How Nature Can Help You Grieve

It’s 3AM.

You still haven’t slept.

Whenever you close your eyes all you can see is the face of your loved one who is no longer here.

When you’re up and going about your day, the smallest of things remind you of them. Perhaps it’s grabbing for their favorite tea they used to drink, a song on the radio, or a phrase that someone said that is exactly what your loved one used to say.

These reminders and any memory of your loss arise an aching in your heart, you begin to cry, waves of sadness coming over you, and you maybe feel a lump in your throat.

Grief’s Impact

Grieving elicits somatic (physical) sensations, it affects our mind as we become preoccupied, causes us to behave differently, and feel a wide range of emotions – sometimes various ones at the same time that wouldn’t normally go together.

The act of mourning literally affects every part of our being. Grief is natural. It’s a natural response for when we’re confronted with the loss of something or someone we formed attachments to. How much we grieve depends on the depth of the attachment. All of the physical, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, and psychological reactions we have when we are mourning, are our ways of adapting to the loss.

How we effectively mourn or adapt to our loss depends on the intention and time placed on active grieving. When we’re in nature, we are given many tools for effectively mourning. I’ll explain more below.

Grief and Nature

It might seem almost instinctual to place grief and nature together. As I previously mentioned with how innate it is to grieve and mourn, nature has always held a monumental place in our healing process, whether we’ve been attuned to it or not.

By simply witnessing the changes of the seasons, we see that death is a part of life’s cycle. As fall and winter come, the leaves begin to wither and die, as well as a lot of vegetation when the cold weather hits. Hawks and other predatory animals must take life from another to sustain theirs and their offspring. Death occurs daily in the natural world.

You might say to yourself, “But these deaths are necessary. In the spring new leaves and crops will grow. Predators hunt to keep themselves and their kin alive.” Thus, death in these contexts have been given meaning.

To healthily grieve and mourn our losses, we must give meaning as well. We must understand our loss and how it changes circumstances – both for the bad, as well as the good.

Nature Holds Space

In counseling as well as other healing environments, there’s talk about holding space. Essentially this means allowing the wounded to have a place where they can do the work for healing. Nature provides this through its inherent non-judgment, quietness and solitude, and plenty of room to engage in the behaviors traditional to mourning.

You want to yell? Go ahead and yell.

Do you feel the tension and anger in your body? Go ahead and stomp on the dirt paths, and maybe hurl some stones into a nearby river or stream.

Need to calm down your nervous system? The best air to do deep breathing exercises can be found among a forest of trees.

When you’re out in nature, it demands nothing more from you than to be exactly who you are at the present moment.

Nature Promotes Emotional and Mental Health

Natural spaces have already been known to alleviate symptoms related to depression, anxiety, and stress. Many of these symptoms are likely to be experienced when you’re mourning. The feelings of despair associated with depression, the uncertainty related to anxiety, and the stress of the loss in general can all be reduced or softened by just being outdoors in nature.

To add an increased benefit, put your phone away and any other technology that might take away from you being fully immersed in your natural surroundings. Powerful grief work requires you to minimize distractions so you can fully engage with the pain as well as the memories of your loss. Having full engagement will help you begin to make meaning of what’s happened and give better clarity to the circumstances of the loss that will aid in your understanding of what to do next.

You’ll also become more aware of what your mind and spirit are telling you to do for continued healing. For example, as you’re walking along a trail you might come across a large stone slab that looks like a table or altar. Perhaps it reminds you of the religious or spiritual traditions that comfort you, and you begin to think about bringing in ceremony or ritual into your active mourning. Perhaps you decided to gather elements around you that might represent what you are trying to convey.

You might gather stones to represent your undying love or commitment to the memory of your loss. Or maybe you put together water and dirt, mixing them together to illustrate the transformation of your grief pain to continued love and moving forward as a new person. You might feel inspired to sing or pray in honor of your loss and tune in to how the animals react to your presence. You might feel the wind picking up during certain moments of your ceremony and come to an understanding of what that means for you. Whatever it is you decide, your intention and sincerity will aid you in healing.

