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Rewilding Our Spiritual Practice
Mindfulness Rewilded
“As great as the infinite space beyond is the space within the lotus of the heart. Both heaven and earth are contained in that inner space, both fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and stars. Whether we know it in this world or know it not, everything is contained in that inner space.”
THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD
As someone inside “the mindfulness industry,” I have observed that yoga has become as deprived of nature as the rest of society. With our rubber-soled shoes, yoga mats, and indoor practice spaces, modern humans move from one nature-disconnected space to another. Even during those rare moments between the car and the studio, we wear shoes that prevent contact with the ground beneath our feet. Yet the practices of yoga and meditation were born in the mountains, forests, and deserts of Asia.
A few years ago, I attended a yoga conference in Manhattan, a few floors up at the midtown Hilton. After my second yoga class in a stuffy, windowless room, with hundreds of yogis in spandex moving about on rubber mats, I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance. I love yoga—it is a powerful, beautiful practice—and I believe that the widespread increase in yoga and mindfulness practice is profoundly positive. However, something about this scenario didn’t seem quite right to me—or quite right for me.
Not long after, at another yoga and recovery conference, my friend Tim Walsh, an avid outdoorsman and recovery coach, expressed my own thoughts when he said, “Folks, we’re standing on rubber mats inside a temperature-controlled room on the second floor of a giant brick building. How much more disconnected from the earth can you get!” His words rang inside me, and at that moment, something at my core woke up. I had felt this disconnect for years, and now it was time to do something about it.
I had dreamed for many years of somehow bridging the worlds of meditation, yoga, and mindfulness with rewilding. When I finally started to research the connections between nature and mindfulness practices, I ended up creating programs for students at Kripalu that immersed us in forests and fields while practicing. I wanted to help people become conscious of their inner nature while out in nature and to help them see the importance of conserving our natural environments—the primal parts of ourselves. How did yoga and meditation, wild practices designed to awaken, empower, and enlighten, become so disconnected from the enlivening power and the beauty of the living earth? Because yoga and mindfulness have profound benefits for well-being, they have also been co-opted and commercialized. Products have proliferated—the mats and the clothing, the snacks and the food, the shoes and the hats. Our economy is driven by the consumption of things that must be extracted from the earth and produced and marketed and sold. As yoga and mindfulness became imbedded in modern culture’s mostly indoor lifestyle, these ancient practices also became cut off from the presence of the wind, sun, moon, and life of the living earth.
When we disconnect from the living earth, we lose the life-affirming wisdom that is found outdoors. If we consider the fact that we are an evolutionary expression of the evolving earth, then our own self-awareness can be thought of as the self-awareness of the living earth itself. Which is a pretty powerful idea to ponder! And it means that human rewilding can lead to a rewilding of our spirit, a reinspiriting of our essential nature.
Pacification or Liberation?
Yoga and mindfulness today are often used to help people invite calm and to support greater self-regulation and impulse control in stressful situations. But just as I’m concerned about their commodification, I’m also concerned that these ancient practices are being used as pacifiers to help people put up with the negative effects of modern society, because these ancient practices are also the tools for true liberation from the root causes of our distress.
To be clear, yoga, meditation, and mindfulness are extremely valuable practices. The abilities to take a deep breath and step back from the fight-or-flight response, to self-soothe, and to know when to practice self-care, these are all critical tools for living consciously.
I am reminded of an episode of the old television show Kung Fu, in which a martial arts master, played by David Carradine, is taken prisoner and forced into manual labor under the blazing sun. Labeled a troublemaker, he is put into a hot box, a cast-iron oven with an unbearably fierce temperature. In the box is another man who is panicked by their dangerous situation. Carradine calmly teaches the man how to meditate, to slow his breathing and witness his thoughts. At the end of the day, they are released, and both emerge from the box alert and calm, much to the surprise of their captors.
A more recent and real-life example is the group of boys on a soccer team in Thailand who were stranded for almost two weeks in a complex network of flooded tunnels. They learned to meditate from their coach, who had lived in a Buddhist monastery for 10 years. They sat in the darkness, not knowing if anyone would come to their aid, and they stayed calm and connected to one another. They were all ultimately saved by a team of divers who risked their own lives in the effort.
