignorance, we risk harming all life. We must understand and honor just how intricately our lives and the consequences of our actions affect the web of life. Immersion in nature helps wake us up to the delicateness of this balance and reminds us of the necessity to live in harmony with all creatures.
Nature can also teach us about simplicity and peace. In his poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” Wendell Berry writes of being stressed about his children’s lives and how nature is a salve for that anxiety: “I come into the presence of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief.… / For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” When surrounded by the natural world, we see how preoccupied we get with future thoughts and worries. Nature reminds us of the peace that is available when we orient to the present rather than get lost in a swarm of future concerns. Immersing ourselves in such landscapes strengthens our ability to abide in the grace of the present.
Bringing mindfulness outside can also help us step out of clock time and into natural rhythms. We get so caught up in busyness and a lack of time, which causes us to rush anxiously through life. Outdoors, we adjust to nature’s clock, which moves slowly, organically, everything happening in its proper time.
Along Utah’s Green River, the high canyon walls are up to three hundred million years old, which provides a different scale of time entirely. Rafting the river on a nature meditation retreat, I realize how silly and unnecessary all my rushing and angst about deadlines are. Our hurry creates so much extra stress and burden. Instead, nature invites us to slow down, to sense the vastness of time and the intimacy of this moment, if we are present enough to notice.
Perhaps the most significant lesson is how nature can take us out of our myopic self-centered absorption. Indoor living can accentuate a self-focus and a preoccupation with the details of our life. The further we roam from our human-centric world, the more we foster a sense of spaciousness and perspective. Immersing ourselves in nature, absorbing its rhythms, distancing ourselves from egocentricity, our sense of self naturally softens and relaxes. It is as if our psyche can breathe.
On my nature meditation retreats, many students report how the constricted sense of self easily dissolves while spending quiet time outdoors. It is like shedding a tight-fitting suit, and without such constriction, a natural sense of peace emerges. This easing of the tightly wrapped sense of self can be both insightful and life-changing. We see how the self, to which we cling so tightly, is like all things transient and ephemeral. With that we can access a natural lightness and freedom that can profoundly transform how we live in this world.
• PRACTICE •
This practice involves going outside to a nearby park, meadow, woodland, or coastline and immersing yourself in a natural environment for half an hour or more. Once you arrive, take time to meander around and take in the elements of the setting. Then find a place to sit comfortably, whether against a tree, on a rock, in a shady grove, or even on a park bench.
Notice how the natural world allures your attention. Notice colors, shapes, forms, movements, smells, and textures. Let the movement of wind, the sound of waves, or a flight of birds capture your curiosity. See how awareness spontaneously becomes attentive to the rich, dynamic landscape compared to the relative flatness and lack of stimulation in our homes and offices.
Now attune to your senses and notice the fluctuating flow of experience. Observe how no two moments are the same. Observe the waterfall nature of the sensory world — how sounds, sensations, temperature, sights, smells, and touch ceaselessly change. This is also true of inner experience. Can you sense how this is occurring all the time, though we often fail to notice?
In the same way, notice how everything in nature embodies both growth and decay. Consider the grasses, trees, flowers, or even the fresh falling snow. Notice how life is disintegrating and emerging in myriad ways. What happens when you take in that dynamic aspect of transience?
Next, attune to the interconnected flow of life. Notice how everything is interdependent. Notice how temperature shifts with the movement of the sun and breeze or how the fragrances of the forest emerge after rains. Animals, plants, insects, weather, and landscape exist in an interwoven dance that moves to the daily rotation of the planet and the yearly orbit around the sun. Be curious how your inner world of feelings and moods follows similar cycles, how inner and outer landscapes impact each other, how everything is interwoven — body, mind, heart, and world.
Finally, notice how you can lose all sense of self when you are fully absorbed in nature. These moments of “self-forgetting” can allow us to merge or dissolve into something greater. Our limited, contracted sense of self can drop away, and instead we open to a sense of vastness, awe, wonder, and profound silence. Be open to such moments arising. They most often occur when you least expect them! Yet they point to a truth about our own nature.
• • •