There’s something perfect about the way nature has evolved to create strength through diversity. So many of us can feel the peace of energy doing what it is supposed to do when we are in more wild surroundings. We breathe easier, our nervous systems heave themselves down, and time seems to lengthen. It’s almost as if Nature is reminding us we never left her, that our bodies and our minds still abide by her sacred, organic rules.
Out in the human-made world, it gets a little weirder. Forgetting where we came from becomes quite easy. Most of us have jobs where we sit much longer than the body was intended to sit. We get so busy, our attention so fractured, that our emotions become like my sock drawer in college: Disorganized, stuffed full of things that may not belong there, and overwhelming to look at.
We evolved on Earth, and our bodies are like little planets, running the same energy dynamics. Earth, without human intervention, has evolved to seek balance in all her ecosystems, and to store energy through creating more and more species. She works against chaos by, from the bottom-up, organizing pathways for energy to move, share information, and manifest. What we see are phenomenal landscapes of flora and fauna that rely on each other for stability. So when we are in the midst of our human life, scrolling, emailing, texting, trying to exercise, navigating relationships, and possibly stuffing the stress down into our flesh, how do we work like to earth to regulate our energies, rather than stuff and get small?
Before I became a somatic psychotherapist, I worked as a wilderness ranger and a trail crew member. I studied forestry and ecology as an undergraduate (until the classes became about cutting trees down), and when I began studying the mind-body-spirit interface, the correlations stuck out to me. Our culture might push us to shut down our flow of energy, to not express emotion, to not even know when we are feeling it, but our body was formed by the physical laws of Earth and her energies. If we align with them, we can start to find balance within ourselves.
There are many ways our mind-energy-bodies abide by the rules of nature; here are 5 to revel in:
1. Emotions are the subjective experience of energy flow in the body. In Edward W.L. Smith’s text, The Body in Psychotherapy, he places emotions squarely in the realm of energy. How do we know when we are feeling an emotion? If we are to really pay attention, each emotion, and each thought, is located somewhere in the body. Emotions are felt as sensations, and those sensations are electrochemical energies that move through our internal mycelia of nerves and tissues. Recognizing this profound truth opens us up to harnessing our inner flows of energy to find balance.
2. Energies seek a balance. Earth is all about finding a balance. Water will wear away landscapes to reach flatness. Heat constantly moves around the planet in order to disperse and find equilibrium, creating weather patterns and ocean currents. While an absolute balance is not necessarily often found- total balance can create stagnation- a multitude of beautiful landscapes, water ways and weather patterns make our planet a dynamic place to live. She does do a pretty good job of trying to regulate heat and keeping this planet alive and diverse, this Earth. Our emotional energy is the same. It moves around our bodies trying to find a balance, dissipate, or leave. When we pay gentle attention to our body sensations, without trying to change them or squash them, we will notice sensations moving around our bodies- something Somatic Psychotherapists call “sequencing.” This is a great secret to starting to let emotions process- by trusting the energy’s need to seek balance, we can take more of a back seat of curiosity and observe just how our tiny planets regulate themselves.
3. Nature does not like to waste energy. The first law of thermodynamics speaks to the conservation of energy, as energy cannot be created or destroyed. It just changes form. Earth solves the “changing form” problem by creating fauna and flora as “sinks” for energy. Energy gets stored in trees, bushes, animals, oceans so as to work against the second law of thermodynamics– entropy. Without some structures– like dense cedar tree trunks, or bear or fox, energy would be chaos. Not much would exist. But earth is VERY efficient with her energy storage…she does not like to waste energy. For example, animals in the wild can only use as much energy as they eat, so they are very careful not to over-expend themselves. Our bodies are made to conserve as well. It does not like to be stuck in the energy-expensive state of flight flight, nor the energy bleeding states of collapse. Our bodies are wired to conserve. Therefore, when we give gentle awareness with curiosity to our sequencing emotional energies- especially in EMDR, Brainspotting, or other somatic processes- over time, we will find the body-mind will process to balance. This may subjectively look like many challenging memories and old emotions that have been wired into the brain, tumbling through the mind’s eye and body until a greater wisdom sprouts– perhaps some sort of self forgiveness, or understanding the past is over, that you did the best you could, etcetera. It seems like magic when it happens. But it is nature. She does not want us in constant pain. Trust this.
4. Energy moves in waves, spirals, and intensities. Just like energy can be measured in frequencies of waves, so might our emotional energies. They may reach a high, crashing crescendo before gently sifting back into the ocean. Often, stuff an emotion down when it gets too big, so the wave never gets to complete itself. However, that wave will await awareness, sometimes for a lifetime, in order to complete it’s crash, it’s release of energy. Emotions can feel really big until we actually feel them…we might then realize we have spent more energy on the fear of how something will feel than the actual feeling itself. Once the emotion is expressed, the body can organize it, make sense of it, realize it can tolerate it, and even understand the scary causal event is over. Waves might grow in our chests, or flash down the spine. They might follow the spiral pathways of the body, as our tissues organize in these springy patterns. Our heads might slowly roll, our wrists might crave to make circles, etcetera. The important thing is to listen, to observe, and to allow the energy to follow the paths it needs to find balance.
5. Stuck energy will create problems until it can be released. Back to that conservation piece again…our bodies do not like to remain in energy-expensive threat responses. However, if we have had any sort of experiences that were wired into our brains with the meaning of danger, and if our emotions around these experiences were unable to fully complete themselves, the triggers will keep on triggering until the “splinter” is removed. We often get mad at our perceived maladaptive feelings and behaviors. However, these are the signposts, the tips of the iceberg that show us where to apply our healing focus. Our emotional energies are goal oriented in a way that they need to complete, they need to feel they have finished expressing or else feel stunted in some disempowering way. If somebody attacks an animal, they will have a need to push the attacker away. If the pushing away is not successful, and if they do not process the fear from the situation, that unsuccessful push could get wired into the brain. That animal will act accordingly, perhaps getting small and hiding rather than running (for example). As humans, we have the great benefit of being able to revisit that uncompleted emotion or action and let it process until it feels completed. This essentially rewires the brain, as that greater truth can come through– I did the best I could. I’m safe now. I could have died if I tried to fight back. I did try to fight back and I was overpowered- that is not my fault.
We have so many more natural patterns wired into us than these five. And, to realize that nature has our back when we are on the healing path can afford us the trust to lean in to the process, to follow the energy instead of trying to control it, for nature has designed us for balance. When we can relax into the Earth’s great processes and believe our bodies will follow the laws of nature, we can experience the safety and “being held” that allows for energy to naturally organize and evolve. And the subjective experience of that is Divine.
