Author: Holly Mae Haddock

Spending time in nature is like spending time in our own, truest inner nature. Shepherding our physical bodies into the safe space of a pretty wilderness, park, or garden, refreshes what is green and full of breath within our own selves. 

Being Outside Helps Mind, Body, and Soul

Researchers documenting the effect of the great outdoors on human beings have gathered sizable evidence suggesting that nature time is as healthy as can be. As this study unveils, bathing ourselves in a wild space’s aura permeates us with good.

The benefits to the physical body are multiple, including immune system enhancement, reduction of inflammation, and restoration of sleep. The soul benefits equally from time in nature, with the elevation of mood, protection against stress, and self-esteem as the top boons to our psychology. 

According to some studies, even our minds function more effectively with a little support from Mother Earth. Better concentration, memory, and attention can come our way just by going outdoors.

Being Outside Helps With Trauma and Addiction

Women recovering from addiction or chronic traumatization should be aware of the positive outcomes linked to green time. This study documents a connection between time in the great outdoors and the reduction of PTSD symptoms: 

All in all, for those of us on a path of recovery from substance use, nature is a real resource. Here are 6 recovery-specific gifts we get when we develop a relationship with Mother Nature.

6 Benefits of Being Outside (for People in Recovery!)

1. Nature helps us Process

Have you ever noticed that when you go for a walk someplace green, your mind begins to pleasantly wander as if taking a walk of its own? We may find ourselves chewing on things, reviewing events that happened to us throughout the day, and considering and reflecting. 

This is because being outside helps support the body to shift into the state of processing, a bit like REM, a neurological necessity that helps us break down and let go of what is no longer needed. 

For people with trauma who are now safer, there will be many pieces of mobilization (also known as activation, or fight-flight overstimulation) that can now be released because it is safe to do so. 

Nature is a peaceful, pleasurable context for releasing baggage, for unburdening ourselves of all we don’t need to carry anymore. 

2. Nature is Relaxing

When we go into a natural setting, the body responds at a subconscious level to the environment and begins to relax. Nature is known to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of our body’s wiring which enables us to rest and digest, release and integrate.

Just bathing in nature’s vibes, we let go of excess stressors, tensions, and used up energies that are so uncomfortable to hold onto in the body. For those of us with a tendency to get rattled and riled, nature soothes our nerves and softens us back to safety.

3. Nature stimulates our Inner Pharmaceuticals

The neurotransmitters and hormones responsible for creating states of deep peace, emotional connection, love, and well-being respond to the signals of nature. The beauty, harmony and cohesion of nature and its geological, plant and animal kingdoms tease us into positive feeling states, improving our moods, our feelings of connection, and meaning. Most people on the path to recovery know, we’ll take a natural high whenever we can!

4. Nature entrains our Brainwaves to Flow

Nature is its own biofeedback machine, providing resonances that entrain our brainwaves to the oh-so-satisfying flow state, where we are able to experience the alertness and wakefulness of our own deepest creativity, while also feeling balanced and at ease. If you want to get into the flow zone, then get into a green zone!

5. Nature gives us Perspective

When triggered, we get tunnel vision, and we can’t see the bigger picture. When we go into nature and allow the lens of our attention to gently dilate, we take in a bigger and more beautiful world. This perspective helps us make better decisions. 

6. Nature leads us to Reverence

Still searching for that promised spiritual awakening, the one that powerfully replaces addiction’s hold on us? Being in nature famously leads to lasting reverence for the mysteries of creation, for what’s behind the events of our lives, and the challenges we endure. For a plunge into spirit, plunge into nature. 

References:

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/3/1380

https://emilkirkegaard.dk//en/wp-content/uploads/The-Cognitive-Benefits-of-Interacting-With-Nature.pdf

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33899932/

Nature is good for the mind, body, and soul. When we let ourselves have free time in nature, we enjoy more equilibrium, health, and peace of mind. 

Nature can also help us heal our biggest psychological wounds, the core areas of our identity that feel broken and hurt. The parts of us that feel too painful to touch, that maybe feel like they never seem to get any better – nature can help with these.  

When we look to nature as a mirror of what we are in our core essence, as well – nature made us, after all – we can find supportive examples, lessons, and metaphors that help us pick our way along the path back to emotional wholeness.  

