Note from the Authors

Connection is essential to our well-being. When we feel connected—to ourselves, to nature, to our community—we can flourish, drawing strength from a linked network that is larger than each of us. We feel safe to express our true nature—opening to, rather than resisting, the unfolding of life. When we’re in connection, we can achieve what we could never accomplish alone. By contrast, disconnection leaves us isolated, feeling small and fearful, with an array of outside forces aligned against us. We lose perspective and start to believe the illusion that there is a human world separate from the natural world. Looking around us today, we can sense that there is something wrong. We experience imbalance and the lack of connection in ourselves as stress, mental illness, loneliness. We see signs of lack of connection with the natural world in human-caused species loss and habitat degradation, buildup of toxins in the environment, and the climate crisis.

It can be overwhelming if we view all these challenges as burdens that must be carried alone. But the voices of scientists, artists, poets, and religious leaders remind us that we truly are in this together. Our mental health and thereby our ability to respond wisely improves dramatically when we are connected to community and nature. Dozens of studies have shown unequivocally that humans are happier when we reconnect with the natural world. Spending even ten minutes in a natural setting produces positive effects on our mental and physical health.¹ And spending time in nature just once a month measurably increases our sense of nature connection.²

Yet, for many of us, our relationship with nature is so remote that the natural world is essentially unknown to us, rendering it mysterious and unpredictable, and thus a bit scary. For others, nature is like a museum full of rare and beautiful artifacts (you can look, but don’t touch!), or simply a collection of objects existing for humans to extract and use. Our wall of isolation is so impenetrable that we don’t feel a connection even when we’re standing in the middle of a natural area. It is only when we recognize that the armor of isolation is self-imposed that we can begin to break through and feel the healing that comes from time spent outdoors.

We go about our days under the illusion that our bodies are individual entities with skin that is a definitive boundary between what is “me” and what is “not-me.” But give this a try: Visualize yourself lying in the middle of a tennis court (or better still, go lie in one). Sense the hard surface under your back. Crane your neck to see the sidelines and baselines. Do you feel like a small independent unit inside a big box? Now consider how this feeling changes when you learn that the surface area of your lungs is as big as the entire tennis court—and that’s just your lungs! The length of the blood vessels carrying the oxygen you absorb from the air is over sixty thousand miles. You are literally way bigger than the tennis court, and all this surface area is intertwined with the world around you. As your lungs expand and contract, your breathing pulls in over two thousand gallons of air every day, and gasses from this air soak into your blood. Where is the dividing line if you are inside the air and the air is inside you? Even your skin isn’t a firm boundary that separates you from the outside world; as you breathe and pull oxygen into your lungs, other oxygen molecules are moving from the air through your skin to nourish your skin cells.³ Moreover, among all the living cells that make up you, there are way more nonhuman cells—microorganisms like bacteria and viruses—than there are human cells.⁴ Not only that, the stuff of your body is intricately woven into the fabric of the cosmos itself. Your atoms were forged in the stars. There is no place where you stop and nature begins.

The disconnect we experience between ourselves and the natural world is mirrored in the equally strong disconnect we feel with our own internal world—our hearts and minds. In the same way that the burgeoning interest in reestablishing a relationship with the natural world (what we call the “nature connection movement”) stems from a deep sense of longing for connection with nature, the popularity of mindfulness meditations and practices (the “mindfulness movement”) reflects a similar longing for connection to our inner world. Mindfulness practices invite and guide us to reconnect with our true selves, and herein lies the beauty and power of the intersection of mindfulness and the natural word: connection with true nature, inside and out.

There are many authors and teachers who explore why nature connection is important to human beings (see “Further Reading”). Likewise, writings and teachings that consider the inner world of our minds have been available for thousands of years. And this hunger for inner peace hasn’t abated. A quick look in any bookstore will reveal dozens of books and magazines related to the topic. There are entire fields, such as ecopsychology, wilderness therapy, and the Nature Rx movement, dedicated to using the natural world as a tool (what Buddhists would call skillful means) for helping us develop as fulfilled, spiritually healthy humans.⁵

Yet exploration of how the outer-looking focus of nature awareness and the inner-looking work of mindfulness combine to support and enhance one another for the benefit of both humans and nonhumans is far less common, even though there is no fundamental reason for this inner/outer disconnect. For example, more than 2,500 years ago, early Buddhism connected the development of mindfulness with time in nature. One of the most influential Buddhist texts on mindfulness (the Satipatthana Sutta) instructs the practitioner to “go to the forest, or the root of a tree.”⁶ And early practitioners in the wilderness awareness movement explicitly linked activities such as animal tracking to spiritual growth.⁷

When the worlds of mindfulness and nature connection are brought together fully, what looks like a simple nature awareness practice becomes a door to understanding ourselves. Likewise, a mindfulness practice focused on inner consciousness leads us to a direct connection with all of nature and life. Mindfulness and nature connection mirror and support one another. Our goal with this book is to reestablish the connection between our inner nature and the nature outside of us. The synergy that results from linking the more inner-focused work (mindfulness practices) with the more outer-looking work (nature awareness practices) allows for a direct experience of the interconnectedness of all life—human and nonhuman. Mindful by Nature is an invitation to step into the natural world and find your seat in the middle of it all.

