Come Back to Yourself in Nature: My Story of How the Outdoors Healed My Nervous System

COVID was one big meditation retreat that most of us did NOT choose to be on.

And with hindsight? I’m kind of grateful for it.

Not for the fear. Not for the loss. Not for the relentless uncertainty that sat on all of our chests for months on end – I’ll never be grateful for that. But for what happened when everything stopped and the world went quiet.

I started going outside.

The Nature Center, the Ferns, and the Year Everything Slowed Down

For almost a year, I walked to my local nature center every single day. Not as exercise. Not to hit a step count or clear a goal off a list. Basically because it was one of the only places I could go that didn’t feel stressful. In fact, it felt calming. And in 2020, that was everything.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped just walking through the nature center and started actually seeing it.

I watched fiddlehead ferns push their first curl of green up through the forest floor. I came back the next day and the day after that and watched them unfurl, slowly, on their own timeline, completely indifferent to the chaos happening in the world above them. I know their entire life cycle now – because for the first time in my adult life, I had nowhere else to be.

And then there was the orchid on my windowsill.

One afternoon I sat on my sofa and just… watched it bloom open in real time. I know that sounds small. But I had never – not once – given myself the stillness to do something like that. To watch something beautiful happen without rushing past it. Without half a mind on my phone, my inbox, my to-do list.

Something profoundly shifted. I started to understand what a genuine nervous system reset actually felt like – and how desperately I had needed one.

Why Nature Does What It Does to Us

Being me, I immediately went looking for WHY. Here’s what I found:

20 minutes in nature measurably lowers cortisol levels. Not “might help you feel better” – actually, measurably lowers the stress hormone that keeps so many of us stuck in fight-or-flight.

Japan has a government-sponsored forest bathing practice called shinrin-yoku because the science behind it is so compelling they built it into their national health infrastructure. This isn’t woo. This is policy.

Doctors in the UK are now prescribing time in nature to patients. Nature as medicine. Written on an actual prescription pad.

Green Mind research is an entire field dedicated to understanding nature’s effect on our stressed nervous systems – and the findings keep pointing in the same direction. Outside is good for us. Profoundly, measurably, undeniably good for us.

And yet most of us spend around 90% of our time indoors.

90%.

That gap – between what our nervous systems genuinely need and how we actually live our daily lives – is what I’ve built my work around. I call it pausing. Using simple, accessible practices to reset our nervous systems so we can be healthier, more content, and a great deal less stressed. Not through grand gestures or expensive interventions. Through presence. Through nature. Through giving ourselves permission to just… stop.

What This Looks Like Now

This past Mother’s Day, I gave myself the whole day to do exactly what I wanted. I spent the morning at the garden center and the rest of the afternoon with my hands in the soil – planting, weeding, pruning. No agenda. No productivity metric.

And this morning, I stepped outside with my coffee and just stood there. Looking at my blooms, my herbs, everything coming alive and reaching toward the summer. And I felt this big, slow smile spread across my face before I’d even had a chance to think about it.

That feeling – that quiet, grounded, I am exactly where I need to be feeling – is what I want for you.

It’s why forest bathing is now at the heart of every weekend retreat I run. We go outside in every season. Yes, even in the snow and ice. And yes – everyone always asks to do it again. Because there is something that happens when you step into nature with intention and genuine presence that no amount of indoor breathwork can fully replicate. Your nervous system knows it before your brain does.

If something in you just said yes to this – trust that. That’s your nervous system talking. And it knows what it needs.

I run nature mindfulness retreats throughout the year, all designed around exactly this – giving you a full day to step outside, reset, and come back to yourself.

You can see all upcoming retreats right here

Nature has been waiting for you. And honestly? So have I. 🌿