After working through a tremendous amount of loss, anxiety and depression over the last 7 years, I learned how to bring peace into my life from nature and without the use of any prescription medications. Here are tips I have used and I hope they can help you as much as they’ve helped me. I love to meditate and connect with the Universe and nature, but I’m not someone who meditates for hugely long periods of time or carves time out of my schedule specifically for that. I read a fantastic book a few years ago called The Medical Medium by Anthony William and when I read his tips on meditation, I thought they were brilliant and that I could easily incorporate this type of thinking into my daily life.  I cut and copied it into the notes on my phone and I have used it every time I am in the following environments. If you like what you read below, you will love the book.

Waves on the Beach

It’s possible to attain a superior meditative state of healing by watching the waves on a beach—if you know how to tap into them. I have seen countless clients rid themselves of PTSD, pain, and suffering with this technique. As you sit, stand, or walk on the beach, envision every wave as a surge of soul-cleansing energy. When a wave comes in, imagine it bathing any war wounds and scrubbing loose any damaging emotions or thoughts. As the wave recedes, watch it take away all those impurities. With each new wave, let yourself be cleansed of poisonous memories, injuries from past lives, and stains on the soul. See them all wash out to sea. When you feel purified, let each new wave bring strength and renewal to your spirit and soul. For added benefit, call upon the Angel of the Ocean. She’ll help put you in the best frame of mind for the meditation to have maximum effect. (You’ll learn more about receiving the support of the angels in the next chapter.) You can also benefit from wading. Understand that any natural water source—be it a lake, a river, a stream, the ocean—is alive. It has a breath to it, as well as a will and a spirit. When you step into living water, envision the things you want to come true in your life.

Surrounded by Trees

To get the most out of nature, it’s not enough just to go for a hike. For the most healing effect, here’s what you have to do: when you first enter a wooded area, whether a city park or your own property, call upon the Angel of Trees. Then take a moment to acknowledge the peaceful environment, especially all the trees that rise up around you. Turn your mind to their root systems. Think about the minerals and water they’re drawing from deep within the earth, up through their trunks, up through their branches. As you let yourself feel surrounded by this deep earth energy, envision roots growing out of your feet and into the Earthly Mother’s soil. When you intuitively feel it’s time to end this glorious grounding experience, imagine that you’re leaving roots protected and preserved in the earth as you break free and walk away. These roots remain a part of you. Wherever you are, transcending all time and space, you can draw healing energy from their spot in the ground. This is the most powerful grounding treatment available. It will fortify every aspect of your being. It will reinforce your will to survive, invigorate your spirit to receive positivity and ward off negativity, and create a strengthening frequency for body and soul. It will prepare you to free yourself from fear and live life at its best.

Free as a Bird

Bird-watching is a healing activity simply because it takes you into nature. When you truly focus on seeing and hearing the birds, though, you elevate it to one of the most enlightening meditations you can perform. Birdsong is the most sacred form of music; birds sing the songs of the angels and the heavens. Birdsong mends a fractured soul and can reverse disease. This is because the frequency of these melodies resonates deep within our DNA, which allows it to reconstruct the body on a cell level. If you listen to the birds with respect and appreciation and don’t take them for granted, there’s no doubt that your life will start to transform. Observing birds is powerful, too. Here on earth, our souls can become caged up and our spirits suppressed. When we witness birds’ freedom in flight, it ignites and unleashes the spirit and breaks the cage of the soul. Further, a bird lands only on an area it deems safe—and has the ability to flutter off if that spot doesn’t work out. When we pay attention to the way a bird alights on a branch or the ground, it activates our own healing and promotes a sense of safety within our souls. If it’s healing you’re seeking, enlightenment, connection to the Divine, spirituality, wisdom, compassion, knowledge, and understanding of your greater purpose, then seek not the owl. Seek the hummingbird. Admire the owl as a blessed and beautiful creature, yet take your cue from the hummingbird, which flies by day and feeds off the nectar of the earth’s flowers, pollinating as it goes. This is the most spiritual form of eating and shows the greatest wisdom. In order to heal, it’s critical not to sleep by day as the owl does, and to instead follow the hummingbird’s teaching and sleep by night (with short naps in the day as needed). Hummingbirds are light-workers. Every time you spot one, recognize it as a true and sacred symbol of the Light. Witness it as a fairy spreading the holy light of the angels. Let it purify your thoughts and intentions, then send the hummingbird with a wish or a prayer. It will carry your message to the right recipient.

