“All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.”
Joseph Campbell
The human being is intimately linked to the natural world, even if our conscious awareness of this bond was disconnected long ago. For thousands of years, humans have endured a disconnect between themselves and nature, which has resulted in a lowered consciousness and a resounding collective wound. Generations upon generations have carried this wound and told themselves that they are different from the rest of nature, which has developed this strange relationship where we simultaneously feel separate and superior. Humans even talk about nature as something that only exists “out there.” The result of this separation is becoming increasingly clear: mental health is declining at an alarming rate, and emotional trauma is rampant. For beneath the story of separation, the human animal is just as connected to nature as all the other animals, plants, and minerals.
When you look at nature, it’s all about balance. Life is endlessly churning and recycling in the natural world, where every cycle is steered towards balance. Life is filled with opposites, constantly trying to maintain some homeostasis – a perfect midpoint. There are no judgments, rights, or wrongs. Nature doesn’t operate like that. It holds a much more profound wisdom and doesn’t change based on judgments about how things should and shouldn’t be. Instead, it responds to an incredible intelligence at work, ensuring nature stays balanced – working towards that perfect midpoint where the polarities unite. We see this intelligence in the different ecosystems that balance themselves out naturally. If you leave nature alone, it will restore itself in spectacular ways. Some species will even adjust their sex to uphold the male and female ratio to maintain the balance of the species! The human animal is also part of this balance-seeking nature, and healing appears when you unite the polarities within and find that perfect midpoint in yourself.
HUMAN NATURE
Living in harmony with nature also means being in harmony with your inner nature – aligning your mental, emotional, and physical well-being with your inner core self. It means being in complete peace with who you are, accepting yourself, and standing in your power. Sadly, this is not the norm for most people today. We have lived in a disconnected state for so long that we think it is normal not to be at peace with ourselves. We have come to accept and even expect mental problems like anxiety and depression as a common occurrence in modern people. But these mental issues are simply symptoms of imbalance in our modern lifestyle, and like other symptoms, they are there to help us readjust. We have become stressed, depressed, anxious, and emotionally unavailable living in a culture that promotes the things that make us feel that way. It’s common for humans to live in environments that don’t ensure a natural and healthy development. A healthy environment would be a relaxed environment where comfort and love are provided freely. Humans need a healthy environment to evolve correctly, and the nervous system needs social interaction to regulate appropriately. Humans evolved in big social groups, where the communal context was crucial for raising children. Social interactions were pivotal, and the parents had companionship and a lot of support from other adults and children. This is how we evolved; this is our natural environment, but today, most of us are left fending for ourselves. Human needs are not met. The stress, isolation, suppression of emotional needs, and lack of social inclusion and interaction take a great toll on human health, both physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
The most prominent feature in human animals is our highly evolved and complex nervous system, which distinguishes us from other animals. The nervous system consists of the brain and the brain stem, including all the nerves in our bodies that allow us to experience life. It’s a very sophisticated biological technology with an incredible ability for logic and creativity. It can even “time travel,” where our imaginations can pull us out of the present moment and into the past or the future. This fantastic feature lets us plan, calculate, and edit our experiences as we go and adjust our behavior in a precise manner. The human brain is also profoundly connected to and can’t be separated from its environment and wires in tandem with the physical world around it. Modern neurosciences show that our environments – the people and the physical world around us – are very important for our development and evolution. The brain hardwires in specific ways depending on its context and builds a “model” based on the sensory inputs it receives. It then uses this model to understand, seed new concepts, and predict the world. The brain learns and functions by using contrasts and comparing what it already knows with every new input, which gets filed away in the model. So, if we have been living in an unnatural, imbalanced environment, it’s no wonder that our true nature reacts with symptoms like depression and anxiety! These are perfectly healthy reactions if there is an imbalance between who you are and what is happening around you.
Our surroundings are crucial for our development and function, and separating from our natural environment can affect us profoundly. Our biology needs the right environment to wire and function correctly. We see this also in other animals taken out of their natural environment, where their growth stagnates and decays, and they don’t thrive or evolve as usual. They suffer both psychologically and physically, where their symptoms vary from extreme stress, anxiety, and erratic behavior to depression and complete shutdown. These are all normal reactions to living in abnormal situations, so why would we expect anything else from human animals? If you put the human animal in a situation where its life force is repressed, depression is the natural reaction. If you put the human animal in an unsafe situation surrounded by perceived dangers, the human mind becomes highly anxious. The vast numbers of depression and anxiety we see today are, therefore, a perfectly normal reaction to the unnatural ways humans have been living. It’s an excellent sign that the human spirit is alive and well, and it’s telling us that we need to pivot and regain balance, both on the inside and the outside.
CONNECTION AND SENSITIVITY
The complexity of the human nervous system makes us an impressive animal, but it also makes us extra sensitive. It might not seem like it, but humans are highly sensitive creatures. We see this from birth, where it takes a human baby a long time to become independent. Where a newborn horse can run after only a day, the human baby needs several years to do the same. Humans need much more nurturing, care, and help before they can become functional adults, and there are so many opportunities to traumatize a human because of our natural born sensitivity. When you combine a lowered consciousness, imbalanced living, and separation from our natural environment, there is no wonder that there are many traumatized people in the world. And traumatized people often lash out and hurt others, which keeps the cycle of trauma going. Humans’ sensitivities make us naturally loving and empathic creatures who long for connections with others, but the same sensitivity also makes us more vulnerable to being traumatized because of neglect, abuse, and separation.
The human animal is also a social creature that needs other humans to survive. We were not meant to stay on our own, and we need the physical, emotional, and spiritual support of others to thrive. This is how human biology evolved; humans suffer if you remove those connections. Our bodies are fine-tuned to making connections and produce the hormone oxytocin when it connects with others, making us feel good, loving, and comforted. In contrast, the body produces the stress hormone cortisol when it experiences separation. Humans long for connections with others, and isolation can harm our nervous systems. Human interactions are crucial for the development of children, but also for the well-being of human adults. However, when living in a society with a lot of unconscious and traumatized people, it can be challenging to find and maintain healthy connections. The best thing for our nervous systems is other people, but other people can also be the worst thing for our nervous systems! This is one of the more difficult balancing act in today’s society.
So, how do we heal those parts of us that have become unbalanced? The simple answer is that we should map to nature. Because Nature IS balance; balance is what she does. Nature is constantly moving, changing, and evolving while maintaining its balance so that life can flourish. Balance is never extreme. It oscillated back and forth, aiming for the still center in the middle. Balance is the sunsets and the sunrises, where day and night meet. It’s the solstices and the equinoxes when light and dark are balanced on Earth. It’s where all polarities unite. Humans are also part of this balance-seeking nature, and healing happens when our polarities unite. The Indian mystic Ramana Maharshi famously said that everything we see in the world is just our projection. There is no outside and inside – it’s essentially the same.