being the earth’s poem
There is a language of the body. Our bodies know even if our minds may have forgotten.
This is the way I used to speak. When guiding a session I used to talk to participants about leaving their thinking minds to slow into an embodied sensory experience. It remains true that an embodied state of being is good for forest bathing. But I no longer see my guide role as as one of helping participants leave the thinking mind to get there. I’ve come to realize that doing so reinforces the false separation of mind and body.
Through my own experience with somatic (meaning “of the body”) movement practices I have learned how to listen to my body, and let my body lead, as it were. When I say I am listening to my body, the assumption is that I’m listening with my mind. Yet using the word “mind” carries with it the predominate cultural assumptions that the mind, though it lives in the brain, is distinct from the body. However, somatic practices don’t require me to remove my brain from my body. If the mind is of the brain, and the brain is of the body, then the mind is of the body too.
So to avoid perpetuating the mind/body dichotomy with my language, I’ve started to replace “mind” with “awareness” or “consciousness.” During a forest bathing session, when I slow into an embodied sensory experience, my awareness is expanding beyond my thinking mind; though my mind is still present and active, I allow my consciousness to prioritize inputs from the senses that live in other parts of my body. Expanding awareness to include a wider set of sensory inputs can allow an embodied state of being.
In this embodied state, slowly wandering in the forest can open us to something even larger. With practice our consciousness can expand beyond our bodies to include inputs we might normally think to be outside ourselves. Sounds, after all, don’t originate in our ears.
Many people try to capture and transmit such an experience. Poetry seems to me to be the most appropriate vehicle for doing so. In a similar way to how poets often say the poetry does not come from us but is rather transmitted through us, what if this opening to a wider awareness permits the Earth to dream through us? Perhaps, in my wandering, sitting, and being in the forest, I can come to embody the poetry of the Earth.
When we forest bathe, we can be the Earth's poem.
Invitation
Touch the forest with tenderness. Pause with each touch, allowing your awareness to awaken in that part of your body.
