00:00:06 Archita: Long before calendars, deadlines and notifications, the human nervous system learns safety from the land, from the rhythm of wind, through trees, from the steadiness of the ground beneath our feet. And maybe that's why even now, when life feels overwhelming, something in us instinctively wants to step outside, breathe deeper, and slow down. Today, we are exploring a powerful idea that belonging isn't just emotional, it's biological.

00:00:39 Archita: Welcome to sacred Harmony, a space where we explore the deeper connections between inner healing, spiritual wisdom, and the rhythms of life. I'm your host, and today we are joined by Frankie Edwards, a nature based nervous system specialist and founder of Abundance World, Canada's first queer centered wellness sanctuary. Frankie's work blends neuroscience, somatics, and forest bathing to help people regulate stress, rediscover belonging, and reconnect with the natural world as a source of healing and grounding. In this conversation, we are exploring something beautifully simple yet deeply transformative how reconnecting with nature can restore safety in the body and remind us that we were never meant to live disconnected from the land. Thank you. It's such a gift to have you here with us.

00:01:38 Speaker 2: Thank you so much for hosting me, and I'm really happy to be chatting to your listeners today.

00:01:47 Archita: Yeah, and I'm really glad that you're here and I'm really curious for this conversation as well. So without wasting any time, let's start. And before we start anything, I would love to hit somewhere personal. So when did you first begin to notice that nature wasn't just something beautiful around us, but something that actually regulates and supports the nervous system?

00:02:15 Speaker 2: Definitely. I started my personal journey back in university. You know, I studied kinesiology, so that's the study of human movement. And for a long time I thought that I could will everything around me away if I was in optimal health in my own body. And that is true to a certain extent, but actually having the ability to interact with the world around you really does make a difference. And I realized that through my university degree that I was actually way too in my head. And I don't mean that in an anxious or depression kind of way, but in my head, as in I viewed the world in a very theoretical way. And so I started going out a little bit more to my roots. You know, I grew up in the basically the middle of the woods, and I started doing that more and more. Going to visit certain rivers, certain lakes and ponds and just getting back to the land in a way that I totally had forgot about. And that really enabled me to get out of my head and back into my body. And in a large part, it helps me with many changes that were happening in my own life. So it allowed me to step into my queer identity, my gender expansive identity. And I realized that healing really isn't just physical, right? It's emotional, it's ecological, it's spiritual. And so that kind of brought me full circle to the work that I do now. It's it integrates all of those layers. Yes. There's science, yes, there's somatics, but there's also spirit and there's lived experience, which really shapes our health and our identity.

00:04:04 Archita: Absolutely. And that is so beautiful. I think nature can, you know, help us, um, nature can work as a therapy for us. And like you said, I think healing is not only about, um, the physical being, it's also about our emotional being, our spiritual being and reconnecting with nature really helps because we came from nature and we go back to nature as well. So it's only fair that, you know, um, it, it makes us feel connected with our true self as well. So definitely. And I, I love that for you. And now, uh, Frankie, moving on, something interesting I have noticed is that many people treat time in nature as a kind of luxury, like something we do when we are on vacation or when life slows down. But I'm curious, from your perspective, is nature actually more of a biological need than a lifestyle choice?

00:05:05 Speaker 2: I would say in short, yes, it's definitely a biological need. You know, the human system is very resilient. Our human bodies are very resilient. And we could spend a lot of time, you know, in the penthouse or on the thirty fifth floor of a high rise building in a very busy, very big city. For most of our lives. And we can be okay with that, you know, we can live our life lives like that. However, it is a biological need to eventually get the feeling and the yearning to step back outside, right? We have two feet and a heartbeat. We really have the ability to go down the stairs or take the escalator or the elevator, and we need to go down, right? We don't have wings right now. Not that I know of. Um, and so this ability to really just land back down on our feet, touch the soil. And that's something that I really took from moving from a very small place, a small town in the middle of nowhere, very rural, very wild, into the biggest city in Canada, which is Toronto. And I called it a space in the air. I lived in a space in the air. I lived in an apartment building, you know, and I was only four, five flights up. And I still really, really needed it biologically. I needed to come back down to earth. And so from there, I actually moved into a house. I had a backyard and oh my goodness, the physiology that changed in my body when I had that, you know, uh, there's, there's so much research even now, just on the basis of getting down, touching the earth, you know, it lowers your blood pressure immediately. I walk in the forest, reduces your cortisol levels. There's so, so much knowledge in this. Now that our science is actually caught up to the biological need that we have, which is interesting because I do feel that academia really, in a way, we have to trust it. And we are in a state in the world right now where we need to think that, you know, the science has to say yes before I even try to do that thing, when actually it's the reverse for this case. You know, forest bathing and nature immersion really is something that your body already knows. And you don't need to wait to get permission from anybody to do that.

00:07:42 Archita: Absolutely. And that really reframes things, what you just shared, because it shifts nature from being something optional to something our body was designed to interact with every day. That's how it should be. And the thing that changes when we do that, like you just shared, that's that's absolutely amazing. It's really sad that we nowadays we are not able to do that because we're supposed to do that. We were made to do that. So and we forget when we forget that relationship between us and the nature, the nervous system ends up trying to function in an environment it was never built for. That makes a lot of sense.

