On… Nature
What does it look like, when nature heals us?
Last year I suffered a pretty spectacular burnout and subsequently stepped down from my role as the Founder Director of a fast-growing (and wonderful) climate communications charity.
After six years of relatively high-flying activism, rubbing shoulders with MPs and multi-million pound funders, I found myself jobless and extremely unwell.
I experienced an emotional collapse which also had profound effects on my life at home, and which, compounded by coronavirus as it began to take hold across the world, led to some of the most vulnerable experiences of my life so far.
As I slowly recovered, I began to pour these painful experiences into research on how burnout affects the climate sector more generally and was fortunate to get some financial backing to support me in doing that.
I began to lead workshops, mentor others, and produce resources aimed at helping people working in the environmental field to safeguard wellbeing as they carry out their work.
I’ve talked to amazing people, discovered some wonderful strategies, taken a deep dive into my own journey and how it led me to burnout… but still, after a year and a half, I often struggle to feel right in myself.
Instead of feeling refreshed, renewed and healed by this time of reflection and wellbeing-focused action, I have found myself often feeling pretty joyless, and battling with a fairly constant sense of dread about the future.
In other words I have been, I am still at points, depressed in a way that I had never known before burnout.
I have found myself often feeling pretty joyless, and battling with a fairly constant sense of dread about the future.
I have sometimes found myself leading these wellbeing workshops and wondering, ‘Am I a fraud? How can I possibly offer wellbeing solutions to others when the struggle for my own wellbeing is still so real?’
But a few weeks ago I had an experience in nature that caused a quite profound shift within me. I came home, wiped my calendar clean for the week and pondered what it all meant for my wellbeing work, and my life generally.
So in this month’s post I would like to share a little of this experience in nature with you, how it changed and healed me and how, maybe, it might offer something of the same to you too.
Change in Nature
I stumbled upon Change In Nature as part of a series of conversations I’ve been having with a variety of environmental leaders about the wellbeing of our sector.
Change In Nature was founded after Andy Raingold and Chloe Revill, who also have a background in climate policy, came to the conclusion that this work is in need of more support for its substantial emotional challenges.
For six years Chloe and Andy have run a variety of courses offering deep nature connection to changemakers in order to support ‘purposeful action in pivotal times’.
This May I was lucky enough to find myself undertaking their week-long residential Nature Facilitation training at Hawkwood College, in the South West of the UK, learning how to run retreats and workshops that connect people to nature.
Within an hour of arriving at Hawkwood and pitching up my tent, I sensed that this was going to be a pretty immersive experience. We were asked to place our phones in a locked box and to muddle our watches so we would have no idea what time it was for the whole week.
We were then introduced to a variety of practicalities such as how to call the group back together again using a ‘wolf howl’. This meant a genuine howl to the sky, which, when we heard it, would signal to us to turn in the opposite direction and release our own howl at the top of our lungs. In this way the sound would carry across Hawkwood’s expansive grounds, eventually reaching the entire group.
In our first workshop we learned how to travel back in time, meaning that we returned to the creation of time itself and followed the earth’s journey to present day... within three hours of arriving, life outside of Hawkwood was already starting to feel pretty distant.
Within three hours of arriving, life outside of Hawkwood was already starting to feel pretty distant.
Fearing People
Being amidst a group of nearly twenty people after one and a half years of lockdown was in and of itself a quite profound experience.
It was my first time with a group of strangers (or any group of more than six for that matter) in over one and half years, so I found myself noticing the old and familiar feelings that arise when I’m in groups much more intensely for having had a break from them.
Childhood memories of making new friends or wondering how to fit in rose to the front of my mind, challenging me to reflect upon the ways I still live out things that have long passed as if they are my present.
But there were new feelings too. Lockdown has meant that since burning out I have been largely able to hide myself away from the world whilst attempting recovery, without the usual fears of missing out (or offending anyone). Even when I have occasionally wanted to get back out and about to get away from my dark thoughts, I have instead had little option than to stay at home and face them.
Lockdown suited this particular period of my life because burnout had led me to become very afraid of people.
Because I strove to hide the breaking down that was happening within me as much as possible in order to ‘remain professional’, I experienced people as the place where the shutting down of myself happened, as a trauma site.
Exhaustion also meant that I forgot how to set boundaries or communicate my needs effectively, and as a result I experienced people that I loved and trusted as needy, as taking advantage or even as abusive. Knowing I was surrounded by good people and having been someone who previously couldn’t get enough of people, this was probably the most painful aspect of my burnout experience.
