Beyond Self-Awareness: 6 Insights From Nature Questing

Nature Quests, much like traditional Vision Quests, are a process for deep connection with inner nature, outer nature and True Nature, involving spending multiple days and nights alone in one sacred circle in nature. There are a host of potential benefits, including a unique opportunity to develop self-awareness, or awareness of ‘inner nature.’ 

Self-awareness is important personally, professionally and collectively. I say collectively because a lack of self-awareness can have a collective impact on groups and organisations, and can lead to errors and biases such as groupthink or harmful behaviours like micro aggressions. We need to be on our A-Game right now when it comes to being able to work together effectively to sort through some complex challenges. The stakes are high and self-awareness is fundamentally important.

It is somewhat obvious that self awareness would be enhanced by doing something like Questing where you are spending multiple days alone with plenty of time to reflect. But the self-awareness borne from Questing is due to more than just the time alone factor. I have spent a LOT of time by myself, both on Quest and not, for example while riding a bicycle from Mexico to Argentina, so I can really say without any doubt that spending time alone versus spending time alone on Quest is chalk and cheese.

This provides some interesting angles on self-awareness as a concept, which is useful because it is a broad term, comprised of a number of different components. The vagueness of the term is made more opaque by a misconception of what the ‘self’ really is. Sometimes ‘self-awareness’ is used in reference to properties that are transient as if they are enduring. We mistake ‘self’ for elements of our personalities that only stay for a short time, while being relatively unaware of the core self. Questing definitely helps reveal the more enduring, essential parts of ourselves, and also provides some unique insight into pathways to develop self-awareness. 

I have summarised six themes to do with self-awareness, born out of my own experience of Questing as well as stories I hear from participants.

1. Refinement of the senses

One of the first important things to happen on a Quest is the relaxing, opening and refinement of the senses. The scale and power of this is not to be underestimated. The sensory stimulation present in the standard modern content consists of more sensorily intense and frequent stimuli that the sensory environment humans evolved in. As we spend undistracted time in nature, our senses can relax and unfold back to their intended baseline. 

It is incredible how much we can pick up on. This has implications for connecting with outer nature but it also means that our internal-facing senses, or ‘interoception’ becomes much more refined as well. 

When we can ‘hear’ our body more clearly, we become much more self-aware in quite a literal way. For example, the ability to sense our own heartbeat accurately has been shown to be linked to emotional awareness and regulation. I can recall a couple of Quests of my own where I was perceiving my heartbeat so loudly that it kept me from sleeping! Many Quest participants have noted a similar amplification too, as well as an enduring greater awareness of their emotional state.

Just the restoration of the sensory capabilities we were meant to have is significant. For example, a 2016 study found that the interoceptive ability of stock market traders predicted their relative profitability, and even how long they survived in the financial markets. 

Self-awareness is about more than just thinking about yourself. There is a very significant embodied component.

2. Strengthening of the ‘observer self’

One level of self-awareness is about having an understanding of our strengths, weaknesses, values, triggers, conditioning, where we are likely to make a mistake etc. It’s about noticing patterns in ourselves. 

Spending an extended period of time alone, with no distractions and accompanied by awareness practices leads a strengthening of the witness aspect of ourselves, also called ‘The Watcher’. At least in the system I use for the Quests, participants are given awareness practices to use to help cultivate mindfulness, or the observer self. Patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour that we thought were ‘just us’ and took for granted without much reflection upon can be observed and considered in a new light. 

A Quest is also a challenging process. You are meant to feel uncomfortable. In fact, we could say that any good initiatory process involves a brush with death at some level (sometimes this is fear of physical death but many times this is about letting outdated parts of ourselves or belief systems die). 

In normal life when we face something challenging it is often when we are at our busiest or have many things to handle or juggle. This means there is not much space for observing and reflecting on how you are responding in the moment. On a Quest however, you can watch yourself respond to challenge completely undistracted, whether that is how you deal with discomfort, fear (of snakes for example), difficult emotions or how you make decisions under duress. 

3. Awareness of patterns of relating

There is also an added effect related to the intention of the Quest to deepen connection with nature.  It may seem as if we would not be learning so much about how we relate with others since there are no other people around, but this is not the case. It is actually a very intimate process with the opportunity to notice and learn about your patterns of relating.