A Final Word

No matter how deeply you choose to engage or interact with nature for active mourning, you are sure to find noticeable benefits. While grieving is ultimately your journey, you don’t have to take that journey alone. You can bring a friend, someone who has shared in your loss, or even a counselor such as myself!

Lastly, remember there’s no specific distance on a trail that will say you’ve trekked enough. That’s for you to determine, and the same goes for your healing. Grieving takes time, and it’s okay if you need to have moments where you take a break, just like you might find a rock to sit on when you’re weary from a hike. Listen and trust in yourself to know what’s right. May the trails lead you to where you need to be!

Lessons from Mud

Ever walk through mud?

The regular snow and rain that happens in late February as well as in March produces some sludgy, muddy trails in the woods. That consistency that comes from a mixture of sediment and water, gets stuck in the grooves of my hiking boots and makes it hard to trek on through without slipping a little.

Mud doesn’t feel the most pleasant to walk through, so you usually see people avoid stepping in it (me included!). As much as I like to hike and spend time in the woods, I don’t enjoy the sensation of feeling gunky, squelching, mushy earth beneath my feet.

WHEN AVOIDANCE DIRTIES YOUR PANTS

On a recent, short hike though there was a part in my excursion where walking in mud was unavoidable.  I found myself rushing through it to lessen the unpleasantness, and in doing so I began to slip, slide, and almost fall. Not only were my boots becoming very muddy, but so were the bottom of my pants. I felt frustrated and somewhat annoyed about the mess I was going to bring into my car and home later on.

Then I began to think: How many times do we try to avoid the unpleasantness of something going on in our lives, and when it’s finally in our face and we can no longer avoid it, that we try to speed up the process so we can stop feeling whatever negative emotions that arise?

Avoidance will tend to perpetuate the problem you are trying to pretend is not there. There’s also the underlying stress that exists in the background of your day-to-day, because subconsciously you know it’s there and unresolved.  Sometimes the problem becomes bigger the longer it goes unattended, so that when we finally have to address it, it’s this huge issue that we’re trying to rush through.

As a result we end up unintentionally creating more chaos and other problems, just like the mud that had gotten on my pant bottoms.

walk through mud

So what do we do?

Walk through that mud.

Feel the sticky, goopy, unpleasantness of it. Allow yourself to fully experience those negative emotions.

Just as we might describe what the mud feels like, what do those emotions feel like?

Does the emotional weight have a presence in your body? What’s it like? Describe it. Live it – because it won’t go anywhere until you attend to it.

Take your time walking through that mud, so you don’t kick some up onto your clothes.

Now I know this was just a metaphor. This mud. But the next time you find yourself avoiding some emotionally intense problem, I encourage you to take it on in the woods. Find yourself some muddy trails and work through those emotions as you physically work through that sludgy muck. Both your mind and body will thank you.

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

Humor me and take a moment to think about what’s a story you’ve either read or heard about that has stuck with you?

It can literally be any story.

Greek myths, Bible parables, or a story your grandpa told you. It can even be Disney’s Encanto movie (which I’m obsessed with by the way).

Got it in your head? Okay.

Now think about why that story has stuck with you so much.

Maybe it’s how the characters are described or made out to be. It could also be the themes that have significant meaning to you for some reason – themes about redemption, forbidden love, rags to riches, overcoming obstacles, etc.

What do you think has touched you most from those stories?

Next, I want you to check in and reflect about how those details make you feel. Are you inspired? Do you feel validated? Connected? Just take a moment.

As you can see, stories have the power to arouse and stir up deep emotions. Your life story does the same, and it’s why it’s so important to realize how you’re telling it. Let me explain.

What’s your focus?

When you think about how your life has been and how it’s currently going, there are certain details, elements, themes, and so on that your mind will tend to emphasize. What you emphasize is crucial, because if you tend to mostly highlight the bad details or moments of what’s happened to you, then that will take precedence over how you see yourself and your perspective of the world around you.

For example, let’s say you used to go out on hikes with your family when you were a kid. You used to never like those hikes because it would happen every Saturday morning, which is when your favorite cartoons would be on. Saturdays were also one of the two days you would’ve gotten to sleep in. You might also recall having been dragged out when it was cold, rainy, or too hot; none of which made family hiking time any more tolerable. You might also remember how uncomfortable it felt to step in mud, how your siblings annoyed you, and that one time you walked into a spider web.