Meditation is a powerful antidote to fear and the modern daily stresses that can harm our health if left unchecked. Meditation can even save your life. But if you are under duress, the first thing to check is whether you can get out of it. See if the door to the hot box can be opened. Look for the escape route in the cave. If a change in the circumstances is possible, the wise action is to eliminate the cause of suffering first, and meditate later.
As a species, we often don’t even know that we are in a hot box or a dangerous cave. The stress of modern life is ubiquitous, so a change of environment may not even seem like an option. And, of course, not everyone can get away from their circumstances or difficulties. Not everyone has easy access to pristine natural places. Many can’t afford to travel to a place with fresh air and water.
I hope that the steps I teach in my book, Rewilding, for connecting with the living earth will open doors for everyone. The sunlight, the movement of air, the presence of the earth that is solid and stable even in asphalt, the dandelion coming up through a crack in the pavement, all can be entries into a wilder, more conscious, more awakened life.
For more practices in rewilding, search for “Micah Mortali” on the Sounds True blog to read his other posts or find his book, Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature, at your favorite bookseller!
Micah Mortali is director of the Kripalu Schools, one of the largest and most established
centers for yoga-based education in the world. An avid outdoorsman, mindful wilderness guide,
500-hour Kripalu yoga teacher, and popular meditation teacher, Mortali has been leading
groups in wilderness and retreat settings for 20 years. In 2018, he founded the Kripalu School of
Mindful Outdoor Leadership. Mortali has a passion for helping people come home to themselves
and the earth, and he is finishing his master’s at Goddard College on nature awareness and
mindfulness practices. He lives with his wife and children in the Berkshires. For more, visit
micahmortali.com.
Read Rewilding today!
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This is a new day. A mindful day. Our day.
It’s still dark
when one small bird
fluffs his feathers
And lifts his voice
To sing up the sun.
Snuggled deep in our dreams,
we hear his clear song.
And we open our eyes
To the gift of a new day.
This day.
Our day.
Years ago, we attended a family meditation retreat with the beloved Buddhist teacher Thich
Nhat Hanh. The children loved him. He showed them how to count their breaths from one to
ten. (The best part was finding ten perfect stones to move from one pile to another.) During
walking meditation, he urged them all ahead with a running meditation. Another time, the
children served tea to the adults, moving carefully and slowly, focused intently on the task at
hand.
Today, there is growing recognition that practicing mindfulness has benefits for children
regardless of religious or spiritual background. From preschools to middle schools, educators
are incorporating mindfulness into their learning communities as a way to help young people
cope with emotions and anxieties.
Mindfulness can also start at home. Here in Oregon, the OPEC (Oregon Parenting Education
Collaborative), a public-private parenting education effort, provides evidence-based parent
resources on mindfulness: “The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness with Children at Home.”
I hope my new picture book, Mindful Day, with gorgeous illustrations by talented California
artist Shirley Ng-Benitez, will also be helpful to families. Rather than a how-to, the story instead
follows a young girl, along with her mom and little brother, as they go about the simple,
ordinary activities of a day: eating breakfast together, getting dressed, brushing teeth, and
going to the market.
Shirley’s child-friendly artwork makes the characters come to life and examples of how to
practice mindfulness are integrated into the text. As the young girl pops a raspberry into her
mouth she says, “I chew slowly. It tastes sweet as summer.” She also practices being aware of
her breath. “Together we breathe: in out, soft slow. I look and listen. I play.”
Mindful Day was inspired by the time I’ve spent with my toddler grandson. I hope readers will embrace Mindful Day and make mindfulness part of their own family life. In this way, we can better treasure each precious moment—and help our children learn to do the same.
Thank you,
Deborah Hopkinson
Deborah Hopkinson has a master’s degree in Asian Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she studied the role of women in thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhism. She lived in Honolulu for 20 years and practiced Zen Buddhism with the late Roshi Robert Aitken, founder of the Diamond Sangha and Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She lives near Portland, Oregon. For more, visit deborahhopkinson.com.