You are very much aware that you arrive a visitor to that small, sacred circle. Much like entering a stranger’s home you suddenly are alert to how you might be impacting on the space and sensitive to the correct ways to interact with others. Of course verbal communication is not of much use, so we rely on the subtler senses to listen to those around us. Even on the programs I run with organisations, where people are out for much shorter periods of time in Nature, it is often the awareness of how one’s state of being impacts others that is reported as the most significant lasting benefit. 

The absence of other humans is another important factor. Without others around, the grip of our conditioning and neuroses are lessened and we can actually see our issues with relating at a deeper, truer level. And because Nature is there completely non-judgementally, we cannot project our usual reasons for behaving in certain ways onto the beings we are relating with. You really have to face yourself. 

4. It’s a ceremony and there is something about calling yourself into the sacred that brings forth the most essential part of ourselves

Have you ever tried a gratitude practice? Aside from the benefits, one thing that sticks out for me is that when you are practicing gratitude, you can’t fake it. As in, you can’t be sarcastic or make snide comments to yourself like, ‘I’m really grateful that bad thing happened to that terrible person.’ That’s not gratitude and you know it when you’re doing it. Gratitude calls forth a higher, more beautiful aspect of ourselves.

The whole Quest is a ceremony really, and then we encourage a specific ceremony within the ceremony, using the directions as a way to address the whole circle of life in ceremony. 

Gratitude is an essential part of ceremony, as is prayer and feeling into your deepest hopes and dreams, as well as reflection and honesty. All these components call forth our higher aspects. When we address the sacred we do so with the most sacred place within ourselves. When we do that, we become aware of our most essential selves.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard ceremony discussed when it comes to self-awareness but it is transformational. 

5. Shedding the ‘not self’ 

All of the above come together to provide the opportunity to remove layers of ‘not self’ that accumulate through conditioning or the perceived need for protection. Things that we thought were important to us, that we strongly identified with, we can get some space from to see that they are not actually an essential aspect of ourselves, but an old identity we had donned as a cloak. It may come in the form of labels for ourselves that not longer seem as important, or narratives that we’ve used to explain who and how we are.

I’ve always been dubious about terms like self-love and self-awareness because there is an implication that the ‘self’ is a discreet object that can be known. To quote Alan Watts, “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”  The self is there for sure, the ever-present sense of ‘I-ness’, but truly knowable in a definitive sense, wisdom traditions say no. The ‘self’ is the conscious subject, which is the awareness, not the object.

This unknowability can lead to a sense of existential against, and an urge to assume identities to try to cling to. But there is danger in collecting things about ourselves to use as ‘identity cladding’ against the insecurity we can feel due to the fact that whoever we are can never be pinned down.

I don’t think anyone has ever turned up to a Quest stating the intention that they lose old identities. It’s not really something that is easy to be conscious of needing. When we are identified with something we do not get space from it by definition. 

We need the deep unwinding that deep rest in nature can provide, as well as the strengthening of the Observer and solitude. Being apart from other people is essential to realising errors in our construction of our views of ourselves. Again from Alan Watts, “Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment.”

This unwinding is part of the strong healing aspect of the Quest. This is isn’t a temporary effect either, and is why Questing or similar has been used as a rite of passage across many cultures. We return changed, but paradoxically even more ourselves. 

With the falling away of the ‘not self’ parts and the calling forth of our essential selves, it becomes far easier to sense our true desires and what is right for us, helping us make decisions based on our internal compass. I am someone full of ideas and I can get excited about doing a lot of things. Questing has been essential for me in allowing the things that are not for me to drop away (often involving me saying no).

6. Visceral understanding of interbeing; getting closer to the true nature of self 

As we deepen into connection to the point that it could be called ‘communion’, where we feel our common union with other beings, the illusion of the hard boundary of self is revealed and understood in an entire different way to just mentally thinking about interdependencies. 

We wouldn’t exist as we are if not for everything else. We can learn scientific facts that demonstrate this truth, such as the fact that 90% of the cells in the human body are microbial, not human. But what the deepening experience of connection leads us to is a visceral sense of being part of everything else, beginning with the beings of nature we are surrounded by in the Quest circle. 

Which is an incredible form of self awareness, transformative to our personal experience of self and life, as well as our relationship to nature and mental models of reality. I will not labour this point. It is a peculiar thing to write about, especially since I am saying that you need to feel this to understand; my words don’t mean much here.

“… if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”

~Alan Watts