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The Buddha looks pretty regulated, doesn’t he? Many of us are drawn into meditation practice by the promise of his qualities – steady, easeful, composed presence, contentment with things just as they are. It’s nice to imagine we could embody this state all the time. The fantasy is that we might be still and equanimous enough to sit in the eye of the storm when it arises, peacefully witness the commotion without getting pulled this way or that. This would be to live out our Buddha nature.

But wouldn’t we be missing something? Doesn’t the unperturbed Buddha also look a bit…dull? Isn’t his serenity a bit…lacklustre? Has he ever surfed a wave? Danced ecstatically? Orgasmed without abandon? Has he fallen in love and had his heart broken? Isn’t this the stuff of life? 

Maybe Buddha nature is attainable – maybe more so (but also not guaranteed) for folks who live in monasteries, reduce distractions and renounce worldly pleasures. But for those of us who live in the everyday world, who engage in relationships (of all sorts), who brave parenthood or entrepreneurship or creative endeavours, we are bound to expose ourselves to experiences that will cause excitation and devastation, experiences that will cause dysregulation.

To be regulated is to stay within an optimal state of arousal – not too hyperaroused (excitable or revved up) and not too hypoaroused (numbed out or shut down). But dysregulation is baked into life. From the moment we exit the womb we are highly dysregulated. We come out screaming and crying, seeking to be soothed (co-regulated). As infants our regulation is entirely dependent on others. As we grow up, we have more capacity to regulate ourselves. In the same way that the mind wanders and we bring it back in meditation, our nervous systems get dysregulated and we (try to) bring it back to regulation. Regulation is a practice as much as it is a state.

When we are dysregulated, the opportunities we have to engage in life and with others, to learn, grow and heal from trauma are impeded. Mindfulness can help us track our levels of arousal and remind us to engage in practices that bring us back into regulation. In hyper-arousal our energy spikes, and we may experience a racing heart and/or mind, jumpiness, muscle tension, hypervigilance. When we notice hyperarousal, we might be able to regulate by bringing our energy down through things like deep belly breathing, feeling our feet, orienting to the room, using the imagination to visit a calm or safe place. In hypo-arousal our energy drops, and we may feel numb, fatigued, foggy, depressed, checked out. When we notice hypoarousal, we might be able to regulate by bringing our energy up through introducing rhythm to the body (e.g. tapping, walking, dancing), deep belly breathing, cold plunges, making plans that connect us to the future. We can’t reason our way out of dysregulation. Dysregulation is experienced physiologically, not psychologically. It must, as a result, be processed through the body. 

I used “might” as a qualifier because there are times when these tools don’t do the trick. In my experience as a human and a therapist, the issue isn’t that you aren’t breathing deeply enough; the issue is that life is sometimes overwhelming and the reality is that we can feel dysregulated for long stretches of time. At least that’s been my reality, many times over.

In difficult times I do my best to remember and utilize as many regulating practices as I can. I also do my best to hold space for my experience as it is. I try to remind myself that to be human is to be vulnerable, and the fact that I’ve gone into dysregulation is not a problem in itself; it’s a very human experience. Just like in meditation, fighting and judging my experience doesn’t get me anywhere. This capacity to be with myself as I am, with less judgment, is one of the greatest gifts of my meditation practice. Judgment can add a layer of shame and self-blame, deepening the fall into dysregulation. Instead of judging, the practice is to notice the hypoarousal and do what we can to state-shift, with an approach of loving-kindness. In this way, the attempt to return to regulation is a practice, not a guarantee. Over time, when our environments are safe enough, we might be able to notice and to bring in practices that support regulation.

I also want to name that to have the capacity to be regulated is a privilege in more ways than one. It is first of all a privilege to feel safe enough in our bodies to be regulated. Feeling safe enough might come from being born into a body that is not othered and in some way discriminated against in society. Many people of colour, women and gender diverse people may never have the privilege of feeling fully safe in their bodies. In addition, feeling safe enough might also come from having had very attuned caregivers and not experiencing very much trauma or neglect, especially early in life. This is not everyone’s experience. These foundations of feeling safe enough and having good enough caregivers can give us a baseline of regulation. With a strong, regulated baseline, we have more innate flexibility to come back from dysregulating experiences and in that more opportunities to choose how we respond in life, rather than react to life. So again, people who are more regulated aren’t just better at breathing; they may have been graced with circumstances that gave them a more solid, regulated foundation to work from.

Regulation is all about bringing the system back into balance. Different approaches are likely to help different people at different times; no one approach is better than any other. Like mindfulness, the more we practice regulation, the more our bodies remember how to regulate and the easier it is to return from states of dysregulation. Over time, being regulated increases our capacity to be present to more and more challenging experiences. Through mindfulness, we expand our “window of tolerance” – the range of experiences in which we can be regulated –  and can embody more of the Buddha’s composure more of the time.

