Of Acorns and Woodpeckers
Zenmai- A Practice of Unfoldment in Nature
Zenmai is the Japanese name for the Asian Royal Fern or Osmunda japonica. It’s an edible fern that has also been proven to purify air indoors. This is a practice of unfoldment to be done in Nature. It’s inspired by my studying with Steve March (Aletheia) for coaching and Mark Coleman (Awake In the Wild) for mindfulness in Nature. I am grateful for their wisdom and teachings.
Start by taking a long walk in nature where you can be mostly undisturbed. Refrain from talking to people and using your phone. Pay attention to all examples of zenmai or unfurling of leaves, ferns or other plants that you are encountering. Notice the life potential that is unfolding itself naturally in this process.
When you are ready, sit down for a meditation. Take a few deep breaths, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth. Gently close your eyes and turn your awareness to your breath. Once you feel settled and present, allow yourself to just be, let yourself unfold.
What are you feeling? What are you sensing in your body? What are you observing in this moment? Can you sense into your innate wholeness? Bringing back to mind one example of zenmai that you encountered during your walk, remember how beautiful it was in its own unfolding. Can you feel the same about yourself?
Trust that the life you want will unfold from where you are now. As you become more aware of the natural process of unfoldment, the one of the fern or leaves that you observed or your own that you are now experiencing, your trust in it will deepen. Accept, love, and value yourself exactly as you are.
When you are ready to end this practice, gently open your eyes and stretch.
Sometimes .... All You Need is a Wandering Walk in Nature
Practice: Embracing the Unknown
Today as you start your solo meandering walk, preferably in Nature, bring this theme of Embracing the Unknown with you on the path. As you meander, forget about reaching a specific destination, or walking a number of miles, or being on a schedule or navigating a given trail. Let go of the need to know where you are going. Notice when your mind is busy trying to figure things out and pause to reconnect with your intention to practice Embracing the Unknown. Experiment with walking as if in a liminal space where you do not know what is next: whom you may encounter, what the next turn may show, or what else you may discover on the path. Pay special notice to what you may be attracted to in this special state of awareness and of any insights that the natural world may give you about Embracing the Unknown. When you get back home, journal about these images or insights to further understand the wisdom that you may received about releasing the need for certainty in life.
Cultivating Wabi Sabi- A Nature Practice
Start by taking a long walk in nature where you can be mostly undisturbed. Refrain from talking to people and using your phone. Pay attention to all examples of wabi sabi that you are encountering. Can you see that a tree, among many other trees in the forest, does not judge itself, compare itself, blame itself? Can you see its beauty despite the fact that it may be twisted, decaying, broken, unbalanced or otherwise imperfect? Can you see how it still provides value for the forest ecosystem just by being there, despite (or may be because of) its imperfections?
When you are ready, sit down for a meditation. Take a few deep breaths, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth. Gently close your eyes and turn your awareness to your breath. Once you feel settled and present, slowly reflect on a part of yourself that you may not have been fully accepting. How can you use the concept of wabi sabi to look at things differently? Can you see the beauty in this physical or character flaw? Bringing back to mind one example of wabi sabi that you encountered during your walk, remember how beautiful in and of itself it was, no matter its imperfections. Can you feel the same about yourself?
Now reflect on the fact that you are original in this world. Can you see how -your mind, heart and body- are completely unique? Can you see that you too, like every thing else in this world, has value and worth simply by existing?
When you are ready to end this practice, gently open your eyes and stretch.
Announcing Four Additional Seasonal Walking Events in Carmel Valley, CA
Join me for a series of four seasonal contemplative walks in a beautiful landscape!
We will walk the same trails each season in an area with diverse environments including forest, chaparral, redwoods, seasonal streams and ponds: an evocative path for a journey through the four seasons. With a distance of about 7 miles and about a 1,000 feet of ascent (and descent), this walk can be arduous at times. Walking the same route each season, often completely in silence, supports self-reflection, witnessing and observation. On this walk, you will allow nature to touch you in a deep way.
In addition to walking in silence, the walk may include a guided meditation, a contemplative nature practice, the reading of poetry and sharing circles.
Be a pilgrim for a day: leave your phone behind and be ready to slow down, to fully engage your senses and to be amazed by the beauty that exists in the natural world. Come home refreshed and reconnected to yourself, others and nature, ready to fully engage your whole self to life.
These walks are open to self-identified women of all ages and backgrounds. The only requirement is that you are able to walk the distance and stay with the group. Bring a lunch, plenty of water and a notebook if you like to journal. Hiking poles are recommended for additional support on steep slopes.
Any questions, please contact me.
Dates:
CANCELED- Spring- April 4
Summer- June 13
Fall- October 3
Winter- December 5
Level of Difficulty: Moderate to Challenging
Group Size: 6 to 12
Location: Garland Ranch Regional Park, Carmel Valley, CA
Cost: sliding scale (suggested donation of $10 to $35 per walk). No one will be turned away for lack of funds. It is in the spirit of generosity that I embrace the 2500-year-old Buddhist tradition of dana and provide these events freely to all who are interested.
