Beech Teachings
In 2018 I was walking my dog near my home on Blakeney Hill in the Forest of Dean. It was a spectacular day, I stopped to take in the sunlight moving through the gently swaying leaves, beautifully lighting up the forest floor. I suddenly felt a presence, as though someone had walked up and stopped behind me, it turned out to be a beech tree making me aware of its energetic presence.
The communication was without words, a felt experience, without labels and definitions, an awareness of energy transformations and emotional ripples. Time stopped, I was overwhelmed by the many processes taking place within the tree; I could feel the conversion of sunlight into sugars and the pull of vast amounts of water sucked up from the earth, and the interactions of the insects birds and microscopic life. Then I became aware of all of the other energy transformations around me, the other trees, the insects, birds and creatures interacting with those trees and the mycelium connecting the trees, which then expanded into the inter-connection of everything, including myself and my own interactions with all that was around me and out into the world and universe. Fully connected. BOOM!
When the experience had passed and I found myself back in the forest with the familiarity I was used to, I laughed out loud with tears in my eyes and joy in my heart, having been informed, on physically ‘knowing’ level, that life, and also death are gifts, each sustaining the other in the ever-spiralling dance. To be alive and conscious in this process is a miraculous gift and to die and feed the eternal flow is just as much of an honour.
As you can imagine, my encounter with the Beech tree had a profound effect on me, it came completely out of the blue and I had no idea how it came about.
I started by reading The Hidden life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. As I told people about the experience and what I was reading I was recommended other books: Overstory by Richard Powers, To Speak to the Trees by Diana Beresford Kruger, Wild by Jay Griffiths, Think like a Tree by Sarah Spencer, Evolutionary Herbalism by Sajah Popham. All these books resonated with me, all of the authors obviously have a reverence for nature and helped me understand that a) I wasn’t crazy and b) there is some deep wisdom we can learn from nature if only we could understand the language.
Then a good friend recommended Radical Wholeness by Philip Shepherd, When I read his example of how a tree is connected with everything, I knew that Philip had an understanding of the deep connection of everything. His writing and lessons helped me to realise I didn’t need to ‘understand’ my experience with the beech tree but gave me a whole new way to understand how our society conditions us to live in the head, separated from the wisdom of the body and how important it is to reconnect with our whole being by shifting our awareness lower into the pelvic area in order to embody the present moment and feel the world moving through us.
I bring this awareness of the present moment into my Soma Breath and Qi Gong practices to help reconnect us to ourselves and the living world.