Learn more and buy now
Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound
Shauna Shapiro: Good Morning, I Love You
Shauna Shapiro, PhD, is a teacher, public speaker, and author whose published works include The Art and Science of Mindfulness and Mindful Discipline. With Sounds True, she has published Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire Your Brain for Calm, Clarity, and Joy. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Shauna about the neurology of self-image and why conscious acts of self-compassion greatly enhance our well-being. Shauna comments on practicing mindfulness with warmth and open affection, as well as how this gradually cultivates empathy. Tami and Shauna also talk about “trusting the good heart” and the possibility of changing our baseline levels of happiness. Finally, they discuss why changing ingrained habits is so difficult and the subtle power of the daily self-affirmation, “Good morning. I love you.”(55 minutes)
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How Trees Boost Your Immune System
Qing Li, the medical professor in Tokyo, put together a list of basic rules to create the ideal interaction between forest trees and the human immune system. Professor Li is one of the leading scientists in the area of forest medicine. He advises:
- Remain in a woodland for at least two hours, while walking approximately 1.5 miles (2.5 km). If you have four hours to spend there, hike about 2.5 miles (4km). In order to boost your natural killer cells and anti-cancer proteins over a longer period of time as well, it is recommendable to spend three days in a row in a forest.
- Make a walking/hiking plan that suits your physical condition. Make sure you don’t get tired during your time in the woods.
- If you feel tired, take a break whenever you want and as long as you want. Look for a place in the forest where you feel comfortable.
- If you’re thirsty, try to drink water or tea.
- Pick a place in the forest that you spontaneously like and invites you to stay. Stay there for a while, sitting and reading, for example, or meditating, whatever you want, but enjoying the gorgeous ambiance and relaxing.
- To lastingly maintain the number and activity of your immune system’s natural killer cells and anti-cancer proteins, Qing Li recommends staying in a forest region two or three days per month and advises spending about four hours each day in the woods.
- In addition to his advice, I’d like to add the following tips that I consider very helpful:
- The contents of the anti-cancer terpenes in the forest air change over the seasons. The highest concentration is in summer and the lowest in winter. They increase rapidly in April and May, and in June and August, reach their peak. During these months, there are the most terpenes in the woods for your immune system to absorb.
- Furthermore, you can find the highest concentration of terpenes in the middle of the forest, since tree population is the densest there. The tree leaves and needles form an especially rich source. Additionally, the dense canopy prevents these gaseous substances from escaping the forest. Therefore, it is advisable to go further into the woods and not just spend time on the edges.
- When the air is moist, for example after rain or during fog, a particularly large amount of healthy terpenes is swirling around the forest air. This means we weren’t going crazy when we felt especially good during a walk in the woods after rain showers.
- By the way, anti-cancer terpenes are the densest in and near the ground, where we humans are normally present. Higher up, some of them are destroyed by the sun’s UV light that manages to get through the canopy here and there. Thus, it appears as if the distribution of this healthy substance was actually tailored to our body size.
Important: Don’t forget that forest medicine is especially helpful when it comes to preventing disease. However, if you are already sick, or feel sick, please go straight to your doctor. Forest medicine is under no circumstances a replacement for conventional medical check-ups.
Looking for more great reads?
Excerpted from The Biophilia Effect by Clemens G. Arvay.
Clemens G. Arvay, MSC, is a biologist and nonfiction writer who studied landscape ecology and applied plant science in Vienna and Graz. He centers his work on the relationship between man and nature, focusing on the health-promoting e?ects of contact with plants, animals, and landscapes. His most recent book is The Healing Code of Nature (Random House Germany, 2016). He lives in Austria. For more, visit arvay.info.
Rick Hanson: You Can Change Your Brain
Tami Simon speaks with Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist and cofounder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom. Rick is the co-author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, as well as the Sounds True audio learning programs Meditations for Happiness and Meditations to Change Your Brain. In this interview, Rick discusses the neurological structure of the brain, and how this knowledge can help us create a positive mental outlook. (71 minutes)
Andrew Holecek: Dream Yoga, Part 2
Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher whose work blends a background in ancient Tibetan Buddhism with the leading edge of contemporary Western thought. With Sounds True, he has released the book Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep. In the fascinating second part of his interview on Insights at the Edge, Andrew speaks with Tami Simon about pressing beyond lucid dreaming and into the actual nighttime practice of dream yoga. They talk about illusory form yoga and invoking specific imagery within dreams to cultivate positive qualities. Finally, Andrew describes the ability to actually meditate within dreams—as well as the doorways to personal inquiry this practice can unlock. (78 minutes)
