“Many of the exercises—and most of the ideas—arose from my time in nature. Thank you to the more-than-human world: my inspiration, my refuge, and my first love”.
Although I drew on established research for the book, the core lessons came from the more-than-human world. The book is structured around the Three Keys to Nature Connection: slow down, get curious, and use all your senses. These Three Keys came to me on a nature walk, arriving complete as if dropped into my mind by another intelligence.
“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”.
Nietzsche
I write about the importance of storytelling: “A story forms an invisible thread connecting past to present, and present to future.” I illustrate this through stories woven into the text, notably glimpses into prehistoric life. These tales reveal moments in the lives of Nu and Fa, parents of two children. Several chapters feature the family; in most cases, I had a clear purpose in mind. For the ‘Use All Your Senses’ chapter, my idea felt thin. Inspiration came during a quiet walk in the woods. Standing still, I listened, and all my senses awoke: I heard silence, felt the breeze, and smelled the subtle scent of the trees. This is how it was for our ancestors, free from the barrage of sensory noise we face. Without sensory overload, they honed their senses to a sharpness we can only imagine. Nature gave me an insight into my imaginary family’s world, which I’ve tried to share on the page.
The book contains over 60 exercises, most of which are directly inspired by experiences in nature. Typically, I am inspired by my engagement with the non-human world, and then I consider how to help others have similar experiences. Sometimes a ‘conversation’ with the spirit of place guides this process. I know the human perspective well—and the spirit of place reveals the deeper reality we often overlook. It might say, through symbol, feeling, or inspiration, ‘It’s like this.’
Have I managed to translate the wisdom of the more-than-human world into words? I hope so.
Humans have been on the planet for 300,000 years, and for 99.9 per cent of that time, we’ve lived in intimate contact with nature. But the vast majority of us have forgotten how deep that relationship was and have fallen for the lie that we’re not part of nature. This tragic disconnection has dire consequences, not least the ongoing climate and diversity crises. There’s also significant evidence that our loss of nature connection has negatively impacted mental health.
At least part of the solution to the triple crisis of mental health, climate, and diversity is rediscovering our relationship with nature. To that end, I’ve spent decades searching for ways to help people awaken to a deeper connection with nature—reading books, training with teachers, and immersing myself in practice. Approaches such as ecotherapy, forest bathing, Deep Ecology, mindfulness, and environmental psychology each offer value, but none have fully resonated with me.
In late summer of last year, I was out on a day-long walk when everything suddenly fell into place. I realised that there are just three simple keys to nature connection: slow down, get curious, and use all your senses. Ever since I developed this model, I’ve been testing it in my nature connection workshops and my personal practice. I reckon it’s pretty much foolproof! This model is as simple as it is powerful. What’s more, it provides a structure that all the other precious teachings I already have can hang on.
I don’t have the space to consider every model I know, but there’s one that invites comparison because it claims to offer Five Pathways to nature connectedness. This is one of the best-known models, based on research by environmental psychologist Miles Richardson and his colleagues (Lumber, Richardson, and Sheffield, 2017). I was aware of Richardson’s model when I developed the Three Keys, but it isn’t obviously influenced by it. I wondered if my model, which is simpler and isn’t based on psychology research, is as robust as his? Let’s see!
The two models map the same territory: our relationship with the other-than-human world. But they do that mapping in different ways.
Richardson’s Five Pathways are:
Contact. This involves engaging with the natural world through the senses.
Beauty. Take time to appreciate natural beauty. This can be through appreciating nature itself or through the arts.
Meaning. Think about what nature means to you. Reflect on how nature resonates with your life and values.
Emotion. Open yourself to experiences of awe, joy, wonder, and peace in nature. Reflect on your feelings about nature.
Compassion. What can you do for nature? Recognize your kinship with other living beings. Embrace a moral and ethical concern for the natural world.
My Three Keys cover a lot of the same ground, but they work best when taken one step at a time. Slowing down is essential for a deeper connection to nature, and all Five Pathways depend on it. In our modern lives, we’re often so busy that we barely even notice nature. First of all, pause and give yourself space to truly be in nature, rather than rushing through it.
My second step is to get curious. Opening up your curiosity invites you to explore your emotional resonance with nature, wonder about meaning, and notice beauty. It also encourages greater engagement with others—human or otherwise—which facilitates compassion.
My third key is to use all your senses, which aligns with the first of the Five Pathways, ‘Contact’.
