Ep.47 Seeking Wholeness with Natural Spirituality with Laurie Baker

Welcome to ReConnect with Plant Wisdom. I am your host, Tigrilla Gardenia, Nature-Inspired Mentor and Leadership Coach. In this podcast, I share ancient and modern knowledge, from biology to spirituality, about the wondrous ways plants can help you lead a Naturally Conscious Life.

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grass fired mentor and leadership coach. In this podcast I share ancient and modern knowledge from biology to spirituality, about the wondrous ways in which plants can help you lead a naturally conscious life. Hello, hello, hello Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of reconnect with plant wisdom. It’s me to get it I got Dinya so this this episode, I knew this episode was going to be good. I knew it was going to be good, but I didn’t know it was going to be this good. Seriously I’m speechless. I’m speechless. So this is episode 47 of very fascinating conversation with Laurie Baker where we talk about natural spirituality. So this is really about seeking wholeness with natural spirituality and I just and we still had so much more to talk about, but we ended up having to close it down because you know, we can’t just go on forever. So it is my extreme pleasure to invite you all to listen to episode 47 seeking wholeness with natural spirituality with Laurie Baker.

Laurie, I have been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Because for a long time for those that don’t know Laurie at the very beginning when I started my podcast Laurie used to help me by putting asking me questions, so she would send me questions that she thought were good ideas to, to use in the podcast. And so now we’re going to turn the tables, and I’m going to ask her a set of the questions that she originally asked me, but before we start Laurie Laurie Baker who is Laurie Baker?

1:48
Yes, we always start with the hardest questions, don’t we? The first thing that comes to mind is about the Bonnie Raitt song. I am an old woman named after my mother. But because I don’t know for some reason that song is like one of my you know, your worms or something. But I am an old woman, and I relish. I relish this like I have wanted to be old. Pretty much since I was born. And and so at this point, who is Laurie is like, this aggregate this integration, this accumulation of all this stuff, most of which I hate it when it was happening. And now it’s like, rich and juicy. And as a writer, which I am a writer, it’s it’s very helpful to have had a lot of challenging moments in life.

And I am also I’m a student of spiritual healing. I’ve been a student of other spiritual disciplines in the past, and I I mean, in the sense of I’ve done classes and gotten some certifications and stuff like that, and nothing ever really took. Actually my very first job at 16 was as a was as a healer in the sense of I was a nurse’s aide in a little hospital in a little town. In North Dakota, in the 60s. And that, that is a life theme for me and I have finally found in in the endowment her Academy in the school for spiritual healers. The fit that I have spent my whole life looking for which one,

3:54
I’m gonna tell you a little bit of the words here the words that come to mind when I think about Laurie I think, I think for sure, crone in the best sense of the word like he just said, it’s like you want it to be old your entire life and and in that beautiful kind of that rich understanding way because you’ve lived you’ve really lived your experiences, writer for sure, editor poet, because even when you write your words sound like poetry when we’re in the writing group, we talk about this all the time when you’re not around, where like Laurie just somehow makes everything sound like poetry. So actors, journalist, activist community creator hmm, and there are so many more that I could just keep listing I mean, true multi potential i in the flesh, like you,

4:56
my I had a fairly one stint in the corporate world as project manager which is thinking right people know and I’m, and I, I fell into activism and leadership around homelessness, and you know, it’s not a place I ever intended to go. But it that is definitely tapped into a deep a deep well in me for the needs of OB eggs. You know,

5:30
our conversation today that I really wanted to have was all around the idea of natural spirituality. I’m going to be honest, I know we’re going to waver through and we’re going to weave through a bunch of other topics because there are other things that I know will naturally come up in this conversation and that’s what I love. But I wanted to ask about the natural spirituality especially because now that you’re in the school for spiritual healers, you’ve been now to domande her we’ve talked about different experiences, and at the same time, I know you’ve had deep relationships with different plants and trees, even the cottonwoods which I’ll let you tell the story of the cottonwoods through your home and and the whole story around their relationship with them.

