Nature and embodied spirituality

The Fractal Dimension of Stress Reduction Imagine you have an hour to recover after a stressful week. Which of these four places would you choose? Vote below. Please choose before reading on. There is no correct answer, although there are some interesting reasons why one landscape might appeal more than another. Nature is not one kind of place I doubt we think of nature as if it were a single type of environment – of course it's not. It might mean sitting beside a river, walk

Let's begin by noticing the very thing that you may have been missing. That which literally takes place under your nose. Your breath. Take a moment now to notice how you’re breathing. Are you breathing through your nose or through the mouth? Where are you breathing – into your chest or down to your belly area? How does your body move as your breathe? How long are you breathing in for – short or long inhales? What happens at the top of your in-breath – do you pause or go strai

It's easy to live too far above our own life to notice our baseline. Nature connection can teach us the value of normal. There's a practice in nature connection called the sit spot. You choose a place; a corner of a garden, a park bench, the foot of a particular tree, and you return to it regularly to sit and sense and do nothing except pay attention. At first, you notice the obvious things. Temperature. Birds. Wind. Light through leaves. Smells. But over time, something more

What if inhabiting my body became a way of praying, a way of having a conversation with God…a way of coming into direct contact with real life in the here and now? Over recent years, I have discovered that running has grown into more than exercise for me. It has become more like meditation…more like prayer…more like a spiritual practice. It keeps me grounded and takes me beyond my anxious thoughts, it gets me out of my head and into my body to a deeper level of awareness and

If you’ve ever had the sense that God was getting your attention through the natural world, then the next question is how to stay with that moment well. Whatever the moment is about to be ... my first advice is NOT to take a photo of it. That bursts the 'moment' bubble. And, if you're a bit more practised than that, don't immediately label it (that's a sunset, or that's achillea millefolium, as can happen in my head). Don't grab its surface meaning or jump to any fast interpr

If you have eyes to see, nature becomes a second kind of scripture, the book of creation, sitting open in front of you and you can feel it tugging at your spirit. This is a look at the Spirit's voice through nature, signs, synchronicity, coincidence and the craft of discernment. You’ll find a simple outdoor contemplation practice, a method for testing what a moment might be inviting and prompts to take into spiritual direction when you want help with the listening. How does G