Deepening Connection to Nature: Awakening Into Deep Connection to the Web Of Life by Learning In Nature

Hominids have had a relationship with plants for more than 1 million years. The methods for processing plants have changed little in that time. Shredding, stripping, retting, carding, thrashing, winowing and grinding. The technology and plants have changed, but the process remains the same. 

Learning with a few plants, their properties and the primitive forms of processing are the skills and knowledge which bring us into a closer relationship with nature, when this is learned as part of a cooperative learning group in nature on an overnight which includes food, campfire, observation skills and a walk in ancient an ancient landscape with commentary on the history of ancient woodlands, coppice, hedge laying and the history of coppicing in Britain and Europe, which dates back to the earliest stone-age farmers.

From processed plant materials, we begin to understand that skills are not compartmentalised and learned in isolation from one another. Processing fibre provides tinder, fibre provides cordage, and cordage is needed for fire and shelter. Fibre can filter water.

There are deep skills associated with the land, fire, community and being outdoors in nature for a long period of time. The combination of tribe, ethos and mythos can make a community, even if only for a few days. Fire skills are more than lighting a fire. The fire is an eternal ritual space uniting the mundane of everyday need and the spiritual medicine space for ritual that affirms community. 

Close contact with nature from the minute to the magnificent and ancient trees and a changing climate.

The extinction of species is happening in real time. The Dodo is a famous example of man-driven extinction. Climate and extinction grief can best be eased through a therapeutic connection to nature. A deep connection to nature through outdoor skills helps us to awaken into a deep connection with the Web of life, and all that we do should be in service to life, for life and not celebrating us being alive, but knowing that we have much to do to restore nature. Plant fibres are a metaphorical interconnection between the reasons we process them in nature-connected skills. This metaphor filters through into the theoretical interconnectedness of nature, which is what "the web of life" seeks to simplify.

The fact that fibre can filter water is where we start to understand that survival knowledge is key to having a close connection with nature and an understanding that plants played a central role in human flourishing until the start of the Global spread of industrialised humans. The Use of Xylem to filter water is also MIT Engineering science

Can Neo Shamanism Connect us to Nature or the Web of Life?

Some Neo Shamans claim we can achieve a deep connection to nature by sitting under a tree and asking it questions before going on to describe coppice in the Ancient Celtic period.

My mother was 70 when she became a grandmother. Coppice went into Full dereliction in the 1930s. When the NHS ceased to use wooden walking sticks the last big commercial buyer of Coppice now is the Environment Agency. This picture below is what Scott is describing: unmanaged, derelict, contemporary, ancient woodland in decline.

What Scott is describing below is not about coppicing, but the Celtic Shamanic Spirituality teaching she does. Which is entirely based on her Boudica books and her "Dreaming Awake" mystery school which she teaches in person and online.

It is clear from her stance that how our ancestors coppiced, how they survived beyond growing crops and ignoring their woods for generations is of no consequence to connecting to the web of life. In fact, Scott has gone further, in her interview with the author of Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Adriotti she quotes her unscientific and deeply flawed position on the neurotransmitter serotonin and how it connects us to nature through the heart.

https://accidentalgods.life/ co-evolution.

I have already blogged about the reality of Serotonin, mental health and nature, but to be clear, nature connects to humans via the brain, not the GIT. GIT Serotonin cannot cross the "blood-brain barrier". GIT Serotonin is for digestion and the production of gastric enzymes as well as regulation of the heart and blood pressure, but the heart does not experience "Serotonin is the neurotransmitter that helps us sense this sense of entanglement and connection with everything, and calm and responsibility towards everything else." (Andrioti) FMRI studies have clearly demonstrated how nature stimulates the release of homoeopathic levels, 1-2% of Serotonin in the brain: This sharpens attention, improves concentration and reduces stress as part of the fight/flight mechanism. Put simply nature and the brain sort out stress through pleasure. 

I am surprised that Natali Nahai, a psychologist & Dr Gail Bradbrook are taken in by this psuedo science.

Learning In Nature Leverages The Limbic System

Most Neo-Shaman fail to grasp what is important about nature. The ritual practice, visualisation meditations and agenda to change the world get in the wat of the nature. Nature becomes and abstract mantra.

"Connect To The Web Of Life"

"There's a tree ho and sit under it. Over time these people are all saying and doing the same thing. They are teaching nature connection online, devoid if nature. They claim that nature connects to the nervous system or as we have already seen the GIT.

Nature is now well established as a salve for good mental health

These "spritual entrepreneurs" do not spend enough time in nature or learning anything in nature because they come with preconceptions of what experiencing the web of lif feels like and then wanting to monetise it as soon as they believe they have learned what-ever the course has taught.

This ignores time as a maturation process of practising skills, building knowledge and learning how plants communicate with us. This is the foundation of initiation culture. Every new survival skill is an initiation into a  deeper connection with nature. 

Teaching nature connection coupled with the philosophy of nature as kin, leave no trace & walking lightly upon the earth comes from the idea that we, live in a low-impact way. This is different to going off grid, but some of the skills are similar.

Cooperative learning is a group learning process where competition is managed. The entire group is expected to cooperate and learn the skills together and achievement of learning is a group process. This process of pro-social learning is about fostering cooperation in a group and breaking the assumption that survivalism is a lone activity.

Author: Rumi Mohideen (rumi.mbm.mohideen@gmail.com) is a outdoor skills tutor and former NHS mental health worker. In 2018 he won an award recognising his work with acute mental health patients taking them out into nature to do meaningful therapeutic activities. He has worked in land management, including the estate manager at the Elder Stubbs Allotments in Oxford and coppicing in Oxfirdshire. He grows Shiitake Mushrooms and teaches periodic courses in nature connections skills.