Podcast Highlight: Alyssa Benjamin
Alyssa Benjamin is a writer, intuitive coach, strategist, back to nature guide, and podcast host of Our Nature Always Podcast.
She's all the things, literally and figurately.
She was raised in Jewish household and later recognized in her life that she leaned more into the Jewish religious experience, than being culturally Jewish. A distinction she succinctly covers in our interview.
She began her seekers path early in her life asking "What do I want?"
Like many of us she started discarding everything she once knew and not believing in anything. Breaking away from one extreme to the other--only to find herself at a soft and curious equilibrium where she began to study the ancient Hindu philosophy of Vendanta. Joining The Vendanta Centre in Boston, she recalls specifically learning the practice of honoring all religions and Gods. An experience that was particularly powerful to her and was the starting point of her spiritual journey.
Alyssa talks about a time in her life where she felt like she was struggling; dealing with physical issues, being out of work with no clear plan or direction, and feeling the burden of depression, anxiety and overwhelm in her life.
She says about this time that she felt "lost in every capacity--I knew there was a different to feel...I just didn't know how to get there and slowly I was intuitively called back to nature."
Her reconnection with nature began a healing journey within her.
While living in New York City she would walk down to the Hudson river and instantly feel better. Soon after this experience, Alyssa says she underwent a giant internal shift of compassion for the world and her self after reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose and she felt her identity dissolve.
On the path of awakening, this can be one of the most painful processes to go through because we live in a world who tells us what our identity is, soon after we take our first sacred breath.
As seekers we understand that deconstructing our domestication and dissolving identification is paramount to coming home to ourselves, something Alyssa is passionate about helping people do.
Her life's work has been to dedicate herself to helping people to return to the truth of who they are, through nature.
I'm struck by the profound words she utters when she says "When we connect with nature, we are connecting with ourselves because we have all the elements within us." How easy it is to forget that we are nature, despite our perceived position atop the proverbial food chain, I think.
Alyssa goes on to say "Returning to nature is not an easy path, its a courageous path."
She's couldn’t be more right.
When we return to our innate nature, we have to look at all the light and dark parts of ourselves that get in the way of us connecting to ourselves and the world around us. We have find a way to love it all, to be the compassionate observer of our lesser behaviors, actions, and thoughts--and that takes true courage.
Alyssa reminds the audience that when we shine a light on our dark parts, they lose their charge.
She goes onto say how nature holds both the darkness and the light, chaos and order, beauty and destruction.
Nature never discards anything, but holds it all without preference or position--which is the Masters Path on this road of awakening, homecoming, and expansion.