00:08:24 Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah. And I don't think that people realize, you know, the deepest suffering on this earth comes from a sense of disconnection, right? Disconnection from ourselves, from our bodies, from our community and from the earth. So when you remember that you belong and that you belong to the land, it's not because you earned it. You don't have to do anything. You just. You are in nature, you know. So when you step onto the earth, think of earth as almost like an ancestor. And that will bring in some more sacredness to it. And you always belong here. You are part of nature. And that that can definitely shift something in you because belonging is the foundation of nervous system safety, right? So once you feel safe, then you can activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Then you start growing. Then you start developing resilience.

00:09:31 Archita: Exactly, exactly. And yeah, I mean, you couldn't have explained it in a better way. And that brings me to the point that you speak a lot about belonging to the land, which is such a powerful phrase. And I'm curious how you understand belonging, uh, not just socially or emotionally, but biologically in in the body.

00:09:56 Speaker 2: That's a great question. Yeah. And that kind of brings in the, the question of all the languages that we have here on earth in humanity and not not languages, I mean by, you know, English or. Spanish, that kind of thing. I mean, languages that really describe the same truth. So science, I would say is like one aspect, one language in healthcare, and so is somatics now. So, um, you know, psychotherapy and mental, emotional. And then there's also the theology aspect, the spiritual language that we speak. And that can change culturally as we go around the world. But I really do see that belonging outside of an emotional and mental context really does impact your, you know, our scientific cells, our from a molecular level all the way down into our cells because chronic stress, hypervigilance, burnout, anything where you feel like a deep sense of not enoughness, you know, you have to keep working, work for the man, work for the dollar, work to pay back your bills, whatever. That actually translates deeply into survival physiology into our bodies, right? So that actually makes our nervous system constantly and chronically ill. It's always on, right? When we weren't supposed to be like that, we're not supposed to live like this. So yeah, I feel that deeply. You know, we're all exhausted. And that's partly due to capitalism and probably partly just to do with the end stage grief of what was, you know, the nineteenth century and beyond. Uh, I guess before that. And so now we're in this new kind of postmodern era where, you know, our bodies are still living like we still have bodies as if we're twelve thousand years ago. You know, we're just living here on the earth, but we have these modern challenges. So I feel very, very strongly and deeply that the sense of belonging that you get from nature, specifically from being in and around trees and plants and soil, can really, really shift that physiology back into, like I mentioned, the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the state of rest and digest and ease and grace.

00:12:27 Archita: That is so true. And that very idea that belonging is something the body feels, not just something the mind understands, feels incredibly important. And I, like you said, I don't think that people realize it often nowadays, but it is extremely important because many people today intellectually know they should slow down, but their nervous system still feels unsafe because they are conditioned to live that way. So yeah, absolutely. Now, Frankie, let's stay with that for a moment. A modern life. As I was saying, it is it is fast, urban and very screen based. Uh, many people spend most of their day indoors, even children under artificial lighting and rarely interacting with the natural world. So from your perspective, how does that disconnection show up in everyday life?

00:13:24 Speaker 2: Yes, it's very obvious. You know, our attention spans are and will continue to be probably very much so decreased. Um, even since I think maybe twenty years ago, our attention spans have decreased down to like fifteen to forty five seconds. Even in a healthy adult, right, which is abnormal, you would normally see that level of attention span in the young child who is exploring their world. And, you know, but as you grow, you're able to focus your attention more and more. And that's what we would hope. However, we do see that decreases in attention span. One is definitely because of our screen time and perhaps even because of ads that we get on the screen as well. So we're watching a television show, but we have, you know, these ads that come up every forty five seconds or every minute. It's like, we can't actually get focused on anything because the world wants us to keep buying, right? We're in this state of constant digital noise. And so the way that it reverts back into ecology and somatics and neuroscience, you have to really see that that relationship, right, is, is starting to become more in your face instead of being able, we're, I guess we're not able to look, step back a little bit and look at it for the broader picture and see that everywhere you go there is adds on, you know, different medications or whatever it may be. Even when I'm playing, I love Sudoku on my phone. Even when I'm playing Sudoku, when I get like a a couple good numbers, the game automatically goes to an ad, you know, and then I'm like, oh, I lose my focus. I lose my concentration. So even through really simple sensory practices, that's kind of what I introduced to folks to reconnect with land. Yes. But you're not looking at a screen. You're looking at things that are very either very close to you. So in your palm and in your hand. And you're not just using one sense either to view them. You might be feeling soil in your hand or the touch of fir needles, you know, along your fingertips or the bark on a tree. That type of thing. So those really simple sensory practices kind of take us out of just one way of being and seeing. And then there's this other piece around, and there's quite a bit of research on this around awe and wonder and how when you look at a mountain in the distance, the sense of awe that you get, you can't get that or anywhere else. And so there's this idea that when you're in a state of awe that your body responds, your physiology says, oh, I am part of something bigger, something greater. And then the body starts to remember how to settle, how to repair and how to trust again. Right? And this, it sounds very intuitive in a way, but it's like people really need permission to step outside their door and go touch that flower or take off their socks. You know, especially if you're in the city, you don't really want to be walking around, even in parks here in Toronto. It's not really safe to walk around sometimes with your socks on. Even if there is grass, you know, there might be a dog doo doo or whatever. So my work is really about restoring and allowing people to remember that their body has that natural ability to go into the relationship again with yourself and with the land. And then you start to expand your idea of what relationship is. And that to me. I wasn't planning on talking about this, but that really is animism in a big way, is that animism is understanding that everything around us has sentience. So, you know, it's not just humans that are alive and well. It's also earth that is alive and well. It's the river. It's the rocks. Everything has its own significant energy imprint. And that relationship with us and the things around us that's so, so important to be restored. So, so important.