Cancellation: No refunds for cancellations made 7 days before the walk.
Registration: Register here for all four or any of the events.
Solvitur Ambulando- A New Coaching Offering for the New Year
Solvitur Ambulando is a Latin phrase that usually translates as “it’s solved by walking”. My eponymous new coaching offering is a coaching session that is conducted while walking together in nature. I am offering it in response to what I have recently witnessed in my coaching practice: clients prone to anxiety, restlessness, sleeping difficulties, tied to their electronic devices and social media apps with little time for exercise, self-reflection, let alone time outdoors, and as a result not prone to engage in a self-development program while still looking to grow and get answers to some deep questioning. So, I am adding to my life coaching programs and walking events, a simple coaching while walking offering that can be purchased in single or multiple sessions. While walking with me as your life coach, my intention is for you to experience a different way of being, to learn to be more grounded and present, to ease your anxiety, to increase your creativity, to be more resourceful, and to learn a new practice that will support you for life.
The Nature Pyramid: Are You Getting Your Recommended Doses?
The Pyramid, called The SHIFT Rx Challenge Pyramid was informed by Florence Williams’ research in her book The Nature Fix, as well as Tanya Denkla-Cobb/the Biophilic Cities Project’s “Nature Pyramid.” The SHIFT Rx Challenge Pyramid indicates optimal “doses” of nature. From daily micro-doses that can range from exposure to daylight and plant life multiple times per day to annual multi-day excursions into wilderness areas where people can disconnect from technology, the Pyramid offers recommendations for duration as well as location of nature contact.
“Time spent outside in nature is good for us,” said Christian Beckwith, Executive Director of The Center for Jackson Hole, SHIFT’s parent organization. “In an age when the average American child spends seven hours per day in front of screens and seven minutes in unstructured play outside; rising obesity rates add billions of dollars to health care costs; opioid addictions outpace car accidents as the leading cause of death; and the growing disconnect from nature, particularly in our urban areas, leads to stress, depression and increased levels of mental anxiety in our citizens, time outside has never been more important.”
Do you need help getting your recommended doses? I have the following offerings:
Women’s Pilgrimage in the annually/bi-annually category
Wise Women Walk in the monthly category
Custom Contemplative Walk in the “anytime” category
I also offer the following coaching while walking programs:
I hope to see you on one of those. Anne-Marie
Nature Rx: Ask Your Doctor If Nature is Right For You
Nature Rx is a grassroots movement dedicated to entertaining and informing people about the healing aspects of nature. More at Nature-Rx.org.
Fill your Nature Prescription with a contemplative walk. Details here.
On The Wisdom of Walking in the Woods
“When the eyes and the ears are open, even the leaves on the trees teach like pages from the scriptures”
If you have visited my website, you may have been intrigued by my Medicine Walk offering called (Inner Compass) Wisdom Walk. Or, if you are a client, I may have suggested that you take on a walk as a new practice for your coaching program: labyrinth, hike or meditation walks are some of the practices I recommend often. But why? I strongly believe in the benefits of walking in nature to reconnect with oneself and the world. In this newsletter, I want to share some texts that point to the same conclusion.
Much has been written over the years about the physical, emotional and spiritual benefits of walking in nature (Thoreau: “An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”, Muir: "In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.", Rousseau: “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think, my mind only works with my legs.”), but in recent times, nobody has written more beautifully and more completely on the subject than Rebecca Solnit in her 2000 masterpiece Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
She writes: “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.[…]
Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.[…]
The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along ..“
When you go on a Medicine walk, this is exactly what happens. Your mind, heart and body are in a conversation with the world. Your body relaxes, your mind slows down, your heart opens. You suddenly hear a message that you had missed before. Your attention is drawn by a natural element and you inquire: “what is this?”, “why am I receiving this now?”. As Kabir, a 15th-century Indian mystic poet and saint, says: When the eyes and the ears are open, even the leaves on the trees teach like pages from the scriptures.
Further proof of the benefits of being in nature with or without walking, can be found in the book The Nature Fix by Florence Williams. The Nature Fix demonstrates that our connection to nature is much more important to our cognition than we think and that even small amounts of exposure (just 5 hours per month according to the author) to the living world can improve our creativity and enhance our mood. Earlier in the year I wrote about Shinrin-Yoku or Forest Bathing and I was excited to read about it again in this book The Nature Fix- Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and more Creative by Florence Williams. Written in a journalistic style with tons of supporting evidence, scientific data, anecdotes and well told stories, Williams explores different beneficial aspects of Nature and takes us on world tour starting with Japan, then Korea, Finland and Scotland. She also takes us on a tour of our senses: starting with our sense of smell (aromatherapy in Japanese cypress forests), our sense of hearing (bird songs in Korea) and our sense of sight (fractals in Finland). Her book brings a global perspective on the status of the latest studies of nature practices and their alleged benefits. She affirms that 5 hours a month immersed in nature is enough to make a difference to our well-being. The best summary of the book is given in this YouTube video created by the author.
So remember: “Go outside. Go often. Bring friends. Breathe”.