The Sit Spot Practice - what it is, why it’s so powerful & how to do it
Hello,
It’s always been plants for me. At least, it was until I started my sit spot practice.
For most of my career, it’s the plant world that has been my doorway to Nature. The fact that plants are medicine, so tickled my interest that I narrowed my focus even further. My way of practicing “deep nature connection” has been to connect with specific plants and to learn deeply from them.
Building these friendships with specific types of plants (and sometimes even individual plants), it turns out is only one way to do the “nature connection” thing.
I’m telling this story because of how the Sit Spot practice has helped deepen my relationship with what I’ll call “nonfocused” Nature, in that you’re using both your peripheral vision and expanding your awareness of everything around you.
It’s a remarkable practice that is builds your resilience and sense of inner resource.
So please, check out my take on the Sit Spot (with credit and gratitude to the 8 Shields movement)…
then you can post a comment and share your sit spot story…
Is this different than your practice in some way? What do you do differently?
Post a comment and let me know :)
strenght & wisdom
garliq
PS. If you’d like to learn about going deeper with specific plants, you might be interested in this 6 month mentorship program… Learning the Lost Language of Plants: Cultivate Clarity & Confidence in Communicating with Herbs
It’s designed especially for spiritual herbalists, permaculturists, & nature-based artists looking for inspiration, healing and wisdom.
hello folks this is garliq with the living medicine project and i wanted to make this video today to talk about uh the sit spot practice i'm not sure if this is a term that you have heard yet um it's becoming more and more common um i hear more and more people uh talking about it in some form or another uh for me it came it's a term that i learned from the h shields community uh and the work of john young uh but it has spread far and wide beyond that um and yeah this morning i've been sitting in this spot here for about 40 minutes just listening to the birds and letting go of my thoughts and um and i'm reminded of an old buddhist expression that says uh don't just do something sit there and so i wanted to make this little video to introduce this sit spot practice to folks in my community my audience who haven't come across this yet so um and if you have come across this you know maybe maybe i do it a little differently than you and i would love to hear the way that you do it and how you know what really works for you but basically how i understand the stitch spot and how i practice it is that i come to the woods it's got to be some place convenient that's the first tip someplace that's within a couple of minutes of your house or your workplace or something uh the place where i'm sitting here is about a three or four minute drive from where i drop off my youngest at his for school program and so three days a week i come straight here and i just sit for between 30 and 60 minutes until i feel that calm inside even here i had the idea about a half hour ago to shoot this video and uh i needed to stick with the practice i needed to just let go of all of the thoughts and just stick with the practice and here's the practice as i do it is i come i work on cycling through my the awareness that i have and the focus that i have on my senses so the first thing that i find most useful is to notice sounds so i ask myself the simple question of what is the quietest sound that i can hear in every direction and i started to play a little game that i notice i now have adopted so anytime i'm feeling stressed or anxious i do this as well but i actually try in both directions to listen at the same time so what do i hear in the to the right and what do i hear to the left and then i hone in what's the quietest sound i hear in each of those directions and it's so powerful to notice how the mind chatter just totally drops it's such a powerful uh pattern interrupt from whatever you were thinking or whatever you were doing to just ask yourself the question and shift your focus to what are the sounds around you and so you can go through the four directions around you or the eight directions uh or the ten directions if you include above and below however you wanna do it but then also notice what you smell can be easier to close your eyes when you're doing the smelling and the listening but i encourage you to open your eyes and look around and see what it's like where you are you know this is a practice of really noticing um especially if you're going to the same place every day even if you're just sitting on your front porch or in your backyard notice the little changes see if you can pay enough attention that you notice that the wind blew a leaf six inches or maybe a squirrel moved a stick or something i mean maybe you'll just notice that it's gone you won't know why and that of course is actually a really potent place to be uh okay i'm gonna shift gears here so that you guys don't i'm not i don't have a tripod here so i'm just holding this and i don't want it to be too jittery for you and then taste you know taste the air there are times i'll even taste the soil or take a good you know handful of soil and really just smell it to get a sense of the place where i am um and then for me there's also a practice of noticing how i feel in response to this place so emotionally how do i feel how does my body feel in this place what's my nervous system telling me you know and i used to meditate i don't i don't like i don't really officially meditate anymore i'm not sure what official meditation would look like but i don't sit on my cushion inside this is how i meditate these days and it has a very similar effect except with the bonus that i feel connected to the to the living world to the greenness to the insects to the birds especially because i'm a very auditory processor maybe you've heard me you can tell i like to talk i try to shoot these three minute videos and they all take six or seven minutes so quieting and listening to the sounds really is quite profound and so i want to encourage you to uh find what works for you which sense start to become aware of which sense is actually uh your dominant if you have a dominant and what's the secondary one and what can you start to do at your sit spot that helps bring you down that helps with your regulation and bring you down like in a good way right bring you down back into your body out of the mental chatter into the feeling and being in the body kind of experience um yeah so that's that's my take on it for right now uh if you have different take if you have different opinion please you know post it below uh if you haven't already then i invite you to subscribe and um um and also check out my my website uh livingmedicineproject.com i've got uh a new mentorship program that is just launching and uh we'll be starting uh in early may 2021 and a lot of other stuff on the way so you can hear about that from being on my newsletter and by uh by subscribing and clicking on the notification bell below so that uh you hear directly as i'm producing more and more content so that's uh that's me for today i'm garliq with the living medicine project thanks so much talk to you next time