by John Davis, Diamond Approach student and teacher
Many, many people have found awakening, nourishment, intimacy with themselves, and direct contact with essence through experiences in nature. I sure have. For almost as long as I have been doing the Diamond Approach, I have also pursued wilderness experiences and connection with the natural world. This nature-based part of my path has expanded my understanding and maturation, and I have come to see nature as an arena in which the soul can come to know its true nature, find guidance, and develop its potential more fully. The Diamond Approach continues to provide the foundation for my path, and I have come to see experiences in the natural world as means of deepening my realization of the Diamond Approach’s teachings.
For me, and for those I have guided on wilderness retreats the past 20 years, direct and immediate contact with the natural world has exposed more of the soul’s innate aliveness, tenderness, flow, and eventually, its transparency to being. Being in nature, especially wilder places, tends to dissolve the crusty, uptight, avoidant, asleep, and deadened structures of the ego-self, leading to dis-identification from conditioned habits, self-images, representations of others and the world, and object relations—the stuff of the personality. When this dis-identification happens, being and its essence are naturally more available. The natural world mirrors the soul’s inherent strength, power, sensitivity, joy, and support. All about us, we see birth, death, and transformation, and the soul relaxes into its ongoing process of transformation. In a word, wild nature is free, and immersed in wild nature, the soul is more free.
There are a number of ways to bring the Diamond Approach into nature experiences, whether they are watching a sunset, strolling in a park, or backpacking in the mountains. They all start, of course, with being there, as awake and open as possible. Recognizing and penetrating the obstacles and resistances to being there is also helpful, if not necessary. The Diamond Approach’s teachings and practices apply directly to this work, deepening our presence. Spending time in nature exposes our instinctual responses, giving us the opportunity to explore, understand, and mature them. Applying the understanding of object relations to our representations of nature reveals our projections onto the natural world and the ways we see nature as a danger, an object to be used, a home and family, or a greater self.
Beyond helping us be free of these representations, the Diamond Approach reveals our ultimate non-duality with nature. The Diamond Approach’s understanding of the boundless dimensions is so very descriptive of nature mysticism, from that of indigenous peoples to current transpersonal and eco-psychological research. The characteristics and movement of the soul easily maps onto a pan-cultural, earth-based fourfold model of nature, a model which includes the four cardinal directions and the seasons as well as aspects of human nature, the body’s centers, and ways of being in the world. Though simple on the surface, this model has been remarkably rich for me, helping me contact my soul more deeply in a wide variety of circumstances. Many people have found an initiatory quality to wilderness experiences, whether deliberately on vision fasts and other wilderness rites of passage or not. Such nature-based initiations and rites of passage not only bring deeper meaning to life transitions; I feel they are a means through which the personal essence or pearl matures. And so on... These are a few of the fruitful connections I have found in bringing the Diamond Approach into the natural world. No doubt, there are others yet to be discovered.
I encourage you to discover these connections for yourself. No matter how much contact you have with wild nature, opening to a bit more exposure will help your journey. Bringing a plant into an otherwise sterile room, working a garden, walking in a local open space or sitting by the water, spending time watching clouds or driving out beyond the city lights to discover the Milky Way for yourself, spending a day from sunrise to sundown in nature, or participating in an extended wilderness retreat—these, and countless other practices, are all good ways of increasing your contact with nature, your soul’s inner nature, and ultimately true nature.