The Wound We All Have

There is a wound that all humans have, regardless of the timbre of our suffering, and this wound is the mother of all lesser wounds. You can call this wound “disconnection”. 

The wound we all have is the one of feeling ourselves too separate, too cut off from the rest of life, sealed into our own experiences without the warmth of spirit. The wound of feeling, as a result of that separation, alone, lonely, and undernourished in soul. 

We may mask this experience from ourselves, but in times without distraction, without substances or entertainment – in those times when there is no one else around upon whom we can project our inner dramas – we come to know the pain of the wound we all have.

How Nature Can Help You Heal the Wound We All Have

Nature can help us heal the wound we all have. Here are 7 ways nature does that, through dispelling the lie that we are what the ego says we are. 

1. Nature shows us our Right Size

When we spend time in nature, we see that we are neither too small nor too large. We are not the biggest thing, nor are we the smallest thing around. We have to be mindful of smaller organisms, and yet we are also, ourselves, affected by the circumstances. This Right Size mirroring is helpful for us – and a reflection of the truth. We are not everything (what the puffed up ego says), nor nothing (what the deflated ego says), but actually, we are something. 

2. Nature shows us we are Universal and Unique

Nature shows us that we are original, and also that we are one of many, many other equally perfect beings. No leaf, no blade of grass, no crystal is exactly the same as another, nor is there a concept of better or worse that makes any sense at all. There is room for infinite variation on any theme. At the same time, fractal repetition in the basic design of our lives, a pattern across universes. The electron clouds inside of our bodies look just like stars. 

3. Nature shows us We Belong

I know that some people look at nature as a race to the top, predator eats prey. What I see in nature is a very inclusive family. An awe-inspiring diversity of beings serve no particular purpose, except to be what they are by nature, and they are loved so, it seems to me. There can be goshawks, and there can also be sparrow hawks, similar but not the same. Nature has room for all of us. Whatever you are, you belong. 

4. Nature shows us Timing and Cycles

Nature has soothing rhythms, promises it keeps every year, every morning no matter what. It is ok to be composted when something has bloomed and faded. Within the time signature of nature’s music, change is constant, and it is good that it is. The world is never still. 

5. Nature teaches us Balance with the All

Although there is room for all of us, no one is allowed to take over the whole ecosystem, or else suffer the consequences of being out of balance. We are allowed to flourish, to have enough, but we are not allowed to have it all.

6. Nature shows us our Mystery

We are part of something ineffable. Each of us is embedded in a jaw-dropping mystery, infinite and everywhere. If we pay attention, we will know that we ourselves are limitless and unknown, made of the same substance. Full of surprises, genius, beauty and delight. 

7. Nature teaches us about Soul Gifts

Each animal has a kind of specificity for which it is outfitted. Birds are made to sing, beavers are made to build. What are you made for? There’s a reason you are just how you are – your truest soul gift fits you perfectly into the bigger landscape, and makes sense of your presence here with us.

Good therapists, parents, teachers, healers and friends all share a secret: they understand the power of Unconditional Positive Regard. That’s why we like to be around them, why we feel safe and good when we’re with them.

Unconditional Positive Regard is a magic potion for the soul, and it is one of the faces of love. 

The phrase itself comes from Carl Rogers, a renowned psychologist whose philosophy of therapeutic relationships has been very influential. Rogers helped articulate why it is that for clients, just to be witnessed in an unconditionally accepting, friendly way is healing in and of itself. 

Responding to an era in which many psychologists were trained to hold a very distant and analytical stance towards clients, Rogers argued that therapists need to bring an aspect of warmth and human kindness to treatment, or no one will get any better. 

Many of us who are drawn to professional roles of service arrive at the same conclusion, with or without coming into contact with Rogerian writings, just based on our experiences sitting in the room with people: platonic love is an important part of any healing relationship. 

This makes so much sense once we have understood that the cause of all psychological pain is disconnection, or missing warmth. 

When we have parts within us who are cut off through fragmentation and trauma from the inner sunshine of our own love, these parts take on semi-autonomous lives that erupt into the surface and cause problems. Healing comes from reclaiming all citizens of the psyche who have been split off and disowned, giving them love, belonging, and a seat at the table. 