Bee Watching

Bee watching is a secretly miraculous meditation. As bees dance from flower to flower, absorbing the sun and distributing pollen along the way, they emit a healing frequency that reverses disease and promotes soul and emotional restoration. This is something we can’t fully understand on a rational level, but our cells understand. When you make yourself aware of the bees and ask your body to tune its channels to their frequency, all of the cells in your body will start to resonate with this healing vibration.

Collecting Stones

When you want to cleanse yourself of negative emotions, take a walk in nature and keep your eye out for small stones that call to you. Over the course of your stroll, select three that feel good to hold in your hands. Name each stone by the label of whatever you’re harboring that you’d like to leave you. For example, you might name the stones Guilt, Fear, and Anger. Keep the stones on your bedside table. Develop a relationship with them; become friends. The healing frequency of the minerals will act as an antidote to whatever ails you, whether emotional, spiritual, or physical. When the time naturally comes that you feel the stones have done their job and you’re ready to let them go, carry them back to nature and release them into a body of water, such as a pond, ocean, lake, river, or stream. The living water will purify them of the venom they’ve drawn from you, and you’ll walk away purified, too.

Sunbathing

It will be centuries before scientists discover all of the healing benefits the sun provides. Not only is it calming and warming, but the sun’s rays contain mystery elements and promote biochemical reactions in our bodies that produce more than just vitamin D. Just look at the way our pets love to find a warm, sunlit patch of the floor and bask in it. All animals love to sunbathe—they know it’s a powerful healing tool. To benefit from the sun, spend time each day letting your skin absorb it. Try to acclimate yourself to 15 minutes at a time (taking care not to get sunburned). If it’s a cold time of year, find a peaceful spot inside where the sun comes through a window. To make the meditation most productive, call upon the Angel of the Sun to help the rays enter into your being to soothe your soul and heal your body.

Picking Fruit

Picking fruit is one of the most powerful meditations in existence. It is a sacred act of respect and gratitude to the Earthly Mother for the miracle of food. Even if you do it only once in your lifetime, it will be an experience you can reignite over and over, just by thought, to activate healing in the soul. Each piece of fruit still on the tree is living food that’s connected, via the plant’s roots, to living water from deep within the earth. If you visit a pick-your-own apple orchard, for instance, then when you touch an apple on the tree, your cells will resonate with the apple’s grounded nature, and peace will spread throughout your body. On top of that, you’ll naturally assume healing stretches and positions as you reach for apples and bend or crouch to collect them. These natural stretches supersede any human-created exercises. The joy in your heart and soul becomes one with each physical fruit-picking position, making it uniquely healing to you. While exercises such as yoga are beautiful, they are ultimately man-devised, so they won’t create the same healing effect. Picking berries, or even wildflowers, has the same effect. Since humans have existed on this planet, berry picking has been a celebration of abundance. When we follow in this millennia-old tradition, it ignites that ancient celebration of life within our souls and promotes healing. As you gather strawberries or blackberries or raspberries or apples or peaches, meditate on all the months of development that led to this moment. First the plant started as a seed or root graft and grew to fruiting size. When it reached maturity, it didn’t start bearing fruit every month of the year—rather, it developed with the seasons. Picture the tree or bush or vine in its dormant state, when it must have looked like nothing was happening. Next envision the leaves returning, the buds, the farmers tending to it all, the flowers blooming, and the pollinators paying visits. Our lives go through similar cycles. When we take the time to focus on nature’s rhythms, we activate trust and faith within our souls that our efforts to live a good life will be fruitful.

