Mindful Connection Practice
A 3-hour exploration into what nature can teach us about the transformative power of connection based on presence, choice, and appreciation.
Can you relate to any of these?
-
Struggling with feeling shut down inside, anxious, or disconnected from yourself and others.
-
Feeling awkward, even lost at times, in forming and nurturing strong, healthy relationships.
-
Spending more time looking at screens than being in nature.
-
Yearning to experience more aliveness and engagement with a particular place or the more-than-human world around you.
Most of us live in a damaging state of imbalance that affects our physical, psychological, and spiritual health, as well as our bonds with family, friends, colleagues, and communities. Often, we aren’t even aware of this imbalance—it just feels like ‘the way things are.’
​
Science shows that reconnecting with the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, and even our survival. It’s also teaching us that connection is vital to our ability to learn and grow, regulate our emotions, work through tough times, form positive relationships, destress our lives, and enhance our creativity.
Developing the skill of connection is vital to living a fully engaged life, and at the heart of this skill is our ability to foster a mind-body-nature connection.
What would become possible in your life if you were more skilled at connection? How can nature help you become more connection-savvy?
​
The connection many of us yearn for doesn’t come solely from human relationships or from simply doing personal inner work; it also requires reweaving ourselves back into the tapestry of the natural world—a world as diverse as each of our different homes. Whether it’s high-rise buildings with birds soaring around balconies, small backyard spaces with flowers and bushes, community parks with old trees, or rural living, we can reap extraordinary benefits by learning to connect with the natural life around us.
​
Paradoxically, this helps us nurture our human relationships too.
​
The thing is, simply going to nature to heal us and make us feel good is not the kind of transformative skill-building that has the power to reshape our lives. It’s merely more of the same “taking from.”
​
Transformative, rich connection is based on choice, regard, and appreciation. It requires us to be mindful, to heighten our awareness, and to go slow. To enter into what poet David Whyte calls “the conversational reality of life.”
It just so happens that horses are experts in this depth of conversation, fostering it with every movement, every footstep on the earth, every turn of the ear.
​
Our Mindful Connection Practice is a simple yet profoundly nuanced and energizing way to begin developing your own unique connection practice. We start where you are, and we start in nature. We offer simple mindfulness techniques to help you grow your present moment awareness. We slow down, take lessons from the herd and the rich life of a place, reflect, and notice what happens inside and around us. We enter into a space of attunement, following our body’s intelligence. And we use everyday exercises from ecotherapy and nature-based expressive arts to integrate what we learn.
​
Every practice session is unique, just like the group that shows up. Each one offers different tools and techniques you can take home to continue nourishing your practice.
​
This is three hours that have the power to transform your life and your relationships. Join us once, join us often.