Читать книгу Finding Inner Safety - Dr Nerina Ramlakhan - Страница 14

This part of the book is very dear to me. Initially, the scientist in me worried that what I was writing was whimsical and fluffy and that I'd be called a tree hugger! In order to write it, I needed to retreat into myself for a while. It was August 2021 and in London we hoped we'd come out of the pandemic. People weren't sure what to do with themselves; it felt as if the world was in a lull – a perfect time to be still and write about safety from a different perspective and one that even my ‘gurus’, neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges and trauma therapist Deb Dana, hadn't written about – the healing potential of trees and their ability to show us how to feel safe. These respected professionals are considered by many to be amongst the top pioneers in the relatively new field of ‘safety science’.

My gut or intuition was guiding me strongly here, driven by the question: What is the counterbalance to all of noise out there? The opinions and divisiveness in our world? The uncertainty that we're all facing at the moment? All of this serves to take us even further away from feelings of safety and surety. Can trees, just by virtue of how they exist and operate, demonstrate to us all what feeling safe really means? In this section of my book I show you that they truly can.

My aim in writing this book is to take you deep. We can't ‘do’ feeling safe unless we are prepared to plunge our depths. This means going back to the source or the roots of our relationship with feeling safe, where we came from, through tramlines of parental and ancestral DNA from our parents and back to their parents, and their parents too. And even beyond . . . I started thinking – what if we go back to our very beginnings on earth? Can we learn something meaningful about how to feel safe in our changing world? According to James Lovelock, the prize-winning creator of the Gaia hypothesis, we are inextricably connected to our planet, to Mother Earth and nature.

In this third part, I write about the unexpected muse who turned up at the right time and helped me to deepen my understanding of the roots of our safety. Here I write about our relationship with nature – and trees in particular – what they can teach us about feeling safe and their amazing capacity to heal. I believe it can also teach us how to break free from patterns of survival and truly thrive. For too long we have been obsessed with our world of technology, speed, and consumerism and this is what we have looked to in order to feel secure. Right now, with our whole world in chaos and crisis, we need a different perspective and one that brings us back to who we are, our true nature.