This episode of nature being is an invitation to step away from polished outcomes and into process. With Beethoven as a muse and guide to live as a messy, living mammal. This episode explores creativity, ecology, and energy as ongoing exchange rather than perfected product and reflects on western culture’s fixation on results (often erasure or conceling the mess behind so much of what we often admire) with the many unseen forces that shape bodies, music, and environments alike. 

Like most exposides here, this is not a solution-driven experience but a spacious, invitational one. Exploring how we might sense differently, honor irregularity, and remember ourselves as ecological beings living within larger, often unseen, currents.

thank you to viridis graduate institute for educating me on mess and entanglment and Frans de Waal for shared attunment with all primates and inspiring this episode.

Music: Beethoven — Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
Performance: Davis High School Symphony Orchestra
License: Public Domain (CC Public Domain Mark 1.0), via Musopen

What if darkness isn’t something to avoid but what makes life and any flourishing possible, on earth and in our psyche?

This episode explores psychological composting: the necessary process of breakdown, decay, and renewal within the psyche. Drawing from ecological psychology and the living intelligence of soil, worms, fungi, and darkness itself, we're invited to tend what we’ve buried; grief, old identities, unresolved hurts, cultural conditioning and allow them to transform rather than harden into inner strata.

This is an invitation to return to the dark as ecology. Learning to trust cycles of descent and renewal. To remember, we are permeable, sensing beings living with a more-than-human world.

thank you do the life work of Dr. Lori Pye for extensive teachings into the world of both ecological an psychological composting taught @ https://viridis.edu.

This episode explores what it means to be a human animal in a modern world that overwhelms our still very ancient, sensitive nervous systems. We look at how constant stimulation and individualization can pull us away from deep mammalian needs we’re still wired for. Like touch, attunement, connection, ecology, and meaning.

With reflections on grief, instinct, and the emotional lives of other species, we examine how loss impacts the body, why our bonds run so deep, and how much we share with the more-than-human world, while questioning the idea of human exceptionalism. We consider how widening our sense of relationship can reconnect us to aliveness, belonging, and each other.

Sharing the concept of circumambulation the slow, circular process of returning to what pulls us in and what matters, the episode invites a gentler way of understanding our experiences. Instead of expecting or forcing clarity or control, we can learn to circle, revisit, and sense from many angles, honoring what reveals itself over time.

A subtle reminder to remember ourselves as ecological beings: feeling organisms on a changing planet, shaped by cycles, complexity, and interdependence. By paying attention, grieving openly and honestly, and staying close to the living world, we participate in a shared evolution... to listen, to notice, to relate... to circumambulate.

(Thank you to Robin Saltonstall, the inner mammal whisperer and Dr. Lori Pye for teaching and inspiring this episode)

nature being is a space to micro-dose ecological psychology. to remember that we are mammals sharing a more-than-human world. to attune, listen, and explore what it means to be a body in a living world; where we porously exchange nutrients, ideas, and curiosities. a space to reunite psychology and ecology.

teachers cited in this epside are Dr. Lori Pye and Robin Satonstall and where it all began @ viridis graduate institute https://viridis.edu

tricia french, M.A is the host of nature being. an ecological psychologist and graduate of viridis graduate.

a continued opening to nature being, where we’re invited to remember ourselves as ecological, mammalian beings living in deep relationship with a living earth, contemplating the body, brain, heart, microbiome, and inherited cultural stories... this episode explores ecological psychology as something ancient, deeply relational, and always alive within us.

to slow down, question the myth of separation, and reconsider what it means to live with the living world rather than above it. to reconnect with our animal bodies and the multispecies planet we are of.

thank you to the brilliant ecology of robin saltonstall (a teacher of mine) for the 'mammal hands' journey. and always the ecosystem of viridis graduate institue as a whole (Dr. Lori Pye)... without whom none of this would be possible and some favorite north star(s)... adam phillips (paraphrased here, highly recommend his books) and iain mcghilchrist (can't recommend his podcast enough) if you want a deep dive into hemispheric action "the channel mcghilchrist" .

nature being is a space to micro-dose ecological psychology. to remember that we are mammals sharing a more-than-human world.
to attune, listen, and explore what it means to be a body in a living world; where we porously exchange nutrients, ideas, and curiosities.
a space to reunite psychology and ecology, which have always belonged together. to slow down. drop in. and sense deeply.
as beings, of nature, with nature being.

tricia french, M.A is the host of nature being. an ecological psychologist and graduate of viridis graduate institute.