Locating nature does not require us to have an abundance of free time or the ability to travel to someplace far from where we live. In the largest cities, pocket parks, landscaped areas, and even street trees can offer us access to nonhuman beings and nature. Cities are habitat and home to an abundance of birds and insects, and a variety of mammals, too. Interaction with our nonhuman, urban neighbors offers a rich opportunity for self-reflection and awareness practice. If you live in a suburban, exurban, or rural area, you may have more access to larger natural areas, but you may also find that in a busy life you struggle to get yourself out there. One common challenge of rural living is overfamiliarity with nature. Because we have driven the same roads or walked the same trails for years, autopilot kicks in and we are not fully present to the ever-changing lives of the cast of characters in the natural world around us. In our instructional programs, we have been told numerous times that the stories, teachings, and practices described in this book have helped folks who have lived in wooded areas their entire lives see their surroundings in new ways that reframed and deepened their relationships with the natural world. The bottom line is that the “best” nature is the nature you access with curiosity and presence.

This book is laid out in five parts, designed as a path toward increasing interconnection with self and nature. Each chapter is built around a story of a personal experience that provided us with valuable insight and concludes with an activity or meditation that we call a “Try.” These Trys are the actionable steps to building the muscles of awareness, inquiry, and presence. Let these activities be invitations and jumping-off points for your own experiential learning. Be loose and gentle with them, and feel free to modify them as needed so that they best serve you. You cannot fail a Try. The real work in any of the Trys is in the returning to awareness of your own moment-to-moment experience. If you are mindful of yourself and the world around you while you are doing them, you are doing it right!

In the first part, Grounding, we lean into embodied awareness as an essential tool for getting started. The focus on our own direct sensory experience offers us a pathway to presence. We introduce tools such as seeing baselines, asking the essential questions, the kinesthetics of moving in nature, tapping into the awareness of birds, and noticing blind spots. Deep Listening takes the tools of Grounding and provides opportunities to apply them as we navigate our day-to-day lives. When the world doesn’t meet our expectations, or we have gone beyond the edge of the familiar, these tools can be our guide. When we become disoriented, we must learn to listen deeply both inside and outside. Our path will become clearer, and our experience will be richer. Leaning In becomes vital when we reach our edges—the edges of our perception, the limits of our comfort, the boundaries of what we feel we can handle emotionally. While we don’t want to push ourselves unsustainably, we acknowledge that deep learning occurs when we are challenged, not while in our comfort zones. This means when we reach what we believe to be our limits, we can use our grounding and deep listening and just lean into those walls a bit. We are often pleasantly surprised at what can happen. We’ve called part four Wise Action after the concept in Buddhism.⁸ As our perspective starts to shift, we develop deeper, more compassionate relationships with ourselves and the beings in nature around us. From here, how to navigate and live in this world comes more into focus. Finally, Coming Home conveys the feeling that we are back to our roots. After being lost in doubt and disconnection, it is a relief to feel we are back where we belong. Of course, we were always there—we just had to realize it.

In all our stories, we have intentionally chosen not to specify which of us is the “I.” Much like the birdsong in the dawn chorus, our voices blended such that it felt less important to name the individual. We hope that you will benefit from, and enjoy, a more universal “I.”

While there is an order to the book, each chapter stands on its own. If you are drawn to skip around, feel free to follow your curiosity! You can bring the book outdoors with you and follow along with a Try step-by-step if you like, or you may prefer to leave the book at home and simply work the spirit of the Try after you have given it a good read. Remember that while you are leaning into your psychological edges and nature’s edges, it is important to be safe. Whether you are doing these Trys in a wilderness setting or a city park, you will want to be aware of your surroundings. In some cases it may be appropriate to practice with a friend, or choose a different location. Let your intuition, awareness, and personal situation guide you. We hope to see you in the forest, or at the root of a tree!

To attend one of our programs online or in person visit us at www.mindfulbynature.org.