Every element in both models overlaps with the rest. Any one of the Five Pathways will support the others, and many nature connection practices will involve more than one of them. For instance, a simple daily practice like noting ‘three good things in nature’ can involve contact, beauty, and emotion. It’s the same with each of the Three Keys: they’re mutually supportive. For example, when you start to get curious, you’re likely to use your senses more and will often slow down. Likewise, sensory awareness is a mainstay of mindfulness, which is the essence of slowing down.
To some degree, at least, my Three Keys encompass all Five Pathways. A careful reader might think that the Three Keys don’t particularly facilitate compassion, the fifth of the Pathways. I agree, but as you’ll see at the end of my post, there’s a twist.
While these two models share some similarities, they operate in distinct ways. The language is particularly relevant. All Three Keys are verb phrases, whereas the Five Pathways are all nouns. Verbs are more direct, and the Three Keys are invitations to embodied action. In contrast, Richardson’s nouns present abstract categories. This highlights how the Three Keys work. Each one invites you into an experience, and while you’re having that experience, you encounter each one of the Five Pathways.
These two models complement each other: The Three Keys are accessible and action-oriented, while the Five Pathways provide theoretical conceptual depth and structure.
My new book, Nature Connection: Remembering Wholeness, uses the Three Keys to provide a practical guide. I’ve included nearly 70 exercises, most of which are linked with one of the Three Keys. As is often the way with projects like this, the book spoke back to me. As I wrote what I thought was the final chapter, something fresh emerged. I realised that the Three Keys open a doorway to awe and gratitude, which in turn inspires compassion towards others and the natural world. On paper, the Three Keys don’t especially deepen compassion, but experientially, they most certainly do.
What is embodiment, and how can we deepen our embodied experience? These fundamental questions have fascinated me for decades. I was curious to know what other people thought about them, so I invited some key thinkers and practitioners to explore them on my podcast. I planned to do one episode, but the subject proved so compelling that it became three. A wide range of perspectives are represented: academia, coaching, embodied practice, activism, environmentalism, mental health, life and death.
A key theme for me, and a personal fascination, is how interwoven we are as embodied beings. This theme resonates with many of us, as our culture often encourages a sense of being disembodied. We are dangerously out of touch with our embodiment, and several contributors agree that that is the root of many crises we face.
Glen Mazis, a Merleau-Ponty scholar and a published poet, expresses concern about the prevalence of a ‘disembodied culture’ that prioritizes mental manipulation over connections with others and the environment. Charlene Spretnak, a co-founder of Ecofeminism, highlights the “extraordinarily relational nature of being”.
In the latest episode, I speak to three Indigenous spiritual leaders and hear that theme again:
“We are not separated from nature, we are nature”, and yet “we are very disconnected from this consciousness, this awareness”.
Shaneihu Yawanawá
Albert Einstein wrote much the same: “A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness” (1950).
One of our most brilliant scientists confirms the wisdom of ancient Indigenous cultures, philosophers, artists, embodiment practitioners, activists and spiritual leaders!
And yet, as Plant Medicine guide Wachan Bajiyoperak says, “We are sleeping deeply”. The message here is clear: Although we are nature, we’re caught in an optical illusion of disconnection. I do not doubt this illusion will destroy us if we fail to feel our way out of it.
As Glen Mazis says, “you can have all the concerns you want about global warming and its effect on the economy and all its other dangerous effects. But if you don’t feel the connection to the environment, if you don’t feel the wonder of the trees that are blowing in the wind out my window, or you don’t feel the wonder of the plants and the earth and all these other things or the creatures around us, you’re trying to make up for some deficit that you’ll never be able to make up. And we’ll never really care for the earth in the way we should”.
So what do we do? The solution is both simple and oddly challenging. Martika Gomez explains that we have to build a deeper relationship with Mother Earth, and we begin to do that when “we give back to her in a symbolic way, just to have that connection, to honour you know, to know that she’s alive, and that the waters, the rivers are alive. When we give an offering of love with that consciousness, that we are having that relationship, we’re respecting it, the world will be so different, you know, we wouldn’t have all the problems we’re facing right now”.
Philip Shepherd says something closely related:
“what the body most deeply feels is the present. It feels the earth, it feels the breeze, it feels the sounds, it feels the world around it as it is unfolding in this moment. And I think what the body most deeply realizes is that everything is alive”.
