What can Trees teach us?

A personal story from Karen Howard

I have always loved trees.  Although I am an urban dweller and would choose sea over mountains, I have always been drawn to trees.  I like to look at them from car windows, admiring their bark and the smell of them when a passenger on rural drives.  I love how they grow to the conditions, bent by the wind, reaching for the sun.  I love the texture of the bark and used to hug them before I knew it was a “thing”.  Every now and then I have to go find some to admire or sit under, just to be in their energy.

Looking back, I have also always been able to receive messages from places….

One of my favourite memories is going to The Olgas on a Year 11 school trip and never wanting to leave.  They were so beautiful I nearly cried, and it was not just a visual beauty, there was an amazing energy to the place that I was too young to understand.

I remember at 21 sitting at the feet of a thousand year old statue of the Buddha in Asia and feeling the energy of the many, many prayers.

I also remember at my first visit to Port Arthur in the late 80’s (before the shootings in the 90’s) where I felt the pain and suffering of the convicts as I did the tour.

And, in the last 10 years, as my capacities have expanded, I have been able to open myself up, and receive from nature even more.

Last year one of my Facebook Friends posted something in response to an article about how the original Bramley Apple tree was dying.  A friend of hers had received messages from the tree that were profound and moving, and she created a group called “Personal Conversations With The Earth”  where people could share their experiences of communing with nature, and we could all grow in awareness.

In this group a woman called Rachael had magically ended up on a piece of land in Drumwhill Scotland where she was receiving a lot of information from trees, and where she has begun co-creating her longed for retreat centre WITH the land and the trees.  She wanted to experiment with “messages from trees” for other individuals and asked for volunteers, and I was one of six who said ‘yes’.  The session was a bit like a guided mediation, and information came through for me about how I could receive more (it was amazing).  Afterwards, Rachael said that each of the sessions was so different, and asked all of us if we were interested in trying something as a group?  Since then the group, with members from all across the globe have zoomed a few times, and the sessions have been amazing!

The focus for us as a group has been to come together and reconnect with the trees and the land, and sometimes that has meant that we have used our different capacities to help shift the patterns and memory imprints of the things that once were, so that they have the ability can come together in a different way.

Rachael feels that we maybe have been called to do a job that the animals used to do, before we built houses and roads, etc, and connect the trees above the ground.  (For information about how the trees connect below the ground I recommend the book “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate” by Peter Wohlleben.)  Rachael has some videos you can watch about the Drumwhill trees, including this one about how the trees want to connect, which includes an exercise you can do yourself.

What these experiences have opened up for me is an awareness of possibilities for sustainable living for the future for all lifeforms.  And this is something that may not have happened without the space created by the COVD-19 pandemic.

So what can trees teach us?  All sorts of things – we just have to be in the right space to hear them!

Karen Howard is a coach, energetic bodyworker and “being” communicator.  She can be contacted via alwaysshinebrightly@gmail.com.

Rachael Hattersley is currently offering transmissions from trees every Friday via zoom – she posts the links in Personal Conversations With The Earth Facebook group,
and on her Facebook page www.facebook.com/drumwhill.  And you can read more about her journey with Drumwhill on her website www.drumwhill.com.