If you are someone who has struggled with anxiety or stuck in a stressful every day-loop, please read on. Rather than only succumbing to taking pills, get to know your anxiety, your stress, that in fact is fear. It’s sound, healthy and deriving throughout human history to have a flight, flee or freeze response. And it’s the same type of fear, that now has moved into our boarding rooms and offices. Being often online with self presented material, can also be a source of performance anxiety, that can be unhealthy, like stage freight. Both building a scare but dressed differently. So, what does our fundamental fear feel like? Go outside in nature, preferably alone, to find out.

First there will be sounds, you may or may not recognise. Birds passing by against a beautiful sky, or rattled by something moving on the ground. There may be other animals, whether domesticated cats, wild boars, or little dragonflies and butterflies. Then there will be mushrooms and berries, some poisonous, some nourishing. By the water and with the wind, you will meet real power. And at no time, will you be certain, or superior, if you are awake and present. Now, you’ve gotten to know real fear, and can thus understand better, where your own reactions are coming from, when it’s other people that are the threat, or potentially so. Your reaction is not an illness, it’s an instinct.

A bonus. How does it feel to pet a horse, cow or dog? Animals will immediately mirror your own emotions. If you are hesitant and a little nervous, the horse will also hesitate and become nervous. If you greet your dog with loud love, it will meet you with the same. And if they are indifferent to you passing by, you are in synch, neither threatened, nor threatening.

Nature puts us in our right place.