Natural Wellness Week Returns

Relationship at the Heart of Natural Wellness

Natural Wellness Week begins again this week, bringing us into our third month.

After three months of focusing on Natural Wellness, perhaps it is time to take the lid off the heart of it all.

Why is relationship so central to Natural Wellness?

At what point do we stop along our current path and look deeply into our heart for the truth behind our relationships?

How many times do we feel terrible when one of our relationships moves into challenge?

Something happens. Something is said. Something changes between us.

Then life continues, most of the time. 

We adapt to the present moment and, over time, perhaps we stop thinking about what happened.

But did we ever really forget?

Does that experience still exist somewhere while it sits quietly in the background?

Does the thing that challenged us, blocked us, hurt us or tore something within us continue to live somewhere?

When we become clear, quiet and present enough, we can bring the memory back into awareness and bear witness to what happens in our body.

How does our body respond?

What tightens?

What softens?

What rises?

What changes?

Our bodies have a way of revealing what is still present.

The mind, on the other hand, can move quickly. It can explain, justify, reinterpret, protect, avoid and create another story altogether.

I remember my Shaman teacher Orion saying:

Take the road from the mind to the heart.

I have also witnessed how something changes when we forgive, send love, say sorry, give thanks, or tell someone that we love them.

Something can soften.

Something can become lighter.

And perhaps this lightness of the heart sits very close to the heart of Natural Wellness.

Relationship

We live within relationship.

We are in relationship with other people.

With our body.

With food.

With the land.

With animals and plants.

With our thoughts.

With our history.

With what has happened to us.

With what we have done.

With life.

With death.

With Spirit.

With ourselves.

And we are all held within an interdependent relationship with a Greater Whole, while at the same time living within a constant relationship with our own inner world.

So how we are in relationship matters.

Who are we within those relationships?

Where are we standing?

What sits at our centre?

And what is the vibration of the relationship itself?

These are important things for us to listen to.

Listening

Listening was an earlier theme of Natural Wellness Week, and it is a theme that will return each winter from now on.

Winter pulls energy inward.

After Autumn — a time primarily associated with shedding, passing and ending — winter offers us an opportunity to become quiet.

In shamanic terms, as the light diminishes and darkness increases, the veil between Spirit and the living world becomes thin.

Winter invites rest.

Rejuvenation.

Listening.

Conception.

The planting of seeds for what may eventually become.

Listening asks us to become quiet enough to receive.

Perhaps even to become, for a moment, nothing.

Empty in the heart.

Not empty as absence, but empty enough that something new has room to enter.

If the vessel is continually full, where does the next thing go?

What needs to be birthed?

What needs to pass?

What needs to be nurtured?

What is asking us to listen?

How Does Natural Wellness Build Upon Itself?

Through reflection and return.

I am coming to see return as one of the fundamental keys of Natural Wellness.

Our ability to return:

Daily.

Weekly.

Monthly.

Seasonally.

Cyclically.

Yearly.

Again and again.

Following the shamanic seasonal cycle we have been exploring:

Winter — Nurture, Listening, Becoming

Spring — Beginning, Vision, Intention

Summer — Fire, Challenge, Growth

Autumn — Humility, Completion, Shedding

And then we return.

What interests me is that this is not only a yearly cycle.

We can move through this cycle within a lifetime.

Within a relationship.

Within a project.

Within a healing journey.

Within a single day.

Sometimes within a single conversation.

Natural Wellness begins to accumulate through the wisdom that comes after we have travelled a cycle and consciously returned from it.

We walk the Wheel.

We journey.

We experience.

We reflect.

We debrief.

We return.

And when we return, part of us comes back into the present moment carrying what has been learned.

Hopefully, all of us returns.

Because sometimes part of us does become stuck somewhere.

A moment remains unfinished.

A relationship remains unfinished.

A loss remains unfinished.

A wound remains unfinished.

A decision remains unfinished.

And that part of us can be carried into the next moment, and the next, and the next, until something allows the journey to complete.

Until we return.

Natural Wellness and Our Inner World

Natural Wellness also asks us to look deeply at the relationships within our inner world.

Our relationship with our body.

Our relationship with food and fasting.

Our behaviours.

Our thoughts.

Our beliefs.

Our truths.

Our memories.

Our relationship with health.

Our relationship with illness.

Our relationship with ourselves.

There is something important in the space between us and whatever we are relating to.

That space is the relationship.

Within that space we can label.

Judge.

Attract.

Avoid.

Resist.

Hold.

Reject.

Love.

Fear.

Accept.

The way we continually meet something creates a pattern of relationship.

And the body is part of that relationship.

Our cells are not separate from the world we are creating within ourselves.

They are continually receiving information from the environment in which they live.

So Natural Wellness asks another question:

What message is our inner environment continually sending?

And what happens when that message changes?

Does Natural Wellness Mean Being Healthy or Well?

No.

This is important.

Natural Wellness does not mean that we must always be healthy.

It does not mean that we must always feel good.

It does not mean that pain, sickness, grief, fear, ageing or death have somehow gone wrong or disappeared.

If relationship really does sit at the heart of Natural Wellness, then we must also look at our relationship with being healthy and our relationship with being unwell.

Our relationship with pain.

With dying.

With death.

With uncertainty.

How are we with our own inevitable death?

Are we at peace with it?

Are we not?

How are we with our bodies when they hurt?

How are we with ourselves when we are frightened?

How are we with life when it does not move in the direction we wanted?

Are we at peace when we go to bed at night?

Or are we not?

Perhaps this is getting closer to the heart of Natural Wellness.

Being okay to not be okay.

Being okay to be okay.

Being willing to notice the relationship we are creating with whatever is here.

Not because we need to immediately fix it.

But because we are willing to meet it.

To listen.

To feel.

To reflect.

And, when the time comes,

to return.