Nature is the Ultimate Living Teacher

Seven years ago I witnessed a 9-year old boy blow a coal into flame.  I watched him tenderly cradle the tinder bundle in his hands, slowly turning it to expose the cedar bark shavings to the life-giving breath from his lungs.  I cried when I saw the grey furls of smoke burst into flame – cried with the release and the joy of a mother having just given birth to her baby. Beyond the joy, there was relief – as if some bone deep buried knowing was set free.

Native Children Know Nature

I had heard of other children, children far away in remote native cultures who knew how to light fires using their hands and pieces of wood. These same youth also knew how to harvest food and medicine from the forest; read the language of subtle and intricate animal sign and tracks to find their next meal; and smell the coming of the rains. They were mentored in the rhythms and cycles of the land, their senses trained exquisitely to see, hear, smell and taste all that the world offered for their survival. They were deeply connected to their bodies and through their bodies, they found their place in nature.

On that chilly morning, as I stood in a circle of youth and their mentors, singing in community, and celebrating that fire for it’s warmth, light and eternal power of transformation, I realized that the proverbial other time or place or culture is actually right here, and right now!

The people I gathered with were living testament that reconnecting with our ancestral coding and living in harmony in nature is possible. The pathway from past to present was through the senses, and the journey to feeling that eternal sense of belonging in the natural world was through mentoring.

As a somatic movement educator and therapist, I have trained, studied, researched and guided myself and others on many journeys deep into the landscape of sensation. As a naturalist in the realm of inner ecology, I know intimately and irrefutably that our bodies are designed to experience the world through our senses, and that our senses are part of a larger universe of interconnected cells, tissues and systems, that help us to feel, think, know and act upon our world.  Following the tracks and trails of my inner cosmos out into the forests and fields of Nature’s landscape, I found my way to sacred ground.

Every time we see, touch, smell, taste and listen to the natural world, we allow our nervous system to both set our basic patterns of relating to the world and to create new pathways of learning, literally forming new neural connections in the brain and body.

The more senses we engage at one time, the more complex our learning is, and the more our brains want to explore. The more we repeat this pattern of multi-sensory learning, the greater our memories and ability to recall information becomes.

Children Immerse Seamlessly into their Surroundings

Mud, sand, rocks, streams, plants, trees, animal tracks, bird song and bugs provide year-round challenges to children’s growing brains and bodies that depend on a good sensory diet for higher learning and creativity. When these explorations are met with insightful questions – rather than direct answers- kids can take their learning to deeper levels. This process echoes an ancient way of learning that our ancestors practiced long ago.

In hunter-gather societies, for example, humans moved, paid attention, improvised, and problem-solved all within the context of living in the natural world.  Traditional models of educating our young pale on the sensory scale to the complexity experienced on the hunt:  Walking silently upon the ground while using 360 degree vision and hearing to perceive subtle clues from bird song and animal track and sign. Sharing experiences with aunties, uncles and elders who awaited their return, listened intently to their stories and asked insightful questions to deepen their perceptions of what happened. Gaining new insights, increased curiosity, and motivation for further exploration

This dynamic approach to living and relating is what made the human brain so adaptable and successful a tool for learning. Adding sensory dimensions, we can recreate for our children the rich learning of long ago.

Instead of reading a book about a Douglas fir tree, have your child feel and smell the needles to imprint on her brain sensory information about the tree. Questions like “How do the needles lay on the stem?” or “Where have you smelled this smell before?” may inspire curiosity to learn more and get to know this tree as she would a friend. Changing the way a child processes an experience can change her perception of the world, and her place in it.

Nature is Recuperative

As new pathways are laid for learning, the brain and body also need time for integration, rest and recuperation. Nature provides this effect too:  according to University of Michigan psychologist Stephen Kaplan, spending time in nature can be restorative.

At the very least, it can give us a chance to recover from daily sensory overload in the form of too much structured learning (the average youth age 5-17 spends about 6 hours per day inside at school), too much screen time (the same youth spend an average of 7.5 hours a day in front of electronic media), too much structured play/movement (think over-scheduled dance lessons or sports practices) and poor/unbalanced diet (which can be linked to all sorts of diseases and syndromes). The recuperation effect is even more essential for children who live in urban environments, which have been shown to impair basic mental processes, diminishing the brain’s capacity for memory and self-control.

Immersion in nature and unstructured play outside are essential on the road to revitalizing our children’s dormant senses and restoring our human connection with nature.  If we are to literally come to our senses and live deeply connected in nature, we must also help our children know their place in the natural world, and remember that we are each and together as much a part of nature as the owl that hoots at night, or the western red cedar that provides shelter from the rain.

And most importantly, we must provide them companionship and share our joy and excitement as together we rediscover the mysteries of the world we live in.  This was the life of our ancestors, deeply rooted in their selves, their community and the natural world.