“Eco-awakening”, rewilding and finding intimacy with nature
I went on a wilderness retreat in remote Wales. Here’s what I learned.
Intimacy with life
Zen master Dogen once said, “to be enlightened is to be intimate with life, with our entire living world”.
I was pondering this Tara Brach talk and this idea of being “intimate with life” struck me. It turns out, it may be all that I was ever looking for.
When I think of all the things I’ve wanted in my life – the material stuff, the success, the validation from people I respect, or the love of this or that person – it seems nothing can beat the feeling of pure intimacy that I was ultimately looking for.
All of our lives we go about trying to dissolve the little island universes we live in, looking for that feeling of perfect union with a person or a moment. We chase fleeting encounters of ecstasy, inspiration and connection that temporarily make us feel less alone.
But the truth is if ever we slowed down, very soon we are faced with our aloneness. We come into this world alone. We die alone. Nobody will ever truly know what it’s like to be you.
As Aldoux Huxley wrote:
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
If we’re lucky, we get to experience many moments of boundary dissolution in our lives when we feel this intimacy.
But many old wisdom traditions, like Buddhism, say that this sense of separation we all feel is a fiction – an illusion – not the real state of things at all. We’re fundamentally and profoundly connected, and not just in the sense of a new-age platitude, but down to our very essence. The path of awakening is essentially a path of waking up from this dream of separation where we go about our lives as individual, disconnected entities.
Realising this truth is a big part of many spiritual practices. We long to feel a deep intimacy with life – to feel ourselves to be, as Rumi describes, not a drop in the ocean, but an entire ocean in a drop. Whether that’s achieved through prayer, devotional singing, or mystical experiences on psychedelics. It’s all part of the same, oceanic longing to merge.
Okay, suppose you are intrigued by this promise. How would you actually get there? And what does this really involve?
Rewilding in nature
Recently I went on a wilderness intensive in a remote off-grid part of Wales run by the Animas Valley Institute, the brainchild of Bill Plotkin. This involved five days of wild camping with no connection to the outside world, temporarily out of reach from the tendrils of modernity.
After reading Soulcraft and Journey of Soul Initiation, I was captivated by an idea Bill described as “Eco-Awakening”, which, far more than being just an appreciation of nature, is:
“a somatic, emotional, and spiritual experience, not a (mere) cognitive one. It is the embodied, heart-stretching, and world-shifting experience of oneself as being as natural, as wild, as interconnected and related, and as magical as anything else on our planet — as much as a fox, a chanterelle, a wild desert stream, or an old-growth forest”
It’s when we (especially those of us who grew up in cities) realise we’ve been living in a conformist-consumer culture that’s cut us off from our innate communion with the wild world – an animate world where everything is alive, everything speaks. It’s when we remember something that modernity made us forget: that we’re an inseparable part of nature and earth family, however much we try to conquer it or protect ourselves from its thorns.
The retreat took place at the bottom of a great valley, with no phone reception, and where the weather could get rough and unpredictable. Descending there felt like a sort of stepping back in time, into the mysteries of the Welsh land. We met daily as a small group in an old Celtic roundhouse, and at night camped on the banks of a river to sleep closer to the earth. Each day, our guides handed us wilderness assignments to cultivate certain aspects of ourselves and our relationship with the natural world – in particular, we were developing a way of moving through nature that invoked a sense of mystery and animacy – quite distinct from the goal-oriented, seeking-the-shortest-route-to-an-outcome way we usually move through the world.
For example, at times we were invited to:
“Be guided to a place that looks wounded…”
“Find a portal. This could be marked by an opening in the woods, a cave, a change in the scenery. Say aloud, when I cross this threshold, I will fully be in my wild self”
“Be found by a place or an other-than-human, and speak to it, asking it of its hopes, its longings, what it’s like to be them”
And we’d venture out alone, with our packed lunches, to see what we’d discover.
But let me first say a few things about retreat containers.
Retreats are like pressure cookers for psycho-spiritual growth. The retreat group becomes a microcosm of the bigger world, and all kinds of emotional landscapes that normally lie dormant come to the surface. Like psychedelic or meditation retreats, nature retreats also invite us to peel back the layers that we normally wear to protect ourselves. Without all of the distractions of modern life in the way, the buried parts of us longing to be noticed start to surface: deeper yearnings and desires, feelings of love or pain, relationships with family members that have been regretfully left unattended, and grief that was never fully processed. It takes very little for a flood of tears to burst the banks.
Second, you live in a bit of a suspended reality. In this case, there was a clear invocation of the mystery of the natural world – the kind of Mystery (with a capital M) that can only be felt through symbolism and the mytho-poetic – the magic that lives in the gap between words. Our guides often used poetry to help us tap into this Mystery, and Reni Fulton’s poetry really captures this:
I want to live in the twilight country of my wildish self,
dwell there in the mysterious betweens of dark mountains,
in the deep caves scarred with sacred triangles.
