Sitting in the campsite on a sunny morning, I'm looking at the empty green spaces where the Creative Regeneration workshop participants recently slept in their tents. I remember their stories about the nights they spent here, listening to the stream, or to the scary noises of unknown animals outside. Nature provides everything, from comfort to terror.
We're part of it. At the moment, as a climate emergency is declared and we adjust to our roles as controllers and destroyers or potential saviours and helpless despondents, it's easy to forget that really we are just a part of it. Thinking that we're separate and in control has led to the absurdity of destroying the conditions for our own lives. Now making up technical solutions from the controller-position might be necessary, but it isn't the whole story.
Being part of nature means being prey and predator. It means that you do actually know what to do next. It means that there's a source of power from which you are not separate. That it feels good just to be alive. Animals don't need more.
It means both being blissed out and being scared. Being completely consumed by action, by movement, and also being completely still when the situation requires.
This is the base on which our clever technological thinking, and language, and consideration of past and future and other abstract things rests.
During the workshops here at terrealuma we spent a lot of time just being (relentless though our minds sometimes were). In consequence, a funny thing happened to time. It stretched. We felt at home in it. We felt at home. Our bodies and minds relaxed and sounds and movements and emotions came out which had been trapped, ignored, sometimes it felt for a whole lifetime.
This is not a holiday or a luxury, it's a necessity, a birthright, the base. It's the start of the work that there is to do.
Sarah Luczaj, PhD
therapist, writer, artist, reiki master, creative regenerator and co-founder of terrealuma.
offers online reiki healing/chanting sessions, here