I want to dedicate this story and sharing to my teacher Navanita Harris that left her body in April 2021. She has been my guide into feeling at home in my body and opening the door to feeling at home on the Earth. This very important phrase in my life “At home in my body, at home on the Earth” is a teaching I received from her. It has opened the doors to my journey to connecting with my body, mind, emotions, and spirit through embodiment and ultimately to this incredible home called Earth. It led me to the Forest and to Forest Therapy and to finding a real embodied sense of belonging.
Embodiment brought me home into my body.
Since I can remember music and dance have always been a part of my life. From when I was a child at school, during the breaks, making choreographies of the latest songs with my friends to the first time at the age of 27 that I found a place that felt like home to me. A thumping alive and vibrant community of like-hearted humans dancing under the canopy of a beautiful forest. I have always found freedom in movement but deep down there was a longing for a deeper connection. I felt that there was something missing but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
Around about the same time that I discovered rave culture, I met Navanita. I was going through a transitional moment in my life, closing the door on a path that I had somehow created for myself that felt very destructive and disconnected from life and mostly very disconnected from my soul. Leaving that corporate tamed world behind, I had prepared to be able to take a one-year sabbatical that I wanted to dedicate to finding the deeper connection I was longing for. My soul needed nourishment and purpose. Inspired by a good friend that was in India at the time, I went to Greece for a 15-day training with Navanita called Life Moves – A Training for Life. Having never travelled solo before and to what seemed to me like a remote faraway corner of the world, I arrived. I arrived in that new place on the Earth and at the first step into a remembering that gently and consistently has brought me back home, to myself and to this Earth. The beginning of a 20-year journey that keeps unfolding.
Embodiment as a Resource for Presence
If I had to distill the essence of this embodiment journey into a simple meaning, it is that coming back home into the body offers an incredible resource for presence. The body acts as an anchor to being Here Now. The body exists in the present moment. It is only the mind that wanders into the past and into the future. When we are fully present in our bodies, there is only this moment, now. Our senses are only able to sense in the present moment. You can hear a bird singing only in the present moment. You can smell the perfume of a flower only in the present moment. You can delight in the texture of moss only in the present moment. You can enjoy the flutter of a butterfly only in the present moment. You can taste the sweetness of a juicy pear only in the present moment. You can tune into the frequency of the forest only in the present moment. You can know yourself through movement only in the present moment.
But how can we cultivate a state of embodied presence when our busy minds constantly take us back and forth between the realms of memory and the fascination of future? Our senses are definitely a doorway to the present moment but there are more. There are more resources and more doors to be discovered and explored. We live in an incredible instrument we call a body. Trillions of living, moving, breathing cells that are organised in intelligent communities of organs, structures and systems. Each offering a unique function and quality that we can consciously connect with and get to know. Each offering an embodied resource to be tapped into. Before diving a little deeper into these different structures and systems in the body, let’s consider what Navanita branded as the three essential orientations for life.
The first is Orientation to the Earth. The embodied awareness of our place on the Earth. Where are your feet right now? What is the felt sense of the contact of your body with the Earth right now? What is the quality you connect with when you allow the weight of your body to be held by the Earth? What happens to your breath when you yield the weight of your body into the earth? If you are trying to “get this” with your mind right now, I invite you to get down on the ground and actually sense this contact with the Earth. Notice whatever it is that you are noticing. Each body is unique and it speaks in unique ways, in a language that is non-cognitive and that very often is challenging to put into words. Orientation to the Earth and that embodied sense of contact offers us our ground of support. How many times do we walk through life, completely disconnected from the present moment, slaves to the endless streams of thoughts in our minds, only to find ourselves feeling depleted, that we need to “do it all alone” and that there is no one really there to support us? What if we shifted our perception and our orientation to consciously connect with the ground of support that is always there for us? Bringing our awareness to the support of the earth that is always here for us can tremendously shift our orientation in life. For myself, I find that when I consciously orient to the support of the earth beneath my feet there is a sense of strength that arrives that allows me to respond to life rather than to react to it.
The second orientation is Orientation to Space. Through our cultural and educational taming we are mostly taught to orient and focus on things. When we walk into a room or take a walk in a forest we are mostly orienting on the tangible things that exist in those spaces. We have not been taught to notice empty space. Take a moment now to notice space around you. Notice the empty space that exists between things, between people. What happens in your body when you notice space? When you consciously touch space? What movements unfold? This might be a good moment to get up and explore space with your body right now. Noticing space in front of you, behind you, above you, below you, space all around your body. Maybe notice what sensations and qualities arise for you. How many times do we go through life feeling we don’t have enough space? Not enough space in our jobs, in our relationships, feeling overwhelmed by the demands of our day to day never-ending to-do lists that leave us feeling stifled and pushed into a little corner with a feeling that we don’t have enough space? What if we shift our orientation to consciously connecting with space? Noticing how much space we actually need when we walk into a room our when we are face to face with a friend or family member? Through connecting to the space outside of us, we can recover our own inner space. Taking responsibility for how much space we actually need and taking that space consciously can open up a world of possibilities and creativity in our life.
The third orientation is what Navanita called the Moving Map. We know ourselves through movement. Movement is actually our first sense. In our development in the embryo, the first nerve to myelinate is the vestibular nerve. Myelination is the enclosing of a nerve fibre with a protective sheath. The vestibular nerve is a cranial nerve that conveys sensory impulses from the organs of hearing and balance in the ear to the brain. This is a very clear indication that our senses of balance and movement are very important in our awareness of ourselves. Through our cultural and educational taming, we form ideas of who we are and ideas of what our bodies are. The Moving Map allows us to know our bodies through movement. To discover ourselves through movement allows us to re-story ourselves in each moment.