So taking a step back from Yasher there is different titles given to natural spiritual naturalism or naturalistic spirituality, which is all a whole naturalistic philosophy with spirituality. Some people instead think of it more as a paganistic aspect of spirituality like looking at more nature based spirits and like Celtic, druidic work. Take Take a step back from all of that for a second, given your own personal experience with the natural world and your deep relationship with trees and other plants and your spiritual healing journey and your your spiritual journey in general. How would you define it? What does natural spirituality really look like to you?

6:53
It very much is, on the one hand, kind of an exploration of wholeness, I would say or a search for wholeness, and there is no wholeness. If you’re just by yourself and an individual trying to do every, you know, trying to make yourself what be better or whatever, whatever language you use around something like spiritual growth. It’s not a thing that that an individual tiny spark like me can do. It requires co creation. And so from our time together from my time in NCC, it’s changed my definition somewhat and it really comes down to that notion of spirituality is is practice its connection, and it’s cocreation. To me, and it’s not a thing that’s separate from any aspect of my everyday life.

Or my extraordinary life. I mean, it’s like it’s it’s sort of everything to me, which I know sounds kind of cliched or or small, but But it’s true and I don’t know how to express the the way that it is taught me that and the way that that the trees in particular. And the elements really have taught me that I am never alone. I’m never I’m never on my own in the dark without a guide and a path. It’s always there.

8:39
And I mean, I was I was saying this when we did our naturally naturally conscious leadership group call the other day and we were having our group call, which is part of flourishing sprouts that you you’re in and you’ve been in for so long, and we were having the call and I said, ultimately, some sometimes the farther I go down my path, the more I get to the corny terms that everybody uses, but that I finally that I always kind of tried to avoid, you know, the kumbaya sort of love where and yet that’s where we like we the more I was even contemplating on this this morning, as I was doing my morning journaling after my breath work and I was really kind of tapping into myself and I was realizing that it is so much I mean, I had I had a really challenging day yesterday, and I went to sleep though, with peace even though it was extremely challenging day. And after, you know, I surrendered all of that out and kind of went deeper into myself and I woke up this morning.

And so it’s journaling, everything kind of came back to self love. Everything came back to how the pieces fit together. So I agree with you that natural spirituality isn’t only I mean, I understand that for some it’s about, you know, the divinities or this particular are going out into the woods. It is all of it. And that’s, I think, the most interesting part. It’s about living according to our own nature. And I end the own path that gets created and I think that really is the core of it. It’s like, I build a healthy identity and I work in the world but not based on something else, or some other person’s kind of definition on me, but more about the definition that comes when I reconnect all those different aspects of myself like my plant newness.

And I stepped back into the fact that I am animal and my animal illness, and I also get into like the sedentary part of my rockness and my, you know, my mineral illness, and then I move outwards towards my divineness and I bring all of these pieces of me together, which I access through different ways, right, I might access them through a particular plant or a particular tree, or I might access them through to a particular divinity in that particular moment because of all of my personalities. But in the end what I’m really just doing is putting together through these various different elements, the complete, like you said, that wholeness, that whole picture of myself,

11:13
and I also really, I really rely on what I mean, we all come up with our own words for how we talk about what our inner life is right? And I have long since I began doing yoga in the late 70s. I have I’ve always thought of it as the inner teacher because when I started I would be trying to have a pose and I would feel hands on my body, you know, turning an arm or repositioning a foot or a hip or something in that as an adult. That was the beginning of oh, oh, somebody something is helping me. So I really think about it. As inner teacher, but I have come to understand that that inner teacher includes my Christmas cactus, which this is telling me to mention her right now.

12:14
Isn’t it funny how they do that? Isn’t it funny

12:18
is beautifully in bloom though, so you know, oh my god, she’s gorgeous. So good. She’s a little late blooming this year. But then so am I wait until after New Year’s like, a smart a smart CEREC Christmas cat I wanted to say yesterday, just as an example of you know, feeling that pleasantness that Animalist. Yesterday, I was swimming at the pool and I found myself at the end of the swim. I had to I wanted to I didn’t want to put my fins back on so I put them on my hands. And so I swam, because they’re just the kind of short fins, right?

