Going mindfully wild in the forests of Hampshire

This weekend my girlfriend, Jo, and I went camping in a forest down in Hampshire, right next to the beautiful South Downs Way near the New Forest. It's a privately owned forest that our friend Sean manages and uses for woodland skills course and mindfulness retreats.

Our campsite

There're loads of things I could write about - like our dandelion coffee making adventure (see below for some pics) - but since this is a blog about finding your inner universe I'm going to write about dirty fingers!

Ever since I was little I've had a thing about getting dirty fingers. My mum will tell you, when I was around 5 I insisted on eating my jam sandwiches with a knife and fork for fear of getting jam on my fingers... And to this day eating pizza with my hands takes some mental effort (not to mention going to an Ethiopian restaurant).

So spending a couple of days in the forest without a shower or running water was always going to bring up some issues.

On the first night it rained heavily, so we spend the morning searching out dry (or just less wet) wood for the camp fire. The rain made the dead wood slimy with forest gunk, so you can imagine what my hands looked like after dragging back the branches and breaking them up for the fire... My mood worsened as I tried not to get more gunk on my jacket or trousers. I was snapping at Jo and all humour had left me.

Now this is always an important sign! The lack of seeing any humour or the funny side tells you that you've got into a bad mood. "Are you breathing in the hara?", Jo asked. Grrr...

Well, ok, no I wasn't. Hara is the Japanese term for your belly, or your being's energy centre/battery pack. It's synonymous with the Chinese/Taoist lower dantian or the yogic swadhisthana chakra. When you meet someone with a strong hara you can feel it immediately - very grounded, solid and stable. And when you're relaxed you naturally breathe in your belly. Conversely, consciously breathing in your belly/hara (diaphragmatic breathing) stimulates your para-sympathetic nervous system and causes you to relax. It has all sorts of beneficial effects, as any singer, Tai-Chi or Aikido practitioner will tell you.

So I softened my belly and let my breathing relax naturally downwards. I did what I could to let go of the resistance to getting dirty and start enjoying the sensual feeling of the slime and mud on my fingers. I rolled up my coat sleeves and had a good laugh with Jo about the ridiculous states you can wind yourself up into.

From then on (until we got back home to our sink, bar of soap and nail brush) I just let my hands be dirty. It's only natural, organic forest gunk.

Ok, I did scrub pretty hard when I got home, but step-by-step...

Dandelion root "coffee"

The enormous root Jo found

Cleaning it with a sprig
of antiseptic pine

Frying and crushing the
chopped up root

A lovely steaming cup of dandelion "coffee"

See here for some interesting facts about the common dandelion

Forest work

Sean tasked us with clearing some log debris from an ancient stone-age burial mound in the forest. Another opportunity to get dirty fingers...

Clearing the log debris from the tumulous

The stone-age tumulous (burial mound)