Toward a Relational Ecosomatics

I’ve been thinking a lot about ecosomatics lately, for a whole host of reasons. As we orient toward moving out to the river sanctuary this summer, a place we hope to transform into a retreat space for the weary to recover, rest, and regroup in times of crisis, I keep finding myself exploring the interchange and interactions of human bodies in, among, and amidst the multiple bodies of the more-than-human world. Ecosomatics is a frame I keep chewing on - one that feels both fortifying and full of pock-marks.

Ecosomatics, coined by Craig Chalquist, is the blending of somatic psychology and ecopsychology into a radically holistic framework for the understanding human behavior and for healing human spiritual and psychological wounds. Both are based on the premise that disconnection (be it from place or body) is the root of dis-ease, and so to heal we must center re-connection to both the individual body and the earth body. As a modality, this approach offers practices that serve in connecting with the body and the land at the same time. It seeks to highlight interconnectedness with all life and underscores the importance of feeling belonging or at home both in the body and in the Earth. It is also true that the human body, and therefore the human being, is nature, and so to not include the body in our approaches to nature connection is to fail to uplift the basic mechanisms for connection… right?

I keep thinking about the dynamic of relating to place as healer, as co-regulator, as container, as medicine. So many aspects of the ecotherapeautic orientation is this invitation to connect with the more-than-human world such that the human experience of disconnection might be soothed and human suffering might be reduced to a more appropriate size. That our human issues, however small or grand, might find some kind of resolution if brought into places of less human design. As someone trained in both somatics and ecotherapeutic practice, I myself have defaulted into this way of orienting toward, and often times romanticizing, both the body and the Earth as the things that will save us…

In these orientations, I often have heard the invitation to “send what no longer serves me (ideologies, beliefs, behaviors, grief, anger) down into the Earth. The Earth knows what to do with it (knows how to transmute and compost and transfigure that which no longer serves into that which nourishes what is to become)”. Or something to that effect. There is this way in which we all then start coming to the more-than-human world, come to nature and wild places, with the belief and energetic of “getting healed.” In this moment, I’m aware that the same consumptive seeking of solutions that we bring to wild places we bring to wild people - the Indigenous “shaman” that knows how to use nature to transcend and transform “people” - namely those of us that would identify as members of the Western paradigm, regardless of how close to center we locate ourselves.

Within these patterns of seeking and longing for healing, we come into the more-than-human world fully anticipating that nature has the bandwidth, the capacity, the tolerance, and the willingness to receive what we can no longer manage ourselves. There is a way that we have transfixed the avatar of the healer/savior archetype onto wild places into which we can enter broken and emerge remade and there is an assumption of consent on the part of these wild places.

The emergent research into the efficacy and profound healing implications of ecotherapy and ecosomatic interventions highlights the path we are on. It shows that immersion in nature, connection to the more-than-human world, and deliberate engagement with place serve human people in finding solutions to their intrapsychic and interpersonal problems. That when engaging with these modalities, people find resolution to trauma, an deeper connection to themselves, and a feeling of belonging to an interconnected world.

A 2015 study by Bratman et al. showed that participants who took walks in natural environments, compared to urban environments, exhibited lower levels of rumination, a cognitive process linked to anxiety and depression. Rumination is a key factor in autonomic nervous system dysregulation, and the study suggested that nature can help regulate this process by restoring mental balance. Research has explored how ecotherapy practices that integrate nature connection with somatic therapies can promote nervous system regulation, particularly for individuals with trauma. For example, Buzzell and Chalquist (2009) discuss how nature-based interventions can help individuals move out of states of "freeze" or dissociation (common trauma responses) by fostering safe engagement with the environment. Nature can act as a supportive, grounding presence that facilitates the regulation of the nervous system and aids in trauma healing.

There is something truly helpful, healing, and important happening in these spaces, I am not refuting that. As a person that has found transformation and healing on long cold hikes where I speak with the trees and share with them my troubles, I have fully engaged this way and found benefit in some of my darkest moments. But recently, I was out for a ski tour and in the beauty of the late winter day, I could not shake a grief that mounted me. As we moved, we kept commenting on the disappearing snow pack in February and the fact that we could hear a nearby rock crusher turning a mountaintop into gravel. While it felt so good in my body to be in the woods, it also felt terrible. It also felt silent and tender and as though there was a reach being made my way by the land. As if this place sought out my attention in such a way that it could maybe do with me what I have done - lay down what not longer serves and ask that I hold it, transmute it, and turn it into something life-giving again.

I haven’t been able to shake this feeling that we’re doing something very wrong here. That to assume that we can keep coming to the more-than-human world to calm and soothe our nervous systems when the environment is dysregulated is a colossal failure and traumatic oversight. What I felt on that tour was the way in which the ecology, the ecological nervous system, was and is in fact dysregulated. I could feel the stress and fear response echoing through the landscape and emerging in my own body. I could feel into the ways in which this place was actually unable to tolerate much more pain - mine or anyone else’s.

“We need to ask the worms what they are needing to compost....”

I’m wondering now if we need to not only be seeking permission to engage for support (akin to the Indigenous lifeway practice of honorable harvest). I’m wondering if reciprocity also needs to be in our asking the trees, the water, the soil, the wind “what is your grief? What pain do you need to set down?” If we need to ask the worms what they are needing to compost and then bear witness to their suffering. (Because composting PFAS is certainly a grief, a sorrow, and not serving, right? Because the impact of the stress of a mountain being crushed must certainly be intolerable to other stones within earshot of that destruction, right??)

Have we come to wild places to listen to their suffering? Have we come to open ourselves up not to be healed by them, but to offer our attention back, our innate human capacity for healing and transmutation? Is healing even possible if we don’t? Is true recovery an option if we’re not reciprocal in our listening, in our taking in what the Earth can no longer hold or tolerate, and in our human way finding ways to compost the Earth’s pain?

Just as somatics cannot be reduced to a set of bio-hack practices to stay calm and become more productive within this extractive system, ecosomatics cannot be reduced to a set of eco-hack practices to stay calm and become more productive within this extractive system. We cannot let ourselves continue these reductionist, human-centric patterns of healing that seem to be fully invested in our feeling better but not doing better for ourselves, the Earth, and future generations.

I can feel the Earth screaming. I can feel the way there is not much more space for my bullshit to be dropped at the base of mountains that are also being destroyed. The water cannot take my tears and also my bottle tops. The air cannot carry prayers when choking on CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Not for not wanting to, but for the real fact that we all have our limits, we all get dysregulated, and we all require an empathetic witness to move through trauma.

Maybe the promise of ecosomatics is our sensitization that makes a dysregulated ecosystem obvious to our own human nervous systems. Maybe the prayer is that we’ll start listening as a central process in our healing.