How to find peace within yourself

Last summer, I went with my youngest son to the town of Lietlakhti in the Vyborg District, says Irina, a 42-year-old Muscovite. “There was no running water or electricity. The phone was not charging, and I didn’t take it everywhere, and on the second day I completely forgot about it. I unloaded my head and felt alive again. I left wrapped up, I didn’t even know what to do to relieve tension. And there is a feeling that nature itself grounds you. And they let me go.

I looked at many things differently. I realized that I can not dwell on problems, but change my attitude towards them and move forward. I saw the child in a different way: it turns out that he has grown up, he has a core, he holds the load, shows character and is quite independent. I stopped being too protective of him. As if there was a reboot, I found harmony inside, the fuss was gone. And it was so calm in my soul! It’s like I’m an extension of nature.”

30-year-old Yaser from Moscow feels free and natural in nature: “There is no need for pathos and beautiful images, they don’t play mind games, no one owes anyone, no one is outraged. It’s quiet there. You can finally listen to yourself, not others. You are not confused and not knocked down from your own interests.

It is hard to hear yourself when there is constant noise and din around. In nature, I’m in charge, I don’t compare myself with anyone. I live there. I dictate the rules myself and do not deny myself anything. There I rest, even if I get physically tired, climbing mountains or cycling for tens of kilometers.”

We often think about nature when the city absorbs us, and we begin to lose a sense of reality and vitality. Then we want to return to our fundamental principles. “If humanity has a cradle, then this is the whole planet Earth,” emphasizes the analytical psychologist, Jungian fairy tale therapist Alla Tretyakova. “And we want to be in this cradle in order to get our vitality, juices, potency, libido.”

The need for them increases in stressful situations and in conditions of psychological fatigue, observes environmental psychologist Barbara Bonfoy: make them a little happier.

The thing is that in the collective unconscious happiness is certainly associated with the idea of ​​rebirth and a return to the origins, to the most important thing, to the purity of nature, to naturalness and to freedom. Nature is ourselves, and not the false goals and social roles imposed on us by society.

In pursuit of power

When 38-year-old Lana realizes that she is “wounded, washed out and her emotions beat like overtrained muscles,” she leaves her native Krasnodar, making short forays into nature. “Jeeping suits well: to go off the track into the forests, make your way through mud, off-road, loose roads, cross the pass, go down to the sea and return along the night serpentine, which looks like silver in the moonlight. On the way, visit the beekeeper and eat honey, look into the stables, ride bareback. I return to the city emotionally ordered.”

Such forays into nature also help 47-year-old Ekaterina from Minsk to put herself in order: “I had a period when I coped only thanks to the fact that I came to the village, went out to the hill, sat under a tree and didn’t think about anything. Sometimes I had to go to bed. The absolute absence of human sounds: birds, the rustle of branches and grass from the wind, horses in the distance, dogs. This helped her to come to her senses in order to return to the city again.

“Inwardly, we understand the difference between landscapes from the height of the 12th floor and a cliff,” comments Alla Tretyakova. “Today we live in flats — shoe boxes, running away from spiritual poverty and internal total hunger in them. We need to squeeze into this city, otherwise, as we think, we will be lost. But as a result, we stop feeling our body and noticing its needs.”

In this state of the race lives a huge number of not only city dwellers, but also residents of rural areas, where there are more and more agricultural farms resembling factories, and less and less of what is grown by one’s own labor.

Meanwhile, when we find ourselves, for example, on the bank of a river, we quickly realize that we do not need as many clothes and food as supermarkets offer. We admire the landscape, listen to the silence and feel that we don’t particularly want to eat, and we guess that the water and the forest don’t care what brand we are wearing.

“We got out of our boxes, went out into the open, climbed a mountain – and the soul begins to straighten out,” Alla Tretyakova reflects. – Just according to the law of similarity: there is a cosmos above, and there is a microcosm inside us. For the connection of these two cosmos to take place, we need to open up. In nature, crumpled, crumpled like an old newspaper, the soul miraculously opens up.

