We Are Nature: Reclaiming the Connection That Was Never Lost
There's a question I return to often, especially here in the high desert of northern New Mexico, where the mesas glow amber at dusk and the canyon walls hold thousands of years of human story: When did we start believing we were separate from nature?
It's a quiet but profound disorientation — this sense that nature is something "out there," something we visit, something that exists apart from our daily lives and certainly apart from our bodies. And yet, the more science catches up to what indigenous wisdom traditions have always known, the clearer it becomes: we don't go to nature to reconnect. We go to remember what we already are.
The Body Knows
Your autonomic nervous system — the vast, ancient intelligence that governs your heart rate, your breath, your sense of safety — did not evolve in an office. It evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in relationship with wind, soil, water, and living systems. And it still speaks that language fluently.
Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges and increasingly refined through recent neuroscience, describes how the nervous system is constantly scanning the environment — a process called neuroception — for cues of safety or threat. Porges argues that feelings of safety have a measurable neurophysiological substrate, regulated by the autonomic nervous system, and that acknowledging this can shift our understanding of wellbeing from the purely subjective to the objectively measurable. What this means in practice is remarkable: your body is not passive in nature. It is in dialogue with it. nih
The sounds of birdsong, the dappled light through tree canopy, the smell of rain on warm earth — these are not simply pleasant aesthetics. They are sensory signals that communicate safety to a nervous system shaped to receive exactly this kind of input. When your system receives those cues, something shifts. The ventral vagal branch of the vagus nerve — the branch associated with social engagement, openness, and ease — begins to activate. You exhale. You land.
What the Research Is Telling Us
The science on human-nature connection has grown remarkably robust in recent years. A landmark 2023 systematic review, covering 16 meta-analyses and data from 832 independent studies, found that psychological and physical connections with nature improve both human wellbeing and conservation behavior, with nature connection found to be "strongly and robustly" related to pro-environmental behavior across self-reports, observed behavior, and stated intentions. But perhaps more striking is what's happening at the physiological level. Earth.Org
A 2023 scoping review published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health examined HRV (heart rate variability) data collected in outdoor and nature-based settings. Researchers noted that HRV provides a meaningful window into the intrinsic regulation of the autonomic nervous system, making it a particularly valuable measure for assessing health outcomes in outdoor, free-living contexts. In other words, HRV lets us measure what our bodies experience when we step into the living world. PubMed Central
And a 2024 study on forest bathing in Frontiers in Psychology found that immersion in a forest environment for two days produced measurable physiological changes across multiple parameters, including heart rate, HRV, electrodermal activity, blood pressure, and salivary cortisol — a cascade of responses that speaks to whole-system regulation, not just mood. doaj
Research has even proposed a "physiological adjustment effect" — the idea that HRV adjusts toward an optimal value during nature contact, increasing when baseline HRV is low and decreasing when it is high — as though the living world itself acts as a biological tuning fork, drawing us toward homeostasis. Nature
Coherence as Homecoming
In HeartMath's framework, coherence describes a state in which the heart, brain, and nervous system are operating in harmonious synchrony — reflected in smooth, rhythmic patterns in heart rate variability. A large-scale global study analyzing 1.8 million HRV biofeedback sessions found that positive emotional states were consistently associated with higher coherence scores and more stable HRV frequencies, while negative emotional states corresponded with lower scores and more dispersed patterns. Nature
What's profound about this is that coherence is not an abstract concept — it's a felt state. And for many people, that state arises most naturally and most readily in nature.
When we walk slowly through a forest, pause beside a creek, or sit with our back against a tree, we are not "doing nothing." We are engaging in one of the most sophisticated forms of nervous system regulation available to us. We are allowing our bodies to entrain to rhythms that are ancient, steady, and deeply familiar — the rustle of wind through leaves, the pulse of light, the breath of the land itself.
Nature Connection as Identity
Recent research has begun to explore not just what happens when we spend time in nature, but how a sense of being part of nature — rather than merely being in it — shapes us more fundamentally.
A 2022 study on the human "experience of nature" found that these experiences affect human values and attitudes by reinforcing individuals' psychological and emotional connection with nature, with those reporting the highest levels of nature experience demonstrating the greatest pro-conservation behaviors and the strongest environmental identities. Earth.Org
Research consistently supports that deliberate and meaningful engagement with nature — actively noticing it, attending to it — is among the most important pathways to deepening nature connection. ResearchGate
This matters beyond ecology. When we experience ourselves as of nature — not visitors but participants, not observers but belonging — something in our psychology shifts. We move from the exhaustion of separation to the ease of membership. The nervous system recognizes something it has been waiting to hear: You are home. You have always been home.
The Invitation at Living Resonance
At Living Resonance, the work I offer is built on this understanding. The HeartMath tools I use help clients see their coherence in real time — watching their own heart rhythms settle as they breathe, as they soften, as they arrive. The forest therapy walks I guide create space for the senses to open and for the nervous system to remember its native language.
This isn't about escaping the pressures of modern life. It's about building the capacity to carry a different quality of presence into every part of your life — because that presence is always, already, deeply rooted in the living world.
You are not separate from nature. You are made of it. You breathe it, you move with it, you heal through it.
All that's needed is an invitation to remember.
Ready to begin? Explore individual sessions, group offerings, and upcoming Coherence in Nature experiences at livingresonance.net.
References
Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
Lumber, R., Richardson, M., & Sheffield, D. (2023). Psychological and physical connections with nature improve both human well-being and nature conservation: A systematic review of meta-analyses. Biological Conservation. [Summarized in Earth.Org, April 2023]
Queirolo, L., Fazia, T., Roccon, A., et al. (2024). Effects of forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku) in stressed people. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1458418
Perez, J., et al. (2023). Using heart rate variability methods for health-related outcomes in outdoor contexts: A scoping review of empirical studies. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(2). PMC9858817.
Lundqvist, D., et al. (2025). Physiological adjustment effects of viewing natural environment images on heart rate variability in individuals with depressive and anxiety disorders. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-00681-4
Haeyen, S. (2024). A theoretical exploration of polyvagal theory in creative arts and psychomotor therapies for emotion regulation in stress and trauma. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1382007
Shaffer, F., & Ginsberg, J. P. (2025). Heart rate variability biofeedback in a global study of the most common coherence frequencies and the impact of emotional states. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-87729-7
Lengieza, M. L., et al. (2025). Human–nature connection: A multidisciplinary review. [ResearchGate preprint/review, 2024–2025]
