Healing with nature is an entirely new way to relate to and heal trauma from your life. The mediation practices in this book will help you awaken into a new way of being- no longer being held to the reactive and unconscious patterns of your trauma, releasing them and living into a new vital way of living in your life.

This book is for anyone who has experienced challenges of trauma experiences. Trauma simply defined is an experience that caused distress, that in that moment you did not have resources to bear on the distress, and it felt out of your control. This definition includes forms of how the experience of distress is traditionally associated with how trauma may have been experienced- serious accident, natural disaster, war/combat, rape/sexul assault, violent assaults AND also forms of distress less traditionally associated with trauma of significant loss, emotional abuse, racism, bullying/cruelty, neglect, power abuse, policial unrest, medical issues-surgeries, birth, treatments, and climate crisis. There are many different forms that trauma can take within any one person’s experience- if that is what it felt like for you- traumatic- then it is true trauma, and deserving of your care and attention to heal. 

People often try to “move on” or “get through” the difficulty they experienced that felt traumatic. While this is a normal and cultural approach to dealing with difficulties that are traumatic- its not really the best approach to ensuring your physical, mental and emotional well being is supported. Often when someone experiences a trauma, and they get through it and move on, this creates a disconnect from various physical or mental/emotional needs that didn’t get attended to. This book provides you the opportunity through various mindfulness and somatic nature-based meditations to heal what didn’t get attended to. To discover the ways you can reclaim and inhabit the full aliveness of your body; to soothe your mind from reactive habit patterns of thinking that don’t serve you; and to mend the emotional scars of your trauma. 

Nature provides the support, the healing, and the reflective truth’s in our ability to heal trauma. Throughout all of the meditations taught in this book, you have the opportunity to learn how to form a relationship with nature to allow your healing to happen with the support of nature. The safety, stability, support, containment, expansiveness, beauty and mystery of nature will become an ally, a friend, a home in which to heal within.

Mindfulness of your breath, senses, body and the elements with the power and support of nature

The power of somatic healing in nature to experience your body’s ability to heal itself and awaken into new forms of health

The ability to cultivate wholesome states of being- aliveness, compassion, joy, contentment, oneness, ease, love

A life without reactive and unconscious trauma holding you back from your true potential

A profound and supportive connection to nature

New relationships with yourself, friends, family, community, the planet

Readers learn mindfulness practices to calm and relax the nervous system by developing presence and deepening awareness. Compared to practicing indoors, practicing mindfulness in nature has unique benefits in soothing the mind, body, and heart. Readers learn to establish mindful awareness of the breath, use the five senses as a gateway to sensory aliveness, discover (or rediscover) a way to be in the body, and explore the elements as an entry point to learning how nature can heal trauma.

Readers are introduced to the somatic wisdom of the body—where it is stuck, and how they can heal in the body and learn new ways of awakening into living. Building on the mindful awareness cultivated in part 1, readers discover embodied experiencing as a way to rewire their experiences of trauma. Readers explore how to move closer to the trauma rather than further away, learn to move with the current of trauma and find the new river of healing, notice barriers in the inner landscape and begin to work differently with them, and awaken to new ways of taking care in life.

Readers learn to integrate the teachings of mindfulness and somatic healing in nature. In doing so, they experience deeper wholeness and sustained qualities of well-being. By incorporating the practices into life and community, readers discover how to trust their own healing and use the support of nature to live more fully. 

Readers explore new ways of experiencing health in the body, mind, and heart; grow into healthier relationships with family, friends, and community; discover the wisdom in natural rhythms; and discover higher states of well-being like intuition, resonance, love, and interconnection.

Our individual healing can help to restore health to others and to the earth. As readers’ sense of healing and well-being grows, they began to discover a space in which they might support this healing. Part 4 offer reflections and practices inviting readers to begin to take intentional, purposeful action toward healing others, living with integrity, healing the earth, and trusting the mystery.

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I wrote this book because I know the personal power of the transformation to heal trauma through these pathways. I have and continue to heal the traumas of my life and am constantly grateful for the gifts that arise in this work to change the person I am and how this has a direct impact on those in my life as well as this planet. I am hopeful that this book offers you the gift of healing your trauma, and that you become intimately connected to your truest and whole self, that you are able to carry your healed, alive, interconnected being into the presence of others to create healing with each other and our planet. 

My hope is that each of our respective healing of trauma creates a new ripple effect of healing those around us, our communities, our cultures, and our planet. When we are healed, we can heal the Earth. 

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A certified mindfulness teacher with the Mindfulness Teaching Institute and the International Mindfulness Teachers Association, Rochelle Calvert has a devoted love to share the power and healing potential of mindfulness, somatic awareness and nature. She has studied and taught mindfulness for the past 16 years and knows personally the transformational potential. Rochelle currently leads courses and retreats in mindfulness, somatic experiencing and Awake in the Wild- nature-based mindfulness. She also facilitates professional trainings in mindfulness for clinicians and travels the country teaching seminars.