Here, an ecopsychologist shares a nature-inspired practice to help us restore trust and confidence in ourselves. 🙏
on the journey through life. Once our inner wisdom is reduced to a faint whisper, we run the risk of losing our connection to our true nature—and its corresponding system of checks and balances—altogether. As an ecopsychologist, I believe that the elements balance and harmonize within our body's ecosystem, just as they do on Earth. We can restore trust and confidence in ourselves by aligning with each of these elements. This can be accomplished with what I call a re-Tree-ting practice.
Step 1: Sit upright against the back of a chair or a wall, and imagine entering a"soul sanctuary" or inner natural landscape.leaning your head and back against a sacred tree guide at the center of this inner scape. Trust Earth to support you while you open yourself up to guidance and energy from the sun above and the soil below, just like trees, our oldest ancestors, do.Visualize asking your Air guide to breathe more spaciousness into tense situations.
Its ultimate goal is to provide protection and nudge you toward balance, not burn without limits to hurt and control others. Rekindling and reigniting your relationship with your sacred inner fire and passion is essential in regulating your energy, mood, and physical and emotional immunity. An Earth guide will help you to grow tall. Your history is recorded in your inner cycles and circles, just like a tree.
Fortunately, nature and the elements are always accessible as a tuning fork; a system of checks and balances that we can return to any time we feel lost. By listening to their guidance, we are able to discern between truth versus trauma, heart expansions versus hurt contraction, love versus fear, and the wishes and perceptions of our higher soul-centric self versus those of an overbearing ego-centric persona.
Nature and the elements can provide us with trustworthy data checkpoints whenever we've got an inkling that we're lost or headed in the wrong direction. Refining our built-in connection to nature and the elements ensures the needle of our heart compass is indeed pointing toward our True North.