Connection is an embodied experience.

In academia, it is commonly written that the remedy for widespread socio-ecological issues is connection. I’ve read hundreds of papers about models of connection and why it’s important but many fail to mention the most critical element

Connection is not an idea. We cannot think our way into it.

Connection is an embodied experience.

Just like riding a bike or surfing a wave, learning how to do so “cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort” as renowned phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty shares.

Most people understand the healing power of connection with nature and others but very few recognise that it’s a practice, not a concept.

We often look to Indigenous cultures and think they have a mysterious ability to connect with Country, and yes, that connection is something I also revere and respect.

However, it didn’t happen by accident. It’s not an anomaly.

It was practiced.

Connection occurred in the embodied experience of harvesting plants, stripping weaving fibres, walking the land and noticing it’s seasons, taking and seeding life, rubbing ochre into the pores, smoking bodies in ceremony, dancing and singing up place.

Even ancient myths and stories found their vibrancy in living bodies, not in philosophical abstractions.

Once upon a time, this was all of us. Our bodies were saturated in a daily conversation with the wider ecology, seen and unseen.

And connection was not an important thing to do, it was simply a way of being. A lived and breathed experience.

Disconnection is the most common complaint I hear from women who attend my programs. They feel disconnected from themselves, the land, their community etc.

They somehow believe that there is a special formula to connection that they missed out on.

But the beauty is that the remedy is actually very simple.

Start to practice connection in the easiest way possible and let it grow naturally (it will)

Eat your breakfast outside and listen to the birds, walk barefoot on the grass and intentionally breathe in the air around you, cuddle your children and exchange massages for no reason, turn off the screens at dinner and start with a song, pat your dog and really soak in the sensation.

In a culture devoid of belonging, small actions of connection remind us that our separation is all but an illusion. And the way home is through our very own bodies. One literal step at a time.