The Experiment
The 10 Territories of The Experiment 🌿
Over the next 10 weeks we will move through 10 areas of life - one at a time, with full attention and intention.
Think of each as a territory we enter together. We are here to explore, to see it clearly, feel it fully, and experiment with what shifts when we bring conscious awareness to it.
Week 1 — Body
Week 2 — Mind
Week 3 — Spirit
Week 4 — Time
Week 5 — Stillness
Week 6 — Creativity
Week 7 — Relationship
Week 8 — Nature
Week 9 — Vision
Week 10 — Integration
Each week builds on the last. By week 10 you will have touched every layer of your life - intentionally, experimentally, with awareness you didn't have before.
Week 8 Menu — Nature 🌿
Welcome to your eighth open buffet.
This week our territory is Nature - and I want to begin with something that may sound obvious but is rarely actually felt: we are not separate from nature. We are nature. The same intelligence that moves water through a river moves blood through our body. The same force that turns a seed into a tree turns food into thought, grief into wisdom, experience into soul. We are not human beings who visit nature when we need to decompress. We are nature that has temporarily forgotten what it is.
Most of us were raised inside a civilization that treats the natural world as a resource, a backdrop, or a recreational option. We go to nature to recover from life, as though life and nature were two different things. This week we begin to close that gap - not by going somewhere special or doing something dramatic, but by shifting the quality of attention we bring to the living world that is already around us.
Nature as a spiritual teacher is not a metaphor. Every tradition that has produced genuine wisdom has done so through direct, sustained contact with the non-human world. The desert fathers, the forest monks, the mountain yogis, the indigenous elders, the Celtic mystics - all understood that something essential becomes available in honest contact with the living world that cannot be accessed any other way. This week we find out what that is for each of us, in our own specific place, with our own specific attention.
Below is your menu. Choose one from each category, something that genuinely calls to you, let your instinct lead.
Trust your first instinct.
➕ ADD: choose one nature practice to bring in this week
A daily sit spot - choose one specific place in nature and return to it every day this week at roughly the same time. Not a walk, not a hike. The same spot, every day, for at least 15 minutes. Just sitting. Just watching. What you notice on day seven will be completely different from what you noticed on day one, and that difference is the teaching.
Barefoot contact with earth once a day - grass, soil, sand, stone. No shoes, no mat between you and the ground. Even five minutes. The practice of earthing is one of the oldest and most consistently reported regulating experiences across every culture that has lived in contact with the land. Your nervous system was designed for this.
A nature altar or daily offering - bring something from the living world into your home this week. A branch, a stone, a handful of soil, a flower, a bowl of water set in sunlight. Place it somewhere you will see it daily. Make a small, wordless offering to it each morning - a bow, a breath, a moment of genuine acknowledgment that this is alive and that you are grateful. Some time ago I cam across the Instagram and this website of Australian woman who turned Earth Altars into her personal healing and then, into a movement which is beautiful and inspiring https://www.earthaltering.com.au/
Tracking one natural cycle for the full week - the movement of the sun across your space each day, the behavior of one specific animal or insect near where you live, the growth of something in a garden, the changing light at the same hour each morning. Not to analyze it. Let something non-human become familiar. On this last full moon Rob brought my attention to something obvious and fascinating at the same point - as we were watching the position of the bright full moon, he acknowledged that each full moon sits differently on our land, being in a different constellation. We also notice how sun changes its position with the help of our solar panels that need to be adjusted on the equinoxes.
One meal eaten entirely outside this week, slowly, without a phone - not a picnic with distractions. A deliberate act of eating in the presence of the living world. Taste the food. Feel the air. Let the boundary between inside and outside become a little more porous.
Your own choice - any practice that brings you into more conscious, sustained contact with the non-human living world.