They’re not like really big floppy things. And I swim as first as sea turtle but then I discovered Oh no, this is Frog This is me being a frog. And it was that sense of these, you know these big webby front legs that moved me through the water and it was so much fun and then I laid them on the side or whatever and just laid in the water for a while and had an experience as as as lotus or as lily pad really you know we always think of the flower but how that lily pad plays with the water and the air flipping up a little bit here and you know twisting a little bit that it was so much fun. And I want everybody to like go get in the water and you know be a sea turtle be a really, for me, the connection is so rich there. Right it’s like just me lily pad divinity, whatever.

14:09
I agree and I think that that goes back right like that those natural elements of remembrance they trigger that part of us that we sort of suppress that we we condition out of ourselves to to respond in that way. If you remember just recently when I was doing live commentary on a paper that was all around plant sensing, which you can find inside of the naturally conscious community as well as on my YouTube channel and my website, that live commentary. was all about the the how plants how a scientist are starting to talk more about when they’re looking at plant sensing what it’s taking them towards and understanding and a deeper relationship with plants.

But because they’re scientists, they can’t talk about it but the author of it is a dancer and so the way she got into the understanding the way she got to the understanding was through that movement, by dancing like a plant by by mimicking the tropisms the different kinds of movements that plants make, she was able to then enter into a deeper, richer understanding which led to a change in vocabulary for her. And I know that this is a subject also that’s close to your heart like it is to mind the whole idea that our vocabulary today is extremely limited last night, I was listening to a presentation by a writer who’s a science communicator who’s written two books connected to plants, one about plant intelligence and the other one about the eventual move that we need to make towards plant rights.

And she was discussing about how our language by force divides us because we describe plant sensations and movements through their technical because we understand how things travel through the body of the plant. And so we discuss it as like the glutamates you know, processes this way and then they you know, this gets sent out that way and this goes through the, you know, the xylem or the fly fellow for a tree or blah blah blah We do it in very technical terms. When we describe ourselves we say she moved we are or you know she she made a decision. We don’t think about it from the perspective of well, the brain the neurons traveled through and stimulated the muscle and then the missile contracted and therefore she reached and like we don’t do any of that.

And so our vocabulary really separates us and I think that part of our natural spirituality is to re I hate to use the word conquer but I can’t think of a re away, find reawaken, you know reconnect to our of our inherent vocabulary also because if language is going to be our main mode of communication, I think part of also this natural spirituality is re bringing these relationships into our lives through language, and that and using the creative arts to really reimage this entire long standing relationship.

17:15
I agree with that. And I think that sometimes it has to be led by a proprioception, physical sensation. You know, I I spend a lot of time in in the water as much as I can manage, and I will sometimes just, all I’m doing is I’m sensing the cool air on my fingertips which are out of the water and the sensations on my palm. Which are in the water and trying to find words for that and of course, they’re very limited. They’re very limited, but I almost need the sensation to drive me to try to find a different expression and I actually think that this is I don’t I don’t know if it’s I doubt if it’s new to humanity. I think it’s rippling through everyone right now, as part of the the great change that we I believe that we’re in so.

18:15
Right. Well, and in this case as a person who speaks multiple languages, and just recently I was pulled into a meeting that was for the editing of some magical texts here at Delmon her. We were editing them we were I was being asked as a native English speaker to work with two people who are native Italian speakers, but one of them spends most of her time doing things in English. Actually, both of them do so they’re both very fluent, like an English but they’re native Italian speakers. I’m very fluent in Italian but I’m a native English speaker, but peep we’re all people who love words.