All of these collected experiences have composed the decision that, “Being outdoors is miserable.” You might also think, “It’s not good to be in nature, because you never know what going to happen.” The list of negative thoughts and feelings towards hiking can continue, instilling within you this opposition towards nature.

These storylines can develop through any gathered experiences you’ve had and it can end up limiting you from achieving what you want and from living happily. Luckily, there’s ways you can shift your narrative.

Revising your story

Narrative therapy offers you ways for changing or altering the constraints of these potentially harmful stories. Some useful approaches are:

1.      De-emphasizing the negative (and considering the other details of those stories)

2.      Deconstructing the problem

3.      Looking at the story from another’s perspective

4.      Externalizing the problem

5.      Mapping out the problem

De-emphasize the negative

When we can stop stressing the parts that brought on the unhelpful narrative, then we can begin to consider the additional details that were not so bad. For example, let’s say you’ve been through several, failed romantic relationships resulting in you thinking you’ll be alone forever.  

De-emphasizing the aspects of what contributed to the end of those relationships, and instead naming the other favorable experiences will begin to create the alternative narrative. You might recall all the times when you resolved arguments, were able to compromise, and shared moments of real intimacy. You’ll begin to realize you’re failed relationships were not completely bad, but they had bad things in them. Which brings me to the next approach.

Deconstruct the problem

Instead of saying, “they were all failed relationships” and automatically placing a blanket theme over them, try to deconstruct each relationship. Be wary of making generalized statements like, “well, they were all unwilling to do the work to make things better.” Try instead to give clear examples. One relationship may have involved a weary partner, whom after so many arguments, was no longer interested in trying anymore. Another may have had an issue of “shutting down” when confronted and stopped communicating. Another yet may have tried a lot, and in retrospect, the problem was with you who decided to be reluctant in adjusting because the compromises were too great.

Deconstructing the problems in your narrative will help you understand what problem areas you might need to work on, as well as help you be more accurate with what is truly going on.

Consider another’s perspective

This approach reflects one of the core principles of narrative therapy: there is no objective reality or absolute truth. While you recounted past lovers were unwilling to do the work, what might they say about you and the given situations? Imagine you were watching past arguments from the perspective of an audience member viewing this on TV. How would they describe the scene?

Telling the story from another’s perspective might seem difficult (since you’ll have your biases of the narrative you currently have), but it’s very useful once you get the hang of it!

Externalizing the problem

Separating a problem from yourself (or others) will further help you realize your story can be altered. Let’s say you’ve determined you’re a nagger in your relationships, and that’s partly why past partners had become seemingly unwilling to work through relationship issues. Calling yourself a nagger would imply that’s just who you are – it’s a part of you, thus unchangeable.

Externalizing this concept and changing your wording to a person who nags will aid you in understanding that nagging behavior can be changed. While appearing simplistic, how we use our words with ourselves and others is incredibly important.

Mapping out the problem

The last method I’ll mention here is mapping out the problem. It starts with defining the characteristics and naming or labeling of the issue. What does nagging look like? The next step requires mapping out where the problem impacts areas of your life. Does nagging behavior seep into not only your romantic relationships, but also when you’re trying to get cooperation at work? Does it come out with your kids?

After that, we look at how that problem affects those other areas of your life. How do your coworkers react when you begin to nag? And finally, what personal values do you have that are not congruent with that behavior? Maybe you value free will and encourage autonomy. Is it possible that nagging behavior is violating the independence of others?

The Takeaway

I hope this post has encouraged you to take control of your own story and understand that you can make it work for you. Stories help us find meaning and purpose, as well as establish our identities in this world. Narrative therapy strives to separate issues from yourself (and others) so you can get a clearer picture of those things.

Granted, certain components are going to be facts. We can’t take away the reality of you having experienced numerous endings of relationships, but we can change the meaning placed on them.

I invite anyone reading this to look at how you’ve been telling your story. Do you like how you’re relating it? If not, then start amending those chapters and switching up those anecdotes. Create a truth that serves you and how you’ll operate in this world so you can continue to heal and grow.