➖ REMOVE: choose one thing to release this week
The glass and screen between you and the sky - the habit of experiencing weather, light, seasons, and natural events through a window or a photograph rather than through your actual body. This week, step outside for the first five minutes of weather you would normally watch from inside. Feel the rain. Stand in the wind. Let the temperature arrive without climate control mediating it.
Nature as backdrop - the unconscious habit of moving through natural environments while still mentally inside your own head, using nature as a setting for your thoughts rather than as a living presence to actually meet. This week, when you are in any natural environment, practice putting your thoughts down for at least a few minutes and letting the place itself have your attention.
The belief that you need to go somewhere special to access nature - the idea that your real nature practice requires a national park, a mountain, a beach, a retreat center. This week, find nature in the ordinary place you already are. A weed growing through concrete is alive. The sky above a city is still the sky. A houseplant is still a living being. Start here.
Indoor air as your only air - if you spend most of your days in climate-controlled indoor environments, this week make at least one deliberate choice each day to be outside without a destination. Not to exercise, not to commute. Just to be in open air with no task attached.
The speed that makes the natural world invisible - the pace at which most of us move through outdoor environments means we see almost nothing. Trees, birds, insects, soil, weather - all of this becomes wallpaper when we move fast enough. This week, slow down in at least one outdoor moment each day below the speed at which the natural world disappears.
Your own choice - any habit that keeps the living world at a managed, mediated distance.
🌀 DEEPEN: choose one to commit to for the full week
Learn the name of five living things in your immediate environment that you currently cannot name - a tree, a bird, a plant, an insect, a cloud formation, a star. Not from an app, if possible. From a field guide, from someone who knows, or from patient observation. To name something is to begin a relationship with it. This week, begin five. Recently we had a visit from a friend, who just came out of an intense and powerful retreat with a Mayan elder. That elder asked the people in the group to name 5 mountains and 5 rivers in their country. She was asking, how do you live on a land which you have no relationship to, not even basic knowledge of it…
Explore one indigenous or traditional ecological worldview - the Lakota concept of Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ (all my relations, the understanding that all life is related and deserving of respect), the Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku (forest bathing, the medicine of simply being among trees), the Celtic animist relationship with place as alive and inhabited by spirit, the Vedic understanding of the five elements as the body of the divine. Choose one. Give it 30 minutes of genuine engagement. Let it reframe where you live. I have shared how I allow myself to periodically go naked in our jungle, exposing myself to the sun, to the trees, elements and mosquitoes :)
A seven-day nature journal - each day this week, write one paragraph about something in the natural world you actually observed that day. Not your feelings about it. What you saw, heard, smelled, touched. The color of the light at a specific time. The sound a specific bird made. The texture of a specific bark. Observation as devotion. This is actually teaching us to see (like in the Avatar movie).
Spend one extended period in nature completely alone and without a task this week - minimum one hour, no phone, no book, no journaling during. Just presence in a living place. This is the practice that every wisdom tradition has asked of its students at some point - the solo time in the wilderness, the vision quest, the forest retreat. You do not need to go far. You need to go alone and you need to stay long enough for the mind to settle and the place to begin speaking.
Bring your existing spiritual practice outside for the full week - your morning practice, your meditation, your mantra, your prayer - take it outside. Let the sky be your ceiling. Let the earth be your floor. Notice what changes when practice is no longer contained by walls.
Your own choice. And the question for this whole week: if the natural world is alive and intelligent and in constant communication - what has it been trying to tell you that you have been too indoor and too busy to hear?
A few notes before you choose 🌿
Read the menu, read the moon cycle guide and listen to yourself. There is no right answer and no comparison. What one person removes another may need to add.
Once you have chosen please write your three choices in your notebook with today's date. If you can, make it your phone screen saver (using Canva if you fancy fancy :) or by just typing it in notes and adding to the screen saver) so you have a constant reminder. Then share them here in the group so we can hold each other's intentions.
I will share individual guidance from your natal charts after you place your choices, in the private messages. General recommendations aligned with the lunar cycle are on the separate page.