Come back to your senses. Literally.

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If the world looks like it’s lost its senses, maybe it’s because… it has.

Literally. 

Our senses aren’t irrelevant afterthoughts to human life.

Sensory information is data; our bodies and our brains interpret that data to create our lived experience.

In one aspect, our senses are overwhelmed: by constant screen use, noise pollution, light pollution, exhaust fumes, pop-ups, traffic noise and exhaust, artificial flavors, overstimulation. 

On the flip side, we’re starving for rich, true sensory connection—for pleasure.

Pleasure, too, is data.

What if the craziness in the world is pointing to a primal need to return to… pleasure?

To take in data that soothes our nervous systems because of its evolutionary familiarity?

We forget, sometimes, that we evolved along WITH everything else. We are wired from our reciprocal connection with all that is—through our senses.

What might pleasureful senses feel like?

Sound: Birdsong, crickets, crashing waves, raindrops, wind rising and falling in the trees—sounds we’ve evolved along with, but don’t always get to hear, nowadays.

Touch: Dirt underneath our feet, the way different earths talk to our toes in different tongues. Human touch: playful, sensual, familiar, warm, safe. Co-regulating our nervous systems in community through safe, healing touch.

Taste: A palate rehabilitated from the onslaught of artifice, that can taste with delicacy the wholeness of whole food, discern seasonings, know satiation that comes from food as an immersive experience, not just fullness. The tentative touch of tongue to the unfamiliar. The knowing taste of tongue to sun-kissed skin after emerging from the sea.

Scent: The million different scents of earth after different types of rain. Fallen pine needles toasting in the summer sun. The varied terrain of our human bodies. Wet dog. Dry dog. Ocean. Trees in the morning. Night blooms.

Sight: Beauty. Horizons. The billion shades and patterns of ocean waters, sweetwater brooks, puddles, tide pools. The Milky Way, unadulterated by light pollution. A newly-fledged cardinal chasing its parent, vibrating its wings and chirping to be fed. A baby anole wagging its tail as it stalks bugs. Cumulonimbus clouds. The humble pinecone.

All of these sensory experiences speak to us; they remind our bodies what our life is about, how life feels through pleasure, where we find pain.

To come back to your senses, try feeding yourself with conscious pleasure.

This is how we re/member ourselves, and remember our place here on this planet.

This is how we come home.

What it means to rewild

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What it means to rewild

In ecology, rewilding is a movement that allows the natural world time to replenish after cultivation: time to rest, enrich, and realign with her innate intelligence, patterns, and rhythms.

What if humans allowed ourselves a similar process of rewilding? Of rediscovering our true nature?

This could look like…

• Learning how to tune into our intuition

• Rediscovering our instincts

• Learning how to listen to our bodily wisdom

• Naming our strategies for getting our needs and desires met

• Expressing ourselves authentically

• Taking off our masks so we can connect fully and freely

• Reclaiming our passion

• Claiming our truest power

• Creating: a gift, an idea, a poem, art, a project, a paradigm… whatever wildly unique offering you have singing beneath your skin, ready to surge through you. 

When we untangle ourselves from outdated conditioning, stories, and habits, allow ourselves space to sieve through our own rich soil, then plant seeds for a new vision and nourish our deepest desires… we bloom.

Our blood remembers how to sing.

I developed the Creative Rewilding journey as a regenerative process to restore ourselves to our natural state of curiosity, creativity, and vibrancy.

To reignite our fire.

To wander between our inner and outer landscapes.

To tune in to our unique gifts and values, align with patterns in nature.

To fall in love + lust with our own lives—so we can use that as scaffolding to “code” our life force and create what only we can create. 

To fire up our own life force so it can surge through us.

This is generative activism: We transform the world by aligning with its natural rhythms and patterns. And our own.

You know you have a gift you’re meant to offer the world.

The Creative Rewilding process will help you clarify what that is and shift limiting perspectives, so you can GIVE IT. It's needed.

Your greatest gift is someone else’s deepest desire. Will you give it?

Learn from nature’s patterns: radiate

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Learn from nature’s patterns: radiate

This one’s pretty obvious. Nature shows us endless examples of the radial:

• dandelions

• the sun and stars

• hands and fingers

• the iris of our eyes

• a drop rippling outward in the water

• sunflowers

The lesson of the radial?

Let yourself shine your radiance—in all directions.

Throw yourself out there—in all directions. 

AND

Receive from all directions.

Draw nourishment from all directions.

Put out feelers in all directions, so they can draw in the nurturing you need—into your core.

Let your own radiance feed your core: your heart.

This may be the secret wisdom of the radial: that it flings itself outward in all directions… because it knows all roads lead back to the heart.

Shine on, wild ones. Happy rewilding.

Learn from nature’s patterns: fractal

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Learn from nature’s patterns: fractal

Consider the fractal:

• tributaries of a river

• veins and arteries in our bodies

• a fern

• the branch of a tree

• spines of mountains

• leaves of a succulent

• our lungs and neurons

All are examples of fractals, a pattern that repeats itself over and over at different sizes as it grows and expands.

The fractal is another pattern in nature we see everywhere—but how can the fractal pattern bring us closer to ourselves?

Ever repeat a pattern over and over in your life, for better or worse?

That pattern was created because it works (or worked) in some way. Repeated over time, that pattern creates structure—it becomes its own blueprint and scaffolding for replicating itself. It’s a fractal.

Our brains LOVE this: predictable, repeatable patterns simply require less energy than doing things differently.

This is one reason it can be so hard to break a pattern—the wiring wants to perpetuate itself.

The good news is, this is also why truly changing a pattern ripples out into ALL areas of our lives—the pattern reconfigures itself at all levels.

This is why personal self-development is not different from leadership development is not different from relationship development is not different from culture-shifting.

