Nature: The Missing Piece In Our Spirituality?

Are We Leaving Something Out of Our Spiritual Practice?

Read the condensed version of this article (written in 2013) at Om Times Magazine >>

If we begin to see nature as a Bank of Life, we will be more mindful of where we are becoming “overdrawn,” suffering from “debts,” and need to make a “deposit.”

Across many traditions, be they Christian, New Age, Buddhist, Muslim, and beyond, one essential element often goes overlooked: a living relationship with Nature.

Even those raised in faith-based traditions may admire scripture that praises creation, yet never fully embody the reverence those teachings describe. Nature becomes admired from a distance rather than integrated into daily living.

In the New Age movement, the connection tends to be more symbolic than experiential. We send healing energy or think thoughts of love toward the Earth, but rarely deepen into the kind of relationship that transforms behavior, values, or lifestyle. The question becomes, “Do we truly value Nature more than the conveniences and possessions created at her expense?“

Nature as a Mirror of Wholeness

Many spiritual ideals (including unity, oneness, wholeness) become easier to understand when we reconnect with Nature in a real, consistent way.

This is because nature mirrors the energy of the collective. She reflects abundance, beauty, and harmony. She also reveals where humanity is out of balance. She communicates constantly, not through words, but through the state of her waters, forests, soils, and skies. What she most profoundly communicates is that when we lose the ability to see the sacredness in Nature, we often lose sight of the sacredness in ourselves.

The Rise of “Lifelessness” in a Material World

Humanity has gradually shifted its emotional loyalty toward non-living creations: objects, gadgets, conveniences, and technologies. These are made from Nature, yet we value the lifeless product more than the life that was sacrificed to create it.

We aren’t bad, necessarily because we do this. We live in a culture which our very survival depends our our having a mindset of “never enoughness.” We need to work more, create more, buy more (even having to pay to live on the earth’s body), pay taxes, and other requirements that separate us from nature and one another (treating ourselves and others in a buy-and-sell way) opposed to bring us closer.

Even in societies where most people have more than enough for basic needs, we are conditioned to believe we must constantly acquire more. As a result:

We focus on the future instead of the present
We feel anxious about what we might lose
We overlook the beauty that is already around us
We focus on the lifeless more than life itself

Nature reflects this imbalance by showing us, through environmental decline, how little we are treasuring life compared to lifeless things. If it really is true that we manifest what we focus on, then if collective, we are predominantly focused on what is lifeless (allowing life to recede from our awareness) then it makes sense that life, in the physical realm, would start to disappear.

Is Nature “Manifesting” or Simply Responding?

Some Law of Attraction teachers suggest disasters occur because humanity fears catastrophe, and this type of focuses makes them materialize. But a more grounded explanation is that people fear harm to Nature because they see harm happening… and feel helpless to live or act in ways to prevent this. Feeling helpless, it is easy to go into denial. It becomes someone else’s problem as we continue to focus on how we need to harm life (living with cognitive dissonance that we are doing this) in order to survive.

What would help us more is to understand that environmental changes act a mirror of human behavior,. Nature mirrors the natural outcome of extraction, pollution, overproduction, and emotional disconnection.

This isn’t about guilt. It’s about awareness. We are meant to care. Caring is a sign of emotional and spiritual health, not weakness.

When we recognize Nature as part of us, and ourselves as part of Her, we begin to repair the separation that fuels both environmental damage and inner emptiness.

Choosing Lifelessness Over Life

Collectively, we have been choosing lifelessness:

Speed over slowness
Convenience over connection
Productivity over presence
Burning out over replenishing
Consumption over conservation

We protect objects more fiercely than living things. Nature reflects this choice back to us through loss of vitality, species decline, and environmental stress. She mirrors to us what we treasure and where we place value. She mirrors that we don’t view life and worthy of protection, what is lifeless has more meaning in our busy lives. She is a reflection of our own internal strain.

The Law of Excess and Depletion

Every choice that creates excess also creates depletion somewhere else. This applies to both planetary and personal energy. When we overproduce, overwork, or overconsume:

Resources get depleted
Our bodies become exhausted
Our emotional reserves diminish
Balance is lost

Nature operates through balance. When we break that balance, the consequences appear both internally and externally.

If we begin to see nature as a Bank of Life, we will be more mindful of where we are becoming “overdrawn,” suffering from “debts,” and need to make a “deposit.”

Returning to What Is Sacred

As we move forward, we’re being asked (spiritually and collectively) to reclaim reverence for what has life. This includes:

Nature
Animals
Our own bodies
Our children
The ecosystems we depend upon

When we restore our relationship with living things, we restore our connection to the Divine Spark within ourselves.

Nature as a Guide to Manifesting More Constructively Rather than Destructively

To understand what we are manifesting as a collective, we must ask ourselves:

Why do we create as we do? Who benefits?
Why do we value lifeless objects more than living beings?
Why have we forgotten how to enjoy or protect Nature?
Why are we comfortable with the destruction of life, including our own vitality?

These questions open the doorway to inner and outer healing. When I look at Nature and what she is communicating, I hear her whisper, “You must learn how to grow things.” Not just plants, but life itself, including emotional life, relational life, planetary life.

When we nurture something living, our energy naturally shifts from destruction to creation, from disconnection to care. It restores emotional clarity, intuition, and balance. It balances the Divine Feminine with the Divine Masculine in a world where the Divine Feminine seems overlooked or abandoned.

Seeing the Larger Web of Consciousness

Collective consciousness isn’t just about protecting human energy.
It’s about recognizing how our thoughts, fears, and behaviors shape the world around us, including our bodies, our health, and the environment. Its about seeing the fears we never really see or tend to because they are so normalized into our existence.

Lets go back to the example of manifesting disasters because we are afraid of them and so our fear is manifesting them. A good question to ask is, Why do we fear manifesting them? If we really examine deeply, is it because we can see what our collective actions are manifesting and we fear we can’t let go of participating in such lifestyles or actions? So these are the deep-rooted fears we need to begin to address.

We need to also have the courage to come up with new ideas, new models for lifestyles or even political systems which lead to our predicament. I think many of us are afraid to dream this way… I think because we feel too small to come up with powerful ideas, such as:

having community gardens or greenhouses on every blook as well as a fruit-bearing tree in every backyard (where possible) to reduce dependency on supermarkets and help with food insecurity and poverty.
having vertical gardens, rooftop gardens, indoor gardens
working with technologist to make gardening more easy and convenient
working with technologists to create plug-n-play alternative power solutions to free us from grid dependency (which forces us to be beholden to powerful energy companies, as well as the mining and transportation of power which incurs costs to nture, and the risks of pollution.
Buying more local, boycotting big monopolies, getting back to basics, focusing on community.

On the other hand, when we normalize stress, fatigue, powerlessness, depletion, and emotional shutdown, we lose the ability to notice and protect what is sacred. We manifest more of what isn’t sacred rather than what is. We manifest more of what is lifeless rather than what has life. We begin treating our own vitality the same way society treats Nature: as expendable.