Nature Connection: What Are You Expecting to Happen?

The practice begins with the sentence we use to describe it.

Before you go outside, how do you prepare your mind?

Whatever we’re about to do, we set expectations, consciously or habitually, that either open up or close down what we might experience. The way we frame – the way we describe to ourselves – a nature-based spiritual practice can shape our attention and experience before we’ve even stepped outside. The instruction for the practice is already part of the practice, because it tells us what to expect.

Before getting into the detail, the important thing is that we reserve some energy and make time to be outside, in connection with God through creation. That’s step one, if you like. If that’s your challenge, that’s enough for now. But if you can manage that, and want more nuance, you might want to explore a further step.

The language we use reveals our beliefs and sets up expectations

The Nature Cure. The Nature Fix. Nature Therapy™ … or simply going into nature to de-stress. Despite the whiff of woodland wellness brochure, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but it does frame nature as something that does something to me – after I’ve gone into it. Green Prozac. And doesn’t it all imply, unconsciously, that I am separate from nature?

And by adding in the spiritual dynamic, to go and find God in nature, doesn’t that contain the same selective framing? Again, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the language, but there are other framings which might shape your expectations and attention in a more helpful way.

Finding God in nature can imply that nature is where God is more easily found, so I go there to extract or achieve a spiritual experience. But other questions widen the thinking. How would you rewrite your own brief after mulling any of these over?

• When I say nature, what am I including or excluding?

• Can a car park verge, garden or city tree support the same spiritual attention as wild nature?

• What makes me experience myself as separate from nature rather than part of it? What do I really believe here?

• Is connection something I create, strengthen, reveal or remember – something I sense, feel or conceptualise?

• Does the place itself have any say in what happens? How do I experience that?

• What happens when I stop looking for a spiritual experience and simply attend?

• Am I meeting the place, or searching it for messages intended for me?

• Do I allow the violence, ugliness and turbulence of nature into the connection?

• Where do I experience God – or absence, mystery, resistance – in my relationship with this place?

• What if nothing particularly spiritual happens?

• Is noticing relationship itself already a spiritual practice?

• How do I let what is actually happening here influence the encounter?

• What is this place – brother tree, sister bird, uncle ecosystem – requiring of me?

Go alone or together. Go for your wellbeing. Go to pray. Go because you love the place. Call it going into nature if that is ordinary language for you, but notice the story your framing tells you about what nature is, what you are, and what is supposed to happen between you. Then occasionally try another story.

Instead of: I’m going outside to connect with nature.

Try: I’m going outside to notice the living world I’m part of.

Instead of: I’m going outside to find somewhere peaceful.

Try: I’m going outside to meet this place as it is.

Instead of: I’m going outside to reduce my stress.

Try: I’m going outside to give this place my attention.

Instead of: I’m going outside to be alone in nature.

Try: I’m going outside to notice what other company is here.

Instead of: I’m going outside to see what nature gives me.

Try: I’m going outside to meet this place without asking anything from it.

Instead of: I’m going outside to find God in nature.

Try: I’m going outside to pay attention without needing to find anything.

Q: How to fail at nature connection? A: Give the encounter an outcome it has to produce. 

You can improve the original framing in one more way. If the instruction is spend twenty minutes in nature to reduce your stress, and you come back still anxious, your framing has set you up to fail. But if it is spend twenty minutes noticing what happens between you and this place, anxiety may be part of what gets observed, rather than judged or measured. You can remove pass-or-fail metrics from the intention altogether.

A spiritual practice might invite a different expectation. I’m going outside to pay attention to what is here. Or … I’m going to spend some time in relationship with this place and see what happens. Or even … For twenty minutes, I’m not going to require anything of the natural world.

One more step

Perhaps there is one more step to wrap your thinking around. Yes, we’re part of nature but that doesn’t mean we’re indistinguishable from everything else. There is something different about humans, I think, at a spiritual level. Maybe we have a role within creation, not to stand above it or subdue it but to notice, care, protect, give thanks and respond actively and regeneratively. That would make our distinctiveness the ability to take responsibility for our relationship with it. Nature connection then becomes more than noticing that I belong here, it also asks what belonging requires of me.