If I am able to convey my attitude of Unconditional Positive Regard to you, you will feel a warm space encompassing you, in which you are free to share even those things that you yourself are unsure about or feel ashamed of. You will sense in your gut that you cannot be lowered in my eyes here, that I will always esteem you, just because. 

You know that I will see you in the kindest light, and that your shade is ok with me. This is possible because I do not mistake you for any passing quality of light or absence thereof, but understand you are the deeper, unchanging part underneath all that. 

Skeptics of the “love is all you need” approach like to point out that we should focus on reality, call a spade a spade. That’s true too. We need to acknowledge what is here, and admit that it is ugly, if it truly is. 

However, we don’t have to be unkind to ugliness itself by adding extra pain and alienation through judgment. Yes, it might be egotism, narcissism, or hatred here in the room with us. We might be causing long-lasting damage to others with our shadows. 

But that’s life. Judging things and moralizing, saying “It shouldn’t be this way” doesn’t actually make unwanted sides of a human being go away (in fact, just the opposite). Only acceptance creates the kind of environment in which problematic behavior can convert itself into a positive expression of itself.

When someone sees the best in us, they see that our worst traits have an aspect of goodness in them. They see things we are addled with for the life-preserving attempts they are. They see our needs, the limited options we had, how we made do with the lack of love, and survived anyway.

Unconditional Positive Regard loves all of psyche’s creations in abundant measure. It knows all humans, including therapists, have great and terrible shadows. And that the deathless luminosity of anyone’s inner radiant sun can incinerate us all with its powers of love. Such is soul.

Rogers helped provide rationale and language for a truth within psychotherapy, which is that when we offer Unconditional Positive Regard as a background hum to all situations, troubles have a way of melting open, giving up their burdens to be seen, and softening away from stubborn stances of opposition. In my opinion, it is not only a tool for building trust in therapy, but an attitude for life.

The world we have around us now is the world we got by judging, shaming, rejecting, moralizing, criticizing, blaming and withholding love from ourselves and others. I’d like to see what the opposite world looks like, how about you? 

It is my sincere belief that a new earth can be built, atom by atom, with Unconditional Positive Regard. 

Like most words that resonate at the collective level, empowerment has gemstone-like facets.

Those of us who live in a state of disconnection from our own true power feel the loss as pain, even if we don’t realize it. Whenever we are mad or blue about how things are, in resistance to someone or something, we are missing our long-lost power. 

We can wish that someone or something would grant us power, so that we could at last experience it embodied, here and now, within our own beings. Coursing through our veins, available for creation of a world we actually would feel enthusiastic about living in. 

I know my list of wishes is long, and I expect yours is the same. I wish I had the power to… the power to… the power to… Perhaps our love of mythic heroes with transcendental superpowers stems from this longing, to live a life of strength and potency. Amid so much that is not how we would choose it to be, our missing power can break our hearts, give us a gloomy view. 

Contained in the word empowerment is the starting place of having no power. If you already have power, you don’t need to be empowered. Which begs the question, who is it who can empower another? Who actually has the authority?

Some have criticized the word itself for this implied change of state, pointing out that it underscores the myth of power being held not within, but outside of us. 

If before empowerment takes place, I have no power, power must be granted. This is like saying sovereignty does not exist, and that what we need for a life of agency and meaning can only be given to us by those who keep it tucked away from us. 

The trouble with this is that it’s too easy for those who appoint themselves as power-holders, who feel justified to mete out permissions or restrictions, to have actual worldly control. The Great and Terrible Oz rules by our collective permission. How did we get here?

Maybe it’s a good time to remember that empowerment means stepping into one’s pre-existing potential to have and to hold power. More a process of recognition of what is already there, than a transfer from something outside of us, into us. By this way of thinking, empowerment is simply to tap into what is already within us, digging into the earth of ourselves to reach an underground spring. 

When we are not empowered, we feel life happens to us, without consent or choice. This is the victim stance. The victim state is horrible. The victim needs comfort, addictions to avoid her pain. When I have no agency, no influence to secure for myself what I want, what I need to have a good life, then I am in the trauma-spell of disempowerment. Disempowerment as a permanent state will require some measure of chronic pain management for the soul. Good for business, from the point of view of those who profit from human pain. 

