Coming Home to Nature Through the Body

A Review by Stephen Khamsi, Ph.D.

Coming Home to Nature Through the Body: An Intuitive Inquiry into Experiences of Grief, Weeping and other Deep Emotions in Response to Nature by Jay P. Dufrechou (2002) UMI #3047959

Coming Home is the very personal story (and doctoral dissertation) by Jay Dufrechou, the attorney and psychologist. Dufrechou employed intuitive inquiry to examine experiences of grief, weeping, and other deep emotions in response to nature (his own, as well as those of forty others). Most of us in industrialized societies have developed ego structures that suppress our intimate contacts with nature. But what actually happens when people connect deeply with nature?

Like a French Impressionist, Dufrechou looks beyond the confines and catharses of the clinic—to lived-experiences of being-in-nature. “Have you ever wept or felt grief or other deep emotions when feeling deeply connected to nature?” From this simple question, Defrechou documents how connecting with nature can be deeply meaningful (p. 8), and is often a source of healing and creativity (p. 9). His emphasis is on developing embodied descriptions of experience, and conveying—through concrete details of sensation and emotion—how it feels to have such experiences (p. iii).

Dufrechou’s personal story began with a profound felt-connection with rain during meditation. He wept and felt a range of emotions, including a great sense of longing. The feelings were at once physical, transcendent and mystical—full of excitement, bliss and awe. He was drawn into a sphere seemingly beyond the physical world that possessed infinite compassion, knowledge, and potential for healing. His eventual transformation energized him to move his family of five from suburban silicon San Jose to faraway Helena, Montana.

While his treatise is not about primal therapy, it at once radically supports and challenges the very foundations of primal theory. In support, these stories are, after all, about real people having real feelings in real situations, who frequently experience major transformations. As a challenge, not all deep feelings must singularly arise from, nor singularly connect to, primal pain. Still, it seems likely that several of these participants may have been further served by connecting with, dropping into, and feeling though multiple layers of personal—as well as ecological—pain and suffering.

This work, and others like it, could well provide a new beginning in the primal movement, because not all pain, it appears, is entirely personal or entirely ecological. Can we accept that pleasure and pain originate from the earth as well as from other sources? Can we keep our hearts and minds open and avoid both primal and ecological reductionism?

The bottom line? Sensory contact with nature is sometimes experienced as spiritual, sustaining, and healing. Connecting deeply with nature can restore personal equilibrium, and may simultaneously help to transform our culture (p. iii). This process seems to repair the split between mind and body, as well as the split between humanity and nature—both of which are prevalent in industrialized countries (p. iv).

In conclusion, it is my opinion that deep feelings arise from personal experiences, and also from experiences with nature. Primal pain can be resolved by re-living and re-feeling personal trauma and also, to some extent, by simply being-in-nature. Let us applaud Dr. Dufrechou for his fine work,
and hope that he finds the time, inspiration, and stamina to continue to present these ideas to the world. While there are no quick or simple fixes for the problems of humanity, Dufrechou’s essential insights provide a ray of real hope—one with revolutionary possibilities for individual and cultural transformation.

Stephen Khamsi, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco. He is a long-time member of both the APA and the IPA.

This article appeared in the March 2004 IPA Newsletter.