Same skills—different scale.

That’s a fractal.

One example that’s common with my clients (and myself):

Learning how to have difficult conversations while maintaining authentic connection. This is something that will help you in conversations with your colleagues as much as with your partner and friends.

Same skills—different context. 

Is there a pattern in your life you’d like to rewire?

If you were to shift one pattern, what areas in your life could transform?

I’d love to know—share in the comments!

Learn from nature’s patterns: torus

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Learn from nature’s patterns: torus

A tree.

A human body.

An earthworm.

The Everything Bagel. (Anyone?)

Perhaps the universe itself.

What do these have in common? 

They’re all examples of the torus, a rotating, regenerative, self-perpetuating… doughnut.

A tree grows up from the ground; as it grows through seasons and cycles, it sheds leaves and disperses rain off its leaves, both of which nourish the roots and soil it needs to continue to grow.

A regenerative, self-nourishing cycle. Its own decay + shed serve its continued growth.

Human bodies, even earthworms do the same thing.

We ingest nutrients, they nourish and sustain us, then we release that sh*t back into the soil to fertilize what we need to grow to continue nourishing us—so the cycle continues. 

So beautifully symbolic. Such rich, earthy wisdom.

How can the pattern of the torus be useful? Ask yourself, in both a literal + metaphorical sense:

• What nourishes you? Are you proactively growing that?

• What do you need to shed in order to continue to grow?

• What healthy, regenerative systems + cycles can you create that continue to supply the nutrients you need without depleting the source?

• What systems and cycles do you see that are NOT self-sustaining?

As we continue to examine nature, nature feeds us back: with foods, beauty, wisdom. 

Regenerative cycles have an innate balance.

How can you find balance in relationship with yourself and the world?

Be the doughnut you wish to see in the world. 

Learn from nature’s patterns: spiral

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Learn from nature’s patterns: spiral

Have you ever noticed that spirals are everywhere?

Snail shells.

Pinecones.

Galaxies.

Flower petals.

Hurricanes. W

hirlpools.

Cabbage.

DNA.

Fingerprints.

Clearly, it’s a pattern that works—physical matter somehow knows how to organize itself this way.

In my mission to NOT recreate the wheel, again, that’s good enough for me.

This is the heart of Creative Rewilding, my sanctuary/launchpad for paradigm shifters:

• Exploring macrocosmic patterns and applying them to our individual circumstances.

• Realigning with the universe’s natural intelligence so we can tap into our own true nature and create what only we can create.

Our desires are what inspire us to journey. Patterns in nature are our guideposts.

There’s a theory of evolution called spiral dynamics that states that growth occurs along a spiral, not a straight line.

A spiral implies movement, but also expansion—it’s not a line drawing over itself, it’s a line expanding incrementally outward as it moves. Over and over again.

The spiral creates itself through repetition. One trip around isn’t a spiral. It needs to repeat the motion—while also expanding.

This pattern helps explain why we as humans repeat patterns—as we move along the spiral, we revisit the same spot, over and over.

BUT—we’re see that spot from different perspectives.

We’re not backsliding, we are seeing the same thing from a different vantage point.

It’s a great lesson in perspective-shifting.

When we can learn how to consciously move along the spiral with curiosity and compassion, examining it can give us incredibly rich information—about ourselves, and about life.

I invite you to play with spirals in your life.

Where are they showing up?

Where are you repeating a pattern, and how could that inform you if you were to look at it from a different perspective?

How are you expanding, even as you repeat motions?

Where are your desires leading you?

If you’re willing to share your insights, I’d love to hear about them! Share in the comments.

Learn from nature’s patterns: ebb + flow.

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Learn from nature’s patterns: ebb + flow.

One thing I’m clear on is that we don’t need to change the world—we need realign with its natural intelligence.

We are the ones who need to regain our balance.

If we can return to our true nature as creatures who are meant to live in a symbiotic relationship within an ecosystem called Earth, we’ll naturally create healthy, healing communities, practices, systems, environments, and psyches.

Nature’s patterns are guideposts for us—they are feedback for us as we seek balance.

• The reciprocity of ebb and flow, like our friends the tides, the breath, vibration.

• The self-nourishing, regenerative torus, like our friends the trees.

• The spiral of growth and focus, from the snail’s shell to spiral galaxies.

• The fractal of iteration, like the fern’s fronds.

• The exploration and delivery system of branches, like our rivers and arteries.

• The radiance of the radial throwing energy in all directions, from our friends the dandelions to the life-giving sun.

These patterns are repeated, over and over, throughout space and time, from macro to micro.

If these patterns work that well at every scale, for billions of years, I figure they’re good enough for me.

We really don’t need to recreate the wheel, just look around to see what patterns already surround us—and embody them.

One of nature’s most basic patterns is the simple dynamic of ebb and flow.

Growth + rest.

Give + receive.

Spend + replenish.

Day + night.

Yin + yang.

Expansion + contraction.

Summer + winter.

Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking of these as polarities. They are simply different parts of a circuit, a self-healing cycle that balances itself as it moves through the journey. A beautiful balance of reciprocity and symbiosis.

What if we could embody the full pattern ourselves? What if we didn’t shame the contraction, the need for rest, the shadows in the dark as enemies locked in battle with their opposites, but rather saw them as integral parts of an ongoing process?

Not saboteurs, simply agents of balance.

Try it out: play with ebb and flow.

Where is your life in flow?

Where is it in ebb?

Where might you need to spend more time or energy in order to find your own balance?

Honor your cycles and seasons as journeys you get to walk, not fixed destinations—there is simply no such thing in a universe as dynamic as ours.

Rediscover your true nature by reconnecting to nature’s patterns. Tell me how it goes? I’d love to know!