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(transcribed by AI so there maybe some small errors!)

Hello, and welcome to The Wild Minds Podcast for people interested in health, nature-based therapy and learning. We explore cutting edge approaches that help us improve our relationship with ourselves, others and the natural world. My name is Marina Robb, I'm an author, entrepreneur, for a school outdoor learning and nature-based trainer and consultant, and pioneer in developing green programs for the health service in the UK.  

Welcome to Episode 40, wild hearts wise bodies. This is the final episode of season five until we meet again on September the 23rd, around the autumn equinox. So I find myself once again in July, needing to recommit to taking time to slow down and make sure I spend time in natural spaces. I think in order to really walk my talk, particularly with regard to listening deeply to the natural world, and the wisdom that might arise from this encounter. I know to do that I need to slow down. And only then can I potentially actually have moments that things might appear maybe images, intuitions and things like that.

And that's the subject really of today's episode amongst pulling together lots of the threads from the season. Though I do also discuss spirituality and acknowledged that I want my own experience of the spiritual to remain somewhat private, something that I can cultivate, largely on my own, or with close friends. And I really want to avoid lots of people's opinions, to be honest. And I get that feeling as well that when I'm like working with groups, and they've had a deep experience, and then they go back into their everyday life, we often say, you know, maybe it's not a good idea to actually share everything that's happened because people that haven't had that experience won't get it. And it's kind of that way for me around the spiritual. So I find myself holding this tension that on the one hand, I absolutely love the wilder spaces being outdoors for long periods. And it's in those spaces that I will often feel a profound sense of kinship with the living world and also being cared for by the living world. But compared to mainstream thinking, that doesn't even acknowledge feelings, or especially not this deep connection, it's a difficult thing to hold both.

So I'm going to actually start the episode with this kind of inquiry. And I just want to acknowledge that we do have this capacity to imagine and discover our own bodies, intelligence, I really hope you enjoy this episode. I'm really grateful to be here doing this podcast, and recognizing it's the last of the season. And knowing that it's time also for me to take some space, and time that's not connected to computers, and speakers and all that we are often connected to while we're doing our everyday work. So I'm grateful to be planning and have the opportunity to take some space and time which for me, also looks like wandering the sense of not having to be anywhere do anything and show up. And in a way this is part of the theme of this podcast as I draw on the strands that the other episodes have brought to life as well as the past year of doing these podcasts.

So again, thank you very much to people out there that are listening and getting in touch and letting me know what's working for them, which is so valuable because when you're sitting here with a mic in front of a computer and trusting that what's going to come out of your mouth is enough and then it's nice sometimes to get some of that feedback. And, yeah, really welcome that. So where am I today? Well, I'm really feeling into the really important theme that our own health, my own wellbeing, our own well being is actually absolutely linked to the planet's health and well being. And this is a theme and a thread that goes through all the work that that I do in education and in health, but all the kind of bigger work that I think, is becoming more conscious to a lot of people that we can't be into our own health and our own individual well being without recognizing that the actual Earth and the land also needs to be well, and a lot of our illnesses and diseases are coming from the fact that our systems and the way in which we treat the earth as a resource, and that there are so kind of limited ways that everyday people can actually protect the planet, that we're in a situation where, you know, our air or water systems are polluted. And that's been going on for a long time. And that's just one aspect. 

But of course, it's the cultural element, as well as our mindsets and what we're used to growing up particularly in, let's say, the Western world, let's say the dominant kind of paradigm that we are just not brought up to recognize remotely the relationship between the planet's health and our own health. And you know, loads of people are becoming more aware of that, and it's great. So this is part of exploring that. And I think we can start with drawing on some of the conversation that I had last week with Rebecca, that actually reminding ourselves that we don't just exist and interact with the world, through our heads through our thinking, thinking fells, but also we're interacting the world, of course, through other parts of ourselves, our wider intelligences, primarily, let's just say, through our body, and that our body is actually incredibly sensitive and incredibly able to tell us what's going on in so many ways. And also our imagination that's been such a theme of this whole series of around how powerful our imagination, our imaginative capacity is, and how little that's kind of nourished, and how much it shut down, like our bodies are shut down. So we don't really feel and it's through our bodies that we feel, and of course, our spiritual capacity and it's taken me to my 50s to really feel that it's like coming out, it's like coming out and saying, Oh, my gosh, you know, I actually really interested in what is spiritual. 