I want to wander alone, elusive,
pulsing like breath or waves of light.
In my dreams I go there to chant with all my voices
dervish spin to natural rhythms,
feel whatever truths there are rise and swell under my feet,
the vibrations of a great beating heart.
I want to live in the twilight country of my wildish self,
a deer leaping into moons of light as if summoned,
seeking some reason to fall down closer to the earth.
This is the kind of container where we were invited to undergo “re-wilding”.
As a city-born human, my connection with nature has mostly been a superficial one. Nature, though beautiful and often awe-inspiring, is also hostile and unforgiving. And growing up in Australia, it was filled with creepy, dangerous bugs and animals. I, like the average modern nature-lover, still looked upon nature as a backdrop to my very human adventures – the scene for a hike, a calming view, an instagram background – often looking out from the comfort of modern lodgings, protected from the sun and the dirt. Remaining separate.
Well, for a few dedicated days, I worked hard to dissolve this separation.
But this rewilding process doesn’t just happen overnight. My first few days were fraught with frustration and disconnect. When asked to activate our innate child-like curiosity with our senses, I prowled on the grass, longing to feel my inner savannah-cat come alive, but felt mostly self-ridicule and the gravel hurting my feet. I looked at the mountains far ahead and felt a sadness that I didn’t feel more belonging to them.
At the same time, I envied the people who had cultivated such a strong capacity to feel at home with nature – the ones that could lose themselves for hours chasing meadows, who walked barefoot in the rain, made necklaces of animal bones or crawled fearless into dark caves and smeared mud on their faces. That was a state of wildness that wasn’t familiar to me.
But after a few days (specifically – they say it takes at least three days before you start to really feel at home in nature), things started to shift. Something primal, instinctual, even ancient, started to wake up inside me. The normal civilised behaviours I’d picked up in society started to feel more optional, and I felt more at ease rolling in the dirt, kissing the grass, and bowing to trees. After all, no one was around to judge or question my sanity.
I was noticing more beauty and feeling things more deeply – from the ecstasy that comes with viewing a sun dip behind mountains so serenely that it moved me to tears, to the sorrow of death and impermanence that left its mark everywhere in the wild. I could start to feel the sacred heartbeat of nature around me.
One day I found myself dancing naked in the rain by a waterfall, screaming, singing, moving my arms like a bird. Another time, I came upon a mound of hay that resembled a human form on the remote hillside, and from nowhere, I imagined this was the symbolic grave of my long-passed grandfather. I dropped to my knees and kissed the grass and it was like kissing the grave of my ancestors. Then I looked around and recognised how ancient this land was, and imagined the mound was the grave of some unidentifiable person who might have wandered on this same hillside in some distant past time. I sang to them and cried some tears that were about everything and nothing. And then soon enough, it became my own grave at some further point in time, when my bones too would be rotting in the earth.
I know poets and mystics throughout the centuries have written about the magnificence of nature, have praised and romanticised her, but in the modern world it is rare to find the space to really experience that magic to the same depth and allow it to touch us to our core. To really feel that intimacy.
Falling in love is a somatic experience
We can say a lot about finding unity and connectedness but ultimately, nothing changes somebody until they have a felt sense experience - not just an intellectual understanding - of this connection. For something to be really true, we have to experience it somatically. Until then, things are just concepts, mere ideas, lifeless data.
I think that for people on a spiritual journey, who are interested in waking up from the dream of separation, experiencing this embodied connection with nature is an essential part that can’t be left out.
I remember once reading the spiritual teacher Adyashanti write that when true awakening happens, one ceases to draw separation between the essence of oneself and even an inanimate log or the ground we walk on – it all reveals our shared source. I can only imagine what an intense level of intimacy and profound sense of belonging living at that level of ‘oneness’ would bring.
And I can see also that the reverse - the disconnection - drives so much of our societal challenges today. The famous Buddhist teacher Thich Thach Hanh talks about how we can’t really solve the climate crisis without this real love and connection with nature, saying
"change will happen on a fundamental level only if we fall back in love with the planet”. Only then would we stop plundering it for our own gain.
But even when we do fall in love somatically, we are prone to forgetting. Returning to urban life, it was difficult for me to hold on to these insights and integrate it with my everyday non-forest-walking life. Modernity makes you numb to these things – it fills your mind with to-do-lists and distractions at such a speed that there is barely time to feel the aliveness of things. I discovered, somehow, I needed to take the time to fall in love with the earth, again and again. To keep noticing the animacy in things, however enclosed they are in a concrete maze. To keep remembering myself as simply an extension of the same unbounded source of life that was really all around me. And to keep practising intimacy with the world.