Druidry and honouring nature
(Nimue)
The idea of honouring nature as it occurs in our own bodies has been important to me for some time. However, there’s always more to learn about how to do that. In recent weeks this is something I’ve been exploring from a number of angles.
Firstly I did some reading-up. I’ve been learning more about what burnout does to the brain – it isolates the more emotional, less logical part of the brain and makes it harder to manage panic. Learning and study are important parts of Druidry for me, so learning about nature in my own body feels like a meaningful thing to do.
Brains can be developed and healed through the ways in which we use them. So, I turned to meditation and visualisation to help me with this. I’ve started visualising the frightened mammal part of my brain as an anxious chinchilla – because chinchillas are cute and invite kindness. I don’t have a great history in terms of being kind to myself and it’s taken me a while to recognise that pushing and bullying myself through times of distress has only been making things worse. I would not yell at a chinchilla to try harder.
What frightened mammals need is quiet, soothing environments, food, water, safety, warmth, comfort. I’ve dealt with rescue cats. I’ve rescued panicking rodents. I know what scared mammals tend to do – they often don’t make great decisions and they need a lot of patience. I’m bringing that experience to the anxious chinchilla in my head.
The principal of slowing down has long been important to me but I’ve not been that great at doing it. There were always so many other things that seemed more urgent than taking care of myself. That’s shifted for me, not least because I’m living with someone who considers my healing and my wellbeing to be a serious priority. Self care is, I recognise, part of honouring nature in my own body. I can’t push myself to breaking point all the time.
When it comes to honouring nature outside of myself, I want to act with respect and kindness. I want to avoid causing harm, and I want to encourage flourishing. I’m better at thinking about the needs of other living beings than I am at taking my own seriously, so I need to internalise more of how I treat the rest of the living world.
The ways in which we humans see ourselves as separate from nature is a root cause of much of the harm we do. We create environments that harm us, ways of living that harm us, and all of this in turn harms the planet. The more we can engage with ourselves as natural beings in need of healthy environments and peaceful lives, the less harm we will do to the world around us.
The anxious chinchilla in my head wants very simple things, and it wants to live gently. Rather than pushing through that anxiety, I’ve started responding to it by giving my mammal self more of what it needs. My aim is to get to a point here I’m not thinking of myself as a bunch of fragments that barely cooperate. I am my body. I am this anxious mammal – I don’t quite feel it at the moment, but I’m working on it. I think there will be a lot to learn from taking better care of the chinchilla in my head, and my body as a whole.
