Remembering Your Wisdom & Beauty in Nature

Today we're exploring the ancient wisdom of nature and how it relates to truth, from Taoism, modern psychology and our own inner journeys. 

What's your relationship with nature?

For me, I grew up having absolutely no interest in it. In fact, when I was 12, my dad uprooted our family from a city to a tiny town called Morgan Hill, California. Back then, it was a place surrounded by mountains and lots of trees, and at the time, I hated it. I just couldn't understand why my dad was so enchanted by the woods. Trees, to me, just look like trees, and I missed my friends, the convenience of the city and the life. 

But life has a way of bringing you full circle. 

Years later, after spending long days indoors, working in an office, I found myself drawn back to the woods, enjoying the fresh air and quietness of them. And somewhere along the way, I fell in love with trees.

To me, trees began to look like living expressions of wisdom, each one strong, authentic and steady, and the very place I once resented my father for became the place where my soul felt most at home.

It turned out that my life had been quietly following a natural cycle all along.

The older I got, the more clearly I began to see the ways I mirrored my parents, how their dreams and wounds related to my own. At first, I fought this, but as I learned to embrace it, I felt a deep understanding, compassion and belonging.

Nature holds so many truths for us. 

We can learn about the truth of life by simply observing it. One of the first lessons nature offers us is this: everything moves in cycles, the seasons, the rise and fall of the tides, day follows night. These aren't separate random events. They are expressions of one eternal flow.

In Taoism, they teach that harmony comes when we stop resisting the natural seasons and movements of life. I'm not Taoist myself, but the more time I spent in the woods, the more I recognize the significance of what its ancient practitioners understood and passed along to us in its wisdom: that hidden within nature are quiet truths waiting for us to remember, that resisting reality creates suffering and flowing with reality creates peace, as Lao Tzu writes in the Tao Te Ching, life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them. That only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Trees don't fight the wind. They trust their roots and let the wind blow through. Trees don't cling to summer. They let their leaves fall. Loss and renewal are part of the same sacred cycle, and in the same way, when we accept the seasons of our own lives, the joyful ones and the painful ones, we move through them with deeper peace

A second truth we see is this: Nature is full of paradoxes.

Life and death, predator and prey, order and chaos. Even though nature often seems wild and unpredictable, underneath it all, there is a deep, invisible order, ecosystems, spirals forming in seashells, patterns repeating in leaves, rivers, cycles that have carried life forward for millions of years.

We see aloneness and belonging. A single tree might seem to stand alone but underground, it is connected to an entire living network. Through its roots, you are an expression of nature. You come from nature, and your life, too is part of this living, breathing, beautiful paradox.

In psychology, there's a concept called dialectical thinking. It's the idea that two things that seem opposite and paradoxical can both be true at the same time.

It's about learning to practice dialectical thinking by holding the tension between paradoxical forces, not collapsing into either or thinking, but embracing multiple truths at once. So just like the forest holds many opposites together in harmony, you can learn to hold your own contradictions, your fears and your hopes, your strength and your vulnerability, knowing that you're not either good or bad, you may be both at the same time. Like nature, you are comprised of yin and yang energies, darkness and light, all at once. That's what actually creates wholeness. And when we create space and openness within ourselves to hold these paradoxes, to recognize that they are natural, we begin to feel a profound sense of peace.

A third truth we see in nature is that the state of being naturally leads to the state of doing.

For example, a tree simply is itself and in its being. It does by creating homes for birds, shelters for insects and oxygen for us to breathe. It doesn't have to try or force itself to be useful. It is useful simply by being itself. The state of being merges into the state of doing where it is simultaneously, both states at once.

This is very powerful, because it means you can do, simply by being.

And there's an ease in life that comes with that. So nature teaches us that this state is possible and that there too is a natural intelligence within each of us, a seed of your truest self, when you trust it, when you let yourself be, you too can become exactly what the world needs.

Carl Rogers, the father of humanistic psychology, spoke about what he called the self actualizing tendency. It's the idea that every living being has a natural built in drive to grow, heal and become more fully themselves. So sometimes you might worry that you're not doing enough, that you have to do more, be more, impress people, or become something you're not. Always remember what nature teaches you, just like a seed already knows how to grow into a tree. You already carry within you everything you need to become who you're meant to be. It's a process for you to flow with naturally, tune into your own nature, to also be at one with a nature of life.

A Practice for the Week:

Spend a little time outside, breathe deeply, let go of all the stress and tension you are carrying, feeling as if it's up to you to hold all of life together. It turns out, there is a natural flow to life. All you have to do is tune into it and be in your own nature. 

Listen to the full episode of the Inner Calling podcast “Remembering Your Wisdom & Beauty in Nature” to learn more about this here, & get the workbook to go along with it in our Resource Library!