Where I Go to Remember: On Returning to Source Through Nature

There are places on the land where something in me settles instantly. The moment I step into them, I feel myself shift — a softening behind the ribs, a loosening in the breath, an inner exhale that says: here you are. It’s not a dramatic spiritual experience. It’s more like remembering a language I’ve always spoken.

People often ask where my connection to plants comes from.
It’s not a learned skill.
It’s not even a profession.
It’s the place I return to when the world becomes too loud: a direct, steady relationship with the natural world that feels older than anything I could have been taught.

It’s source.
And it’s the foundation of everything I do.

The First Feeling: Belonging Without Trying

There is a very particular sensation that arises in me when I’m close to wild spaces — not the curated ones, but the ones that have been left alone long enough to find their own rhythm.

It’s a sense of belonging without performance.

Standing among trees, or next to water, or in a meadow humming with insects, something in me feels mirrored. The land doesn’t demand anything. It doesn’t hurry. It doesn’t judge. It simply is, and the simplicity of that state rewires something inside me.

My nervous system recognises it before my mind does.

This is why nature is not inspirational to me in the way people often say.
It is regulating.
It is stabilising.
It is the blueprint my body understands intuitively.

Connection to Source Is Not Conceptual — It’s Sensory

When I talk about source, I don’t mean an abstract spiritual idea.
I mean something directly felt:

  • the shift in my lungs when I walk under trees

  • the warmth behind my sternum when sunlight moves through branches

  • the way my breath naturally deepens near water

  • the settling in the back of my body when I sit on earth

  • the sense of coherence in my thoughts when I hear birds

These aren’t metaphors.
They are physiological markers of returning to alignment.

Herbal medicine works with the same principle: when the body reconnects with what is natural, flow returns. Tension releases. Digestion softens. The mind becomes less scattered. The heart steadies.

Source is not somewhere “out there.”
It is the part of us that wakes up when we step into the place that formed us.

The Land Has a Different Tempo — And It Teaches Me Mine

I have spent years observing how my own body changes across seasons:

  • spring bringing alertness and curiosity

  • summer expanding and energising

  • autumn descending and shedding

  • winter asking for stillness and depth

What I realised is this:
Nature is not something I visit.
It is a rhythm I return to.

This is why rushing never works for me.
It is incompatible with source.

When I work with clients, this is the underlying current — the pace of nature is the pace of healing. You cannot force bloom in winter. You cannot harvest before the root is ready. You cannot clear stagnation before the system has softened enough to move.

Nature teaches timing more deeply than any textbook ever could.

I Am at My Best When I Am Near Water

Everyone has an element that calls them.
Mine is water.
Not the crashing sea — though I love the coastline — but the quieter water:

  • the spring that emerges from under chalk

  • the slow bend of a woodland brook

  • the dark stillness of a pond under trees

Water shows me who I am when I’m not trying to become anything.

It reminds me to listen for what lies underneath the surface — the undercurrents, the emotional terrain, the unspoken patterns that shape a person’s health.

This is why my clinical work relies as much on intuition and observation as it does on knowledge. Water teaches me to see what is moving beneath the symptoms.

Plants Don’t Speak in Words, But They Do Speak

This is something I have never needed to articulate publicly, but the truth is:
plants communicate.

Not in language.
In presence.

Chamomile softens me the moment I crush it.
Nettle wakes my boundaries.
Rose steadies my heart.
Hawthorn places a kind of invisible hand on my back.
Mugwort deepens my perception.
Cleavers remind me to let things move gently.
Linden unfurls my breath.

This isn’t poetic language — it’s somatic recognition.
Plants are not my tools.
They are my teachers.

And through them, I understand people.

Source Is the Reason I Create the Work I Do

Everything in my practice — herbal medicine, iridology, terrain work, emotional mapping — arises from this relationship with the natural world.

The Turton Method™ wasn’t an intellectual invention.
It was an emergence.

It came from:

  • listening to land

  • observing patterns

  • watching what softens the nervous system

  • learning what restores flow

  • trusting the pace of nature

  • remembering how healing actually happens

The land shaped me long before my profession did.
It is the quiet architecture beneath everything I offer.

Returning to Source Is Not a Luxury — It’s a Reorientation

Whenever I feel scattered, overwhelmed, stretched thin or disconnected, I go back to nature. Not to escape. Not to be inspired. But to remember.

Remember who I am.
Remember the rhythm I belong to.
Remember the deeper intelligence that holds all living things.
Remember the pace that allows healing to happen.

This is what keeps me grounded, clear and steady in my work.
This is what shapes my practice.
This is what shapes me.

Connection to source is not an event.
It’s a continual returning.

And every time I step onto the land, I return a little more fully to myself.