While we hear a lot these days about self-regulation, it’s important to remember that we don’t have to go it alone. Being in the presence of regulated people or animals, sitting by water or against a tree are meaningful ways to co-regulate. Wherever we are starting from, good teachers, therapists, loved ones, safe enough environments and communities can, over time, help us regulate. We are, after all, social mammals whose nervous systems naturally entrain with others. 

The Buddha’s regulation can serve as an inspiration but if we hold that caricature of regulation as an expectation, we risk denying the fullness of our natural, embodied, human experiences and the beauty of our capacity to nurture and be nurtured in times of distress. 

Somatics is the practice of bringing the body into the counselling room. As Besel Van Der Kolk’s famous book is titled, “The Body Keeps the Score.” What he means by this is that the body holds all the trauma we experience, past and present. Traumatic events (big and small) become stored in the nervous system and the body’s way of holding itself. So, the theory goes, to release trauma, we must work at the level of the body.

Traditional talk therapy works with the mind; the left hemisphere of the brain does the processing, logically connecting dots, reframing, understanding things in context, working with forgiveness of self and others, perhaps. The challenge with this approach is that it works at the tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t get to the driving force underneath – imagine disembodied talking heads. Trauma lives below the surface and often beyond memory, usually because trauma is when something happens “too much and too soon” for the psyche to process. Below the surface, trauma is often replayed in the nervous system as if it were happening in present time. As Van Der Kolk explains, trauma has no time stamp. Trauma stored in the body is trauma stored in the body – it is as though the trauma is happening now, running on a loop – not an isolated event that happened and was completed years ago. While talking can sometimes help us make sense of things in a coherent narrative, it doesn’t help us fully process the impacts of trauma or undo the bracing or patterning that trauma creates when it manifests physically in our bodies.

Somatics also works with nonverbal, often unconscious material. Imagine someone who is sharing about the pain of a breakup while smiling. This shows a cognitive dissonance – the expression on the face does not match the emotion of loss and grief. By watching the body’s expressions, we can start to notice some deeper truths about what is happening for us. The smile may be a socially conditioned way of signaling that everything will be ok, no one needs to worry about my well-being, “I’m fine.” Or perhaps the smiling means that the relationship was really not serving the client and it is a relief to be out of it. Only by inquiring and looking into small details like facial expressions, gestures, postures and breath can we catch such nuances.

Once we are aware of how our body is expressing or holding our unconscious material and our traumas, we can work at a deeper level to unpack, re-pattern and honour the wisdom of the body and the unconscious. Both provide strong signals as to what our psyche and nervous system need for their healing. Working somatically and with the unconscious in counselling can help us tune into the subtle language of these two facets of our experience and bring this awareness into everyday life to be more consonant with their deeper selves.

“There are no straight lines in nature” — Antoni Gaudi

I am gender queer, sexually queer, cognitively queer, relationally queer. Queer through and through. And through this recognition I feel liberated. I am proud to share the journey that helped me recognize my true nature.

In addition to moving, my studies in psychology and practices in expanded states of consciousness helped guide my inquiry into my true nature. I began to notice how my own identity had been shaped by my unique upbringing, situated within a collective neoliberal, dualistic Judeo-Christian, hetero-normative culture. Identifying as a straight woman helped me fit in and belong, to an extent. Why would I question that? Fitting in is a primal survival need. It felt good to belong.

But, the more I allowed myself to hold my personal identity as an open question rather than a fixed gender or sexual orientation, the more I recognized that the binary and siloed categories on offer did not resonate with my beingness.

Owning my queerness was initially a process of shedding the default norms that were assigned to me based on my biology and the expectations of others. I’d accepted these norms as core parts of my identity throughout my life without question. In recent years, I’ve come to see that these norms double as structures of oppression. By establishing what’s normal, we also establish what’s “abnormal”. Our human nature tends to fear, ostracise and persecute anything outside the established norm because it threatens a sense of belonging and the ability to neatly categorize and quickly predict (skills we needed in the past to stay safe in the wilds).

If you ask me how I feel, I’d tell you that I feel both feminine and masculine. I also feel wild and animalistic, at times. I’m attracted to both men and women…and beings in between, including plants and animals and words and music. I’m attracted to what I find beautiful. I make a practice of following my bliss. In this culture, some of these attractions and even the radical act of following your bliss are labelled as queer. That is, outside hetero-normative, capitalistic paradigms. To me, these attractions are the most natural movements I have the privilege to make.

These days, embracing my queerness (and this is a different process/definition for everyone) is as much an embracing of my fullest, paradoxical, indeterminate and mysterious self as it is a shedding of labels like straight and woman.