00:18:08 Archita: Exactly. And it's, it's, it's really powerful to hear that because, you know, uh, so many people think their stress, uh, they, they are stressed or burnt. Burnout is purely personal, but, uh, sometimes the environment itself, um, the pace, the disconnection and the lack of grounding is shaping how the nervous system responds. And that is really, really relevant in in today's times. Yeah. And for someone listening who might live in a city or feel like they don't have access to forests or mountains, um, what are some gentle ways people can begin rebuilding their relationship with nature?

00:18:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so handy. And yeah, sometimes it doesn't often come easy. You know, like you said, nature is increasingly becoming this luxury space, you know, and it's linked to economic ties and status. And these are what we call the social determinants of health. So how do we make it so that we can increasingly make nature accessible because we are nature, right? So the further and further we come to belonging to it, then we can actually start to really, really hone in on slowing down and realizing that we don't need to fix ourselves. Right? Um, for someone who's living in a city, it could be as simple as starting your own patio garden. It could be just like one plant inside of your home that you set by the window. And you take really good care of. Maybe you talk to it every day. Maybe you give it a name, right? There's even research based that plants know when you're on the way home, they start to perk up. And it's really interesting all these, you know, all the research that's now finally catching up to what's going on here. So I think the little tiny things, right? And it doesn't actually have to be something green. We talk about green spaces quite a bit, but it could even be Blue space. So people think of blue space as ocean. But if you're in a city and you're landlocked, maybe it's just that you actually take a shower or take a bath and you are connected to the element of water. In that way, it can really hold you, especially if you don't have access to a nearby green space.

00:20:48 Archita: Yeah, it really doesn't have to be a very big garden or something. It can be one or two plants as well. And what you just said, I love that approach because it removes the pressure to do something dramatic, because sometimes healing isn't about changing everything, but about slowly restoring small relationships, uh, with the body, with the breath, and with the world around us. So this conversation has truly been so eye opening for me because this has really made us all realize what is actually, you know, surrounding us and it has made us aware about our environment as well. So thank you so much for sharing all of that wisdom with us today. And finally, for someone listening right now who feels deeply overwhelmed or disconnected from themselves, what would you gently want them to remember about their relationship with the earth and their own nervous system?

00:21:50 Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you so much. I would say to someone who is out there listening right now, wherever you are, put your feet on the ground. It could be indoors or outdoors. Take one slow breath through your lungs. And have and hold the intention of being in relationship, because the air that's going through your lungs right now, that becomes the wind on top of a mountain. So belonging, you don't actually have to go to the top of the mountain or the bottom of the sea to feel like you belong, or the middle of a forest. All it takes is to require presence because the land and all of its elements. They're always willing to meet you where you are. And you were put on this earth for a very specific reason. So remember that.

00:22:54 Archita: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that with all of the listeners. And I'm sure it it's, it's going to be very helpful for them because it's going to be sure. It's very helpful for me. And if there's one insight I'm taking from this conversation, it's this our nervous systems don't just need rest, they need relationship. And the land has always been one of our oldest teachers of safety. And thank you for listeners who feel inspired by this conversation and want to learn more about your work or the sanctuary, your building. Where can they find you and stay connected?

00:23:33 Speaker 2: Thank you so much again for hosting me. You can find me at Abundance World Today. That's my website. It has all of our information about upcoming retreats. We not only do nature immersion retreats in person, we also do them online and we follow the wheel of the year. So we are celebrating the spring equinox, the summer solstice, and so on and so forth. So we do those online. So there is a way if you're not here in Canada to partake. And I would love to hear all of the ways that you belong to the land. So reach out to me. Abundance world today is the website you can even follow me on Instagram at the Frank chapter, the Frank chapter, or if you're on TikTok, it's abundance underscore world.

00:24:28 Archita: Amazing. And we will make sure all of those details are available in the show notes so that our listeners can feel free to reach out to you whenever they want. And thank you once again, thank you for being here and sharing all of those helpful insights with us today. And to everyone listening, maybe today's invitation is simple. Step outside for a moment. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Notice the air, the trees, the sky. Sometimes healing doesn't require doing more. Sometimes it begins by remembering where we belong. This is sacred harmony. And if this conversation resonated with you, share it with someone who might need a moment of calm today. Until next time, take care of your mind, your body, and your connection to the world around you.