There are days when I genuinely believe the trees understand something about being alive that we have spent centuries trying to intellectualise ourselves out of.I do not mean this in the childish sense that a tree is secretly a human being trapped beneath bark, whispering personalised affirmations into the wind if only we are spiritual enough to hear them. I mean something far stranger, and perhaps far more profound. Trees have existed alongside human consciousness for longer than our cities, our religions as we know them, our psychological theories and our endless obsession with fixing ourselves. They have watched human beings fall in love beneath them, bury their dead beside them, make gods of them, burn them, worship them, carve their names into them and then return generations later wondering why they feel so unbearably disconnected from life.
The trees teach us that we were never meant to regulate ourselves in isolation. We speak constantly now about emotional regulation, nervous system healing, self-soothing and independence. We tell ourselves to become our own safe place, to stop needing validation, to detach from people who cannot meet us, to learn how to sit with ourselves. And yes, there is enormous wisdom in all of this. There is a point in every person's life when they must stop handing strangers the keys to their inner world and expecting someone else to become responsible for the emotional weather inside them.
Even so I sometimes wonder whether we have taken the idea of self-regulation so far that we have forgotten that we are relational creatures. Our nervous systems do not develop in a vacuum. From infancy, the human body learns safety through relationship, rhythm, voice, touch and attunement. We are constantly reading one another, often before we are consciously aware that we are doing it. The expression on someone's face can change our body. The tone of a message can make our stomach drop. A room can feel unsafe before anything has actually happened. One person's calm presence can settle us, while another person's chaos can leave us feeling as though we have spent the afternoon being slowly electrocuted. We affect one another. Perhaps that is why the forest feels so different from the world we have built. When you enter a forest, you enter a community that does not need you to perform. The trees do not ask whether you are successful enough to sit beneath them. They do not care whether you have healed your attachment wounds, found your purpose, manifested abundance or finally become the woman you keep promising yourself you will become next Monday. You can arrive furious. You can arrive heartbroken. You can arrive feeling ugly, ashamed, jealous, spiritually disconnected, financially terrified and completely unsure what the fuck you are doing with your life. The oak will still be there. I find this almost unbearably comforting.
The Hidden Networks Beneath the Forest
When we look at a forest, we usually tend to see separate things. That is an oak. That is an ash. That is a willow. Separate bodies standing beside one another.
Yet the world beneath the forest floor tells a more complicated story. Trees and other plants form relationships with fungi and microorganisms in the soil, including mycorrhizal fungi that interact intimately with plant roots. Through these ecological relationships, nutrients and chemical signals can move through complex systems beneath the ground. Scientists are still debating the extent to which the popular idea of trees deliberately sharing resources through a benevolent “Wood Wide Web” accurately represents what is happening, and the more romantic claims about universally nurturing “mother trees” have been heavily questioned. Nevertheless, the central fact remains extraordinary enough without needing to turn the forest into a Disney film. Life beneath the ground is profoundly relational. The visible tree is not the whole tree. This is where I begin to see the psychological parallel to a human being who is not the whole human being either. You see someone walking through the world and you think you know them. She is confident. He is successful. She is calm. He is detached. She never seems to care what anyone thinks. But beneath the visible self there are roots, memories, attachment patterns, unconscious fears, inherited beliefs, old humiliations, the first time your body learned that being vulnerable was dangerous, the first time you realised that if you became useful enough, beautiful enough, quiet enough, clever enough or desirable enough, perhaps people would finally choose to stay. We are all walking around with invisible root systems. Sometimes the reason we cannot understand our emotional reactions is because we are staring only at the branches.
We ask:
Why am I so anxious?
Simultaneously the roots are asking:
What have you survived that taught your body to anticipate danger?
We ask:
Why am I so sensitive?
Beneath the surface is a history of having to notice every subtle shift in another person's mood because emotional safety depended upon reading the room correctly.
We ask:
Why can't I let this go?
But grief does not grow only in the present. Sometimes an ending touches an older root. Someone leaves today and suddenly your entire body remembers every other person who disappeared. The forest teaches us something psychology is only beginning to integrate more deeply.
The individual is never merely an individual. We are biological, relational, ancestral, ecological and symbolic beings all at once.
What changes inside us when we stop experiencing ourselves as entirely separate from life?
Separation has consequences. One of the great emotional illnesses of modern life is not simply anxiety or depression in their clinical complexity, but alienation from the body, from the season, from one another, and from the living world that made us possible.
