What's Spiritually Normal? Sit Spots for the Soul: Learning from Nature

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 interesting happens, you begin to learn what's normal – the baseline – the particular resonance of that small piece of living world at this season and at this time of day. The usual cast of birds, their routines, their relationships and calls. The ambient sound of a system simply going about its business.

Once you know the normal, you start to notice disturbance. A sudden silence. A shift in the alarm calls. Something has changed. The robin knew before you did but now, slowly, you're learning to read the same signals. Jon Young, in his book What the Robin Knows, calls this awareness of the baseline. It's the foundation for experiential nature connection.

I want to suggest it might also be the foundation of something else entirely.

You Have a Baseline Too

You have a normal physiological resting state where nothing in particular is happening at a conscious level. The automatic systems keeping you alive and safe are ticking over quietly. You're not experiencing a mood, emotion or physiological need. It's your baseline.

You can describe it using the affective circumplex diagram below. I think of this as a simple dashboard to read your continual processes of interoception. At any time, you're a point on this diagram. Your normal resting position is your physiological / psychological baseline.

James Russell's model proposes that all affective states are based on cognitive interpretations of core neural sensations.

The equivalent of the robin here, are those signals that register consciously, when the automatic processes communicate a need or concern. Thirst is a good example; your body needs water and so you get an alert – drink.

You can notice a shift in your baseline for other reasons. These might start as moods but with the potential to become emotions and other more complex behavioural reactions. When, for example, anxiety creeps in, or when your state changes, when you realise you've been flat for days without quite registering and now it's lifted.

The equivalent of the sit-spot exercise here may include any exercise that allows you to observe yourself kindly, with no judgement. Those moments of stillness and observation at the start of stillness practices are good opportunities for this awareness.

It's worth noting that we can spend so much time somewhere unhealthy on this diagram that we normalise to it. If you're experiencing chronic (ongoing) stress or illness for example, normal isn't equivalent to healthy, and you might consider looking for help.

What About a Deeper Baseline?

Here's where I want to go somewhere less charted. What if there's a third layer, beyond the natural environment, beneath our mood and energy, that we might call your soul or spirit's baseline? Not your mood or your bodily needs but something linked but beyond both. A kind of interior resonance (or its absence). A sense of being aligned with something, or slightly out of phase with it. I'm aware that sounds vague. Bear with me.

In the gospel accounts, there's a moment where Jesus – in the middle of a crowd – suddenly stops (a woman has touched his clothing). He says that power has gone out from him. Not that he's tired or emotionally drained, something has moved. He noticed a shift in a direction, a flow, a giving-out of something. It's an odd, precise observation. And it implies he knew his own baseline well enough to detect the change. (Which makes me wonder: what does a disturbed soul baseline actually feel like, as distinct from disturbed mood or disturbed energy?) And I wonder if David was familiar with his own soul's baseline when his heart struck him (1 Sam 24:5). Likewise Paul being deeply troubled by the idols in Athens.

The Christian contemplative tradition, particularly in the Ignatian stream (Ignatius of Loyola, sixteenth century, founder of the Jesuits) developed a practice around this kind of noticing. He called the shifts consolation and desolation: movements of the spirit toward life, or away from it. Similar but not the same as mood or state changes or those with something else too.

I don't think these interior systems are unconnected. It may be that soul is not a separate spooky layer on top of animal life, but the depth dimension of it. If so, the animal and the spiritual are not rivals, they are entangled.

The Diagnostic Problem. Attention then Discernment.

How do you know if what you're noticing is spiritually significant, a genuine movement of the soul or just something wholly from your inner system: a bad night's sleep, low blood sugar, the start of a virus.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, in her book, How Emotions Are Made, describes how once on a date she interpreted physiological signals, stomach flutters, a flushed face, trouble concentrating, as attraction to the guy she was with. Only later did she realise that she had misattributed the early stages of flu.

Likewise, careful attribution is needed with spiritual signals. Mystical traditions that ignore the need to discern, tend to produce people who interpret every mood swing as a divine signal. Other traditions that dismiss the signals entirely tend to produce people who are entirely deaf to the subtler frequencies of their own interior life.

The discernment question, is this the Spirit, or have I got a cold coming?  is one of the most human and most underrated questions in spiritual development. And it's very hard to answer alone.

A Practical Starting Point to Learn Your Spiritually Normal

Before you can notice disturbance you need to know your baseline's spiritually normal, so here's something worth trying.

Find a sit spot. Literally. Outside if possible, somewhere you can return to. Spend ten to fifteen minutes there, a few times over the coming week. Don't try to think. Just observe. Notice what's normal in that small patch of world. Notice when something changes, a sound, a silence, a shift in light or temperature. See if your body registers it before your mind does. (You can also try carrying a baseline awareness with you as you move through a familiar natural environment.)

Then, once you've done that, try the same quality of attention with yourself. Not analysing or problem-solving, just noticing. Then ask:

• What is my baseline now – not my mood, but something beyond?

• When did I last feel a genuine sense of aliveness, of things flowing? What was present then?

• When did I last feel flat, or spiritually off? What was present in those moments?

• Are there patterns I keep missing; shifts I only notice in retrospect?

• Is there anything I'm aware of that I haven't been willing to name yet?

These questions aren't designed to be answered quickly. They're designed to open something.

Human beings can learn to detect shifts in inner and outer atmosphere before they can explain them. That holds whether the cause is evolutionary, psychological, relational, ecological, or spiritual. And perhaps that is the point. The practical skill comes before the metaphysical conclusion.

Whether we call what we notice instinct, soul, spirit, attunement, or pattern sensitivity may partly depend on worldview. But the noticing itself is real, and worth refining.

What a Spiritual Director Can Offer

One of the things a spiritual director does is help you develop exactly this kind of interior literacy by creating a regular space where you practise paying attention and where someone who is trained to listen helps you notice more.

The discernment question – what is this movement, what does it mean, is it significant? – is precisely the kind of question that benefits from a thoughtful companion, someone who isn't inside your particular storm but can sense, in time, your position relative to your baseline.

If any of this resonates it might be worth exploring what a conversation with a spiritual director could offer. You can choose a director here.

What do you notice about your own interior baseline? I'd genuinely like to hear – feel free to share in the comments or get in touch.