Reconnecting With Our Mother (Nature)

In honor of the weather beginning warm back up as spring shakes off the last of the winter chills and makes way to longer days and warmer nights, I think it’s important that we take stock of habits that we’ve collected through the cold season and see what changes we should be making in our spring preparations for an active summer.

One of these changes may be to reconnect with our Mother Nature as she begins to bring forth new life and in turn present us with the opportunity to join her in her abundance of growth.

For most of us living in or near the city, it can become very easy to fall into the habit of going from one sheltered, temperature-controlled, static environment to another – from house to car to office to car to house – without creating the time and space to connect with that which we are ultimately inseparable from.

This stagnation in our environment can lead to a stagnation of mind and body. When we do not fully expose ourselves to the fluctuations of seasons, temperatures, and environments, it’s easy to lose touch of the many daily, weekly, and seasonal fluctuations of our own lives and bodies. Life becomes dull and flat.

Raw, unadulterated nature teaches us about ourselves in subtler and more powerful ways than any book or course. For millennia we’ve had to live in congruence and embrace our oneness with nature for our own survival. (The same is true today although we’ve seemed to convince ourselves otherwise and are seeing the repercussions of our illusion of separation.)

Nature is gentle yet relentless, the giver of life and the destroyer – the culmination of the balance of complementary opposites that allows this entire experience to be possible. There are times of growth and times of decay; seasons of activity and seasons of rest. The death of one organism is the birth of another. In this way there is truly no waste, but ultimate abundance. The more we can connect with these cycles and principles the more we can allow them to have an influence on our approach to life.

We have been indoctrinated into a paradoxical belief of scarcity and productivity at all costs. ‘There isn’t enough so we have to work ourselves to dis-ease and death to have enough to manage our dis-ease and death.’ The application of this belief strips us of our humanity by separating us from our source – our Mother.

Putting yourself back into nature and allowing yourself to be a wondrous child in awe of her beauty and majesty can be a source of deep healing for us all. Realizing the wholeness and completeness of nature helps us to recognize the wholeness and completeness of ourselves, because ultimately there is no separation between what’s out there and what’s in here.

A simple practice of getting your bare feet on the earth or sitting in silence under a big tree or maintaining a garden or at the very least caring for a houseplant can be all it takes to reinstate your initiation into your journey of reconnection and remembrance of your oneness (and with it your love and compassion) with all that is.