Remembering rapture
A bunch of brightly coloured flowers is a psychedelic without the psychedelic?! On the extraordinary power of nature for healing not only ourselves, physically, but for flourishing worlds too.
Faster recoveries, 20% better memories and more focused attention? All from a virtual or physical walk in nature? That’s some of the physical and measurable supercharging benefits of nature. And it goes much deeper than this helping us to be bigger than ourselves and the sum of the group, wiring our co-creative intelligences. We’ve known these benefits for centuries. We’re integrating them now.
Florence Nightingale
People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by colour and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.
Florence Nightingale1
In 1859 Florence Nightingale initiates a revolution: natural beauty—whether through windows, cut flowers or gardens—has tangible healing effects, reducing stress and promoting recovery.
She witnessed euphoria in patient after patient:
“I shall never forget the rapture of fever patients over a bunch of bright-coloured flowers. I remember (in my own case) a nosegay of wild flowers being sent me, and from that moment recovery becoming more rapid.”2
Fast forward a century—write it up in the premier academic journal Science—and patients with views of trees outside their windows have:
8.5% shorter hospital stays
less pain medication
fewer post-surgical complications3
More rapture
The same is true across all of our lives. A walk on the wild side delivers:
improved memory performance
better attention span
by a 20% margin4
This is staggering and potent even when we don’t walk:
Exposure to pictures of nature led to more improved executive attention performance than did exposure to urban pictures.5
Waking up
It goes well beyond pictures. The sense we make from our own, others and environment experiences changes us as well as those around us. It is a powerful element for transformative change.
That is both physical and through creative and curated experiences:
Storytelling, visioning, audiovisual arts, festivals and participatory creative practices play a critical role by offering new perspectives on humans’ relationship with nature and by fostering imagination, sense-making and emotional engagement with environmental issues.6
And we do this through feeling & sharing in:
practices reflecting interdependencies with nature or ways of ‘living as nature’
revealing a radically expanded perception of the world and realizing the unitive nature of reality7
Try it 1
Spend 21 seconds in the Highlands by Beinn Dearg, Torridon, Northwest Scotland.
Try it 2
We humans are collective beings as well as individuals. Nature is powerful when we meet, experience together and make sense of our feelings—the states, patterns and levels of connection with each other and nature, bliss and sensualities of what we encounter.
Peak nature, second Saturday every month, lets you step into that online. More here>
We explore how are extended states of consciousness are supportive for the difficulties we and humanity face. We help ourselves wire our enhanced awarenesses and bring this into situations it would have previously felt more remote: help the circles of people around us, our organisations and more. To treat what emerges (4th person type sensed entities8) as having their own life, enhance our capacity to be in shared awareness, and simultaneously take this lightly: Open to the other realities that are true too.
This is a psychedelic for our individual and collective consciousness without a psychedelic.9
Photos & video: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US. Except #1 Florence Irisdragon
Nightingale, F. (1859). Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not Amazon & Public Library
Popova, M. (2022). The healing power of nature and beauty: Florence Nightingale on expediting recovery from illness and burnout The Marginalian
Ulrich, R. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery, Science. Views of trees compared to views of a brick wall. Full text
Berman, G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature, Psychological Science. Full text
ibid. 2008 & there are many others, including connecting this with profits and people, creativity and work benefits. https://positivepsychology.com/attention-restoration-theory/#9-restorative-benefits-of-nature is a good overview.
ibid. 2024 and see Inclusive creativity
For an exploration of 4th person Scharmer, O., & Pomeroy, E. (2024). Fourth Person: The Knowing of the Field. Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change is great. Full text
Loved the interview you cited in footnote 9. Pamela von Sabljar made clearer to me something I've been turning around--the necessity to embody eros in a relational world. We in the west are not taught about eros, probably because we lost touch with it eons ago and now most of us reduce it to sex as we know it. I want to know more about Pamela's work.