Within our joint capsular tissues, ligaments, tendons, muscles and skin we have sensory neurons called mechanoreceptors that relay information to the central nervous system about touch, pressure, vibration and cutaneous (skin) tension. We also have proprioceptors in our skeletal muscles, in the interface between muscles and tendons, in our joint receptors and specialised proprioceptors in our internal organs like our heart. Both these types of sensory receptors are constantly informing us of our position and location in life. Through movement and touch we can start to build our real embodied perception of ourselves. This might be a good moment to explore your perception of your body through movement. You might want to explore what it is like to get to know your body through movement, light stretches, maybe even a little dance. Noticing what new movements you discover and allow. Noticing what it is like to allow yourself to follow the body’s lead rather than you directing the body in its movement.
For many years I have been burdened by the shaming of my body. Wanting for it to be different than it is and inflicting quite painful eating and exercise regimens upon it because my taming told me that body needed to be different than it is. Through the journey of discovering my body through movement, I have come to find myself at home in my body and have discovered an inexhaustible source of joy and freedom. Through movement I am learning how to become friends with my body and how to truly listen and care of it. My body has become a place that I consciously want to inhabit and be present to.
A Universe of Resources within our Bodies
Beyond these three essential orientations, we can move deeper into the different body systems and tap into their resources. There are many and beyond the scope of this text. Inspired by the work of Body Mind Centering developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, I will share here a few pointers into the intelligence of these systems and what they can support us to discover.
Our skeletal system is our basic supporting structure made up of bones and joints. Bones offering us support for our weight in relationship to gravity and our joints defining the shape of our movements through space. Through embodying our skeleton we can offer the mind the possibility to be become organised and cultivate a supporting ground for our thoughts.
The ligamentous system sets the boundaries of movement between bones by holding bones together and guide muscular responses by directing the path of movement between bones. By embodying our ligaments we can cultivate and articulate clarity of focus and concentration to detail.
Our muscular system offers balanced support and movement of our skeletal system and allows us to embody vitality, express our power, resistance and resolution.
Our organs carry the functions of our internal survival of breathing, nourishment, (comma) and elimination. They are the primary home of our emotions and carry the memories of our inner reactions to our personal systems. Each organ system in itself offers its own quality and resource.
Our endocrine system is the major chemical governing system in our body. It offers the quality of internal stillness, surges of explosion and balance and crystallisation of energy into archetypal experiences. It underlies intuition and perceiving and understanding of the world.
Our nervous system is the electrical governing system of the body. It receives and gives information to all the cells in the body and is the perceptual base through which we view and interact with our internal and external worlds.
These are just a few of the body systems we can work with. Through movement practices and explorations we can connect and discover these resources within ourselves that support our presence and vitality in life.
Embodiment and Forest Therapy
It is hard for me to write about Embodiment and Forest Therapy because I feel they are one of the same. In my perception and experience one does not exists without the other. My embodiment practice has been an incredible teacher in my journey as a guide, mentor, and trainer just as Forest Therapy, and especially The Way of the Guide, has been an incredible teacher in my journey with Embodiment. The Way of the Guide is an archetypal journey and it is the philosophical foundation of the ANFT Relational Forest therapy where, as guides, we work with the moto “The Forest is the therapist, the guide opens the doors”. The Way of the Guide teaches us deep listening, to ourselves, to the forest and to participants.
I remember Navanita sharing that she felt that in general, humans at this time are like radios that are out of whack. Radio transmissions full of static that have disconnected from the frequency of life on Earth. She shared that by coming back into nature, through embodied presence, we were able to retune to the natural frequency of life.
What I know is that in walking the Way of the Guide, embodiment is my greatest ally and vice versa. In my experience, The Way of the Guide is a journey of humbleness and surrender to the Forest and its intelligence. Through the intelligence of my own body and its language I am able to see and feel when I am stepping away from Way of the Guide and how I can step back into it. It is like a dance of trusting the forest and trusting my body. As an example to illustrate this, there are many times where, through the tensing up of my body I can notice that I am feeling that maybe I am not a good enough guide and that my participants are feeling bored, so I start to question what I am doing. By noticing these signals of tension in the body I am able to consciously resource myself through, for example, leaning into the trunk of a tree and finding the ground of support underneath my feet. When I do that I notice a deeper breath in my body, my muscles soften, my vision widens and I am able to receive the forest just as it is in that moment and the trust in the forest comes back all my itself.
Every time I go to the forest to guide a walk or to simply go on a hike, I feel I have the space to connect more deeply with myself and through that deeper connection with myself, I can truly connect with the forest. Embodiment and the Forest have taught me to slow down and be present to what is. Both have taught me the endless possibilities that can exist in a single moment and where those possibilities can take me. The journey of embodiment and Forest Therapy continue to unfold for me in every moment and with each of these moments I have a deeper sense of being at home in my body and at home on the Earth. Both these practices have offered me a real sense of belonging in the family of all things.
End Note:
Inspired in her journey of Embodiment and Forest Therapy, Geeta has created a professional Development course for Forest Therapy Guides and guides in training that offers an experiential journey into the body and its resources and how these can support a deeper understanding of the Standard Sequence and of foundational aspects of Forest Therapy like Way of the Guide, Encounters with Wholeness, Deep Listening and Language of Invitation. It is a self-paced course with monthly live community calls designed to offer a space for sharing and witnessing our unique journeys and experiences.
You can find out more about the course HERE.