Our ancestors knew hundreds of medicinal uses of local plants and herbs. They knew the seasons, when to plant, when to harvest, how to forecast the weather by the behavior of plants and animals, and a host of other things based on their observations of nature. The lessons our ancestors learned haven’t gone away. They’re still there, waiting in the forest like an open book. All we have to do is to learn how to read it.
9.0 Forest as Teacher
Before the advent of the written word, our ancestors had no books from which to learn; no sacred texts from which to grow their spirituality, and no written history of their peoples. Nature was their sacred text. They studied the forest in the way that we study books today.
Think about applying the mindful skill of focusing on one thing at a time to your studies of nature. Can you see the day-to-day changes in the trees as they grow through the seasons? What could you learn about the medicinal properties of the trees by paying close attention to them? What can you learn about the qualities of each tree by studying it? Do different trees have different personalities? What can you learn about your own personality by studying the trees?
Optional Activity: Experiencing the Forest
If you have the opportunity to access a forest or wilderness area, try this exercise.
Go out into the forest. If possible, get far enough away from civilization that you can experience the forest without the sounds of mechanical devices like automobile engines, cell phones, etc.
Find a comfortable place to sit, and close your eyes. Pay attention to what your other senses are telling you about the forest. What do you hear? What do you smell? Can you feel the breeze on your skin? Is there a taste to the air as you exhale?
Practice observing and describing in this manner for a time.
Did this activity change your experience of the forest?
How?
9.1 Animal as Teacher
If you look at the myths, legends and stories of indigenous peoples, you won’t have to look far to find that animals are used quite often as teaching tools. Remember Aesop’s Fables? Most of those parables involved animals. Likewise, many of our fairy tales, from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to the Three Little Pigs, involve animals.
You don’t have to be a shaman in order to use animals as teaching tools. You already have within you volumes of knowledge on animals and their characteristics. You can draw on these traits to create your own personal stories and legends.
The My Own Animal Legend exercise on the next pages is a way to use the knowledge within you as a way to teach others and yourself. To complete this exercise, first answer the questions provided, then go on to the next page to use that information to create your own Animal Legend. Don’t worry too much about being elaborate in your creativity. If the story comes from your own heart, it will be a good one.
9.3 Nature as Teacher
The Animal Legend exercise is an opportunity to allow nature to teach us. It is also an opportunity for us to draw the archetypal energy of various animals into our lives as aids to connection. When I have done this session in workshops in the past, we have occasionally acted out the stories people have written. This has been especially enjoyable when people were able to wear the masks they created in the Faces and Masks exercise during the performance.
The techniques applied in the Animal Legend exercise may also be used in other aspects of our lives as we learn from nature. Imagine coming upon a stream while walking in the woods. A practitioner of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy sees the stream and studies its every aspect. How am I like the stream? How am I different? How may its energy be tapped? Why does it reflect the light of the moon? What is its substance? What is the nature of its life force? Is there an Art of Water? How do people feel about the different faces this stream presents? These are just some of the questions one might ask when observing and connecting with a stream.
The basic lesson of Nature as Teacher is to keep an open mind about anything you are studying so that you do not allow your preconceptions to cloud what is really there. This is not as easy as it sounds, but it can be accomplished. As with all things, the skill will grow with practice and patience. The key to this is to try to see all sides of a problem before looking for an answer.
With nature as your teacher, always strive to find the truth about your universe, and not merely what you wish to see or what your senses tell you. Remember that anything you will ever learn has been filtered through the sieve of your senses. What your body can perceive is but a small fraction of what is really there. The real nature of the Universe is deeper and more mysterious than we can ever know, at least in this present form. But that does not mean that we should stop trying. Your own inner universe is forever limited to the boundaries of your senses, but because of this, you also have the ability to create your own universe. That is the true nature of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy: The ability to see the world as it really is, free of expectations or assumptions, and to create your own world by changing your beliefs and assumptions.
