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Are you listening?

Jarvis Smith says hearing nature’s voice is key to living in our natural state
Jarvis Smith - My Green Pod
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This article first appeared in our Organic September issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 08 September 2023. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox

As systems crack and break beneath the pressures of climate breakdown, and our awareness of the madness we all support becomes a reality, more and more of us are waking up to the fact and feeling that an enormous change is necessary.

Returning to our natural state

The greatest lesson from my spiritual teacher, a female shaman indigenous to the UK, was the art of listening to nature – a skill now etched in my DNA as a natural state of being.

The way of the shaman is to dance with life and to be in co-creation with nature, knowing deeply and profoundly there is no separation from the Earth – and that, in fact, we are the Earth.

We are the soil, the wind, the water and the sunlight. If ‘it’ is us and we are ‘it’, then of course it makes sense we should be able to hear nature’s voice.

It took me years and years – well over a decade of deep meditation and hours of daily yoga – to disconnect from the human noise and fall back into a rhythm of what I would describe now as a natural state.

Everything natural on Earth has a rhythm – day and night, the in and out breath and of course our heartbeat. But is that rhythm always in harmony with the Earth’s rhythm? I feel it can’t be.

Earth Overshoot Day recognises that we are using up 12 months’ resources by the middle of the year, revealing in a very basic form that our rhythm is beating faster than that of our planetary sponsor, the Earth.

We are moving at a speed that has disconnected us from a natural state of being. This puts a stress on our mental, physical and emotional states, yet each day we fall back into the same misalignment.

Harnessing our superpower

The natural state is connected to what I call the fourth element, the element beyond the mental, physical and emotional states.

It is the spiritual state; the place where intuition is strong, and when you know if a decision you are making is right or wrong.

It involves being guided by source, or that inner knowledge of what you must do in order to get the job done. 

Each and every one of us has this innate superpower because it’s part of our natural state of being – a truth that can never be manipulated or distorted by any of the external machines that now seem to be spiralling out of control. 

If we choose to accept and allow the fourth element, that spirit-body connection, then the art of listening, trusting and acting from it can instantly put us back in control.

Perhaps this is what nature is trying to teach us: we have fallen off the bumpy old wagon, and she is nudging us to stir and awaken, brush ourselves off and get back on.

We need to recommence our life journey with not just open eyes and ears, but with full sensory awareness – ignited by connection, trust and an understanding that we must live love for everything there is.

One key thing nature told me is that if we can at the very least honour and respect her for everything she has given us – if we can slow down our abuse of her resources and give her a moment to breathe again – she will correct the course we are currently on and take us in a new harmonious direction, bringing about what many texts have called ‘Heaven on Earth’.

That seems to me to be something worth striving for.

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