We sit beneath artificial light at midnight scrolling through photographs of forests while our actual nervous systems quietly beg us to go outside. I am so glad to see that more and more of us are actually embodying our inner voice now.
I Have Noticed Something About Myself Around Trees
There are moments when I go outside carrying an entire argument inside my body. You know the kind. Nothing dramatic has necessarily happened that day, and yet you feel as though your nervous system has collected every unfinished emotion from the last six months and decided that today would be the perfect time to present them all to you simultaneously. Your chest feels strange. Your thoughts are moving too quickly. You replay conversations you have already replayed seventeen times. You begin constructing imaginary arguments with people who are not even present. You remember something embarrassing you did when you were fourteen. Suddenly you are analysing your future, your past, your relationships, your appearance and the metaphysical meaning of your entire existence while standing in the kitchen looking for a spoon. And then I go to the trees and suddenly my attention begins to leave the prison of itself. I notice the branches. The sound of leaves. The particular green of moss. The fact that one tree has grown around an old wound. The smell of rain before it arrives. Isn’t this pure alchemy? Indeed research into forest bathing and nature-based interventions suggests that immersion in forests can support improvements in aspects of mood and well-being, with studies and meta-analyses reporting reductions in measures such as tension, fatigue and negative affect, although the quality and consistency of evidence varies and nature is obviously not a magical replacement for appropriate mental health care. Even so, reducing this entirely to cortisol and heart rate variability would also be a kind of violence against the experience. Because there is something bigger happening. Our hearts are making new meanings, in awe, and forming new perspectives.
The sudden recognition that your internal drama, however painful and important it may be, is occurring inside a world so vast that you can feel both insignificant and deeply held at the same time. This is one of the paradoxes of nature. It can make you feel smaller without making you feel worthless. Sometimes that is exactly what the ego needs: a fresh perspective. Your heartbreak is real. And the oak has survived three hundred winters. Your anxiety matters and beneath your feet the earth is carrying an entire invisible civilisation. Somewhere above you a bird is building a nest without knowing anything about your situationship. Life continues, not dismiss your pain but to remind you that you are more than the pain currently occupying your attention.
Raising Your Vibration Is Not the Same as Escaping Your Humanity
I want to speak about this because I am exhausted by the spiritual obsession with being high vibrational.
The phrase itself is not necessarily the problem. There is something intuitive about recognising that different environments, relationships and states of consciousness affect the way we experience ourselves. Anyone who has spent an hour doom scrolling knows that consciousness can feel different afterwards than it does following a walk through a forest at sunrise. Somewhere along the way, “raising your vibration” became synonymous with becoming emotionally palatable. Be positive. Do not entertain negative energy. Detach. Rise above it. Do not give it your attention. And suddenly grief is considered a spiritual failure. Anger is considered low vibrational. Depression becomes evidence that you are not thinking positively enough. Women are told to forgive people who harmed them because resentment is apparently bad for their frequency. I am sorry, but sometimes the most spiritually dangerous thing you can do is force yourself to transcend an experience your body has not yet been allowed to feel. The forest does not do this. The forest does not maintain a positive mindset. A forest contains birth and decomposition simultaneously. A tree can be magnificent and rotting from the inside. A branch can die so that something else can grow. Mushrooms rise from decay. Leaves fall. Roots break stone. Entire ecosystems are nourished by what has died. There is no toxic positivity in the forest. There is authentic transformation.
Perhaps raising our vibration should not mean becoming happier every second of the day. Perhaps it means becoming more coherent, more integrated, and less divided against ourselves. The woman who is genuinely alive is not the woman who never feels rage. She is the woman who can feel rage without becoming possessed by the need to destroy herself or someone else. She is not the woman who never feels grief. She is the woman who learns how to sit beside grief long enough to discover that it is not a bottomless pit but a landscape that changes when we stop running from it. She is not permanently soft. Sometimes she becomes an oak. Sometimes she becomes a willow. Sometimes she disappears beneath the ground like a root and spends an entire season growing where nobody can applaud her. That, to me, is vibration. Not constant happiness. Aliveness.