Our culture finds this hard to grasp because it’s caught up in the illusion of disconnection: We can’t escape the illusion because it stops us from seeing the way out!
But everyone I’ve interviewed talks about pathways of connection: mindfulness, dance, interoception, psychedelics, ceremony, nature connection, and Focusing. These practices offer a pathway from the illusion of disconnection to a new but ancient consciousness. All you need to do is start.
I leave the last word to Shaneihu Yawanawá:
“This is a very good moment for us to awake … everyone can contribute to this transition. There’s no excuse. Everyone needs to do her or his part”.
I’ve been writing about animism for years, and I sense that it’s an idea whose time has come. Animism has never gone away for Indigenous peoples, of course; it’s those of us in the Global North who lost the plot. But perhaps there’s an animist awakening coming.
Earlier this month, I read the news that Traditional Māori and Pasifika leaders had signed a declaration that granted legal personhood to whales. Crucially, this opens the way to discussion with governments across the Pacific to create a legal framework of protection for whales and a $100 million fund backs that. Reactions in the media have been positive. The reason, I suspect, is because animism makes sense to us. The evolutionary psychologist Bruce Charlton suggests that we are born animists; it’s “the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans”.
Orion magazine recently hosted a conversation between Sumana Roy and Mary Evelyn Tucker about how spiritual traditions can reconnect us to the more-than-human world (The Rites Of Nature). Sumana Roy, author of the non-fiction book How I Became a Tree, explained the importance of inviting plants to a traditional Hindu wedding. Roy emphasises that we exist in a living earth community. She referenced the work of scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who, in the 1900s, argued that plants may be sentient. More recent research supports this idea, with some leading plant scientists claiming that plants can distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ (Witzany & Baluška, 2012).
Rachael Petersen contributes a different perspective in her article Zen Mind, Vegetal Mind. Reflections on Buddhist practice and plant science. Petersen considers contemporary and traditional discussions in Buddhism about plants. Are they sentient? Do they have Buddha-nature? Petersen concludes that “not only do plants have a spiritual life, they are the spiritual life”, adding that “through deep practice that we may hear the voice of plants ‘with our eyes’.”
That intriguing suggestion echoes a recent experience of mine. I’ve been experimenting with super-slow-motion videos of water, including one of a river on Dartmoor. As I watched one of these videos, it occurred to me that the spirit of this place – the genius loci – was communicating through the mesmerising patterns of light and shade. Is this the voice of the more-than-human ‘speaking’ through an image?
Just over a year ago, I wrote about the power of community to support psychedelic journeys. It’s well established that psychedelic experiences are characterized by a sense of connectedness, but sharing that journey with others can enhance those feelings. Community is fundamental to indigenous psychedelic healing, and it’s fundamental to the ACER integration program.
Group psychedelic integration
Two recent research articles move the discussion forward. The first, ‘(Dis)connectedness, Suicidality and Group Psychedelic Therapies‘ (McAlpine & Blackburne), notes that social disconnectedness is a significant risk factor for suicidal thoughts or behaviours. They consider the “potent synergy“ of psychedelic group therapy and suggest that “such a collective space … has the potential to not only awaken a renewed awareness of social support but also to establish a sturdy framework of communal care”.
The second one takes a different route but comes to the same conclusion. ‘Psychedelics and neonihilism – connectedness in a meaningless world’ (Plesa and Petranker) highlights the tension between the “contemporary neoliberal” context most of us live in and the connectedness at the heart of psychedelic healing. The predominant psychological model reinforces this neoliberal ideology because it’s “based on the individual as self-contained, as atomic – a self which fashions itself as separate from the other” (Bhatia, 2020). Plesa and Petranker suggest that psychedelic group psychotherapy could help us overcome modern experiences of meaninglessness. It may offer “a collective confrontation of meaninglessness as a radical departure from individualizing therapeutic practices that further reinforce neoliberal forms of individualization, responsibilization, competition and self-governance”.
Western culture has a curious habit of rediscovering what’s already known. Typically, spirituality comes to a profound understanding first, and a philosopher gets it next. Sometime later, psychology catches up, and neuroscience finally ‘discovers’ it with a brain scan.
Cutting-edge neuroscience has found that the brains of social species like mice, bats and humans tend to synchronise, creating what neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley describes as “a single überbrain that isn’t reducible to the sum of its parts”. Like when oxygen and hydrogen combine to make water, what emerges is qualitatively different.
