A Natural Spiritual Experience

Many years ago, as a new art and education student, I experienced an interesting and significant encounter with a field.

On a walk through the countryside near my college a field took my attention. It was on a hill and, to me, looked like a wave rising up from the road which then dropped down behind the hill. It had been lightly ploughed so the earth was brown and bare. As I looked at the field I felt an enormous surge within me – I could hardly breathe. It felt like I became the field. The field was me. It felt like I was being turned upside down, flipped over and remade. It was incredibly powerful and a bit disturbing, but I essentially felt slightly ‘heady’ and very much alive.

I was not your typical art student. I was quite reserved, a bit shy and quite impressionable so I knew not to mention any of this to the group of friends I was with. I knew also that this was not an absence of the ‘petit mal’ kind. I knew how those went as I had suffered from epilepsy during my teens. It felt like something completely different. Unknown. Mysterious. Something related to both the landscape and my inner world. My being. I later spoke about this in a tutorial and was introduced to the notion of Einfühlung – empathy in its translation. The idea of “in-feeling” or “feeling into” another form. I was intrigued. So began a fascination with the natural world which was expressed in drawings, sculptures, pottery, printing and alongside this was my commitment to my emerging spiritual life. The two in my mind were not connected although I experienced similar feelings of awe, wonder and spaciousness in both. It might be said that I was developing my wild-mind, wild-earth self as described by David Hinton. But it would be years before I would come to understand that idea.

Jung in his autobiography says, ‘At times I feel like I am spreading out over the landscape, and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.’ So I was in good company.

My spiritual practice has taken different forms throughout my life, some connected to traditional Christian religious practices, some to meditation practices through Buddhism and mindfulness courses. My education has involved the psychospiritual approach through A Course in Miracles, an academic Masters’ programme and more recently through a more experiential approach with The Spiritual Companion’s Trust through their diploma programme. The practical nature of this course, the community, the humour and genuine support to explore an individual approach was just what I needed to augment my more ‘serious’ research. Gradually I have evolved what Thomas Moore might term a ‘personal spirituality’ with no defined rituals, techniques or set ways, but daily meditations, connections to a like-minded community and an openness to the wonder and joy of life. My work latterly, as an eco-therapist also helped me explore spirituality in a more embodied context. I now regularly work outdoors with clients and supervisees and often in this work I experience a transformational shift, a mysterious quality which I attribute to the location, the holding of a landscape, and the deeply embedded nature of the work. My spiritual experience is becoming sensorily grounded in the messy, moist, changeable world of woodlands, hills and valleys.

Moore suggests that taking in the world as it is, allowing it to affect us, noticing ‘presence’ could be described as a form of ‘ordinary mysticism’. He speaks of finding the sacred in ordinary everyday life and encourages us to consciously ‘empty ourselves’ to allow a more receptive contemplative state to receive whatever needs to be received. Being in a natural environment for me is essential in this process. Going out with intention and with the mindset of ‘being with’ rather than ‘being in’, and with the sacred earth beneath my feet, brings a quality I cannot create alone in my human-being self.

On a recent summer walk, I was absorbed by the grasses in a field. I stood midfield and watched. I saw the slender stalks moving together as the breeze moved through them and me. The heavy seed heads bowing gracefully in unison. In the sunlight some stalks almost disappeared so that the seed heads seemed to be suspended in light and space. I held my breath, transfixed and transformed. I felt a lightness, my life suspended and yet held by some invisible ‘stalk’. It was a moment of connection. A moment of bliss. It is not a grandiose thing or an over-the-top religious moment. It is quiet, full of wonder, and awe-full. A moment where my breath quickens, and I feel slightly ‘trembly’. There are times when we can be ‘shaken’ to our core in simple everyday life. Noticing these moments, noticing my embodied response, allowing myself to feel this with all my being is an important part of my spiritual life.

Through the many spiritual paths I have explored, communication with nature, allowing it to speak to me and to lose and find myself in it have all helped with the development of my spiritual life. Although it has only been within the latter 20 years that I have actively viewed this as a ‘gateway’ to spiritual experience, believing, like many others growing up in a Western society, that the only worthwhile spiritual experience to be had was in a designated sacred space – a church – with all the attendant rituals and practices.

I found that it was through my grounded, embodied physical self rather than the belief of my spiritual self being somewhere ‘out there’, separate from me or my body, that fostered a different spiritual approach and a deeper way of being with the world.

Nature is a powerfully energetic and comforting place when I most need it to be. Feeling and ‘knowing’ I am part of the rhythms, the climate, the seasons feed into my daily life in supportive and uncomplicated ways. There is a simplicity which transforms my internal, sometimes despairing, dialogue. I experience a body-mind spaciousness which I now actively cultivate. It is not a journey for my rational mind but a dive into sensorial, sensual, embodied, physical and spiritual self.

This re-enchantment with the natural world with intention and deep listening is also, of course, raising my level of consciousness for the ecological crisis facing us all. For me this is now the sole purpose of engagement. The earth needs my attention. And I am not alone. Many others are deeply embedded in this work in a myriad of ways. There are growing communities all over the world reconnecting with the natural world. As kin. As sacred. This is changing the way we relate to the natural world, moving
“From a collection of objects, to a communion of subjects” Thomas Berry

These changes might a collective shift in consciousness in how we see ourselves in relation to the planet and some, including me, might call this a need for spiritual bravery.

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This piece is an amalgamation of extracts from my inclusion in two books:
Supervision as Spiritual Practice edited by Robin Shohet and Joan Shohet
Ecotherapy – revision. Edited by Joe Hinds and Hayley Marshall. 

Further References
Moore, T. A Personal Spirituality
Berry, T. in Spiritual Ecology – The Cry of the Earth edited by Vaughan-Lee, L
Hinton, D. Wild Mind, Wild Earth
Jung, C. Memories Dreams and Reflections