The Willow Tree and the Sacred Art of Not Becoming Hard
The willow has always fascinated me because she looks like grief. There is no other way to say it. Stand beside a willow tree long enough and she appears to be mourning something ancient. Her branches fall. She bends towards the earth. She often lives beside water, that old feminine symbol of memory, emotion, intuition and the unconscious. Across folklore and literary traditions, the willow has repeatedly become associated with sorrow, enchantment, mourning and love. Her symbolism shifts depending on the culture and period, as mythology always does, but the emotional resonance remains remarkably consistent. The willow understands what many traumatised people struggle to remember. Bending is not the same as breaking. When people have been hurt repeatedly, rigidity can begin to feel like safety. You tell yourself that you will never let anyone close enough to hurt you again. You become hyper-independent. You stop crying in front of people. You stop asking for help. You become proud of the fact that nobody can tell when you are falling apart. You call it strength.
But survival strategies have a dangerous habit of remaining long after the danger has passed. Eventually, the armour that protected you from one war begins preventing you from being touched by anyone who loves you.
The willow asks a more frightening question.
What if you do not have to become harder to survive?
What if the ability to remain emotionally responsive is not weakness?
What if the woman who can cry and still continue is stronger than the woman who has convinced herself she no longer feels anything?
There is a reason emotional flexibility has become an important psychological concept. The capacity to adapt our responses to changing circumstances, rather than relying on the same defensive pattern every time we experience distress, is associated with healthier psychological functioning. The problem is not that we feel. The problem is often that we become trapped in one relationship with feeling. Fear means avoid. Anger means attack. Shame means disappear. Grief means numb. Loneliness means return to the person who hurt you. The nervous system learns patterns. One day we wake up and mistake the pattern for our personality. This is just who I am. But is it? Or is it simply the branch that learned which way to bend?
The willow does not ask the wind to stop existing. She cannot. She responds to what is real. Likewise, emotional regulation is not about controlling every internal experience but developing enough capacity that we can move with what life brings without abandoning our centre. There is a particular kind of woman I think of when I think of the willow. She has been called too sensitive all her life. She feels everything. The atmosphere in the room. The change in someone's voice. The subtle withdrawal before the abandonment has even happened. She has spent years being told to toughen up by people who secretly benefit from her emotional intelligence. One day she begins to understand that sensitivity was never the problem. The problem was that nobody taught her discernment. Nobody taught her that feeling deeply does not mean giving everyone access to what she feels. Nobody taught her that she can remain soft without becoming available for exploitation. The willow does not invite every traveller to cut off her branches. Softness has structure. Water has boundaries. The woman who learns this becomes something terrifyingly beautiful through being selective.
The Ash Tree and the Descent Into the Unconscious
If the willow belongs to the emotional body, the ash belongs to the axis between worlds. In Norse cosmology, the great world tree Yggdrasil stands at the centre of existence, connecting different realms. The image of the cosmic tree is not confined to one mythology. Across cultures, trees have repeatedly appeared as symbols of connection between the underworld, the earthly world and the heavens. Look at a tree. Its roots descend into darkness. Its trunk occupies the visible world. Its branches reach towards the sky. If Carl Jung had designed a botanical metaphor for the psyche, he could hardly have done better. The roots are the unconscious. The trunk is the conscious self. The branches are possibility, imagination, meaning, transcendence. The tragedy of modern emotional life is that many of us are trying desperately to fix the branches while refusing to examine the roots. We want confidence. But we do not want to look at where the shame began. We want secure relationships. But we do not want to acknowledge why intimacy makes our nervous system panic. We want to stop people-pleasing. But we do not want to sit with the terrifying possibility that somewhere in childhood, love became associated with usefulness. We want to become spiritually awakened. But we do not want to descend. And every mythology of transformation understands this. The heroine goes down. The old self is confronted with something it cannot control.
Clearly, transformation is not always a gentle upward ascent into light. Sometimes psychological growth involves an encounter with material that the ego would prefer to avoid. Stanislav Grof, Jungian psychology and many traditions concerned with spiritual emergence have all, in different ways, grappled with the possibility that encounters with the unconscious, symbolic and transpersonal dimensions can be destabilising as well as meaningful.
Is this why the tree asks us to stop being so frightened of what we cannot immediately understand about ourselves. There are things inside you that will not reveal themselves because you interrogate them aggressively. The unconscious is not a customer service department. You cannot simply demand an answer and expect it to respond within twenty-four hours. Sometimes you must sit beside the question. Sometimes you must walk, paint, write, dream, grieve, or go quiet. Slowly the roots begin revealing themselves.
