Could the wildfires, the typhoons, the freak flooding, the hurricanes, and more that are bashing planet Earth at increasing rates be an act of ferocious love from mother nature?
Please note there is a video version of this blog at the bottom for increased accessibility.
I write this blog from an absolute position of privilege; sitting in the UK, the NHS covering the costs of the majority of my healthcare including testicular cancer surgery last March as the pandemic hit, food delivered to within 1km of my house most days, running water without any fears, yes I had a very close ‘near-miss’ when the flash floods hit the UK during July 2021 but my life is so uber-privileged compared to the 95% of the rest of the world’s population. I must use this privilege to hold space for a new type of dialogue.
Yet when it comes to nature’s ferocious love we are ALL, every single one of us as COVID has shown, equally vulnerable. Yes, we have different-sized boats to navigate the stormy seas, but we are ALL impacted concurrently as these events become more common. A real reminder of our deep interconnectivity and interdependence.
Something my friend and personal inspiration Cornell Thomas shared with me during our recent activating consciousness podcast was that “the world is a complex place because humans have made it complex. The animals have figured it out! You take us off the planet and nature takes care of itself.”
Do you remember seeing those pictures of Beijing, China with clear skies within a matter of weeks of the world being shut down due to COVID? Do you remember how you felt as you didn’t have to commute every day to your place of work? There was and still is a lot of pain too, I appreciate, but considering the relative privilege that I and I know many in the West hold, what lessons is nature’s ferocious love teaching us?
I believe it is a message to remember our connections.
Connection to ourselves.
Connection to others, especially in those regions of the world where much of our produce, raw materials, and manufactured products are extracted from. The voices and experiences of the often unheard.
Connection to systems at large.
For too long each of the above has been taught, sold, communicated as separate topics yet they are deeply connected and interwoven.
This reminds me of another amazing statement that Cornell shared which is “we feel the same; your thoughts change every millisecond, feeling has a lot more impact and power than thought.”
This is why I do what I do.
The ferocious love of nature, I feel, is an invitation to FEEL, to get out of our heads, and to embrace the power and energy that comes from feeling within. I wrote some time ago that feelings are just ‘data points’ as to where our thinking is but actually it is the other way around.
Thinking, I feel, today is our best attempt at retrofitting those feelings into words, language that is so primitive when compared to our innate heart intelligence. Check out more about heartmath.
I assert and know from my own journey that without doing the inner work individually, truly feeling and sensing into our own lived experience, we cannot offer our fullest, brightest, most impactful versions of our ourselves to the world.
I am not anti-logic and anti IQ, we need head AND heart, yet we have to acknowledge and now do the work to CONNECT the two. Our survival as a species depends on it.
Those raw feelings need to be better understood, it is nature’s intelligence inviting us to reimagine differently and I am here with HEXO Change and a global network to support you on that journey of sensing if you feel moved, whether you are an individual or are leading teams.
We are all part of nature which means we are all contributing to these events and we collectively have the power to turn them around.
It may seem strange and a tad scary when we start sensing into these interconnections in a more systemic way, but it seems to me that now is the time to embrace natures ferocious love and that means bravely connecting to ourselves as a priority, with grace, self-compassion and a lot of fun as we go exploring.
How well connected to the ‘real’ inside of you are you? Thoughts, feelings, beliefs, stories?
