Creativity with nature: a portal for presence and connection

This year’s theme for Mental Health Awareness Week is “nature”, encouraging people to #ConnectWithNature to nourish our mental health.

Here are a selection of nature-based exercises designed to promote connection with yourself and nature.

If you find these exercises helpful, please consider sharing them with others and directing people here. You can find all of the above exercises as posts on my Instagram and Facebook pages. A share, comment and follow are always appreciated and help my work to grow, be seen and accessed. Thank you.

#1 What you see, not what you think you see

I have a busy mind. My thoughts are often trying to take me off on future focused plans and adventures, or taking me back to past experiences and replaying conversations or events. I am grateful for these thoughts; doing their best to keep me safe and growing with the information I have available. ⠀
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Sometimes though, I want and need to settle into the moment. Drink in what is right now (not what was or what might be). Become fully present in what is around me and within me. ⠀
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I’m using nature as the inspiration for being present as it does it so well, and our disconnection from the rest of the natural world can have a serious social, environmental and mental health impact.⠀
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Sometimes, I can sit with/in nature and feel completely connected. More often than not, my thoughts drift in and take me away. I find it easier to maintain that presence and connection with what is around me if I’m using my senses to keep me hooked in.⠀

#2 Nature from indoors

Getting out in nature isn’t always possible when we want to. The restless, isolated, anxious and stressful times are not always at moments we can realistically take ourselves off for a walk in the woods, or to sit by a river. Sometimes we’re at work, or it’s the middle of the night. Sometimes we might have a child sleeping nearby and noone to take over their care. Sometimes we might be self-isolating or too unwell to go out.

But we’ve nearly always got memories of natural spaces we can go to. Or fantasy environments and scenes we can conjure up. We can work creatively with how we experience these images of nature. Whilst not focusing on your current physical environment, you are focusing intentionally on a natural scene or memory and connecting with the feelings that come up in relation to it in the here and now.

You’re also connecting not only with what you see, smell and hear in the image, but connecting with how you feel in relation to the scene. Perhaps the idea of sitting in the middle of a dense forest makes you feel small, or safe, or amazed. Or sitting on the edge of a cliff over looking the sea, you feel alive, grateful, in awe and important.

#3 Reciprocity

Much of what I have seen this week on connection with nature has positioned “nature” as a resource for us to utilise as humans. Something we can benefit from. Indeed, there is much to take and benefit from in nature. And we are part of nature, too, and so perhaps it is important, too, to give back. To consider how we, too, can be valuable for other-than-human beings.

Often, we think of how we (humans) can benefit from nature (non-humans) and this is seen too in a more human-centric approach to therapy and mental health. Ecotherapy and outdoor therapy takes a biocentric (multi species) approach to our existence. It considers reciprocity with nature: The process of giving and not just taking.

The culture we live in tends to focus on consumption and commodities and it is easy to become disconnected from the symbiotic relationship with nature that we need to live.

Perhaps we think “what can I get from nature?” or “I shall go to nature” or “how can I use X, Y, Z element of nature to benefit me?”. Could we instead consider how we can share our existence with nature? What are we taking and how can we replenish and nourish life around us?

We could start relearning how to live reciprocally with the natural world by using our creativity. What skills, ideas, knowledge and resources do you have that you could utilise to give back to nature?

#3 Play

Play.⠀
That’s pretty much it for this one! ⠀
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Sit, walk, stand, climb, run and roll around in nature. ⠀
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Enjoy the feel of the moss on your skin, the noise of the pebbles under foot, the way the light dances on the water. ⠀
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Climb a tree, crawl through caves, inch your way into cold water for a paddle, jump in puddles and shout into the wind. ⠀
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Make patterns in the sand, towers with stones, dens with sticks and daisy chains in the meadow. ⠀
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Allow your inner child to play. Play helps us connect with the present.⠀

If you find these exercises helpful, please consider sharing them with others and directing people here. You can find all of the above exercises as posts on my Instagram and Facebook pages. A share, comment and follow are always appreciated and help my work to grow, be seen and accessed. Thank you.