And I've always been interested in spiritual and interested in other ways of thinking and knowing and learning from other cultures and fully knowing how many humans out there have spiritual aspects that are being developed and nurtured every day within their culture, but also kind of knowing why is it so awkward sometimes to even think about the spiritual aspect? You know, because it's not the same as religion. And yet, there are so many people out there that I must be speaking to you now that are religious and might have a very deep connection with their own gods, and so on. And, you know, that's also imaginary, in a way, isn't it? Because I'm not seeing anyone, you know, manifesting a God so that I can speak to them. And that's not me saying that that's not real. So there it is, aspects that are a little bit taboo in our culture, and I always some just have to go back to sort of public documents, like for example, in education, where as a teacher, you know, we were given the national curriculum and documents and it says, you know, that we at schools will develop all the aspects of children including their spiritual, their physical, their emotional aspects and yet when you look at the way that is developed in children, it's just not given the space and the time or even the depth of consideration that I think it needs to be given. And again, there's this awkwardness of what is spiritual, and a lot of people still don't have a have a definition. And I quite like that it's not fixed, because it's also very much about exploring that within ourselves and what that might mean to us. And I was really struck by, in particular Rebecca kind of, and she calls herself a kind of plant, consciousness whistleblower, although we may not have mentioned that last week, but this idea that, you know, plants have consciousness and I know, as somebody that's done a little bit of research into the way that you can actually put, I don't even know the right word, but like, electronic electrodes, I think on plants, and they respond to different people that come into the room, depending on what's happening. So they have single cell memory, and so on. 

So there are kind of scientific way of saying, hang on a second, look, these plants have a level of consciousness. And obviously, there are times when animals have been seen, you know, animals, dogs, cats, bears, elephants were not seen as having consciousness, let alone trees, rocks, rivers, and all of that. And I really noticed that a lot of this area is kept quite private in my life. And that I choose to do that for very good reasons, for good reasons why I don't think it's seen as particularly acceptable and in that judgment that might come but also, it's private, because who am I, to say that my experience is more than real? I don't know. It's just my experience, you know, and I'm not here, I feel quite strongly that I'm not here to put my analysis of what it is to be human, or what is real or not real onto another being, but I am here to be open, I'm very open to hearing people's experience, and to not try and decide, well, that's just, you know, not well, or that's not mentally well, for example, because there is stigma, isn't it when people say you know, that they may feel that they can converse with a tree. And I've been thinking about that element, as well as public and private, and how in our world, and here I am on a podcast, right? 

So I'm speaking to people, quite a lot of people. And thank god, I'm not actually in the room with you, because I'd probably put me off. But there's something around knowing that there is a part of me that absolutely wants to be public and wants to and is comfortable in that space. But course, like all of you have private aspects that I don't want to Sharon, and I can kind of equate it, but with things like, you know, my private life, my family life, my relationships to my husband, or my children, I'm not going to just talk about that with anyone what's going on in that and you know, there's a necessary boundaries me around what I want to keep private and what I'm curious about and exploring, and that's the way it is boundaries are there for good reasons. So having said that, of course, I'm interested, I'm interested in philosophy, I'm interested in what is reality, how we can have a physical reality, but we can also have a reality that's an atomic level, you know, that kind of level that we couldn't even imagine an electric side to our lives, for example, you know, in understanding our nervous systems are passing electricity through them, that's a nerve, you know, so there is so much I don't understand. And yet I, of course, am open to the possibility of the world being conscious, you know, the world, actually operating communicating in ways that I can't understand it's a living being the ecosystem as a whole ecosystem, the whole biosphere probably connected to wider than the Earth as well, but a sense that I know that everything is living and how little I know. And going back to where I started, which is, again, the themes of this season around the imagination and in my work, you know, I work within a nature centric model. 