The more I take an honest look within myself, the more I recognize myself as essentially fluid. I am not an image I am trying to create (though I sometimes dabble in social media). Certain identities feed my ego — therapist, guide, community organizer, consciousness explorer. But these are roles. They are not who I am. I change — emotionally, physically, psychically… All the time.

Meditation has helped me on this journey of recognition and acceptance. Each time I sit, I sit within the ever-changing nature of my experience. Practicing pure awareness helps me find ease and equanimity within that. I love to remember that I “don’t know” (a zen practice) much about anything, including myself. I’m slowly and surely replacing judgmental thinking with genuine curiosity. And as I attend to myself through regular meditation where I often planting seeds of loving awareness into my own heart, I am much more able to compassionately attend to others.

The study of ecopsychology and the works of Bill Plotkin have been speaking to me lately. Ecopsychology, the combination of human psychology with ecology, is the study of interdependence and connection among all forms of life on earth. Ecopsychology situates the human psyche and each ‘individual’ psyche as a node in a vast, interconnected network. In this shift from ego-identification to eco-identification, ecopsychology is off-centre (or de-centers the self) and is an ‘abnormal’ — or queer — paradigm. It would have to be, it’s wild.

Within an ecopsychological frame, each human is no longer an independent unit, apart from others. Rather, all humans are all already a part of their environments. From an ecopsychological perspective, our wounds are symptoms of our disconnections from the natural world and others; our health can be recovered by consciously affirming and strengthening our connectivity to the natural world and those around us.

Ecopsychology is much more than a response to an individual’s well-being and self-understanding. Ecopsychology is a response to our climate crisis and a call to action. When we can see how environmental degradation is self-degradation, when we can listen deeply to the earth, the elements, the stars, and each other, we can nourish and be nourished by the abundant connectivity of our beings. Nature, of which we are a part, speaks a language of creative resilience and renewal. The answers to our current predicaments (personal and collective) are within nature and nature is reflected within our selves. It is all right here if we can become still enough and wise enough to listen.

From Quantum theory to the theory of evolution to the current pandemic — the proof of our already existing connectivity to each other, our environments and the unseen has never been more obvious. In our search for health and wholeness, we must re-member ourselves as co-extensive of and co-existent with our physical and social environments. Meditative practices like forest bathing and establishing sit spots are tools of this trade.

As I deepen into questions of identity and ecopsychology, I am coming to experience the nature and the wilderness that appear beyond or outside of me as extensions of the nature and the wilds within me. Meditation offers us the opportunity to sit within ourselves and to clarify our true natures. And what many of us find in this experience is that we each contain a wholeness of being that is nondual. Not this-Not that. As we see in ecopsychology, the ego is not separate from ecology but contained within it. To paraphrase Rumi, we are not the drop within the ocean but the ocean within the drop. And just like the ocean, our tides shift, waves form and crash, storms brew, waters calm. As in nature, our experiences of self, “other” and the world are ever-changing. The path of meditation gifts us with teachings and practice in the arts of grace, fluidity and acceptance.

I take care of my canoe and my body so as to be able to reach the other shore.

An urgent message, a past experience with which to live the present, an existence in which life is not absent.

Have you still not talked to the trees or listened to the mountains ?

Have you still not made a pact with our brothers, the animals ?

Have you still not learned the language of the clouds ?

Come and reconcile yourself to nature.

• My Canoe, author unknown

Ecopsychology: Working with and within nature

We often conceptualize the challenges we face as disconnected from the larger world around us. For example, we might feel and understand our experiences of depression or anxiety as our personal challenges to bear and overcome. This way of thinking makes sense as traditional psychotherapy has worked on the premise that the client has a problem, related to their own ego structure, which can be fixed through clinical interventions, personal growth and development. Along these lines, the dominant Western paradigm is premised on an ego-centric perspective in which it is natural to place ourselves and our problems in the center of our own worlds. Alternatively, ecopsychology invites a shift from ego-centric identification to an eco-centric perspective, expanding the way we see and make sense of ourselves in the world.

Ecopsyhcology as a framework for healing:

“Interdependence is the ongoing recognition that we are not separate from other beings or the world around us. Life is a web of infinite relationships.” Djuna Deveraux

Ecopsychology bridges human psychology with ecology, focusing in on the interdependence and interconnections among all forms of life on earth. Ecopsychology situates the human psyche and each “individual” psyche as nodes in a vast, interconnected, relational network within and among all beings. With all beings, we include everything in the world around us, sentient and nonsentient, including, for example, entities like mountains, rivers and stars, as well as death, pollution and decay. 

