Natural Healing: Weaving Ourselves Back into the Web of Life

The full moon is on the rise. The songbirds of spring are singing their bedtime songs. The fire in the fire circle is lit. People have come to Commonweal Garden to gather around the fire to share what is on their heart.

We are sitting with the element of fire, listening to the crackling. Watching the flames dance. 

I am grieving the loss of my son….I am celebrating this process of awakening happening...My beloved passed on, may we lift his name up and pray for his spirit’s journey?...My sister has been battling addiction and has just entered rehab, may we say her name and hold her and her family in our hearts?...I am sitting with the awareness of how much of my life I lost to scrolling on social media…It feels good to be sharing like this, without any screens...I don’t know how to hold all of this loss, this grief, the collapse, the violence, the insanity….It helps to be with others, to not feel so alone with the weight of all of this. 

Incense from one’s ancestral homeland of Iran is offered to the fire with prayers. 
Presence. Witnessing. Being heard. 
Songs, tears, laughter. The relief of feeling belonging, of authentic connection with others, with the elements, the cycles of nature, our humanity. Unburdening. Loving kindness. Soul medicine.

It is a time for gathering up all of the medicine for our collective medicine bag.

Down in the root system of our epidemic unwellness is estrangement—from ourselves, from meaning and purpose, from each other, and from the living, breathing Earth. The jagged edges of these soul wounds leave us vulnerable to forces driving us to consume, escape, and hide. The medicine is in reconnection, repair, returning to wholeness. 

Imagine, if you will, that the land, the natural world, also longs for this return to wholeness, this repair of the rupture, this reawakening to kinship with it all. That the trees, the living waters, the stones, the wild ones long to be seen, to be in relationship, in conversation with all of life, including the humans. That there is very potent medicine for the humans to awaken to in this relationship. 

This is my experience in cultivating this medicine here in the Commonweal Garden. It is profoundly healing. It is medicine that has an essential place in our healing landscape. It offers something that is missing from the medical care of our health.

Trained and practiced in allopathic medicine—integrative family and community medicine—I have experienced the beauty in continuity of caring relationship and the art of the practice of medicine. Poignantly, though, I experienced the constrained estrangement our profession has undergone from deep presence and attunement to healing, to say nothing of the relationship with the natural world and ceremony. This estrangement is wounding to everyone involved. The healthcare system pushes humans to the breaking point as they try to fix the downstream effects of upstream societal ills while working in a system designed with profit as a motive. People needing attuned presence often feel unheard, and the source of the imbalance leading to illness often goes unaddressed.

Returning to wholeness in healing invites us to reimagine where and how we hold healing space. To have our eyes opened to the way the living Earth, the sentience in the land, especially the plants, the trees, is available to partner in this way. Waiting to be invited into this dance.

We’ve been in this conversation with the land, the sentience here in the Commonweal Garden, at Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine, for the past seven years. Tending it as a nature-allied center for healing, these conversations unfold through metaphorical sight, reciprocity, seasonal attunement, deep listening, and affectionate noticing. We notice what shifts internally, what intuition arises as we clear, tend, co-create beauty, and take a seat upon the Earth to be with it all. 

We are tending a living container for healing work.

A circular ecology of care is created. Tending the land and building the soil nourishes the plants that bring nutrients and healing phytochemicals into our body. The tended land invites us into our empathetic, attuned presence and supports us in holding a good space for each other. We attune to the needs of the land, the soil, the plants as we tend and create ecologically coherent niches for humans to drop into presence, communion. Healing transmissions and metaphorical wisdom from our natural neighbors are woven into the healing insights we receive in these receptive spaces, and are integrated into our realizations about the medicine we need and that we are. Our physical labor, the work of our hands, the attunement to beauty and sentience develops our psychospiritual and physical muscles and is good, meaningful work. Work that could never be replaced by AI. We create spaces for healing and experience healing in so doing.

Hands in the soil, our beings join in the ancestral lineage we all share—human beings in tending relationship with the Earth. The land bestows benevolent grace in return, offering her lap, tended by humans, for us to lay down, to rest, to receive guidance, healing and grace. An allied relationship between nature, humans and spirit emerges, from which we learn to listen, respond, and offer gratitude for the medicine we are for each other, here and now. I send up prayers that we are developing a model that could inspire a bioregional network of nature-allied healing sanctuaries, and can help repair the rupture between medicine and nature. Reclaiming healing as a practice we do in community, with each other, with all of life. Accessible, inclusive. Re-skilling ourselves with abilities in self-love, nourishment, deep presence, healing ceremony, responsive human connection, and reweaving our human selves back into the web of life. With ecological attunement, regenerative land tending, and affectionate kinship with all of life at the beating heart of it all.

I go down to be with the redwoods now to listen. The boughs of the trees come down nearly to the ground, forming a natural sanctuary space where we bring people, including those with the Cancer Help Program, to experience the healing energy. This supportive redwood energy is palpable here—below you, above you, all around you. Laying down, people navigating cancer and healing drop into restful integration, and are tucked into redwood, into timelessness. I lay down here now, between these two beloved trees, and see what arises.

Allow yourself to be guided, to become a vessel into which healing wisdom can be poured. You can go deeper into presence. Be still. Be here. Surrender.

With gratitude and an offering, I return to the writing of human words. Words….fail to convey what is best experienced, and is at the heart of deep medicine. Healing presence. Loving kindness. Attunement in all directions. Deep listening for guidance. Intuitive responsiveness. Humility and grace. Sitting in the mystery, with the discomfort. Seeing the patterns. Tending the soil. Going to the root.

The necessary counterpose to excessive doing is depth of being. 
The antidote to isolation and estrangement is connection.
The counterbalance to artificial intelligence is natural wisdom.

The indoor, screen-mediated, anthropocentric experience is making us unwell. Healing wholeness requires us to return to our true nature, to weave ourselves back into the web of life.

All of life is cheering for humans to awaken to this medicine. 

—Anna O’Malley, founder and director of Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine.

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Photo credit: Anna O'Malley