I have had moments in my own life when an emotional reaction felt completely disproportionate to what was happening in the present. A sentence, a silence, a subtle withdrawal from another person, and suddenly something much older would awaken inside me. The conscious mind would say, This is not that serious. But the body would say otherwise. The body is not always responding to the present moment alone. Sometimes it is responding to an archive. The nervous system is not a historian in the traditional sense. It does not necessarily store experience as a neat chronological narrative with footnotes and dates. Experience can become associated with sensations, emotional states, expectations and patterns of response. Something in the present resembles something from the past, and suddenly the roots move. This is why telling someone simply to “get over it” is often so psychologically illiterate. You cannot command a root system into disappearing. You have to understand what the root is doing.
The Oak Tree and the Woman Who Finally Learns to Stand
Then there is the oak. The oak does not teach us surrender. The oak teaches us sovereignty. Across European mythologies and religious traditions, the oak has carried associations with strength, sacred power, endurance, kingship and the divine. It has stood in sacred groves, entered folklore and become a symbol of that particular kind of presence that does not need to announce itself. You do not look at an ancient oak and think: I wonder if she knows her worth. The oak does not negotiate her existence. This is why I love her. Because there comes a point in emotional healing when being endlessly understanding becomes another form of self-abandonment. You can understand why someone hurt you and still decide that you do not want them in your life. You can understand their childhood and still refuse to become their emotional rehabilitation centre. You can forgive someone internally without reopening the door they repeatedly used to walk in and destroy your peace. Compassion without boundaries is not enlightenment. Sometimes it is fear wearing a halo. The oak teaches us the difference.
There Are People Who Only Love Flexible Trees
This is something I learned painfully. Some people do not actually want intimacy with you. They want access. They want the version of you who understands everything. Forgives quickly. Answers immediately. Explains yourself gently even when they have treated you badly. They love your softness because they have mistaken it for permission. The moment you develop boundaries, they say you have changed. Of course you have. That is the point.
Healing changes your availability. The woman who once answered every message because silence made her anxious eventually learns that she is allowed to put her phone down. The woman who once explained her boundaries ten times eventually realises that people who respect her do not require a dissertation before accepting the word no. The woman who once thought leaving was cruel eventually understands that sometimes remaining is the crueler act, particularly when you are remaining in a place where your spirit is being slowly trained to tolerate what it knows it does not deserve. The oak does not chase anyone who walks away from its shade. Read that again.
The oak does not chase anyone who walks away from its shade.
This does not mean the oak has no attachment. It means its roots are deeper than the approval of every passing stranger. Psychologically, this is where internal security begins to matter. Not because you should never need anyone. I do not believe in the fantasy of becoming so healed that you no longer desire love, intimacy or companionship. Human beings are not enlightened islands floating peacefully through the ocean. We need one another. There is a difference between needing connection and abandoning yourself in order to avoid losing it. The oak teaches us to remain connected without becoming uprooted.
What the Trees Teach Us About Emotional Regulation
I do not think emotional regulation is one skill. I think that is where many of us become confused. Sometimes emotional regulation is willow medicine. You need to cry. You need to stop gripping the feeling so tightly. You need to let the emotion move through your body instead of trying to solve it intellectually at three o'clock in the morning. Sometimes emotional regulation is ash medicine. You need to ask why this particular situation has activated you so intensely. You need to distinguish between the present danger and the old memory your body may be responding to. You need to descend carefully, perhaps with professional support, and understand what is living beneath the surface.
Emotional regulation is oak medicine in a sense. You do not need another breathing exercise. You need a boundary. You do not need to journal about why someone keeps disrespecting you. You need to stop giving them access to you. You do not need to regulate yourself into accepting unacceptable behaviour. You need to leave.
Some exhaustion cannot be healed by positive thinking because you are genuinely doing too much and your body is begging you to stop pretending that collapse is a personality trait. The trees do not give us one answer. They give us a forest. Maturity is learning which tree you need to become.
The Forest as a Transpersonal Experience
There is a particular experience that can happen when you spend enough time in nature without trying to turn it into content. You stop thinking about yourself for a while because the boundaries of attention become less claustrophobic. You are no longer the central character of every thought.
Experiences of awe, unity, spiritual connection and profound relationship with nature can all become meaningful aspects of human consciousness, although they should not automatically be romanticised or treated as evidence for any single metaphysical claim. Research exploring forest bathing and spirituality has suggested that nature-based experiences may contribute to spiritual well-being and feelings of connection, while also emphasising the need for further rigorous research into exactly how these relationships work. Personally, I do not need a tree to prove anything metaphysical to me. I do not need the oak to speak. I do not need the willow to send me a sign. I think sometimes we become so desperate for the universe to communicate that we stop listening to what is already happening. The tree is alive. That is enough mystery for me. It is alive in a way profoundly different from me and yet somehow inseparable from the conditions that allow me to exist. I breathe because there is a world capable of producing oxygen. I eat because soil contains life. My body is not outside ecology. My emotions are not outside ecology either. Sleep changes them. Light changes them. Food changes them. Hormones change them. Isolation changes them. The people around me change them. The weather can change them. The seasons can change them.
