Bringing More Nature Into Our Doula Practice

For many of us, wanting a connection with nature is common in times of change, particularly when someone is dying—our self, a loved one, a client. Nature is so often a bridge for us to spirit, the divine, the greatest Mystery by any name, reminding us that we are made of the same stuff as this divine Mystery, whether nature means trees, flowers, sky, sun, soil, pollinators, cats, dogs, or mountain lions. How can we bring nature more into the dying process? Here are some ways that have worked for many people.

Therapeutic hospital gardens and landscaping: there is much research now on how beneficial this is for the mental and emotional wellness of staff, family and patients, all three groups. Just typing in “hospitals gardens landscaping plants” returns an abundance of article references brimming with multiple benefits. Jekka’s gorgeous photos of her top-award-winning hospice garden invite us to step into the picture (Click HERE). Rooftop hospital gardens such as this one are easy to access. An organization called Therapeutic Landscape Network says they are the “resource for gardens and landscapes that promote health and wellbeing.” They list gardens in healthcare and related facilities. To keep it simple, look for pollinator habitat gardens and landscapes in your area; they are going to be the most abundant and beautiful, bursting with flowers, built by people who care about nature. If you are a gardener, they are not hard to create. Just include hardscape paths to make it easy to use walkers or canes or wheel around and bring in lovely benches or chairs to sit on.

If our loved one can no longer go outside to a bench or beach, forest or garden, can their bed be moved to a window with a view so they can see snow glisten, the fog roll in, listen to the wind, smell the fresh breeze? When my Dad was dying in an urban facility with no connection to nature (in a storage room where they had placed a bed, actually), the quality of penetrating late autumn light pouring in through the window, refracted through strong wind gusts, helped keep me connected to my inner source of inspiration. Grateful for that.

Photo by Олег Мороз, Unsplash

If not, bring inside some evergreen needles or leaves or some aromatic flowers; crush them with your hand or a pestle in a mortar, offer them for smelling—peppermint, lavender, monarda, so many others. (Of course commercial essential oils can be used, but there can be a special connection with a leaf that comes from close at hand. And many essential oils are still wild-crafted, which, sadly, is becoming increasingly unsustainable.) You can crush and offer a wide range of kitchen spices, too, which may bring memories with them.

Sometimes you can bring a plant into the loved one’s room (Plants can freshen air). Or a terrarium. Or one or more beautiful rocks. Or read poems or scripture or sing songs with strong nature images. Or a nature sculpture (just enter that search term for amazing ideas). Or a large painting or picture or photo of some beautiful plant or place in nature that you can put on the wall above the loved one’s head or elsewhere it is easily seen. We humans are often drawn to pictures with a special quality of light. And funny nature videos! Or a looping nature video. I don’t remember the name of the TV channel that endlessly looped beautiful brief nature videos when my mother was dying in a hospital room with no window to speak of, having that nature channel TV service throughout those long solitary days and nights reminded me of beauty and helped me cope.

And then there is nature we find in our own imaginations. My friend Diana taught me to notice “micro- pleasures” each moment, whether that might be a moment of connection with a stranger or friend in the grocery store or noticing the funny-looking beetle on the bellflower as I walk past. This practice helps bring me more blessings of human nature as well as the blessings of wind and water and pebbles than I could have imagined, ones I might easily have overlooked.

Guided meditations can also help connect us with nature. Ask your loved one—or another caregiver of course—to remember a beautiful memory in nature and to tell it to you. Tell it back and ask if you are getting the highlights right. When you’ve got it, tell it to your person as a guided meditation. There’s something kind of magic about someone else guiding you on a walk through your own intimate nature place or memory. Dwell there as long as your person wants.

If you both want to go a little farther, you as facilitator might ask if your person wants to invite any special loving person or being (a special tree, animal, rock, legendary figure) to enter that special space. If so, ask simple questions to situate the encounter (where do they both sit or stand?), then invite it to unfold. Ask the person to let you know when they are ready to end it. Practice this with other caregivers beforehand.

Some of us doulas have experienced the loss of beloved places in nature due to epic flooding, intense wildfire, clearcutting, urban expansion, selling of land and other reasons. It’s disorienting, shocking. It can feel like a death in itself. How have we worked with this? The same way we work with any death. We mourn it, honor and remember it, go there in our memories and guided facilitations, knowing that everything we touch, feel, see, hear and taste is evanescent. It’s a manifestation of spirit and as such it both comes and goes and, like a shining beloved person who has died, it is a gift, a bridge to spirit, to the Great Mystery (please use your own terms here). It is never lost. The feel of the place, the inspiration and love can always be with us, even as we find or create a new, temporary “special place” in our physical world.

Since nature is a bridge from form to spirit for so many of us, when we are ready to let go of our bodies and become pure spirit, it will be time to let go of the end of the bridge that ties us to the physical form-of-nature side.

This “I Am Not” meditation*, read aloud by someone with a sense of the wondrousness of the spirit, has
helped people at all stages of conscious dying with the process of letting go:

• I am not my eyes—I am not what I see.
• I am not my ears—I am not what I hear.
• I am not my nose—I am not what I smell.
• I am not my tongue—I am not what I taste.
• I am not this body—I am not what I feel or what I touch.
  
  
• I am not this personality—therefore I am not this patterned identity.
• I am not this consciousness—therefore I am not this mental or emotional programming.
• The taste, the touch, the thoughts that are manifesting within and around me—I am not any of
  these things.
  
  
• I am neither the vision—nor the sound.
• I am neither the aroma—nor the thoughts.
• I am neither the taste—nor the consciousness.
  
  
• I am not the earth—and I am not the heavens.
• I am not the air, the fire, or the water
• Because I am not any of these things...
• Birth and death cannot affect me—
  
  
• I smile—because neither have I taken birth—nor can my eternal soul die.
• I did not suddenly come to life—thus even death cannot snatch my life away.
• My existence never relied on the birth or the death of this body—and it still does not rely on either
  of them.

With deep thanks to the natural world for bringing us to this awareness.

*Meditation p.19 in The Mystical Teachings of the Buddhist written by Professor Jerry Alan Johnson, PhD, D.T.C.M.