By Helena MacCormack

Wild Wellbeing is an organisation that describes its field of practice as “ecotherapy”. I describe myself, as I’m sure many higher education professionals would, as an overthinker.

Caroline White runs this project and hosted us for a mindful walk on this sunny June afternoon. After ambling through the woods bordering the university campus, we arrived at an open expanse of field in Stanmer Park. Caroline had advised us to walk single-file on the way there, slowly and silently, feeling the micro-sensations of the ground beneath our feet. As we obliged, a couple of dog-walkers and a jogger travelled past us, probably wondering whether we were some sort of sombre, backpack-laden funeral procession. By the time we arrived at the field, this exercise in solitary togetherness had rendered us calmand receptive. Caroline led a short breathing practice and instructed us on how to conduct a “sit spot” – a meditative assignment all about tuning into our senses.

Our brains are constantly being fed tremendous amounts of sensory information from our environment. This is true for every human alive, however some of us are bombarded by an even greater barrage of data and equipped with fewer skills to manage such an onslaught. I am one of the approximately 1 in 100 people in our global population who are autistic, and moreover part of the estimated 50-70% of autistic people who also have ADHD. This buy-one-get-one-free combination means that not only does my brain generate around 42% more information at rest than allistic (non-autistic) people, but due to my naturally lower levels of dopamine and “neuronal background noise“, my brain also experiences an “attention deficit” and therefore struggles to efficiently manage such a vast quantity of information. To put it another way: there’s a lot going on.

Perhaps this is why, throughout my life, I’ve frequently gravitated towards mindfulness, meditation, and yoga. The idea of having a peaceful mind is continually enticing to me. One of my favourite books is How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, a meandering text which reflects on the attention economy and gives thought to the political implications of doing… not much at all. (By which she broadly means inconsequential, pleasurable activities which ideally connect you with tangible space, place, and nature – for example, birdwatching – and which she characterises as radically anti-capitalist by virtue of their inherent lack of monetisation.)

Sat in the grass, I listened carefully to Caroline’s instructions, then wandered off to find myself a secluded spot. She had advised us to spend the time observing the natural environment around us, perhaps tapping into just one of our senses at a time to really focus. At first it can feel like an overwhelming task – how am I supposed to concentrate only on sounds, for example, when there’s so much colour and texture around me to look at? What about the tingly grass beneath me and the increasing warmth of the sun on my skin? The smell of earth; the taste of the free conference coffee which I scarfed gallons of, naturally? And this is just the sensory information, not counting the chattering thoughts that are fighting for dominance in my brain: did I remember to put sun cream on this morning? What’s on the schedule after this? What’s on the menu for lunch? Did I neck too much conference coffee? What does it mean about me that free food & drink is the best part of my day? Am I going to have some sort of caffeine-fuelled identity crisis this afternoon?

I pushed the thoughts aside and tuned into the sounds I could hear around me. Closing or un-focusing my eyes helped, and I noticed that there was a surprising depth of noise within the aural landscape. At first I could hear a lot of birds, the occasional aircraft, and people traversing the field with their dogs – but the longer I listened, the more I began to pick out nuances in the sound and tune the rest out. The block noise of “birds” was actually made up of countless different species with unique calls, and they were emanating from locations all around me. Although they were separate sounds, the sonic tapestry they weaved was fluid: as soon as one bird call ended, another had already begun. It was like a relay race; there was always a new sound to gently glide my attention over to. When you first consider it, fleeting attention may sound counter to meditation, but those who are familiar know that it’s at the crux of the practice. No rumination, no lingering, just moving from sound to sound with ease and little thought beyond “oh, that’s there now”.

As my attention bounced around the different clusters of trees the birds were chirping from, I realised that I had started to imagine them as components of a musical score. I’ve often thought of playing music as an exercise which shares many similarities to meditation. When you play an instrument, especially as part of an ensemble, and particularly when it’s a challenging piece, there’s no room to dawdle or overthink. You have to play the notes or strike the rhythm in the moment and then swiftly move on, because if you don’t, you’ll be out-of-sync with the rest of the instrumentalists. You often also become shut off from superfluous environmental input, as that would distract you from the task at hand.

This contributes to a state of flow whereby your cognitive abilities are reduced to only what’s absolutely necessary. Some researchers have proposed that musical flow invokes a mode of “transient hypofrontality”, where the brain temporarily enables “suppression of the analytical and meta-conscious capacities”. In other words, for a short time, your brain disables its own ability (or in my case, propensity) to overthink. In this sense, I suppose you could call musical flow an altered state of consciousness; a form of hypnosis; a kind of spellbinding, mesmeric mindfulness.

I became somewhat entranced with the exercise of live-scoring the bird calls. I could see the sheet music scrolling across my mind; the sounds gently landing upon the staves before they fade out of sight. Here it goes ka-ka-ka-ka, now it goes trrrrrr, now it goes pa-ooo pa-ooo, and on and on. So transfixed was I that I didn’t even hear Caroline’s excellent mimicry of a cawing crow to bring the group back together – or perhaps I simply added it to the score.