So I'm always placing humans as an animal within that model, and when I work and think about the people I'm working with in the ages that they're working with, I'm thinking about the stage that they're in. And it's no surprise to me that when you think about the stage as a human, as an early child, you know, in your early childhood, or when you're maybe six, or seven or eight years old, that you, at that stage have a much greater capacity to apply your imagination, think of all the stories that you make up the playing and characters, the ability to roleplay, to be another animal to imagine yourself as a dog, for example, or imagine yourself flying around, and this capacity to place yourself as the other is something that children do so naturally. And, as I've said, and insinuated, and many times how that idea of being in relationship with, for a child, whether that's having a conversation with an imaginary fairy, or having a conversation with a tree, that comfort that this kind of line between what is an object, what is a subject is so much thinner. And I've, you know, I wonder that actually, this deeper connection, this ability to be in our bodies, and still ourselves enough, and be in relationship with another, living being that something that moves around like a mammal, or a bird or with a something that doesn't move around like a tree, or a rock, and to be alongside that and to get into a state, a body state, where you are in a state which is receptive in listening, and that imaginative capacity allows us to be witness to something that arises.

So that sense of communication for me in my direct experience, as well as kind of filtering what I'm understanding from this invitation to converse with, what appears to be not living sometimes, like a rock, and to just allow yourself to see what arises, whether that's an image, whether that's a sound, whether that's words, whatever that is, and then, you know, to decide, well, what is real? How am I going to know whether that's real? Whatever real is, and whether that's my imagination? And do I shut it down? Because it's an imagination, or do I pay attention and just notice, and I love again, that Rebecca calls on the dream world and God how little I know about my dreaming life and this sense, which I do understand about through Carl Jung's work on depth, psychology, that, of course, it's accessing the part of us that's also unconscious. So allowing this unconscious part of us, meaning that our thinking brain is not really aware of allow those things to arise, and that they can have meaning not always, but they can have meaning. So it feels like this world of imagination, and dreaming is something that is very underdeveloped in the world that I've grown up in. And I think it's something to be really explored. And it links to health, to be able to listen to your body and to listen to what that intelligence of your body tells you about how you are about what you might want to eat about where you might want to go about, oh, that person doesn't feel particularly right at this moment for me or I'm not sure about that person so your move away, you know, that's the body intelligence isn't you could say it's an inner tuition and intuition, the body telling you, but then if we extend the idea of body to the land and to the planet into the living world, and that's also a body and you know, who's to say that we aren't able to pick up a tune with, extend our awareness to what's out there.

And again, I'm not going to be dogmatic here. This is the wild minds podcast, right? So it's a sense of, Well, if we're an animal if we are a wild animal Which, obviously I've been seriously domesticated. But if I tap into that wild part of me, then I am like a wild animal in tune with that land responsive, being impacted being influenced. So I feel that this is an invitation and let's keep it you know, simple, right? Let's keep it simple by going onto the land, by giving ourselves the time and the space to sit to quiet and ourselves, and to be open to other intelligences beyond ourselves and intelligences that are not necessarily going to communicate to us in the ways that a human would through speech or our mouths, but are going to perhaps find other ways to have a different sense of communication. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, it's fixed as a piece of knowledge. I'm saying, let's explore it because I can see that this different mindset, this different ability to be open minded to an open minded and I like the use of the word mind, not as head but mind as a kind of field, if you like that is a field that is probably connects my body and my head and my heart and all those kinds of things, but also extends beyond my body, a bit like Daniel Siegel's idea of mind. And also, you know, this kind of intra relationships that he talks about. So I'm interested in that children seem to have this capacity. And that, of course, we are the same as children. But we shut this aspect down. And the invitation, as I say, is to really explore this idea of stretching our consciousness to be available. And in some ways, this is about, you know, the art of listening and being able to develop that capacity. In our work with a niche connection, we're talking about the art of questioning, which is also the ability to question to be in the state of wonder to keep questioning so that we don't really have the answers in this way, we start to question things and develop ideas together. So these kinds of ideas are really important. And of course, in the work that we do, when we think of behavior as communication, and we know when I work for many years with young people that will struggle in a classroom or in a mainstream situation and will exhibit behaviors that are challenging, and they're challenging to others. They're challenging to me, they're challenging to themselves.

