WHAT THE WILD FOREST TAUGHT ME
Living in the wild forests of central India is one of the greatest blessings I could have received.
The seasons here are not gentle. Winters can be freezing, summers scorching, and the monsoons arrive with torrential rain. Wildlife thrives in this landscape: tigers, leopards, dholes, bears, stunning reptiles, and a seemingly endless world of spiders, insects and other creatures.
For the past 18 years, my home has been Kanha National Park in India. For about four months each year, I return to my mother country, Switzerland. Two entirely different environments. Two completely different energetic signatures.
The forest has many layers. And if you allow the seasons and the landscape to shape you, you may discover more about your true nature than you would in any certified psychology course.
The forest is breathtakingly beautiful. It is also harsh, unpredictable and potentially deadly.
I quickly realised that the most dangerous being in the forest was not the tiger. It was my own mind.
There is a local indigenous community living around the forest, and witnessing their way of being has shaped me profoundly. They walk quietly. They speak when there is something to say. They are rarely in a hurry. And if they don’t know what to do, they pause. Why run if you don’t know where to go?
I had spent much of my life constructing an idea of who I was. I identified with my name, my profession, my education, my certifications, my successes and my losses. All the things I had learned about myself helped me feel that I knew who I was.
Out here, much of that disappeared.
I was simply a strange white woman who didn’t know how to make a fire. None of my certificates would have kept me warm at night.
My mind became frantic because so much of what I had learned and been conditioned by was suddenly of very little use. Who are we when everything we thought we were is gone? For me, this was not a philosophical question. It was a lived experience. And one I would never want to have missed.
I had trained as a yoga teacher, and my practice became a sanctuary. On my mat, I began to move quietly and to observe the sensations in my body without immediately trying to change them. If you don’t know what to do — pause.
Slowly, I began to embody the art of pausing while in motion. Staying with the breath. Listening to the body. Not rushing towards the next thing.
I didn’t practice yoga to master a fancy pose. I practiced to maintain my sanity.
Meditating in the open space of the forest awakened my senses. At first, it was overwhelming. There was simply too much to perceive: sounds, movement, smells, subtle shifts in the air, the constant awareness of what might be around me.
I wanted to run back to Switzerland — back to familiarity, predictability and what I perceived as safety.
But something else was happening. My body and nervous system were discovering a different kind of intelligence. The ability to pause. To tune in. To listen. To soften the boundaries of my physical body while becoming more aware of the space around me. To feel safe in uncertainty.
The forest was slowly teaching me something I could never have learned from a book:
Sometimes, the wisest thing we can do is stop trying to know what comes next. And simply listen deeply.
with love
