Medicine for These Times

This essay explores the longing underneath many modern forms of stress and fragmentation, and the possibility that relationship itself may be part of the medicine we are searching for. I also share about my Sacred Dream and wonder if you’re interested in dreaming that into being together…

Over the past years, I have become increasingly aware of how many people carry a sense of homelessness or lack of belonging within modern life that asks so much of us. Stress, overwhelm, exhaustion or burnout seem to be some of the generic, much suffered, conditions of our time. Perhaps you recognise this too.

As a medical anthropologist and shamanic practitioner, I’m curious to feel into the undercurrents of these repeating patterns, and often I return to a subtle yet insidious feeling of disconnection from ourselves, eachother and the living world around us.

There are plenty of practices that cultivate attention in the general whirlwind of speed and distraction, but do we truly apply them? How can we integrate sensitivity, difference and reciprocity within a culture that thrives on bold moves, similarity and individuality? How can we shift from a notion of ‘power over’, to ‘power from within’?

Slowing down enables us to re-enter a direct relationship with life again. It is not rocket science, but it seems to be one of the hardest things to do despite all the ‘spiritual’ advertising we are exposed to. What are ways you can, or perceive you cannot, slow down in your life? What stops you from listening to your own inner rhythms, and the seasonal, circular, slow spiralling time of nature?

Have you thought of walking or running outdoors without headphones (I know, radical, right?), pausing to make a connection with a tree, or moving your body with curiosity rather than focusing on outcomes? These practices may appear deceptively small, but they can help restore a feeling of participation in the natural world.

Because that seems to be another missing ingredient. Thankfully, (and especially here on Substack!) there are lots of initiatives to reconnect with nature, have a forest bath, rewild your garden or even yourself…

But as with the invitation for slowing down, if we don’t live and practice it, it will not make an ounce of difference for our sense of inner peace, wellbeing or meaningful connections.

When I talk and write about nature connection, I’m not interested in a fantasy of escaping modern life by ‘returning to nature’ that thrived in hippy communities in the 60s or the romantic revival in the so called ‘New Age’… I’m curious to how we can develop simple practices to rekindle our relationship with it. Let’s have a closer look…

In my previous post on Pathfinding a New Career, I wrote how I often felt I had to leave parts of myself behind, when entering an academic space. Although I’m interested in interdisciplinary conversations that bridge embodiment, ecology, ritual and consciousness, I’m even more interested in experiential practice. We can talk the hind-legs of a poor donkey, but only through immersion, participation and connection, we truly challenge the modern assumption that humans are the detached observers science claims us to be.

This lived experience is present in many Indigenous cosmologies, where rivers, animals, mountains and landscapes are no passive objects or backdrop scenery, but beings that participate in relationship with us. Anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro describe worldviews in which humans are only one kind of “person” within a wider animate world. These perspectives are not merely symbolic or poetic. They point toward fundamentally different ways of understanding participation, perception and kinship.

At the same time, thinkers such as Tim Ingold and David Abram have explored how deeply our senses and nervous systems are shaped through relationship with the living world around us. The body is not separate from landscape, weather or atmosphere. Our breathing, movement and perception are continually responding to the environments we inhabit, often beneath conscious awareness.

(You can read more about these scholars and my analysis of how our connection to nature changed over the last 125 years when my Chapter Nature & Solitude comes out with Bloomsbury Press next year! Yes, I know, talking about patience and slow rhythms!)

What I get up for every day, is helping people to find ways to reconnect with nature in a meaningful way. I want to translate ancient and new ideas into practical tools for everyday life, so they become lived experience rather than abstract philosophy.

How do we actually begin to feel more connected again in the midst of ordinary life full of technology, politics and personal change? How do we cultivate relationship with the (natural and social) world around us through practice, attention and embodied experience?

This drive is my Sacred Dream,*) because it extends well beyond my personal life, and will continue after I’m gone. Yet it gives me motivation, courage and a sense of contribution, especially when my body is in pain, my energy reserves are depleted or when I’m overwhelmed. I also know that I’m not the only one carrying this dream…

This dream emerges from practice, from the desire not only to read or listen to things that vaguely inspire us, but to experience them directly in the body and in everyday life. Through Qi Gong, movement improvisation, nature immersion, ritual and symbolic reflection, I keep remembering that nature and I are family.

These practices do not remove me from reality. They do not require abandoning contemporary life, work, technology or the complexities of the world. If anything, they invite me into a more direct participation with life itself. Again and again, they remind me that there is no true separation: with every breath, the world flows into me, and I flow out into the world. When I bring the aliveness of nature back into my awareness, the spaces I move through no longer feel empty, but filled with relationship, wisdom and meaning. This is truly one of the most nourishing practices I’ve encountered over time.

The Wild Kin Collective emerged from these reflections and is the next step in living and sharing this Sacred Dream. It emerges from my deep yearning to create a cauldron where we can explore together and weave threads of relationship, practice and belonging through the highs and lows of everyday life, wherever we are.

If this essay resonates with something you have been longing for too, you are warmly welcome to join me there!

Join the Wild Kin Collective

Join me for a Summer Solstice celebration on June 18th, 7.30-8.30pm CET. Yes, there will be a replay if you can’t make it…

I learned about the concept of the sacred dream from Ya’Acov Darling Khan and Alberto Villoldo.

Kieft, Eline (2027 in press), ‘Nature, the Environment and Solitude’, in J. Stern (ed). Cultural History of Solitude, London: Bloomsbury - ask me for full references of the authors mentioned above.