We have become so obsessed with the idea of the mind as an individual possession that we sometimes forget the mind is embodied, situated and constantly responding to a world. We do not need to escape the earth to become more spiritual. Perhaps we need to return to it without a mask.
Deeper Significance
The tree is one of humanity's oldest mirrors. We looked at its roots and imagined the underworld. We looked at its branches and imagined heaven. We watched it die in winter and return in spring and created stories about resurrection. We gathered beneath sacred trees because something inside us understood that vertical life, the thing that descends into darkness and reaches simultaneously towards the light was a symbol of our own existence. We are all trying to become trees, in a way. We want to reach higher without abandoning what is beneath us. We want to become more conscious without denying the unconscious. We want to love without becoming consumed. We want boundaries without becoming imprisoned. We want softness without becoming weak. We want strength without becoming cruel.
This is why I cannot accept the modern obsession with healing as a straight line. Trees do not heal in straight lines. They grow around wounds. Have you ever seen a tree that has survived damage? The wood changes. The shape changes. The tree does not return to what it was before. It incorporates the wound. There is something so brutally beautiful about that. Because perhaps you are not failing to heal simply because you are no longer who you were before. Maybe healing was never supposed to return you to the woman who existed before the betrayal, before the grief, before the thing that broke your heart open. Maybe you are becoming someone with a different shape.
Message To Remember
Go to the trees when your life becomes too loud and when your mind is racing so quickly that you can no longer distinguish intuition from anxiety. Go when somebody has made you feel replaceable. Go when grief has turned the rooms in your house into places you no longer recognise. Go when you are angry enough to burn every bridge you have ever crossed. Go when you are so tired of being spiritual that you want to throw your crystals into the nearest body of water and become a woman who communicates exclusively through swearing. Go to the trees.
Sit beneath the willow and remember that softness does not have to become self-abandonment. Let yourself bend. Let yourself weep. Let the emotion move. Stand beside the ash and remember that the darkness beneath you is not proof that you are broken. There are roots there. There are memories. There are stories you have not yet understood. You do not have to descend alone, and you do not have to be ashamed of needing help to understand what lives in the underworld of your own psyche.
When the time comes, and it always comes, stand beside the oak. Learn from her. Stop explaining your existence to people committed to misunderstanding you. Stop negotiating boundaries with those who only respect them when they benefit from your absence. Stop calling yourself cold because you finally learned that access to you is not a human right. You are allowed to become difficult to manipulate. You are allowed to become impossible to rush. You are allowed to take up the space your roots require. And if somebody tells you that you have changed, perhaps smile. Of course you have changed. The trees change too. Every season leaves something behind. Every storm rearranges the branches. Every year adds another ring beneath the bark where nobody can see it. That is what becoming is, learning how to remain alive inside the full catastrophe of being human. It is allowing yourself to be willow when life requires tenderness. Ash when life requires descent. Oak when life requires you to stand so firmly inside yourself that the people who profited from your softness no longer recognise you.
You are not a machine designed to remain emotionally consistent. You are a living ecosystem. There are winters inside you. There are forests you have not yet entered. There are roots reaching towards things you cannot consciously remember. There are branches still growing towards a light you have not yet seen. Perhaps that is why the trees calm us, because somewhere beneath all our technology, all our theories, all our endless attempts to optimise the human experience, we recognise ourselves in them. We too are trying to survive the weather, we too reach towards the sky while remaining bound to the darkness beneath the earth.
So raise your vibration if you wish. But do not rise so far above yourself that you abandon the body that brought you here. Come back down. Put your hands in the soil. Lean your back against something ancient. Remember that healing does not always look like becoming lighter. Sometimes it looks like becoming deeper.
One day, perhaps after you have spent enough time trying to become someone else, you will stand beneath a tree and understand that the goal was never to escape your nature. The goal was to become intimate with it. To know when to bend. To know when to descend. To know when to stand, and to understand that you were never an isolated creature wandering through an empty world. You have always been part of the forest.
Endless love,
Nymsera