Walk With Me is an ongoing video series where I invite you to join me while I take some time to check in with myself. It’s all spontaneous, just like Somatic Experiencing — I like to slow down and see where my mind and body take me. I hope you enjoy watching the video or reading the transcript below, and thanks for spending a moment of your day with me.
Hi. So I’m going to try something a little bit different, a little bit the same, a little bit old, a little bit new. I’m out on a walk again, and years ago I did these videos that are still here on YouTube, that I called Walk With Me. And, I really loved doing them.
And I also really loved doing the sessions that are the other YouTube videos that I have here, the ones that are Grounding Connection. And so this is different and the same.
So I’m gonna take a walk, and I’m gonna talk about my work, which is a little bit like Walk With Me. But my work has matured and grown so much over the last few years that this is gonna be entirely new at the same time.
So, I’m here. I’m also going to turn the camera around, because although I’m fascinating to look at and I’m sure stunningly beautiful to some people, what I’m looking at is what sparks what I talk about and feeds it. So, I want you to see it with me.
Right now, I am looking at a beautiful early fall, late summer day. It’s soft. Everything is soft. The sky is soft. The air is soft. It’s not humid, but it’s not super dry. It’s not super cold. It’s not super warm.
I think it’s something like, I don’t know, 60, 68 degrees, something like that. So there’s enough coolness in the air so that when I walk I don’t get hot. But it’s not…yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful day to be out for a walk.
There’s no sun in my eyes or anything like that. But we have a little bit of fall color in New Hampshire here, but still some goldenrod, if you can see that out in the wet, flat areas there. I’m going to turn my camera sideways so that you can see it differently. So, hopefully, that all tracks.
I am in an adorable little covered bridge. My town just has these cute little covered bridges, so we’re going to take a walk.
I was thinking about what I could share today, and I had two new groups start this week. One is a second generation, almost a third generation, of a group on climate change, and kind of having, maintaining resilience and feeling okay, feeling regulated within the context of climate change, which for some of us is really, really hard to do.
So that group went brilliantly. It was just so wonderful, and I’m so excited to continue to run that group. [You can see some videos I did around those topics here.]
And the other group that started this week was, one that I call Finding the Roots. And it’s geared for folks who haven’t worked with me before and, which means that, you know, it’s a little bit different for me.
I mean, I work with folks new all the time, but it’s always one-on-one. So this is a little bit different. I had to think about this week earlier in the week, I had to think about how to structure group number one.
And so I thought about how to talk about my work. And I it feels ridiculous to talk about how I’ve had this body of work for a few years, and in reality, it’s been all my life. Right? Like, I’ve spent my whole life developing a way to look at the world and make sense of it.
And then as I have gathered tools and further life experience (fun and not fun), I have found myself. Like, it becomes a body of work. It’s how I look at the world, how I work with the world, how I look at myself, how I heal myself, how I work with other people.
There is a bicyclist coming, so we are going to look at the beautiful woods while I talk here. We can preserve anonymity.
Here in New Hampshire, there’s a ton of white pines and hemlocks and a couple birches, and there’s a different pine up there. I can’t see the top of it, and I’m not as good with trees as I’d like to be.
This trail is a rail trail, which means that it used to be a railroad, and it’s been taken…you know, obviously, there’s no rails anymore. At this point, it’s a sewer line, I think. But it means that it’s just beautiful. And so people walk and run and bike.
No motorized vehicles. It’s beautiful. Short, short walk from my house, so I walk here all the time. So if you haven’t watched all my other videos of Walk With Me, this is this is a pretty normal pattern for me to walk.
So I was just thinking earlier in the week about how to talk about “renaturing,” because that’s what I call my business, and it’s what I kind of call my body of work and all the things that I do within it. So I was like, how to talk in 10 minutes about renaturing.
And I found myself saying stuff about how I’m just drawn to bringing back the animal that is all of us. You know, because we are, as humans, we are animals. Like, that we’re not separate from the rest of this earth, and being out here, walking, is what gets me to remember that.
Because I live in a little house in a little town, and, you know, I don’t see a lot of large-form nature around me, but this pathway is pretty close. Like, even right now, I’m sitting here– walking, excuse me. I’m walking, I’m not sitting anywhere.
And I’m hearing a whole bunch of little birds. And because I’m a bird geek, I’m listening to, let’s see, chickadees, white breasted nuthatches, nuthatches, red breasted nuthatches, a couple of warblers, a crow, titmice.
So what this says to me is, except for the warblers and the crows, there’s some, winter flocks gathering together. All these birds that spend the breeding season all separate from each other are coming together to make it through the winter together.
And, you know, I have found myself over the last year digging more and more deeply into the Earth cycles, the solar cycles of the northern hemisphere because that’s where I’m at, and finding myself really enjoying, just identifying that this animal that I live in, that I am, is also deeply influenced by the changing light, the changing temperature, the changing seasons, the changing sounds, smells, everything.
And that’s what renaturing is. It’s getting in touch with our animal. You know? So, I run in some circles where “animal body” means something different, so I would usually say “my animal body,” but I’m a whole animal, including my brain. Right? Like, I have a great brain. It’s awesome.
Like, it works. I’m babbling like a total fool because my brain continues to work. But it’s all of me. I am a whole animal, all in one. And renaturing is bringing that all together and helping my, our, systems, like our bodies, our brains, our nervous system, our everything, to come together and work more in the way that it was intended to.
And I don’t mean “intended” by any power, but by just the way our DNA works. There’s a lot of things that happen in our life that influence how we allow, consciously and unconsciously, how we allow our bodies to work. And this is a beautiful organism that I am part of, that I am.
Right? And, and if I can allow it, if I can understand that I am this and I am completely part of everything, everything around me. I am part of it. I cannot be independent from this fallen tree. Right? Like, this is me, and, I can’t ever forget that and pretend like I’m separate, but we do all the time.
So, renaturing. I’m gonna have to keep talking about this more and more and more because every single time I talk about this, it’s different. Every time and over over the years since I started developing this work, it has changed.
It has changed and developed and evolved and stayed the same all at the same time, because I am this organism in this world. And so it is the same.
I am the same, and yet I’m never the same twice. So every time I talk about my work, every time I work with somebody, every time I come upon the same stupid situation that I feel is the same situation that I have to do again and again and again drives me crazy, it’s always different.
And that’s nature, and that’s renaturing. And that’s me for this moment. I’m gonna stop there and, we’ll just see. And we’ll see how how these go. But if you if you enjoy it, let me know. Okay? Thanks.
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