Below is a collection of ideas designed to bring the environment more fully into your life. Adapt the exercises to suit your lifestyle and surrounding area to achieve the best results.

Re-bonding Exercise

This first exercise focuses on 'coming home' and renewing our bond with our Earth Mother through sensory immersion in the wind. This exercise can be done anywhere outdoors, although a quiet natural setting adds something very special and spiritual.

Find a place that speaks to you stilling your mind and withdraw from the stresses of your everyday business.

Bring your attention to the feel of the Earth's breath (the wind) moving around and over your skin.

Notice how our Mother's breath is touching you.

Depending upon the strength and consistency of the wind, its touch may feel gentle, firm, playful or rough.If you feel comfortable doing so in your setting, turn your face to the direction of the wind, open your arms wide, and embrace it in return.

Finally, breathe in the air deeply and then whisper (or shout) your thanks. Our Mother's breath makes possible our own life-sustaining respirations.

• Whenever possible, get your skin in touch with the air, soil, water and vegetation. Walk barefoot on the soil. Dance in the rain and let it soak you. Dig around in the soil or sand (no gloves please). Swim. Better yet, if you can pull it off (so to speak), go skinny-dipping. Go out on a windy day and let it blow your hair around.
• Wrap yourself around a tree. Hold a big rock and feel how it has absorbed the hot and cold of the day. Jump into a hay mound or embrace a wave crashing on the beach.
• Wake up your senses through the natural world. Focus your tactile awareness on rocks, leaves, nuts, flowers, bark, feathers, seaweed, shells, sand and dirt. Smell the scents and listen to the sounds. Purchase or better still grow some organic fruit and vegetables and taste them. Use your eyes, the Earth's nuance and colours are not confined to blazing sunsets and autumn landscapes. Take time to take in your surrounding and its wondrous bounty, paying attention to colour, texture and shape of natural objects around you.
• Surround your indoor home or office with life, including plants, stones, feathers, acorns, pussy willow and dried plants. A nature table is particularly helpful in sustaining the bond between the Earth Mother and young children, so place on in each of their rooms.
• Go home hunting in nature. You don't need to be a seasoned hiker, white-water canoeist, mountaineer, or cave-dweller ascetic. Find a location in nature where you experience nature's presence clearly, and visit there often and experience the beauty and stillness.
• Listen to the Earth, listen to her language, her dialects, and play with learning one or more of these natural tongues. Howl like a windstorm, crash and rumble like thunder, slush like rain, learn to call with birds and animals, sing or chant with ebb and flow of the surf, play a drum or other musical instrument in concert with nature's sounds.
• Take a day each month and serve nature. Pick up litter, volunteer to help with recycling program, assist with environmental education at your local nature centre, participate in a Nature Conservancy campaign, or some other effort to give something back to the Earth that gave us life. This is helpful for the whole family, especially for young children who need to learn gratitude and service.
• Garden. Few things are more satisfying, both emotionally and spiritually. When you raise flowers or vegetables or fruit trees, you participate intimately with nature's working, with the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Gardening is psychotherapy.
• Lobby your local school or your child's teacher to include environmental education (done outdoors, please) in the core curriculum. This should be hands on, frequent and based more on direct contact with nature than on electronic media. Volunteer to help out.
• Join an environmental group dedicated to preserving, honouring, and restoring the Earth's creative wonders. Contributing money is good and necessary, but direct involvement will feed your spirit and help crystallize your bond with the Earth.
• Petition your local government to allow and encourage "natural lawns." Green spaces full of native grasses and wildflowers don't require herbicides, pesticides, or frequent watering. They provide living "shrines" to our Earth Mother, attract wildlife and children, and embrace the life force's proclivity for diversity. There's nothing creative or diverse about a green space that looks like a golf course. Many municipalities and councils have ordinances against natural lawns, or laws that prohibit grass beyond certain restrictive heights. Educate and organise your fellow citizens and bring them to their senses … quite literally. Imagine waking up each day to a tall grass or wildflower-strewn meadow instead of a lawn that needs mowing.
• Taking reasonable safety precautions, go out in storms. Very few of us get soaked in hard rain, cavort in a wild wind, or brave a heavy snow. Storms are adventures, and enduring their adversity enlivens and strengthens one's spirit.
• Go animal watching. This is quite simple. Find a secluded area in nature away from human activity and just sit, listen, and watch. If you are quiet and blend in with your surroundings, animals and birds will soon appear and go about their business, paying little or no heed. You can always count on the bugs, except in winter, of course. Take some binoculars for close-ups.
• Boating is good, provided you leave the motor behind. A canoe or flat-bottomed rowboat will allow you to slip into shallow, secluded areas near shores on lakes or rivers. There you will find a wide array of plant, animal, insect, and bird life that will reveal itself if you are quiet.

These are but a few approaches to re-bonding with the Earth. Generally, they do not demand huge chunks of time or gut-busting effort; but whatever time or energy is required will be well worth the investment.

Rediscovering one's physical, emotional, and spiritual origins in the Earth is more than fun, uplifting, calming, enlightening, reassuring, and awe-inspiring. It is right and true.
True to life.