And what the the reason I was being pulled into this meeting was because I’m being pulled into this work was that they were asking for us to revise all of the magical texts. Because the language in English in particular different than other languages is extremely malleable and is transforming they were telling me at record speed, in the sense that as humanity is reawakening, as more of the magic and the spiritual aspects become codified in or become aware to not just a select a niche, but instead start to permeate through then they they are very quickly for language perspective. They’re rapidly being codified into the language. And this

19:38
was awesome. Just in the way that we we are using key and kin and we are not alone in that. How many people read braiding, sweetgrass, and at least got introduced to the idea? What has the trans or non binary movement done for at least in the English language for us, revealing some of the inadequacies of our ability to talk? I don’t know how that is in Italian. I’m very curious about that. Although I don’t think we want to go down that road maybe another time.

20:12
Well, I’ll tell you after because Dominica is about to have a their first kind of conference on this topic on gender. And so yeah, I’ll tell you after that happens, because I did discover recently, how it’s being termed in certain areas of Spanish because as you know, I’m a native Spanish speaker. So I have learned a little bit there. But for example, yeah, Italian and I do think that this is again, the key the kin right, the pronouns for nature for elements and beings in nature, even just a discussion from species to being the idea that you are, you know, or personhood, like, we’re really going into this and I do think that it ties into it to the spiritual perspective, because it’s really about the original term of natural spiritualism.

Or natural spirituality wasn’t so much about divinities and deities and all of the things that we assume about the when we think of the word spiritual, but it was really more about identity. It was really much more about a almost like a natural like what we’re hearing more of eco psychology from the perspective it’s about, but taking that a step further, right? The expression through your creative passions, the integration of the shadow self, something that that I think gets talked about in a perspective that’s very different when you look at it through the relationship and through the lens of of an ecosystem. A shadow is not considered a scary, negative, bad place in the world of an ecosystem. It’s considered another type of environment.

And so the idea that we have always put shadow work into the negative, we’ve always put shadow work as something that is about looking at bad parts of yourself or when instead shadow is just discovering the other side of a quality and how how it operates when it’s been taken out of the light, and that can be extremely useful and process, right. It’s what we talked about relating and exactly.

22:12
It’s so very much moving. You know, the beginnings I think we are still in the beginning stages of moving away from this dualism and this and that, and it’s so beautiful. My heart rejoices. You had asked me about the beliefs that we need to unpack around spirituality. And I really, I really wanted to address that with you, mostly because I want to hear what you think. I am thinking that that the real issue is that we need the continued uncoupling. From religious dogma. In other words, Creed kind of creed versus covenant. When I think about the domande Hurrian constitution, for example, to me, that’s a covenant. I’m a Unitarian Universalist, we operate from a covenant these are things we agreed to try to live by like principles as opposed to do this or you know, you’re bad, or else and I I was more curious about your answer to that question that I was

23:23
well, I think I think you’re absolutely right. That it’s it’s it’s not, here’s where I struggle. It is religion, but it’s not only in the sense that I think anything, and we could use pretty much almost any example anything that gets used in as a tool for controlling the way that you should think is, is I think, really the true breakthrough because I have even seen spiritual philosophies that it’s like you must show this type of thing. And and I think that that’s the most difficult aspect of this and have what really needs to be unpacked is that most people are not given or don’t take, I don’t know, it’s a little bit of both the opportunity to really freely explore themselves.

And to choose consciously choose their belief systems, which you know, if you look at it from a Kabbalistic perspective, or even if you look at as an eco perspective ecosystem, we’ll take both examples but from a Kabbalistic perspective, right you have the tree of life, most people can imagine the image of the tree of life and it has three pillars, right, the pillar of religion, the pillar of philosophy, and then the middle pillar, the pillar of philosophy is a pillar that’s very loose, it’s very much based on movement and taking action and such the pillar of religion in this particular case is really more about containment. It’s about rules. It’s about structures. It’s about order.

And you have the middle pillar that kind of brings these two together in the way that they should be. I’ll give you I use this example. Often my mother travels the pillar of religion, but her religion was consciously chosen. She studied everything she studied Judaism, Catholicism, different aspects of Christianity, metaphysics. For years, she studied a lot of different things, enjoying all of them, you know, she she’s been told by like priests that she should become a priestess, because my mother has all these different abilities and whatever. But she got to the place where the pillar of philosophy which was very open and broad, and stuff didn’t work for her.