So my arrival into a week of intense living with a large group of strangers prompted profoundly fearful thoughts within me; I have harmed others and been harmed myself through my burnout experience, I have no idea if I know how to connect with people anymore.
I pitched up the pop-up tent I had brought especially for the trip half expecting to pop it back down again within a couple of hours and head back up the M1.
If this whole nature connection thing was too intense, I had my exit strategy planned.
I pitched up the pop-up tent I had brought especially for the trip half expecting to pop it back down again within a couple of hours and head back up the M1.
Connecting with People
It turns out that the level of connection encouraged on this course was way more intense than I could ever have anticipated.
We were invited to lie side by side, close our eyes and take someone’s (sanitised) hand, using our fingertips to gently explore what it felt like. To ‘send’ gratitude to each person we appreciated by wiggling our fingers in their direction and encouraging the rest of the group to follow. To answer questions like, ‘what has moved you in the past year’ which almost instantly brought most of us to our knees.
But I didn’t pack my things up and bolt back up the M1, although knowing I had the option to do that was an important part of me feeling able to stay.
I stayed because I knew that, contrary to everything my mind and body was telling me at certain points, I was safe, and being in nature for the full week was very much part of how I knew that.
Over the course of the week I learned that facilitation in nature, when done well, creates spaces that are safe enough for people to go to their edges, and to even expand them.
I was safe, and being in nature for the full week was very much part of how I knew that.
Connecting with Nature
The closest call I experienced with regards to reaching the edges of my comfort zone was on our fourth evening when we dutifully responded to the wolf howl and gathered round the fire for another meal of the open-fire deliciousness we had come to expect.
That night, however, we were told that there was to be no dinner. Instead we had half an hour to gather our things before heading out into the night, tentless, to sleep under the stars.
All round me there were murmurs of excitement. I even overheard someone say, ‘I’ve wanted to do this for years!’
Personally, I could not have been less up for this.
Since burning out my body has craved the comforts of warmth, a full belly and a soft bed like never before. My tolerance for physical discomfort and my pain threshold have been noticeably lower, and the thought of sleeping outdoors on an empty stomach filled me with a kind of resistance that closely resembled that of a childlike tear tantrum.
Encouraged by everyone else’s enthusiasm, however, I gave it a go, finding a spot as close to camp as possible. I layered up with nearly every item of clothing I had brought with me, and snuck some snacks along just in case.
We had a full twelve hours and I had no idea how I was going to fill the time. We had been encouraged to take as little with us as possible-- to leave even our journals behind so that we could focus on full immersion in the wild.
I set out my bivy bag and lay down at the top of a field where I could view the sun setting into the valley. I crossed my arms, and I waited.
I stared at the sunset, which caught my attention and then gradually completely absorbed it as I watched the colours shifting in the sky.
And then, it’s hard to describe what happened, but something like peace fell over me for the first time in a very long time.
I stared at the sunset, which caught my attention and then gradually completely absorbed it as I watched the colours shifting in the sky. As the evening dew appeared, I noticed some strange insects hanging from the trees above me, spinning themselves round and round by a virtually invisible thread, and I was fascinated to understand why. Before long, the wildlife around me forgot I was there, so that even the birds settled down for the night nearby.
I really felt that I was becoming part of nature, rather than simply an observer of it.
By sunset I was sound asleep, awoken in the early morning by the wolf howl which, as the rest of the group joined in, also woke up the cows who began to moo to the sky with us.
It was one of the best night’s sleep of my life, waking only briefly to find myself nose to nose with a particularly oozy slug, but I didn’t even care.
I really felt that I was becoming part of nature, rather than simply an observer of it.
Nature Politics
I have never spent less time in nature than when my day job was to protect it.
I spent most of my waking hours in front of my laptop, sitting in board meetings, travelling on the train, or speaking at indoor events. It was all about protecting nature, but the natural world had become very distant to me.
As the charity grew and my days became busier, I lost more of my evenings and weekends to work, or recovering from work, until eventually I could go whole weeks without spending time in any outdoor green or blue spaces.
When I did spend time outside it felt so tokenistic that it served to highlight just how disconnected from nature I had become, which didn’t make for a particularly renewing or enjoyable experience.