Sometimes people think they’re empowering themselves, when in truth they are giving into revenge. The urge is natural in some ways, and we should look out for it. It’s not the power we really want, when we seize our opportunity to dominate and control others. Swinging into the opposite pole, and still externally focused, I get my “power” through tyranny? No. 

Empowerment is the middle place, where I see fully that the outer is the logical manifestation/match to our insides. The world out there is a co-arising mirror, following in the wake of my own movements. 

The waves I experience now, lovely or horrid, are the natural consequences of what was co-created at the collective level in our shared past. If we don’t like it, we can make a different choice now. Sooner or later, the new choices will create a world we prefer. 

When we do this, we meet resistance, the resistance of the clay against the molding & shaping. That doesn’t mean that it’s not the right thing to do. Empowering ourselves is not, necessarily, easier in the short term nor entirely free of suffering. But it is required for the restoration of choice. And choice is key to a truly human life. 

As we all know at some level of our being, the moment of empowerment is like the moment that Glenda the Good Witch reminds Dorothy that she has had the power all along, right there on her own two feet. 

Is that good news or bad news, in your opinion?

How to love yourself is the most important question to answer in this lifetime. 

In some ways, it’s the only question we ever ask. It’s behind everything else we go after or avoid. The drive towards love is our core mechanism. The mantra of our haunted parts is this, on repeat: How can I get love? How can I get love? How can I get love?

If you think that you need an external achievement, you may believe that achieving it will help you experience your own love and self-approval. Would you like yourself more, be nicer to yourself, esteem yourself more if you managed to get this specific objective done? 

Would you give yourself the warm enthusiasm, recognition and support you need, if only you could first turn into someone better than the person you see looking back at you in the mirror now? Do you essentially say to yourself, I’d like to love you, but it would be so much easier if you were thinner, prettier, smarter, more talented, if you had a different personality, if you weren’t so needy?

That’s the curse and the trap of conditional loving. Conditional love is the old operating system we are evolving out of now. Conditional love is pure Pavlovian programming: do this and you get love. Don’t do that, or you’ll get no love. Love given as a reward for obeisance, withheld as punishment for going against the grain.  

We go crazy for love. Like rats in the maze, we’ll turn this way or that way, all in the name of love. It’s because love is the true food for our beings, and without it we die, like plants that get no sunlight.

Learning to love the person in the mirror

If you’re struggling with how to love yourself, this isn’t your fault. You have been told since birth not to love yourself unless, in so many ways. And yet if you were to love yourself, you’d be free from everything that torments you, however, it does so. Addictions, compulsions, trauma, disorders – all of these crumple and disappear in the radiant, forgiving presence of your own true love for yourself.

Funnily enough, loving yourself begins, like everything else, just with the decision to do so. Followed by determination and grit. You decide to do it, and then you do it. You understand it will take a while to change your habits. You don’t give up, even though it’s hard. You figure it out, somehow, some way. You fight your way to love, like a sprout that breaks through concrete to get to the light, if you have to. 

How to love the bad parts

Loving yourself means loving your “bad self”. The one that no one wanted around. The one that was shamed and blamed, the one you turned against because it got you in trouble. The one who did things the love-givers in our lives didn’t want us to do. The one we put in the closet a long time ago and cannot tolerate to be reminded of. 

Get in touch with that part of you. She is everywhere, all around you, all the time, and within you, too. Your job in this lifetime is this: find a way to love her.  

It can help to understand that you are the clay, not the shape the clay is in right now. All shadows are in terrible condition from being in the dark so long. We must take it on faith that when we give love to our shadows, only then will they be able to take on their true form. In their true form, they are beautiful gifts to us and our life purpose. Always. 

Can we love ourselves when we’re in our shadow shapes, behaving and being the opposite of our chosen natures? Yes, we can. We must remember that these ugly things we see in ourselves come from wounding, and the defense postures we take to defend the wound.

When we encounter shade in ourselves – our devouring egos, our imperfections of character, the earthy realities of bodies – the challenge is to own that shade and to forgive it, to love it. Not because it deserves love – love cannot be deserved or undeserved, it just is, like the sun that shines on everything equally. We give our love to all parts no matter what, because love is what unbinds us from shadow forms.

