Human and nature liminalityTeachings from the world8When I was a child, I attended a preschool that was located inside of a social welfare facility. It was a multigenerational place that also contained a baby nursery and an elder-care home. Babies, children, senior citizens, bed-ridden individuals, handicapped individuals—it was a gathering of different groups that would otherwise not have much overlap in typical society. Diversity was the essence of that place. And I, myself, was a part of that diversity. For my childhood self, this was a profoundly formative realization—one that would go on to shape the course of my life.As a young woman, I found myself aspiring to work in international development. I studied in the fields of Public Health and Social & Economic Development at graduate schools in the USA, and I spent more than twenty years working for JICA (the Japan International Cooperation Agency) and other international cooperation agencies in developing countries across the world, including Kenya and Zambia. It was in there in those countries that I worked in preventative health and human resource development in the field of public health.During my time in Africa, I saw firsthand the life. One of my tremendous colleagues in pregnancy—I clearly remember the joy we all felt when she was finally able to deliver her fourth child. Sadly, that child also passed when it was barely a year old. That funeral was my first time seeing such a tiny casket. That sight brought me to tears that just would not stop. I told myself that as long as I was working that job, I didn’t want to see loss of in Zambia infant lost three children is other hand, places a paramount importance on our fundamental relationship with nature. In their approach, it is the forest who is the therapist; we as guides simply mediate its communication with those who are called to it. That approach really stuck with me.Rather than a one-way, outward process originating with and flowing forth from us humans, forest therapy instead simply a manifestation of a pre-existing relationship of equality between humans and nature. This is what we call a ‘relational approach’. When we step into the forest and look upon the trees, the trees are also looking upon us. When we rest against their trunks, their trunks also rest against us. With that way of thought informing our vision and our actions, we as humans can truly redefine and reconstruct a mutual relationship with nature that is healing and beneficial to both.KaleidoForest’s deep Shinrin-yoku® is based on such a relational approach, and each visit to the forest is especially catered to both the present weather conditions and each of our guests’ needs. With each encounter with the forest, with each tilt of the ear to the forest’s voice, with each walk through its reaches, our bodies and minds gradually soften, accommodating and aligning to the shape of nature.When you open your senses to the forest, you begin to hear, see, and perceive more widely and more deeply than before. Both the messages from the natural world and the hitherto-unperceived messages from your own heart become clear.This melting-together of the human and the more-than-human is what we call awai. With liminality, of connotations of both connection and distance, awai is a space in which the hard angles and sharp edges of our society-shaped selves soften and blur, leaving behind only our truest, nature-intended selves.in-between, of Depending on the person, this can be a profound opportunity for transformational introspection. It’s a form of meditation, but different from that which we are used to. It is open-eyed, sensitive and sensuous, a totality-engulfing fusion with nature that leads us, paradoxically, first into ‘nothingness’ and then beyond it: to a full ‘openness’ and ‘oneness’ with nature. It is a complete psychosomatic embodiment of all our connections and relations with the natural world and beyond—bodyfulness, rather than mindfulness.This awai is an essential part of traditional Japanese culture. It is present in the principles and philosophies that guide and shape Japanese tea ceremony (sadō), flower arrangement (kadō), and Japanese gardens. The idea that humans are a part of nature is a given. As such, an objective, outside observation of nature is impossible—we ourselves gaze upon nature with its own sensibilities, which already exist within us. We are nature experiencing itself. Stepping into the awai world naturally catalyzes—necessitates, even—a reconsideration of our relationship to the natural world. This is the core of deep Shinrin-yoku® with KaleidoForest.
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