When you reflect on what it is to connect with nature, do you see this as a connection extending beyond your skin, even behind the perceptions that flow past your awareness? When you sit beneath a waterfall or hug a tree, does it ever feel as your skin boundary becomes less solid? You can tap into this experience through the awareness of relational stillness, which evokes a sense of physical porosity to unfold, to a sense of flow to emerge.
Your body, at its most fundamental is a manifestation of consciousness, a co-operative venture between higher self and the fundamental units of physical reality. At this level of reality, our body is a constant, interconnected flow of energy, coded information, hormones and neurotransmitters feeding into and dominating your normal awareness within which your thoughts, feelings and sensations wash over and through. For the most part our consciousness is based on the contents that arise from within and outside.
Most of us are not aware of the fundamentals of our being when we walk in a forest or along a beach. We take it for granted that we move through an external environment with a body that ends at our skin. But a little reflection about the nature of our where our sense of self ends, usually at our skin, and otherness begins shows that we literally extend beyond our skin. To be more precise, it is not so much that we have a physical body that connects but an energetic body that flows and extends into our surrounds.
I could take this further by saying that it is the mind of Self, our soul consciousness, that co-creates an ‘external’ world within which you, the personality incarnation, lives, but that is for another post. Our energetic body consists, at the body level, flows through every cell, through chakras and energy meridians and extended auras, and exchanges energy and information as it intermingles with ‘other’ beings and objects in the environment, almost always unconsciously so.
Research over many decades has proved that our body generates electric and magnetic fields that extend up to several metres from our skin surface. The heart, for example, is the body’s most powerful organ generating a torus field of magnetic energy a metre or more from the body. It sends more information to the brain than vice versa. With its 40,000 neurons, it is the body’s second brain able to learn, sense, and remember, and activate different parts of the brain. The effect of heart coherence on the brain’s coherence is profound.
This heart coherence effect is why practicing gratitude and loving compassion when actively connecting with a tree or other nature being, including other humans, is important, the heart responds with coherent messages to the brain which helps improve cortical functioning, calming and aligning the mind. This helps to explain why practicing mindfulness is enhanced by intentionally feeling compassion, gratitude and love.
The fluctuating electro-magnetic field around your body interacts with and affects other electro-magnetic fields of living beings and forms an important portal for subtle communication and connection. This field, and by extension our body, feelings and mental functioning is also influenced by the bio-fields you travel through. So at an energetic level you cannot but be help but be affected, even connected by the flow of energy, from the quantum to the macro levels.
For example, when we touch something, the molecular and cellular worlds of skin and the touched intermingle and exchange energy and information. The skins cells and their quantum constituents connect with the cellular structure of that which is touched. If you become aware of this and the subtle sensations of this exchange, through intention and focused attention, for long enough, then you can begin to experience a sense of oneness with the touched. That’s an awesome experience, wow!
To conclude, we are all inherently connected to everything around us to the extent that we are energetically embedded within an energy medium which we move within, not through. Our emotions and feelings, our state of consciousness are all affected to varying extents by the myriad of fields we encounter as we walk through natural places. We literally cannot help but be connected with ‘other’ beings, with the spaces we inhabit.
The challenge of this is to make it a conscious connection, if we long to evolve into our greater potential. By having the intent to open and expand our energy centres (chakras), by actively imagining your extended energy state, you may more consciously, rather than passively engage the wholeness of your total being. This conscious approach will deepen and strengthen connection with both the seen and hidden worlds you, the ‘physical’ you, exists within. So I encourage you to either do your own connection process or try my F2F or on-line connection program to enter into this energetic awareness.