Choosing love

Once we make the determination that we will love all parts of ourselves, even the bad parts, self-loving actions follow. Ripples of powerful, all-embracing love emanate from us like the circles of reverberation that follow a stone dropped into a pond. 

Which means our own love will reflect back to us, too. Which means someday, when we look in the mirror, we will see somebody very, obviously lovable there, eyes shining back at us.

Have you experienced the power of a positive mindset? Miracle, synchronicity, happy accident– these are some of the names we call it when life works out in our favor. 

Can you think of a time when your own ability to generate positive feelings, perspectives, or even just your sunny vibe helped you out? 

What about the power of a negative mindset? Can you think of a time when no matter what someone said to cheer you up, you felt weighted down by thoughts and feelings of darkness and gloom? Can you think of an incident in your life where your own mindset negatively impacted how events unfolded? 

My guess is that no matter how cynical or heartbroken you sometimes feel, you have experienced beautiful, heavenly magic in your life some of the time. My guess is also that no matter how positive you may be, you have also experienced the discouragement, even devastation, of things not working out the way you would have preferred. I say that confidently because you’re a human, and it’s the same for all of us.

The truth is that we humans are in a curious quandary. We do not have absolute power over our own lives – at least, we do not experience it that way. However, we are also not powerless – what we do, what we think, how we behave, and the energy we put out into the world has a huge impact on how life goes for us. 

So what do we do? Do we accept the bitterness of life, and stop dreaming, as many have urged us to? Or do we keep wishing, and as a result of letting our hopes rise with those wishes, also sometimes slam up against hard walls in the preexisting reality we are in? 

Are we mad to keep hoping for goodness to appear when life has shown us how much evil there is, or are we mad to stop dreaming of better, when life has shown us how much goodness there could be, if only we would nurture it? 

I believe that this is a choice each of us makes, and that we each live with the consequences. Whatever world we want to live in, we help create it or we help thwart it, by the thoughts we choose to power up and animate with our life energy. At the same time, we all have shadows, and spiritual bypassing – trying to skip over the dark side – only causes shadow to amplify and gain strength. 

So how on earth do we harness the power of a positive mindset, in a world that has as many demons as it does, where denial does nobody any good, but demoralization is a deadly killer, too?

What is especially tender to me about the choice to have a positive mindset in spite of it all, is that it means we are willing to be in our vulnerability. There is no ultimately protected path through this life, no version of the human journey where we are not familiarized with pain. We will be wounded. 

At the same time, through our wounds we deepen more fully into our love and our grief for others and our own selves, as we experience the preciousness of what human life is. 

There is a saying that a teapot shattered and pieced back together is a truer, better teapot than the unbroken one, and it sure seems that many of us need to go through this same process before we can fully understand our own value and love ourselves as much as we truly merit. 

So what is a positive mindset in such a world? 

I cannot speak for you, but to me a positive mindset is one in which we say all things are possible. Yes, things are what they are, right now. 

And at the same time I know that there are positive forces at play in this world – forces that made the big, wild ocean. Forces that designed hummingbirds, that grew fresh soft sage in the springtime, that dreamed up capybaras and babies’ perfect little toes. 

That creative energy, that loving, exquisite, and generous presence, can be called upon to help us at any time. I trust that this energy, being as supreme as it is, is quite capable of giving a solution, a medicine, an antidote, an evolutionary response, to any problem I could possibly face. 

I also know – I choose to recall from my own experiences – that there is always a gift in not getting what I want, and that in austerities of all kinds, and deprivations, there is the gift of discovering something even better grown from inside myself, that far surpasses the pleasure I imagined I’d get from an external situation I was longing for. 

Ultimately, all things, positive or negative, lead me back to the fact that I have choice and responsibility in this world, that I can choose to be a force of good in the face of that which has harmed me without limit, or I can see what it’s like to give into the sadness. In that landscape of choice, I choose a positive mindset, one that feels authentic to me.

Dear reader, what about you? What is your reason for trying, in your beautiful, fragile, human way, to have your own positive mindset, in a world like ours?