The researchers studied what happens when two people create a story together. Starting with the prompt “A group of children encounters aliens”, each person took turns to tell the next part of the tale. Caitlyn and Lorie set their account in a strange landscape, and during one of her turns, Caitlyn told of how the ground started to rise up beneath the feet of the children. A moment later, Lorie took her turn, saying that “It felt like the creature took a breath.” This is exactly where Caitlyn planned to take the story: the kids were walking on the alien itself. Caitlyn felt that they “were on the same page”, while the research neuroscientist concluded that this was synchrony at work.
I’m always pleased when new research upsets the myth of an enclosed, Cartesian individual, but social psychologists came to a similar conclusion a while ago. Take, for example, the phenomenon of ’emotional contagion’. You may have noticed how the mood of people you’re with impacts your own, how we tend to unconsciously ‘catch’ other people’s moods. You may also be familiar with the ‘contact high’ phenomenon, where simply sitting with someone on a psychedelic journey makes you feel like you’ve taken the substance too. Although this goes against the Western model of the enclosed individual, the evidence for this kind of connectedness is overwhelming.
Decades before psychologists came to this realisation, a few philosophers grasped that we are profoundly interconnected. In 1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:
“as the parts of my body together compromise a system, so my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.” (1962)
Each of us is woven into the rich tapestry of existence. As the philosopher of consciousness, Christian de Quincey wrote:
“We are constituted by webs of interconnection. Relationship comes first, and we emerge as more or less distinct centres within the vast and complex networks that surround us” (2005).
The spiritual traditions knew this long ago, and Zen Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh echoed the wisdom of the ancients when he said, “We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.”
Can psychedelic experiences enhance our connection to nature? So far, the evidence is a resounding ‘yes’, and some philosophers suggest that careful administration of psychedelics could be a valuable way to catalyse the development of environmental virtues (Kirkham & Letheby. 2022).
‘Nature connectedness’ is much more than simply spending time in the park: It measures how strongly a person identifies with nature and can be defined as a sense of ‘oneness with the natural world’ (Mayer and Frantz, 2004). Nature connectedness is very beneficial for humans; it helps give our lives a deeper sense of meaning and supports personal growth. People who deeply appreciate our connection to the wider natural world are more likely to protect it. So nature connectedness isn’t just good for us; it’s good for the planet.
I often saw evidence of a deeper nature connection in my work on psilocybin retreats, and that’s been backed up by the research (Gandy et al., 2020). There’s some evidence that psilocybin is especially powerful in this regard and can elicit robust and sustained increases in nature connectedness (Forstmann et al., 2003). Psychedelic experiences and nature connection are woven together like threads in a tapestry. The weave is tight, but I’ll tease out a few of those threads.
Both psychedelic experience and nature connection can catalyse feelings of awe and increase our capacity for mindfulness. Many Indigenous peoples use psychedelics as a sacrament. In most cases, they are animists with a profound respect for the more-than-human world. Robert Greenway is a pioneer ecopsychologist who used to take people on ‘wilderness’ treks. After many years of leading these adventures, Greenway concluded that extended time in nature could engender an altered state that closely parallels the psychedelic experience. There are several aspects to this altered state, but fundamentally it involves “feelings of expansion or reconnection”, which Greenway unhesitatingly describes as “spiritual” (Greenway, 1995). (See The Wilderness Effect).
A pattern is emerging in this tapestry; connectedness. In my recent interview with Sam Gandy, he suggested that we can see “connectedness itself being a fundamentally interconnected or interwoven construct” and that cultivating nature connectedness can deepen connectedness to self, others and the wider world (Embodied Pathways).
It’s quite common for people to have mystical experiences while using psychedelics, and nature mysticism is ancient and global. Are they the same? It seems so: Feelings of interconnectedness, unity, sacredness, and a transcendence of time and space characterise mystical experiences emerging from both psychedelics and nature connection.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour”.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
I would quote Blake’s words in the introduction to the nature connection exercise I used to lead at psychedelic retreats. They are a perfect example of nature mysticism and could also speak of aspects of the psychedelic experience.
The conversation about psychedelics and nature connectedness is ongoing and may be crucial in these times of climate crisis. If you’d like an accessible deep dive into this fascinating subject, listen to my interview with Sam Gandy on Embodied Pathways.
