Naturally Healthy

Health is more than the ability to stay alive, or be without symptoms. It is to be alive with appreciation, compassion, generosity and solidarity. It is to be satisfied by sensitivity, openness, honesty, intimacy and generosity: to live without the need for continuous excitement and achievement. The possibility of genuine health rests directly on our relationship to Nature, and nothing else. In that human beings are natural beings this includes our relationships with each other, within which our social needs can be met. Yet it begins in our access to the natural world. While we do not all have equal access to Nature, we all have options. You need to exercise your options so that your lungs enjoy fresh air daily. So that your skin enjoys regular sunlight. So that your ears enjoy the sound of running or rolling water, bird-call and wind-song, as often as possible. So that you eat unadulterated, local, seasonal, whole foods whenever you can. And if possible you need to find some activity that places you inside the changes and rhythms of nature, like gardening, or planting trees.

Nevertheless we need to understand Nature as well as season ourselves in her bounty. We need to understand her well enough to clearly see the wholeness. If we can not both see and feel the wholeness we will not feel safe enough to give without demand. We will remain caught in the needs and drives of the biological imperative. To soften and contextualise those drives we must see beyond Nature’s interconnectedness. Interconnectedness does not mean that there are strong bonds binding us all together. It means more than that. It means that we are each one of us dependent on every one of us, human and non-human. It means that in a  very real, practical way we are all one. Nature is a single living organism with many organs and organelles, including human beings. It is a wholeness functioning through a singular intelligence. It is an indivisible unity of which you are a momentary expression.

This has to be more than a concept, or it will remain sentimental and dogmatic self-deception. It has to be something that arises organically inside you. The only way that that can happen is if you taste deeply that indivisible unity within your own presence. You need to come to feel the relationship between the movement of your little finger and the fluttering of your diaphragm. You need to know, because you can feel it, that what you do with your head as you walk is responded to by every available muscle in your body. You need to become intimate with the singularity of your breathing generating different sensations in different parts of your body. You need to become intimate with the inclusive openness of awareness revealing all the elements of your ongoing experience. Then you have to start to recognise the same in the world around you, the world that sustains you. You have to experience the fractal nesting of wholeness layered within your direct experience. You need somatic intimacy.

You need to realise that the distinctions between the parts of  Nature, are like the distinctions between the parts and activities of your body. They only exist in our experience, and in our minds. Your body and Nature know nothing of parts, nor wholeness for that matter. They simply function in and as wholeness, no matter what happens to any of their parts. Your body is an indivisible unity and the price paid by one part is paid by the whole. That is what we have to know of the world as well. We have to deeply experience that organic unity from our bodies into the world. Not just into society but into the world as a whole. We have to know wholeness as intimately as we have learned to know separateness. We have to know that Nature is an indivisible unity. We have to know that life is an indivisible wholeness. To feel truly safe we must know that multiplicity expresses an indivisible wholeness. 

It is not enough to understand all this intellectually. It has to inform your fundamental disposition, shape your values and motives, wants and needs. We each have a unique disposition that embodies our values, sets our interests and drives our motives. This disposition is not our nature, but our learned response to experience. A learning that began at conception and continues to this day. If that disposition is one of separateness, insecurity, anxiety we fit in perfectly with the dominant culture of exploitative consumption. Yet what has been learned can be unlearned. An unlearning that allows the solidarity that expresses your social nature, and the generosity that expresses your spiritual nature to generate new perceptual, cognitive and behavioural pathways. Pathways that will allow you to trust Nature, trust Life, trust others and trust yourself. 

You can tell yourself to be environmentally conscientious, but this won’t be enough. You have to change the way you feel about yourself, about nature, about life. You have to fall in love with Nature in her dynamic, mutating wholeness. You have to feel how deeply and generously supported you are by the seamless matrix of the natural world. This is surely possible, if you are able to put aside your need to accumulate and achieve. Yet even this can not be imposed from intellectual understanding. It must arise naturally, spontaneously within you. The most likely way for this to happen is by way of intimacy with your own body. Not least because the human body is the most direct, intimate expression of Nature within your experience. At the same time it is the most direct, intimate expression of Consciousness. Even if your access to Nature is limited, your body is always present. Intimacy with your body is intimacy with Nature. Within that intimacy your mind will become more and more embodied. This will prevent your mind from so often running away with itself into the imaginable and imaginary. Instead it will remain grounded in the natural presence of your body, applying its remarkable intelligence to those things that you can and need to do. 

This grounding will undermine your sense of separation from Nature and others. It will also put you more deeply in touch with the Love that you most deeply are, and its need to give without demand. Love of Nature can not be a sentimental one. It must be a need; the need to give to the natural world without demand. What form this may take depends on your circumstances and the opportunities they provide. It does not need to be formulated. It will arise spontaneously from your opened heart. It will express itself as appreciation and respect for the natural world. It will also express itself as a deep, organic desire to care for the natural world, just as it is nourishing you. You will become more ready and able to recognise your insensitivity and exploitation of Nature. In openly and honestly recognising these tendencies they will lose their power, and new habits of sensitivity and generosity will replace them. As they do your relationship to Nature can become one of love flowing in both directions.