But a lot of we know about communication is it isn't verbal anyway, it isn't so clear that I can just speak to you like I'm speaking to you now. It's what is my body communicating? What is my body language, what is my tone, you know, these things really matter when we think about communication. And it's extraordinary the research that is coming out of looking at the way trees communicate with each other looking how they collaborate with the networks that are under the ground, how different trees will create a food and the fungi will bring nutrients and how that's shared where it's needed. Which, of course brings up other themes of collaboration rather than competition. And that's not to say that competition doesn't have a place but this kind of revisiting the idea of collaborating and, you know, the work within my field within outdoor learning within working within mental health. The kind of approaches we want to be bringing in to our work that are underpinning our work is from a more collaborative place where we're listening to each other. This is as humans, being aware of the land, having experiences understanding that the land will absolutely impact and inform us to listen to each other and CO create and CO produce and then from that space, develop our interests, for example. So I want to kind of bring this final episode into thinking about how you going to spend time and give yourself the time and the space to go into wildest places and to allow your animal my old self to be receptive. And to remember also that we have wild hearts, and I'm using these words in this season, as a kind of sense that the wild happens, it occurs like the wild hearts, that just feel they're not deciding what they're going to feel, they just feel and it kind of links back to previous episodes, that it's actually irrational, it's not irrational to feel, should I say, you know, that actually allowing ourselves to be in that feeling space and to feel what we feel is really important, it's going to give us the energy, it's going to allow us to acknowledge the things that we love the things that are important, and to follow that as much as we can.

And that we're interested, hear about the relationship that we have with ourselves with others. And, you know, with the things that we don't necessarily yet understand. So let's consider how we can bring more balance into our lives, let's consider the importance of how the more demands we put on ourselves, the more demands that are put upon us, the more we need to resource ourselves. It's like that seesaw, the more things that are going on that are hard for us, the more we need to find out what nourishes us, how do we resource ourselves. And of course, it brings into these, when we think about balance, we think about yin and yang, and we think about the kind of doing energy versus the being energy. So if you're out there, and you've been doing a lot of things, and you're doing well, maybe it's a useful thing to consider how we can do more being and often that being is linked to being more in the body, and giving ourselves the time and the space to listen. And of course, you know, I can't just go and be still I need to be able to move offs, some of that kind of frantic energy before I can be still so running around doing something physical, just like that time of life, the children, they often need to run around and do something before they can settle. And the theme this summer, this time, July, but we're in at the moment, it's so abundant, there's so much growing really fast, and we're getting into the harvest the time of the year within, let's say the Celtic will where we're moving into the harvest time where the seeds are appearing. So this is a busy time. And I remember this time last year feeling oh my god, this is when I need to rest. And if you go back to the July last year, I was talking about rest being actually rest is the new revolution, can we actually rest can we give ourselves space to lie on the land, sit against a tree, be in water. And this kind of antidote to being burned out this natural land, if we can access it even looking up at the sky, finding a park, finding a canal in a city, finding a space. it is an antidote to burning out. And we need to resource ourselves. And we need to notice about this kind of how the demands that we place upon ourselves, the kind of antidote is this listening is finding that balance as I am saying quite strongly at the moment.