From an ecological point of view, nothing exists on its own or individually or independently; everything exists in an interconnected set of relationships. As humans, we are part and parcel of larger ecosystems. As a result of our relationships to the world around us, we are impacted both positively and negatively by our surrounding environments. Our health and wholeness depends on the health of our environments. 

So, within an ecopsychological frame, each human and each psyche is not an independent unit, apart from others. Rather, humans are all already a part of their environments and surrounding communities. This approach understands psychological wounds like grief, depression, or anxiety, as symptoms of disconnections from the natural world and from others. The painful feelings we carry may be empathic responses to our environments; we may be responding to the destruction of nature on our planet, unhealthy cultures or disconnected communities. So, ecopsychology holds that our wellbeing depends on consciously affirming and strengthening our connectivity to the natural world and to those around us. 

Ecopsyhology in practice:

Working with nature in mind has the power to change our mindsets and our ways of being with ourselves, each other, and the natural world.  In our search for health and wholeness, ecopsychology encourages us to re-member ourselves as co-existent with our physical and social environments. Answers to our challenges (personal and collective) can often be found and reflected within the natural world. 

Ecopsychology encourages us to see how the renewal and resilience of the natural world is reflected within ourselves. For example, we might feel like our world is on fire, or that our love in a relationship is dying. We might then notice how a forest fire is regenerative, or how a dead tree becomes home to a vibrant network of fungi. In this way, ecopsychology can involve using metaphors and processes from the natural world to frame and make sense of our experiences. 

We can also bring our experiences of nature into the counselling room to be processed and integrated. For example, if we are drawn to mountains, we might integrate the strength and sturdiness of a mountain into our own sense of ourselves. If we are drawn to rivers, we might look at the flow of life energy within ourselves. We might practice feeling the elements of earth, air, fire and water in our bodies. Or we might connect imaginally to spaces in nature that help us feel relaxed and rejuvenated. 

Outdoor sessions are another powerful and often fun way to work ecopsychologically. Working in natural settings enables us to draw on the direct and immediate experience of nature as a resource in the healing process. In an outdoor session you and your counsellor might sit by the ocean, take a stroll in the forest, learn about the medicinal and energetic properties of plants, build an outdoor shelter, or co-create a ritual. Practices like forest bathing and establishing sit spots (places we regularly visit to sit meditatively in nature) are also ways of working with nature. 

The possibilities for working with nature are vast, often creative and meaningful. Outdoor sessions can teach us how to connect with nature in an intentional and therapeutic way. These practices and the connection to nature as a resource can be drawn on outside of counselling sessions and integrated into everyday life.

Mindfulness meditation has come to be an important part of my practice as a counsellor. With its origins in Eastern philosophy and specifically some branches of Buddhism, mindfulness became popularized in the West in the 70s by a number of teachers and psychologists. Famously, Jon Kabbat Zin, a student of Zen Buddhism created an eight-week evidenced-based course for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). An early adopter, Kabbat Zin’s work from 1979 remains a widely successful, secular program that blended science with Buddhist principles in a course of study founded “moment to moment awareness” for a Western audience. A number of (white) people are credited with “having brought Buddhism to the West,” including Ram Dass, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Mark Epstein. Each are therapists, writers and teachers themselves.

Mindfulness or meditation (which I use interchangeably) is the practice of moment to moment awareness, as referenced above. When we are aware of each moment, fully present to it, we cannot be stuck in the past or projecting into the future. We are simply here, now. And in this moment is a silence, a presence, a peace, a breath. Another moment follows. And on and on. Anxiety is premised on thoughts ruminations about the past and projections onto the future. When we practice mindfulness, the cultivation of presence takes the space of anxiety. When we do heart opening and acceptance practices in the moment, it is hard for depression to keep its grip.

There are a multitude of ways to practice mindfulness from eyes open to eyes closed, from practices called “do nothing” of the Zen tradition, to practices where we actively cultivate heart energy (Metta) to visualizations to mantras. The list goes on. Many counsellors, myself included, look to Buddhism to inform their therapeutic practices – whether through the adoption of Buddhist principles like non-attachment, suffering, impermanence, groundlessness, radical uncertainty, compassion (again the list goes on) or through the direct application of meditative practices as a resource in session and beyond.

I often teach mindfulness meditation to clients as a resource for our work in the room and for home practice, and as a tool for facing the everyday world. Sometimes the work we do in session requires a very fine-tuned, grounded attention that is hard to access in our default ways of being conscious and how we usually “pay attention.”

If you’re interested in learning more, some resources that I love on meditation include The Consciousness Explorers Podcast and The Consciousness Explorers Club (a welcoming community with weekly online meditation events and occasional with great teachers). A friend and teacher Jude Star has also developed an incredible course on Mindfulness for ADHD. Authors and teachers like Ram Dass, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg and Mark Epstein also have an abundance of material to dive into.