It’s like returning to the epicenter of birth, which knows more about me than I do. We are all lost, we are lost mammoths huddled together in cities, we have created artificial values ​​​​from wounded pieces of the soul and are always trying to find something long lost.

part of a great whole

Once upon a time, our ancestors abandoned their village houses and went to the cities for a better life, away from hunger, from exhausting work. But almost every one of us still lives a peasant. “Before the First World War, before the revolution, it was a huge estate, to which most of our ancestors belonged,” explains Alla Tretyakova. “But we seem to have a broken picture of life in the village: we know about the hard peasant labor, but we don’t remember how the same peasant cracked seeds, looked at the sunset and thought about the meaning of life. In every village, every house always had a bench with views into the distance.

We are created not only to plow, but also to enjoy beauty. Where did the industrious contemplative go? “This part is hard for us to access,” the psychologist continues, “but when we come to nature, we find that there is a whole world around, huge, immense, that we are not born in a concrete box and do not live in a smartphone screen. That there is everything that we really need, and in order to get it, nothing is required in return. And then the inner space becomes different – ​​a powerful stream for ourselves.”

40-year-old Oksana spent about two years in Moscow, but returned back to the Kuriles: “It was hard in the city. They told me – “Well, go to the park, take a walk.” Once in the park, twice in the park, but how much can you? The park is tortured by people, it is almost inanimate, it does not have the strength to give me something. And I need a lot. I’m not used to economically eating from a natural battery, I always need a full-fledged source, a permanent connection.

At home, I look out the window – the water in the ocean is moving, the energy is already swelling, take it! I went out into the forest, life is ringing there, take it. I stood on the untrodden ground with my bare feet – as if stuck in an outlet. In the natural environment, we experience participation in a greater whole. “The joy that nature gives us is associated with a feeling of a full, happy, meaningful life,” says Barbara Bonfoy. “That famous ‘ocean feeling’ described by Romain Rolland in a letter to Freud dated December 5, 1927, is both a soothing and intoxicating feeling of belonging to the universe and the boundlessness of time.”

Animal soul

But how to determine exactly what makes us feel good: what it is, peace of mind, the absence of visual and sound stimuli, the return of sharpness of tactile sensations, the ability to breathe clean air, admiration for the shades of the sky, the ease of swimming in the sea, watching birds and animals and feeling “we are of the same blood – you and me”? Or maybe we are talking about the return of animal energy peacefully sleeping in us?

“I am a fisherman to the fullest,” says 40-year-old Ayaz from Kazan. “It’s cheaper and easier to buy fish, but it doesn’t bring such pleasure, excitement as pulling it out of the water with your own hands. And the feeling of interaction with nature, dissolution in it cannot be replaced by anything. I think that there is our natural habitat, and the city for people is like a zoo for animals. Comfortable, warm, plenty of food, but still want to go back to the wild.”

Genetic memory tells us that we are an integral part of the wild. “That is why shamanic healing practices are so popular now: in shamanism, contrary to classical therapeutic methods, no distinction is made between the spirits of people and animals,” says Barbara Bonfoy. – In the traditional culture of the American Indians, African or Asian peoples, it is customary to believe that any object has a soul, even stones or sand in the desert.

And the more we tend to look at nature as a living being with whom we can relate as equals, the more we care about preserving it in its pristine state, adopting a sustainable lifestyle that is so good for the planet.” We take with us back to the city a pebble from the coast or a mountain path.

“This is a sacred symbol, we are taking a piece of the world, which will then unfold in the imagination and memories into a real miracle,” continues Alla Tretyakova. – Touching nature is always a way to yourself and a search for a God equal to yourself. In the caves we feel like inside the mother’s womb. The whole area is alive, inspired. There is a soul in everything. We go to nature not for environmentally friendly products or air.

We go to heal the soul – hug the trees, lie down on the grass, drink from the sacred stream. We are not cardboard and flat – we are very deep: each of us has our own blue clouds inside, the Mariana Trench and tundra, there are underground grottoes where our “monsters” live, which sometimes need to be released, which is what we do in nature. And we need to be alone, in silence, in order to hear our own, true, natural voice behind the numerous voices of the city, the chiefs, those close to us.