Tag Archives: awe

Minds and mountains

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Early ecopsychology considered the mental health benefits of what we call ‘green space’ – natural areas covered by vegetation, such as parks, forests and gardens. Later, we started to think about ‘blue space’ – oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds and streams. The research shows that both can have a positive effect on our mental health. But what about mountains?

I spent my Summer holiday hiking and climbing in the Dolomites, a beautiful mountain range in Northern Italy. Being in the mountains – typically well over 2000 meters above sea level – felt very different from being in the woods or by a river. First, there’s very little in the way of flora or fauna: There are birds of course, plus patches of lichen and the occasional hardy alpine plant. But we were well above the tree line, and most of the water there remained frozen even in late September.

Instead of gentle green or the soothing gurgle of a stream, there are wide open vistas, stunning views, precipitous drops, and mountains high enough to dwarf a skyscraper. At times I’d be at the highest point for miles, looking out across lower peaks with the cloud layer far below. Spaces like that seem to open your mind: The far horizon proclaims a pure vastness that invites a crisp clarity to thought.

A high mountain Refugio seen from afar with distant mountain tops on the horizon.

At other times mountains towered above, revealing just how tiny I am! Psychologists researching the feeling of awe talk about the ‘small self’, and that certainly fits my experience. Awe puts life into a new perspective: Our everyday concerns feel less significant, and we feel more connected with everything beyond the narrow confines of self.

Looking up at a high mountain towering above.

It’s somewhat dangerous being on the side of a mountain that’s 3000 meters high. Common sense and proper equipment reduce the risk, of course, but the perception of danger sharpens one’s awareness. Daydreaming on a woodland walk or a stroll along the beach is fine, but don’t try it on a narrow ledge with a steep vertical drop! Existing research shows that being in nature can create a more mindful state, but that’s in ‘green’ or ‘blue’ space. The same thing happens in the mountains, but there’s an edge – literally. Mountains don’t simply invite presence; they demand it.

I think ecopsychology needs to consider a third kind of natural space: ‘mountain’ or ‘M space’. I don’t think there’s a colour that fits, and ‘M’ looks a bit like two peaks and a deep valley. ‘M space’ is significantly different from ‘green’ or ‘blue’ space. It’s more likely to provoke feelings of awe, seems to encourage more open, exploratory thinking, and often demands a focused, mindful awareness.

Is all this a clue to why Nietzsche valued the mountains so much?

“We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books – it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

Mindfulness of Nature: An interview with Claire Thompson

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Gautama Buddha spent most of his time in nature. He taught in nature, meditated in nature and, most importantly, became enlightened in nature. So how come most mediation today happens indoors? We’re missing something crucial and in my interview with Claire Thompson – author of Mindfulness and the Natural World and The Art of Mindful Birdwatching – we begin to unpack what’s so special about practising mindfulness in nature.

Research from the University of Derby suggests that simply being in nature is enough to produce a more mindful state (Richardson and Hallam, 2013). Claire’s experience helps explain why that might be:

“there’s something about being outdoors in nature that holds us within our own bodies a little bit more, because it’s stimulating our bodies with natural scents and sounds and sights. It’s almost like that’s what our bodies evolved to experience or to be taking in, in terms of a sensory experience. I guess to be put back into that environment can feel quite holding for people, because it holds us within our own physical experience a little bit more, which actually naturally takes us out of the narratives of our mind and our thinking and into the body”.

Our human minds label and judge in a way that nature doesn’t: Nature just is and makes no assessment or allowances. That provides a space where you can be whoever you are without labels. Claire found that facilitating mindfulness workshops in nature had a significant impact on the participant’s experience:

“It felt like being in nature opened people up and because of the lack of judgement in that space it felt like people were more able to be themselves and more able to trust that whatever experience they were having, it was okay and opened up a curiosity about their experience in a way that perhaps in some of the indoor spaces where I’d practiced mindfulness, for example, I didn’t feel the same thing. It didn’t feel like the same thing happened, or there was just something – maybe an authenticity about it as well, like people feeling allowed to be themselves more when they’re out in the wild or out in touch with the natural world”.

That can be profoundly liberating and can help to free us from our habitual attachment to the ‘self’. Our intuition – that the self is an identifiable thing, a unique and irreducible nugget of selfhood – is simply wrong; neuroscience and mindfulness agree on that. It’s not that you don’t exist! Of course you do, but the self is a process, not an object. Calling myself ‘Adrian’ helps maintain the illusion, but my ‘self’ is more like a verb than a noun: ‘I’ am the process of ‘selfing’ that extends beyond the envelope of skin around my body. John Danvers writes of how “[m]indful mediation enables us to experience the self as a process that extends out into the world”. (2016; 164).

Pool surrounded by lush green foliage
Tucker’s Pool, Lydford Gorge, Devon

Mindfulness practice facilitates the experience of awe and that powerful emotion has been very significant for Claire.

“It’s an experience of going beyond myself, as in beyond my sense of being a separate self and being taken into something that is greater than that, and connects me to something bigger”.

The experience of awe can reveal that we are, in truth, part of “a dynamic web of interdependence” (Macy, 2007; 32). In the industrial North, it’s very easy to forget that, but the longing for connection doesn’t go away. Claire describes how the feeling of awe can feel:

“… like a longing for a connection that I’ve lost, or, arguably, we’ve lost. And in those moments of awe you get a glimpse of reconnecting with that. And there’s a sense of abundance that comes with that feeling. … a feeling of generosity and more openness to others and more creativity, and kind of takes you out of that kind of fixed separate sense of self, which sometimes can keep us a little bit stuck”.

We tend to think of ‘enlightenment’ as an event that happens to a few special individuals, but it’s not that simple. Perhaps it makes more sense to think of enlightenment as an experience anyone can taste for a moment. Claire suggests that enlightenment comes in “those moments of connection to something greater where our sense of self disappears or it feels like our sense of separate self disappears”. That resonates with me. I’ve certainly had moments like that and even though they quickly pass, you are changed forever. Crucially, these experiences of deep connection happen “in our day to day lives – you don’t have to be in the middle of a beautiful rain forest in Cuba, it could just be with somebody you love, or it could just be on the way to work noticing something that kind of takes you out of yourself or a piece of music that you’re really taken by.”

These sacred moments can come to anyone. At the time – and in our faltering attempts to articulate them – they seem otherworldly: “It feels otherworldly, but it’s also very human”.