I’ve been very involved in work and research on psychedelics over the last year or so. I’ve mentioned psychedelics in a few of my posts here, but I wanted to flag up a couple of presentations. The first is online next week: I’m talking about Sacred Ecology: The Psychedelic Connection at the Embodied Spirituality event.
Back in 1996, I wrote Sacred Ecology. Now, nearly 30 years on, I’ll be exploring that territory through a psychedelic lens. Psychedelic experiences can be profoundly spiritual, often inducing mystical experiences. What does this tell us about the power of awe, nature connection and the future of therapy?
I started working as a Facilitator on psychedelic retreats in The Netherlands last year. This involved spending hours supporting people on their psychedelic journeys as well as helping them to prepare for and integrate the experience. Nature connection is widely recommended for psychedelic preparation and integration and as this is a particular interest of mine, I’ve begun to develop and refine this approach. In this presentation at the University of Exeter, I talk about the work I’ve done on psychedelic retreats and explain how we might apply ecotherapy to integration.
I woke up this morning thinking about my 2008 PhD research (Harris). I spent months living on a road protest site and I recalled how bonding that was. And then it dawned on me; I’d missed a fundamental aspect of the research; the power of community. Living together and working to save the land from a road project united us in a deep and powerful way; it created an embodied connection. That brought to mind an online psychedelic integration meeting I was in last week. Over 50 people came together for ten days of psychedelic training and experiences, and one of the key themes that emerged from our first integration meeting was the power of the community we’d created: There were even suggestions that it was more important than the psychedelic experience itself.
A pattern suddenly appeared, like seeing saltwater suddenly crystalize as it reaches a critical point of saturation: the liminal space of protest camps, communitas and millennia of human experience all highlight the power of community. I’d completely missed that in my PhD thesis – written fifteen years ago – because it’s so obvious. It’s like the imaginary fish who doesn’t notice water because it’s all around. While this is an exciting revelation, it’s a huge subject and will slow down work on the book I’m writing on the embodied pathways of connection. For now, I’ll just highlight a few of the threads I’m following.
Community is fundamental to indigenous healing and “the traditional use of psychoactive plants can help to enhance it” (Ona, Berrada & Bouso, 2021). Despite the importance of community for psychedelic work, it’s frequently lacking in recent approaches. Jules Evans said it well: “At the moment, psychedelics offer a very modern sort of religion – long on ‘experience’, short on community. That risks exacerbating the loneliness and isolation that cause a lot of our suffering in the first place” (Evans, 2021).
However, the ACER model of integration created by Ros Watts has community at its heart: “It is this collective aspect that, although proven to be of great benefit to overall wellbeing, is often missing from the Western model of healing” (https://acerintegration.com/). Ros is ahead of the game: She recognized the central role of community early on and made it the foundation of her work. This is a radical move in the Global North, where the psychedelic substance is typically the star of the show.
Maureen O’Hara and John Wood observed some extraordinary experiences in the person-centered ‘conscious communities’ they studied. They found that individual participants often became “deeply attuned to themselves as individual centers of consciousness” and “interpersonally attuned to each other in an ‘I-Thou’ relationship”. Yet at the same time everyone was “attuned to the group as a whole entity”. People tapped into “deeper levels of empathy and intuition”, accessing “extraordinary” levels of perception “that went beyond ordinary Western ways of knowing”. Members of these communities “frequently attained spiritual trance states usually achieved only after decades of meditative practice”. There seems to be the kind of expansion of individual consciousness “beyond individual ego-boundaries” (2005) that I’ve modelled using the cognitive iceberg.
A 2021 research paper on psychedelic communitas concluded that we may need “to question some of the fundamental cultural assumptions from, and into which psychedelic therapies are emerging – so that psychedelic treatments may not merely remain a “chemical holiday” … but instead, foster meaningful connections within relationships and communities” (Kettner, et. al. 2021)
The profound power of community highlights a tension within psychedelic research. The Western psychological approach typically studies an individual’s psychedelic journey in a clinical setting. This is rooted in a psychology “based on the individual as self-contained, as atomic – a self which fashions itself as separate from the other” (Bhatia, 2020).
But this idea is deeply flawed and psychedelic research is widening the cracks. Sometime soon there may be a crisis, a paradigm shift driven by new scientific evidence. The notion of the autonomous individual, so precious to the ideology of the Global North, will become exposed as nothing more than a hollow ideological myth.
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).
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”.
