Rewild & Slow
Day 10: Lynne Davies-Craine
Nature and Wellbeing
I’ve always had a strong connection with nature, having been raised in semi-rural north west England, with Morecambe Bay birds and the Lake District not too far away. When I was younger I took this for granted, as a lot of young people do, and didn’t appreciate the benefits of living where I did. Now nature is… I want to say integral to me, but actually I feel that I am nature and nature is me; there isn’t any separation of the two.
I had an epiphany which sparked this realisation - that I am nature, I am here for a reason, nurtured by God (energy, the universe however you want to think of it) - and after that everything changed. I started to do more self development work, worked with a life coach, and everything combined sparked a big shift; I started to realised I wanted more. I used to have this real separation in my life, particularly when I went home to visit my mum and struggled to come back to my ‘real world’ of nursing in a city; I felt so torn going back to my reality. As an NHS nurse, I discovered that although caring for people was a huge part of the job, it was the focus on mental health that was really important to me. I realised I needed to find what set my soul on fire and what made me come alive. Slowly, over the next few years, I explored different options and realised that what I wanted was to inspire others to reconnect to nature, to nourish their own wellbeing, and to provide coaching for other young women in nature to help them foster their own self worth and discover what sets their souls on fire.
It’s incredibly important to foster a connection to the natural world. There is now so much scientific study to prove how spending time in nature is vital to us as humans; we are the natural world, yet over time, as technology has advanced further and further, we have lost that knowledge and connection. It’s having a hugely detrimental impact on our wellbeing, but also on the health of the natural world, as we are seeing so evidently all around us today.
But we can seek to rewild ourselves. Spending time outside, in all weathers, seasons, really experiencing, truly seeing what is around us, even if that is in our back garden or local park. There is always wonder to be found. I worked alongside a group of children with the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) last year, and awakening their sense of wonder was amazing. I think as adults we need to find that feeling too. Find what ‘turns you on’ - forests, seas, lakes, mountain climbing - and find others who have a similar passion. Think about the way you live your life and if there are ways to bring nature into your daily activities - what are you passionate about? Follow your heart.