Healing With Nature in Post-traumatic Growth
A story on how nature supports my recovery journey🍃
Istruggle to express just how much nature has meant to me in my healing journey without risking sounding too vague.
The best I can do is to tell my story about how nature was the very catalyst to my (dare I say) innate spiritual and self-nurturing instincts.
It’s about these small expansive moments experienced in nature, which led to widening up my horizons and me gave relief from living with this traumatized lizard-brain of mine
Those moments I roamed free, looking down from the mountainside at the magnificent fjords below. Those moments where I felt my heart just sang.
Because of these moments in nature, I wanted to know more, sense more, and feel more. I wanted to climb taller mountains, walk further, and travel longer distances to feel myself becoming one with the environment. There wasn’t just me locked inside my fractured cognition — but there was also me as a part of a larger living being, where I felt became a part of the wholeness and shared my life in coexistence with all other living creatures of the wild.
Nature as a shelter of safety
My childhood home was ridden by chaos and violence. And amidst it all — I was forgotten and cast into the shadows, left on my own, and became stuck there; mentally, spiritually, and metaphysically.
Growing up, I didn’t know what it was like to experience the warmth of compassion and love from a safe human. But all I did know for sure was the infinite coldness of the void from living without it.
There was a place where I could feel some peace and freedom. It was in the woods when I fled from my house to hide from the world and anyone when shit went down. I would escape and skip school to sit in the forest for hours and listen to birdsong.
In a sense, the forest provided me with a place where I felt some kind of safety in a time when I needed it the most.
Nature became a source for me to escape the inhumanness and to feel myself just simply being a human without proving my value as one
As a young teenager, when I was in a suicidal fog, I fled out to a park in the middle of the night to just lay in the grass. Then with a wild imagination, I decided to make a prayer to nature — asking for it to find me. I was longing to get rescued.
Cultivating a reconnection with nature
Though there was a sad narrative attached to my relationship with nature, it would later reveal why I felt the way I did.
However, what led to a more profound, deeper connection with the natural world wasn’t until I had to leave my childhood home as a rebellious teenager and was allowed to make a massive move with my first partner, who lived on the outskirts of the mountainous fjords of western Norway.
Living in southern Norway most of my life and moving to the mountainous, mighty west was quite the contrast compared to the flat, idyllic landscapes I was used to. Now I could experience the rawness and powers of massive storms rolling over the horizon, where anything and anyone was fragile against the natural elements.
But most noticeable to me were these mountains peaking up from the fjord, painting an almost hypnotic, alluring backdrop to the windswept townscape below. I felt haunted by their presence. And, of course, as I assume any adventurous soul would do, one goes to explore them. So I did.
These encounters and adventures in the wild then spiraled into a newfound love for nature which instilled in me a deep sense of hunger and curiosity towards life. This perspective saves me every day and keeps me going in this human meatbag no matter what.
Nature as the greatest teacher of healing
There is this strange psychological phenomenon that happens when I sit out long enough. It’s still bizarre to me as a person who lives with the endless melange of emotional dysregulation, all the toxic shame in the world, and the chronic loneliness and depression I feel — because all of that negative mental looping just… silences.
Instead, I’m filled with emotions of joy, wonder, and a deep love and appreciation of life in the moment. This state of being is so restorative that it secures me in a way where I can just safely sink into living and suddenly feel I have access to all the parts of my mind and body.
A huge relief for a while until I get back to the city and feel myself slowly becoming a vessel of anxiety — a clear signal that my unnatural, uprooted ways of living there significantly affects my hunger for connection.
From our experiences outdoors, this might validate what we already subconsciously know — that nature benefits the areas of the mind and body affected by trauma. Nature can help bring us back to living life more deeply with new feelings of health and wholeness.
I need to emphasize that nature alone won’t cure us, but nature is essential to our survival and well-being, and we must consider nature as a support in recovery.
Nature reminds me that I am whole and that I do belong. Coming home to nature is also coming home to self.
Experiencing nature
Some mindfulness principles I want you to take away with this read;
The earth is a living being, much like the cells in our body, which can restore itself to balance
The trees can remind you to stay grounded and present in your body, which can help you build emotional resilience
The sounds of the ocean waves can remind you to take one breath at a time and get carried with the flow of the moment
The stars remind us that life is so much more than what we’re able to comprehend, even when your pain convinces us otherwise
The animals remind us of our place and belonging to an ecosystem as a part of a larger whole
I hope this serves as a reminder for you to take some valuable time to get immersed in and hopefully find some solace in nature yourself 🌿
If you can relate or have a similar experience, feel free to share it, I’d love to hear it 🤍
