There is a reason it is called Deep Healing Woods, and I can already feel why as I experience it for the first time. Something in me begins to soften almost immediately, not because I am trying to change anything, but because the environment itself invites me to let go of the tension I do not realize I am carrying.
This experience is especially meaningful for me because it is my first time in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. I grew up in the woods of Idaho and have always felt deeply connected to nature, but I spent almost thirty years living in New York City, where my relationship to nature became something I visited rather than lived inside. Now, being at Blackberry Farm and teaching in this environment feels like stepping into a completely new expression of the natural world I thought I already knew.
Nature does not ask me to arrive differently than I am. It does not require anything from me. It simply meets me where I am, and slowly, I start to come back into my senses in a way that feels almost instinctual rather than intentional.
I notice the smell of crisp morning air in a way I do not in my everyday life. I feel sunlight on my face with more awareness, like my skin is remembering how to receive it. I hear birds in a way that feels less like background noise and more like part of a living conversation happening all around me. Even the trees feel different here, layered and vast in a way that makes me feel both small and deeply held at the same time.
Even something as simple as water tastes different here. It feels cleaner and more alive, as if my body is finally fully receiving it because I am not rushing past the moment.
I do not think we talk enough about how easily we leave our bodies when we are stressed. We live in our minds most of the time, moving from thought to thought, planning, anticipating, managing, and trying to stay ahead of everything. Over time, that becomes so normal that we stop noticing how far away from ourselves we have gone.
But nature has a way of bringing us back without effort. There is nothing to solve here, nothing to improve, nothing to figure out. And in that absence of pressure, something in me settles.
I saw something recently on Instagram that was so powerful. It showed images of nature alongside the human body, veins compared to branches, patterns in leaves compared to the lines in skin. The reminder was simple but powerful, that we are not separate from this. We are part of it.
And yet in our daily lives, we so often treat our bodies as something to manage, correct, or critique instead of something to inhabit and understand. Even in the most loving relationship with ourselves, we can still fall into moments of judgment, comparison, or frustration.
I know I do.
But when I am here, something shifts. I stop analyzing my body and start living inside it again. My breath deepens without effort. My shoulders drop without instruction. My attention moves out of my thinking mind and back into sensation.
In those moments, I remember something simple but grounding. I am not only a mind moving through life. I am a body experiencing it.
And maybe that is what healing actually is. Not becoming someone new, but returning to contact with what has been here all along. The breath, the ground beneath my feet, the senses that bring me back into the present moment.
This week’s mantra:
I am a work of art
Close your eyes and let yourself say it slowly, without needing to analyze it or earn it. Just let it land in the body.
And as you do, remember this: we admire the intelligence and beauty of the natural world without questioning it. We don’t ask a tree to justify its shape or a river to prove its worth. We just see it, and we know it belongs exactly as it is.
Maybe we are meant to meet ourselves the same way. With the same ease. The same reverence. The same sense that nothing about us needs to be corrected in order to be worthy of being seen.