Restoring Our Connection to Nature

One way we can deepen & restore our connection to nature is by learning the names of the native plants and trees around us. So many amazing, useful, resilient plants are often invisible to us or dismissed as ‘weeds’. These ancient beings are still growing through the cracks in the pavements, at the curb sides, edges, hedgerows and waysides. They were respected and useful to our ancestors as food, types of medicine/poison, household use, or for animals.

When we learn the names of trees and wildflowers, we start to build connections and relationships with them and we’re also tapping into the ancestral lineages of the land around us and ‘re-indigenising’ our mindsets. We can essentially make friends with all the plants and trees.

It can sound crazy at first (‘tree hugger’ even became a derogatory term, possibly because it’s harder to be ok with a purely capitalist/consumerist, destructive system when you’re reconnected to nature!) but befriending plants and trees is how to connect with the wisdom that still vibrates in our DNA, to what Carl Jung called our ‘instinctive nature’, and to allow our inherent wisdom to meet the wisdom of the plants around us.

We can mentally introduce ourselves and greet our green kin as we walk by them. We can stop and ask them if we can approach them to get to know their texture, scent, shapes. We can watch their transformation through the seasons and greet them when/if they return the next year.

We can ask if they are willing to share their wisdom and we may be surprised what we ‘hear’ in return!

What is now called Plant Spirit Medicine is instinctual communication and is how indigenous cultures communicate with the beings that grows around them, knowing that everything is interconnected and part of them in this great display and cycle.

I include elements of nature reconnection in my Reiki & Reiki Drum teachings and connect to the elements in my Reiki sessions.

Connecting to nature is connecting to a lost part of ourselves, it heals the rift of disconnection. Healing is to feel a deep sense of connection and wholeness despite any outer upheaval.

Names of the plants in the images: Elder, Speedwell, Hedge Mustard, Ground Elder, Plantain, Lady’s Mantle.