And of course, I need to listen to the message that I'm communicating to. And you know, that's absolutely my intention to create some space and to have some kind of wandering time that isn't around doing or outcomes. And of course, that mirrors the curriculum. For me, it's like we can't always be going for outcomes for results. We need processing time we need space to be with it. And I often think my best ideas and creativity comes when I actually have space. And I often think of it like a cooking pot. I allow things to cook, to simmer to have their time. So that from there something emerges. And I think this is what this is often about really giving ourselves that time to do that and the wisdom of our ancestors would also say in the Wheel of the Year that this is we've come through our June solstice, the peak time the peak energy and we're now moving from what is considered that masculine energy from Christmas, the growing the kind of outwardly externally doing into the more internal time. And that's not to say, Okay, this is masculine as an archetype. This is feminine as an archetype. Of course not. There's many cycles all the time. But it's a sense of reminding us that both are very important. So I hope you've enjoyed what I've been sharing today, again, pulling these threads together, really inviting us to imagine that what if that Dylan talked about, you know, what if we could create something different here? What if we could imagine something towards the planet, something that would be healthy for the planet? What would we like to see in our local areas? Would you like to have more access to the natural world? Would you like to participate in making that more possible for children for the health sector? You know, what opportunity do you have in your life to make that happen, and you know, when you really care about something, as long as you're resourced you can find the energy to participate and to get involved in things that can contribute to some of the changes you want to see.

And, you know, I'm not going to say that it's all our personal individual responsibility here, because I think that's a big mistake that we as individuals kind of take it all on board. And it's all about, you know, us doing what we can, when we know, this is a system issue that comes from a deep history, where we have been disconnected and taken away from ourselves and the land. And I'm not saying someone has done that, to us, I'm saying this is where we find ourselves. And we're sitting on many shoulders of these kinds of cultures and systems. And you know, it is up to the systems and the bigger Legal Policy, governmental structures to come in and actually change things at a senior high level. But of course, it comes from the grassroots as well, because everything is connected. So with that, I'm going to say that I'm excited about the next season, making sure I'm giving myself some time. And I want to let you know that yeah, I'm gonna follow my interest. This is what I'm doing here, following the track, wanting to speak to people engaged in, you know, the natural world therapy, looking at ourselves, looking at how we can support the land outdoor learning, obviously, for a school, the education system, the health system, I'm going to be looking at about how basically how ownership of the land and how that can affect our natural access to the land.

So our right to Rome has been coming up a lot, I want to investigate more about our right to Rome. And how that can impact us actually having a meaningful connection with the natural world look a bit of the history of that. I also want to speak to more people about integrating outdoor learning within the school, and many other subjects. So please, stay with me. Let me know what your liking what you want more of stay connected and really look after yourself.

Thank you. In this season, I've researched lots and lots of ideas. And I've really enjoyed the reframe that humans can in fact, be net contributors, and that we can have a positive role to play in the wider ecosystem. I love that we can ask the question, what if? What if the rivers were clean? What if our food systems looked after the soil and our own health? What if all the children had access to the outdoors and develop a sense of belonging? Regardless of all the talking I do on the podcast, I'm going to make sure I bypass my head as much as I can, and take the time and space to be in my wild animal body and to stretch my own consciousness. I hope you'll join me the on September 23 With the new season that promises more inspiring and interesting conversations and reflections.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Wild Minds Podcast. If you enjoyed it and want to help support this podcast, please subscribe, share and leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Your review will help others find the show.

To stay updated with The Wild Minds Podcast and get all the behind-the-scenes content. You can visit the www.theoutdoorteacher.com or follow me on Facebook at theoutdoorteacherUK and LinkedIn, Marina Robb.
The music was written and performed by Geoff Robb. See you next week. Same time, same place.