This for someone who grew up on a boat, constantly in and surrounded by nature, was a great loss, but it happened slowly enough for me to barely notice the growing absence of nature connection in my life.
This external shift reflected the internal shift that was happening as I rose to the challenges of a job in climate policy. I learned how to negotiate with MPs, make a pitch before potential funders, manage staffing issues and generate a five-year strategy.
These were the strategic, more grown-up and serious parts of myself but as burnout set in, they were no longer just a part of me, they became the whole of me. Slowly I lost sight of the more childlike parts of myself who love to get up close to a funky insect, play in the waves, or set out to the woods for a picnic with my friends.
These were the parts that, for me, make things fun, bring meaning, make life worth living.
Connecting with Nature
In the lead-up to burnout, spontaneity, fun, and the joy of being for being’s sake had disappeared from my life, and what’s more was that I believed this to be vital for my climate activism.
Slowly I lost sight of the more childlike parts of myself who love to get up close to a funky insect, play in the waves, or set out to the woods for a picnic with my friends.
Who has time for childish play when the planet is burning?
In my experience, this attitude is encouraged within the climate policy world because our aim is to encourage decision makers to take our proposals seriously, and therefore we are to be seen in a serious light ourselves.
More widely within industrialised societies, the empirical and rational parts of ourselves have also increasingly dominated public life where the more intuitive and creative ways of knowing have been cast aside.
This, according to psychotherapist and eco-anxiety researcher Steffi Bednarak, poses a significant challenge to our efforts to halt climate change because it creates a separation between ourselves and the natural world, and in particular, a devaluing of nature.
Whilst nature has no difficulty speaking the language of the rational, operating with patterns, rhythms and rules of its own, the primary ways of the natural world are that of creativity, intuition and the constant interaction of an infinitive number of moving parts all operating in relationship with each other.
To overvalue the rational is therefore to see ourselves as separate from, superior to, and dominant over that which is more intuitive, creative, spontaneous, reciprocal, and abundant, such as nature.
According to Bednarak, this is how we have ended up on the brink of environmental apocalypse and it is the rebalancing of these parts of ourselves that can lead us toward healing.
In her article on eco-anxiety and collective trauma she writes;
“The endeavour to reintroduce relational and systemic values into every part of society would mean an engagement with the paradoxical aspects of life that don’t fit into linear thinking, the ability to acknowledge uncertainty, chaotic networks of relationships, living systems thinking, embodied practice and other strategies that are suspiciously viewed as unscientific.
It would mean a willingness to travel into the wilderness of everything that we have ‘othered’ and allowing it to unravel the reductive story we have told about the human condition and the world.
‘We may need to pay attention to the exiled parts in our inner and outer world and make an effort to notice the unseen, that which has been part of our story all along but that we haven’t been trained to notice.”
Making Peace with my Exiled Parts
It is this integration that I began to experience during my week in nature, but it was mostly not a comfortable experience.
As I have already described, I felt most of the time that I was at the very edges of my comfort zone. But in the end, I began to wonder if comfort was so appealing after all.
What is so bad, I wondered, about just letting go? About not knowing what the next activity will ask of us, or what time of day it is? Who cares if I say something stupid, or make a mistake? If we’re lucky, we get another day to give it another go anyway.
Nature carries on, and it allows me to be a part of it, inviting me in, just as I am.
Depression, numbness and joylessness were still there with me, but my experience of slowing down and being immersed in nature left me with a sense in which I am held by the natural world as I experience the shadow side of what it means to be alive.
And also that these are normal, natural responses to the realisation of what is happening to our planet.
Since I left work I’ve been trying to fight these feelings, to get rid of them so I can ‘get back to it’, but over the course of this week I found I could begin to accept them.
This is my night, but day will come again, and the night has so much to teach me in the meantime.
This is my night, but day will come again, and the night has so much to teach me in the meantime.
These are the places that we need to go to if we are to support others in opening to the reality of what is unfolding in the world.
I’ll finish this post with a quote from Carl Jung, shared by one of my fellow nature facilitation trainees, which goes some way to summarising the experience I had on the course;
‘Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilisation take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea.
They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them.
It can be done within or without. Walking in the woods, lying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea, are from the outside; entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.’
Carl Jung Dream Analysis: Notes on a Lecture Given 1928- 1930
I'm running this free online event, 'Is There Time for Self-Care In a Climate Emergency?' on Monday July 12th at 7pm.
About Me I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.
Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.