4 Easy Steps to Bliss

Step one: Find a spot in nature.  Any spot in nature, as long as it feels private.  They’re all good:)

Step two: State your intention and ask for help.  “Help me, Great Creator.  It is my intention to know my place in the all of the everything. In the living, breathing, church of life. Please help me.  Thank you.”

Step three: Bring the awareness out of the head and into the heart.  Intentionally, consciously, choose to open it. 

Step four: Bliss, baby, bliss.  Breathe in, relax into the most natural, innate state of being.  Embodied holiness, heaven on earth.

It’s that easy.

I believe, and have found, that experiencing bliss in the woods (and elsewhere!) is a human right. It is healing, and it is the meaning of life. There are times when it is more accessible than others, but it is absolutely available to all.  I do encourage doing it alone. It is nearly impossible for me to experience bliss in the company of others. It is a solo, individual experience, and being with other people is distracting. It can be embodied and brought back into the world, though.

And...here’s why it matters!
I don’t need science or scientific studies or evidence to tell me anything. I know what is true and untrue in my body.  I feel my truth, clearly and directly, in my body in the woods.

When I heal nature through cleaning up trash, she heals me. Plucking the choking trash from the embedded nooks and crannies in her living, breathing, being simultaneously releases the choking trash from my own.  Ancient, inherited, acquired wounds and trauma all surface within me for release. I am a healer and, miraculously, I heal myself by healing her.  The result is embodied bliss and peace.

If something is true in the woods, it is true. It is my deepest truth. It is easy to deny or resist or talk myself out of truth I know in the woods when I return to the culture. That doesn’t make it untrue.

When I feel bliss, truth, holiness in the woods, it is a powerful counterpoint to the messages I hear in the culture. Feeling holy versus hearing untrue, ugly, judgmental, life-destroying messages.  What feels constructive, empowering. What feels destructive, disempowering. The choice is mine.

When I feel bliss on the inside, I make much better choices on the outside. I eat better. I parent more constructively. I love more peacefully. I live more fully in every area of my life. Slowly but surely I restore trust in myself.

A re-orientation to the choices that I make in my life. It can be easy to lose sight of the fact that every aspect and element of my life is a choice. And I am constantly choosing, re-choosing, the path. When I know different, I choose different.