The forest taught me to listen.
The forest taught me to listen.
But perhaps more importantly, it taught me to question who was doing the listening.
The breath became one of my greatest anchors. I began to notice how intimately it moves with the mind and nervous system, reflecting what is happening within us and responding to what is happening around us.
The breath keeps us alive, but it also gives us information through the felt sense.
It is a way of returning home again and again. A way of meeting myself without words.
Living in the forest also reminded me of something very simple: We are mammals.
We may have degrees, professions, identities and sophisticated stories about who we are. But underneath all of this, there is still a body that senses, responds and reads its environment.
Our basic instincts are still here. Perhaps we have simply forgotten how to use them.
We have built increasingly comfortable cages around ourselves — structures of certainty, identity and knowledge that help us feel safe. And somewhere along the way, we may have become more familiar with the cage than with the environment we are living in.
A tiger does not need a certificate to know its strength. It feels it.
A cobra does not need to announce its danger. Its presence communicates it.
There is no confusion about what they are.
There is simply presence. There is no identification.
This became one of the deepest lessons of the forest for me:
Identifying with an idea of who we are can become a cage.
The forest slowly loosened that identification.
I began to trust the speed and accuracy of my senses — while also discovering how easily those same senses could become confused when my mind took over.
The mind and the breath are intimately connected, and once we become aware of this, we have access to our personal superpower.
I began to sense into a field larger than my physical body. I discovered that embodiment, for me, was not only about inhabiting the body more fully. It also included becoming aware of the energetic space we move through and the presence we emanate.
Everything and every body is an ever-transforming body of presence.
Not this or that, but this and that.
Never finished, ever transforming.
with love
