Meditation In Nature & The Object Of Awareness

Choosing an object of awareness is an essential part of any meditation practice. This becomes the focal point for awareness to keep returning back to and enables the practitioner to develop concentration, enhance mindfulness, cultivate inner peace and clarity, explore inner or outer experience more deeply and ultimately serve the goals of meditation to cultivate spiritual insight.

Anything, including awareness itself, can be the object of attention. 

In this article I explore some unique features of objects of awareness in a meditation in nature practice and why this may be significant for human development.

The object of awareness in indoor meditation

In classic, eyes closed, sitting in a room meditation the object of awareness is most often stimuli that arise from the inner experience. This might be sensations from the body or thoughts from the mind. Sometimes also sounds from the external world. 

This makes this kind of meditation excellent for coming to know your own inner landscape. Its strength lies in the ability to cultivate awareness and understanding of the patterns and habits of mind. Given that so much of our life is dictated by these habits of mind it is very significant that we can bring some of this operating out of the subconscious and into the conscious awareness.

Object of awareness in meditation in nature

More than just a pleasant backdrop for meditation, nature adds a range of other dimensions to form a well-rounded meditation practice. In nature, the focus is less on ourselves. We have an abundance of organic stimuli to choose from. 

The object of awareness could be any aspects of nature as perceived through any of the senses, ranging from tiny detail, single beings or elements, as well as whole fields, such as panoramic vision or soundscapes. 

Of course, you can still have an internal focus. I find that if I spend a bit of time settling into a spot in nature, engaging with the external stimuli, then it is much easier to relax and hold self-generated thoughts more lightly, making for a more enjoyable and potentially deeper meditation experience. This is supported by researched that shows we engage in less rumination and think about ourselves less in nature, and that is even without some kind of awareness practice. 

Significance of these differences

1.Range

While we can practice different forms of awareness indoors – single-pointed awareness vs open monitoring or placing awareness in different parts of the body, for example – in nature we have all the same available stimuli, plus a huge amount more thanks to the sensorial richness of nature and the fact our senses open in a natural setting, away from the intensified and amplified stimuli of the human-created world.  

This means we can exercise our sensing and perceiving apparatus in a range of ways unavailable to us in a room. When meditating on touch for example, we can expand beyond just the contact points with the cushion or feeling of clothing on our skin to the feeling of breaths of air, temperature changes, the feeling of sun or shade. Likewise vision is very different experience outdoors: even if you do practice eyes open in a room, you are looking at the straight lines of a room, in a constrained space. Whereas in nature, you could be placing awareness through sight on anything from the intricate detail of a leaf to the expanse of the sky or ocean etc. 

The experience of this leads me to believe that meditation in nature exercises closer to the full range of modes of awareness and corresponding states of being possible for a human being, along with developing the cognitive flexibility to move between different states.

Additionally, in nature you are more likely to be in a position other than sitting, i.e. standing or walking, and hence you are practicing in a way that is more akin to moving through the rest of life, and the way our wild, animal bodies were designed to be.

2. Inherent benefits of nature

It is also worth considering that often people engage in meditation for benefits such as relaxation and recovery, benefits which are enhanced simply by being in nature. Research shows that meditation in nature further enhances the already impressive list of benefits of time in nature.

Even more specific to the topic of the object of awareness, the physical structures of the natural world engender effects in us as human beings, which are very complementary to the goals of meditation. The nature of stimuli from the living world exhibits patterns and structures that the sensing apparatus of the human being has evolved to attune to. For example, as I wrote about in this post, studies have been conducted on naturalistic fractals vs artificial fractals. It has been demonstrated that these naturally occurring, abundant patterns, when viewed, induce a ‘wakefully relaxed’ state… sounds a lot like meditation right?

3. Connection

Another of the distinct advantages to meditation in nature is that we get to experience a felt sense of connection with nature, which deepens the more we allow our awareness to rest on the beings of nature. Indeed, research shows sense of connectedness with nature grows with meditation in nature.

I like to think of connection as more than simply a mental state, and is one way quite literal through the flow of energy. This is certainly is an ancient idea and evident in practices like Qi Gong which is premised on “Where the minds goes, the energy flows.” So by choosing nature as the object of awareness it is cultivating very direct connection through the subtle flow of Qi (life-force).

4. Sense of Self

Meditation is great for building self-awareness and even refining our sense of identity, gently carving away what is conditioning from what is our true essence. Many people use meditation to centre themselves and find the space to listen to their innermost self. 

It is a very Western idea however to think of ourselves as an individual separate from our context and relationships. 

Flowing on from the felt sense of connection as noted above, feeling our relationship with the beings of nature with the sensitivity that is available through meditation in nature, an experience of communion (common-union) may arise as we have a felt sense of inseparable continuity with the others beings of life. This sense of self, one interwoven with life around us, has been called the ‘Ecological Self’ by Deep Ecologists, a concept that has also been taken up by ecopsychologists for its importance to a healthy human psyche. 

5. Understanding True Nature

The ultimate goal of meditation, in a traditional sense, is to uncover the nature of consciousness, or True Nature. In time, a meditator may experience subject-object duality falling away, and is discovered as an illusion. This is referred to non-dual consciousness or awareness. 

In deep internal meditations, it may feel very expansive and beyond normal human consciousness, yet I have found that the subject-object duality falls away more easily when meditating with nature and the sense of ‘I-ness’ coexisting within and without arises in a way not accessible when only focussing on the individual self. This makes sense. By placing awareness on the individual self there can be a tendency to strengthen that perception (which the ego is in full support of, by the way). Whereas by placing awareness on nature, encouraging deepening connection across the boundary of the small self and developing the ecological self, the awareness of inseparable being-ness arises.