Mental Health & Belonging: The Earth as Healer
May is Mental Health Awareness Month—and one of the most vital pathways to cultivating inner prosperity is tending to our inner garden: our mental health. In a world that often teaches us to push through, perform, or numb out, remembering that mental health is sacred becomes a radical act of wholeness.
Mental health is not just a personal issue—it’s shaped by many layers: biological, psychological, ancestral, societal, and environmental. The world we’re born into—and the ways we’re nurtured or neglected—shapes our nervous systems, our sense of self, and our ability to feel safe and whole in our bodies.
At the root of both personal and collective suffering is disconnection—a crisis of belonging that stretches across generations. This is a spiritual wound—one that lives in the heart, in the body, and in our histories.
A Wound of Separation
This wound is the result of deep separations:
• From ancestral lands
• From cultural memory
• From community
• From the Earth herself
For many of us, this disconnection has been shaped by colonization, enslavement, forced migration, systemic harm, and loss. For others, it may come through the inheritance of power built on domination and forgetting. But no lineage is untouched by the systems that have fractured our collective wholeness.
From this fragmentation grows what many call a scarcity mindset: the belief that we are not enough, that we must hustle, compete, and prove our worth just to survive. But scarcity is more than a mindset—it is a symptom of inner insecurity born from living in a world that has lost its way.
I didn’t come to the Earth for healing in the beginning. I came to survive. There was a time when the noise of the world—its expectations, its violence, its urgency—drowned out my own rhythm. I was moving, giving, doing, mothering, holding space for others while forgetting how to hold space for myself.
But the land, softly and steadily, called me back.
Through movement, breath, stillness, and noticing, I began to remember.
Not just mentally, but in my body.
The Earth taught me how to feel again.
How to listen.
How to rest.
How to trust my aliveness.
This is not the full story, but it’s part of what led me to begin my ecotherapy practice at Whole with Joy—not as an expert, but as someone who’s still listening, still learning, still returning.
Nature doesn’t just remind us of who we are—it reawakens our aliveness.
It brings us back into:
• Presence
• Breath
• Body
• Feeling
• Enoughness
Prosperity is not something we chase.
It’s something we feel: in the warmth of sunlight on our skin, in the steadiness of the ground beneath us, in the soft exhale of being enough.
The land has taught me that healing isn’t linear—and prosperity isn’t abstract. It lives in the body. It lives in the moment. It lives in our right to joy, rest, and connection—not as rewards, but as birthrights.
What part of you is longing to reconnect?
What might your inner garden need right now—sunlight, stillness, movement, or simply time to feel?