Nature and Well-Being

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about the relationship between wellbeing and being in touch with nature. One of the things that has happened as we become a more industrialized society is that we've actually been further disconnected from our planet and the world around us. We build these beautiful houses. We have these cars.

We have roads. And all of it can be a form of sterilizing our human experience. I don't want to completely dismiss it because I partake in it and we've evolved these things for good reason. We have a certain sense ofshelter, a certain sense of safety. And I think many of us prefer to be here than running from animals in the wild.

At the same time, though, we can disconnect ourselves from the place from which we came. And when we're not connected to nature in this way, we lose touch with something that is fundamental in ourselves. If you think of the life cycle of a tree. It starts as a seed, it sprouts, it grows, and eventually one day it will fall. This is the cycle of life.

And we can see this in everything, in all things in nature. It's also the cycle of ourselves. When we're disconnected from that, we can lose this greater perspective of who we are and what our nature is. It's one of the reasons why going outside or going on a walking path or spending time at the beach by the ocean, or just being among trees can be so grounding. There's a sense of being held by a source, we could say.

This place from again, from which we've, we've come that we're connected to, that we're supported by, that we are interconnected with in all ways, but can be so disconnected from when we're in our home, when we're in our car, when we're microwaving our food, not seeing where all of this has come from and the larger body that is holding us. So my invitation to you today is to actually take some time to go outside, to look at the sky, to spend some time with the stars to touch a tree, to look at the animals running nearby. This is the ecosystem in which we live. We might feel like independent creatures, but we're not. We're dependent on everything around us.

And if we lose sight of that, we're going to also destroy the place around us. So this is important for the wellbeing of everything that is here, nature itself, and all the beings that inhabit it. But it's also important to our wellbeing. We can't disconnect the two. So this is both an invitation for your wellbeing, but a call to action that I hope we can all heed.

Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.