She’s like, I need rules. I feel most comfortable under a set of rules. She still studies so she doesn’t take other people’s rules. She read her Bible, she’s become a Baptist, and in a very beautiful personal way, she does not believe on inflicting it on anybody else. She doesn’t believe on pushing into anything. She She reads the Bible herself. She listens to everybody else’s opinions, but she makes a choice. She made a choice to restrict her life and whether it doesn’t matter what I think about it or not, that’s not the point. It was a choice. And, and the fact that she actually made it as a choice and she’s always told me I wanted a simple, peaceful life.

I got to a place where all of this other stuff I couldn’t I just didn’t I didn’t want it didn’t come maybe it did come from traumas, maybe it did come from things. It doesn’t matter, because she made a choice to go down this path and she’s very happy with that choice. It’s very fulfilling to her. And it allows us to have very fluid conversations because it doesn’t come from a place of fear. It comes from a place of choice of empowerment for her. Where I think most people don’t do that. They don’t choose their religion based on that because when you do that, then the prejudices against others start to fade away. On the on the flip side of this, I had a conversation with somebody when when I was in Egypt, I had a conversation with our guide, and I was asking him about his religious beliefs. And he was a great example of the opposite of that.

He’s like, I practice you know, I’m a I’m a practicing Muslim, because I grew up as a practicing Muslim. And I’m like, Yeah, but have you ever asked yourself some questions about it? And he’s like, No, he’s like, I don’t I don’t I don’t question it. I don’t think about it. It just I just do it. And that’s the one that leads to like you said all this dualism and separation and all kinds of different aspects like that.

27:35
Well and me that even may be okay for him. But the way that it then gets inflicted on the the net his children the next generation and then you know this like oh such such bars on the kids. Oh my goodness.

27:49
And that’s it and I think that that going back again, when I look at natural spirituality, and I go and I use the example of an ecosystem, right, an ecosystem is constantly transforming. I could have a temperate forest, but the borders of that temperate forest change over time, right. Sometimes it’s a little farther in sometimes it takes a little bit more space. So these eco tones get created the spaces between the edges of the temperate forests and whatever might be the next ecosystem afterwards, which might be human made or it might not be and so these are very fluid and moving which gives the participants in it you know, the beings that are inside of this to a certain extent of flexibility of movement.

And of motion and of shape and of being able to explore different aspects. Certainly the tree that is in the middle of the temperate forests will always be inside of the temperate forest, right, because it’s going to be hard that that center is going to change, but over but we have to think about it in the sense of a tree doesn’t live there. The keys existence over one life like or it’s over a long period of time. And maybe it is true that in the bottom part that is a temperate forest, but as that tree grows up different aspects are in different parts of that temperate forest.

So there’s, there’s a fluidity and emotion and an adaptation that’s happening and as climate changes as circumstances changes, it could very well be that the whole center of that temperate forest eventually becomes a rain forest, for example, you know, who knows how that’s going to happen. And so I think that the natural world looks more at at how does what does my life my incarnation right now need in order for it to live for it to be the most, the most enriched life that I could possibly have for myself? And so it that it’s just a different approach of that sessile illness of you could be like you said, a Muslim that’s living in my Muslim country and I choose I don’t want to investigate it much. It’s fine for me. It works. It gives me a place to be and I’m okay with it.

Like you said, using the example of that person, but if I’m really comfortable with it, I’m also comfortable with my children choosing something different. All right, Laurie. I I know we have another topic to jump into and I’m so excited. But first let’s take a little break because I want to share one of our Eco conscious business partners with the audience. When you’re looking for something to watch to expand your mind and stimulate your perceptions there is nothing better than Gaia. Gaia offers the largest online resource of conscious expanding videos.

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Thanks for listening to this episode of reconnect with plant wisdom, Intro and Outro Music by Steve Shuli and poinsettia from the singing Life of Plants. So join me to give you like our Dania and my plant collaborators next time on reconnect with plant wisdom