The Healing Power of Nature

A few reasons are driving my recent interest in camping, but at the centre is my need to be close to nature. For now, my home base is a large city but I’m always planning the next escape.

I gave up on hotels a while ago because they’re so clinical and boring unless you’re prepared to take a financial sting. I opted for Airbnb to find what I wanted, and usually, that meant somewhere with an expansive garden in a rural setting.

It’s more than an aesthetic pre-occupation. I’m constitutionally unsuited to built-up and crowded environments and crave unpopulated open spaces. Growing up somewhere rural means that there’s a lot of space between me and the outer limits of my comfort zone.

But it’s not just about the space - otherwise you could just put me in an empty sport field or carpark.

It’s about the soul-nourishing benefits of being immersed in the natural world and how crucial it is for my nervous system. It’s the best way I know how to ground and reset; to return to a kind of homeostasis that just isn’t possible when I’m immersed in the sensory onslaught of the city.

At some point I realised that the best way to immerse myself in nature was to go camping. Once I got over the executive function panic of getting organised and equipping myself, I deep dived into the excitement of growing a new interest.

I’ve taken myself on two overnight trips so far and the momentum is building. I’ve got another one locked in and plenty in the pipeline. What I’ve found really interesting is tracking how my nervous system responds to the environment.

Remarkably, it’s only in the last year or so that it’s dawned on me just how fundamental my nervous system is to my physical and psychological well-being. As a late-diagnosed AuDHDer, I carry a lifetime of trauma from surviving in a neurotypical world. Even after I thought I’d processed it on a cognitive level, the trauma remained embedded in my nervous system.

Never feeling completely safe in any situation means developing a nervous system constantly primed for things going wrong. It means never fully inhabiting the present because my energy is going into managing the risk by masking my neurodivergence.

It means never being able to settle comfortably into being myself because that is incompatible with safety. It means living on the periphery and having superficial interactions with people while the connections I crave remain painfully out of reach.

An important part of healing from trauma has been surrounding myself with safe people in safe environments. But it doesn’t immediately erase the trauma that is deeply embedded in me. The objective lack of threat in the present moment hasn’t yet made a dint in a nervous system carrying the memory of a lifetime of threat.

I need to rewire my nervous system and I figure that immersing myself in nature gives me the best chance of doing it. Not only does it remove the element of human interaction that places me on alert, but provides sensory experiences that ground, energise and calm my nervous system.

The most beautiful moments are early mornings where I’m up and about, looking out at a scene of trees, with a stream winding through and hills in the background. I’m hearing birds chirping to each other and feeling the emerging sun or perhaps a gentle breeze on my skin. My hands are cupped around the coffee I’ve just made and I’m aware that I am in the middle of a perfect moment.

Nothing can intrude on moments like these. They are utterly perfect and impervious to trauma memory that relies on dominance of the past. This is all about the present.

In these moments I feel completely at one with the natural world in a way that I have never been able to with the human world. It feels unconditional and completely lacking in hierarchy. There is no judgement; no rejection or exclusion. It is impossible to feel alone when immersed in nature.

There is no expectation other than just to be as we are. There is no question I am accepted. There is no doubt that I belong, and no taking it away.

Nature makes me feel held and safe. As unpredictable as the elements can be, nature has a constancy in just being nature. It can’t be anything other than what it is. To be part of the human world is to be constantly exposed to the unpredictability of human whims.

I can’t always surround myself in nature but I can absorb those thoroughly soul-nourishing experiences and hold them as a buffer that I take into any situation. With that, I hope to recondition my nervous system so that the feeling of safety in the present can prevail.

I hope that by getting my nervous system used to what safety feels like, I can stop feeling like I have to hide myself from the world in order to survive.

I can stop fighting myself, surrender to what is and let go. And that is at the heart of healing.