An excerpt from Josh’s book, Conscious Nature: The Art and Neuroscience of Meditating In Nature
The Natural Healing Wisdom of the Animals
Animals have a natural healing wisdom that helps them to ditch their stress-load and return to full presence after a traumatic or stressful event. Following their example, we can turn to Nature for insight into the healing process. For me, one particularly memorable outdoor adventure especially highlights this transformational potential:
One afternoon I was walking in a meadow, when I heard a slough of frantic wingbeats coming towards me. Turning around to face the sound, a flock of American goldfinches suddenly whizzed by me at full speed, their tiny wingtips grazing my head in a hurry to flee… whatever was after them was a much greater threat than I might ever be.
The meadow suddenly became deathly quiet. All of the nearby birds stopped their songs and calls. Moments later, a hungry Cooper’s hawk landed heavily on a low branch, just three feet off the ground. The branch swayed back and forth from the sudden weight and momentum of the bird, who gripped the branch with strong talons, flapping his agile wings a few times to stall his flight. The alert predator missed the goldfinches, but remained on the lookout for any nearby potential meals.
As the hawk scanned intensely left to right with keen red eyes, it was then that I noticed a small bird, directly positioned on the ground underneath him. There in the shadow of the branch, just three feet under the raptor and fully exposed on the short grass, stood a junco. The tiny songbird remained frozen and still. Would the hawk take notice and claim his lunch?
After a tense minute of scanning side to side, the hawk flew off. Not too long after, the sounds of tentative bird calls and even a whispered song or two emerged around us. The junco, though, remained frozen silently in place. I thought the diminutive song- bird was just waiting for the “all clear” to get up and leave, but the junco had another, altogether different lesson in store for me.
After a minute or two, the small bird began violently shaking. It seemed as though every particle of the bird was vibrating, from foot to tail to beak. I could feel the intensity moving through the songbird as its body processed the traumatic run-in with the hawk. After 30 seconds or so of viscerally shedding the stress of the encounter, the bird simply took off and went back to its routine, having survived to live another day.
This incident opened a deep inquiry for me around what it means to soothe stress and resolve trauma. The encounter showed me how an animal can quickly transition from a full-fledged fight-or-flight response and back into the regular demands of feeding and foraging. The junco became a wiser bird on that day, yet continued forward in its life with full aliveness and presence. For me, the junco became a mascot for resiliency and flow in its finest sense.
To understand more about how we, too, can begin to shed stress and step into our full potential of flow and presence, we can turn to the body’s nervous system and the powerful restorative effects of meditation upon it.
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