Let The Body Interpret The Threshold Walk
This piece comes from a longer reflection and enquiry into the question of how to make meaning from Threshold Walks, and how to land what is offered from these doorways to enchantment back into everyday life - somatically.
Not another Pop-up-Peak experience
I coined this phrase to describe my longing for pathways to incorporate collective (yet transient) intensive experiences such as vipassana retreats, plant ceremonies and vision quests. It relates to a kind of spiritual tourism: the pursuit of one peak experience after another without allowing insights to be digested and embodied. Being part of a Buddhist community has offered me a vital context for
sharing about practice back home. So that a metabolising of experience in relationship to others has been possible. This support mirrors what is referred to as ‘the village’ in rites of passage work: a community of similarly initiated adults who welcome you back home and help integrate the journey. Sadly, the ‘village’ is often missing within contemporary rites of passage.
In this article I’ll explore how we can connect with the conversation between our own body and the body of earth to metabolise the threshold walk.
We see and are seen by Nature
I recently led a session on Letting The Body Interpret The Threshold Walk, a collection of practices I’ve developed through personal explorations, and wanted to try out with my current Murmurations Mentoring cohort.
Threshold Walks (also known as Medicine Walks) are an invitation to explore your inner landscape in conversation with the landscape of the natural world.
By spending time with a question that opens up communication with the natural world, we may receive wisdom only nature can provide.
Traditionally, this practice involves returning to the group to share stories and have them mirrored back, reflecting the fullness seen in each story. There’s much to say about the craft of mirroring… but that’s for another article.
In our efforts to make meaning of threshold walks, we often focus on what has happened as symbols to decode and memories to analyse, neglecting the importance of the breathing body that is actively experiencing the walk.
What if threshold walks were not puzzles to be decoded by universal symbols but information retained within your own lived, bodily experience - an experience that has been shaped by the interaction between you and the natural world? Instead of asking what the experience means, we might ask what it is like to be there.
This body of work includes practices that explore the threshold walk through the lens of the emotional body, energetic body, and resonant field. Supporting a path back to your own lived, bodily experience - in deep participation as a living organism amongst other living organisms, a body inside a larger body.
For those who know my work, you’ll be familiar with my emphasis on experiential understanding that naturally arrives through contact with the felt sense. In recent years I’ve woven much of Gene Gendlin’s Focusing process into my wilderness guiding - encouraging quieting the narrating mind and amplifying sensory awareness. A first step in moving away from nature-as-backdrop and into reciprocal relationships with the more than human world.
From this perspective, which appreciates everything as alive - threshold walks - and the images and experiences they offer, are also living presences. What might it be like to step over the threshold with the sense that the walk itself is also a living presence?
“Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”
How might the body come first, and mind second as we reflect on what has arisen out of this deep communion with nature? So that meaning-making or interpretation is discovered and emergent, not deduced.
Stars for a blanket, the ground for a bed
Posturally, attitudinally, this is a settling in and a settling down. An easing back as if onto the wide, warm saddle of an old retired horse who has long since given up the need to arrive anywhere. A softening into our hips and pelvis, giving our weight to the ground. A slow companionship with whatever wants to be known. Breathing the sky inside. Space. Space with no urgency and no tightening around meaning.
In this way of re-entering a walk, we let the moments return to us from the inside - stepping back into the images, the beings, the half-seen gestures that shaped the experience. We allow multiple perspectives to speak and shape our waking consciousness. Each resonant encounter treated as a living environment or organism, a living creature with its own texture, its own weather, its own truth-bearing stance.
everything, everywhere, all at once
This final practice invites a kind of co-creative tide between the conscious and the unconscious mind - two currents meeting in the same body of water. I first came across this approach through the work of Stephen Gilligan, a protégé of Milton Erickson. Erickson spoke of the unconscious as a deep well of creative intelligence; Gilligan widens that view, inviting the conscious mind to stay present as an active companion.
There are several similarities with Gene Gendlin’s work.
To name a few: both approaches encourage us to settle into a receptive, felt-sensing landscape - where creative, unconscious resources may reveal themselves, what Gendlin called the “Fresh Edge” of experience. In these fields, insight arises from sensing, not thinking, from the subtle shifts that unfold when we listen with our whole selves. Both paths are process-oriented, not solution-oriented.
I’ve tried to offer some context and glimpses into some of what we dive into within the territory of Thresholds and Mirrors, and The Mirror of Nature. These practices are embodied and experiential - if it comes across as dry please see the comments from the students below after having practiced it. They carry some of the awe…
Quotes from my mentees at the end of this session (with their permission). Ulrich, Liv, Ben, Katarina, Eimear, Jez and Natasha (we missed you Simhasraddha and Geeta).
Yeah, it… yeah, it really felt playful, it's true. It's kind of like this inter-dimensional approach to this, like, it's… it was really not linear, but a constellation. It's really rich, where it all shows up. Like… a story that's not just like this, but it's like a world, and like a living being, maybe, of itself, for real.
Its a really good approach. And when Katarina mirrored me back, she started with one word and then a second word, and she absolutely had me at the second word. Like, the combination of the two words were just perfect.
It just felt really organic, and really alive, and a really exact, and like what you said, totally non-judgmental.
But the constellation is the thing that I perhaps connected with the most, because there were things in a very visceral way, sensorially, and image in ways beyond words, I suppose, although we brought some words to them, and I tried to, and heard some back. I felt a completeness to the… like a connection through everything, through all these parts, so it's very kind of… Meta.
Yeah, I think there's something about…the combination of being accepted and received. As is, in terms of your experience, and then the curiosity and questions. It helps to go that bit deeper, or to find a new angle on the same experience - sort of broadens and deepens. I really enjoyed just how a really simple question could open up a whole slew of memories that were kind of lying dormant just under the surface, but which… came out.
Just allowing you to see just how much experience is there that you're not aware of, even when you're really being aware of your experience. Yeah it's kind of our own aliveness. And kind of drawing forth your experience, and then, like, a privilege to be able to do that with your partner as well. We really enjoyed this