Watching Your Garden Grow

Along similar lines, a wonderful form of meditation is tending your own garden. Getting your hands in the dirt for the sake of growing new life grounds your body, strengthens your spirit, and rejuvenates your soul. Further, the soil carries the soul of the Earthly Mother. Getting (literally) in touch with that puts you in sync with divine natural rhythms. If you grow vegetables or fruit, you get the added benefit of eating the toxin-free and super-fresh results of your labors. And if you grow flowers, you get to eventually arrange them in a vase or basket—which is itself a great way to meditate. As you garden, you’ll be absorbing the sounds of nature, which are very healing. Even if you can hear lawnmowers and cars at the same time, the effects of the nature sounds won’t be lessened. The chirps of the birds, the buzzing of bees, the wind rustling through the trees—this is a sacred soundtrack that, if you attune your mind to it, will bring peace to your body and soul. Weeding can have a profound effect on your life, too. If you envision each weed you pull from the soil as an ill thought, negative emotion, earthly war wound, instance of betrayal, or painful memory that you’re simultaneously removing from your soul and mind, you’ll make room for abundance in your life. Just as weeds crowd out your special plants—hog the water and nutrients in the soil, and overshadow seedlings below—these “weeds” of the consciousness keep the positives in your life from getting a chance to flourish. This exercise will make room for new opportunities to come into your life, seemingly from out of nowhere. If you live in an apartment with no plot of land, then grow plants on your windowsill or balcony. Take frequent trips to the park and attune yourself to the cycles, beauty, and abundance of nature. And the city equivalent of pulling weeds is cleaning your apartment. If you turn it into a meditation, then as you straighten up clothing, vacuum up dust, and donate unused items, you’ll be clearing detritus from your mind and soul.

Exercising Creativity

Art can be enormously beneficial for the meditative state, sense of agency, and cathartic effects that it promotes. There’s a whole other aspect of creativity that you have to know about for maximum healing benefit, though: when you create art, you have an audience all around you on an angelic level. When you paint, angels follow every stroke of the brush. When you write, they read every word. When you sing or play a musical instrument, the angels listen to every note. The angels witness every time you’re being creative, in any way. Even if no human sees or hears what you make, your creative acts are never lost to the void. Creativity cannot die. It has a force all its own that lives beyond us and becomes written into the universe. When you become aware that the Angel of Creativity and other heavenly beings are watching you sculpt or dance or sew, it takes on new meaning. The next time you sit down to make a sketch—or the next time you come up with an inventive way of packing your kids’ lunches, or a creative incentive for your employees to track their billable hours—imagine the angels cheering you on. Making something beautiful or useful or therapeutic (or all three) is a divine act that becomes imprinted in the heavens.

Restoring Trust With Sunsets

We all go through experiences that damage our ability to trust. Up to a point, that’s helpful for survival. An abundance of innocence can lay the foundation for a major betrayal. And as this book has explained, unquestioning faith in even a well-intentioned doctor can be dangerous to your health. However, if you endure a traumatic betrayal—for example, having a spouse cheat on you or a business partner steal from you—it can cripple your ability to trust anyone. And perhaps worse, it can endanger your belief in yourself and your judgment. Along similar lines, if you’ve been told that you’re sick because your immune system has gone haywire and is attacking you, you may on some level lose the ability to trust even your own body. Further, if you’ve been given incorrect information because—as is the case in many conditions in this book—the real culprit is a virus or bacteria, you may lose faith in your internal senses, too. Such emotional blows create soul damage. They also hinder your ability to completely believe that you can overcome illness and recover your health. A simple yet profoundly effective way to heal such damage is to become aware of the sunset. Toward the end of the day, take a few minutes to watch the sun go down (while never looking directly at the sun, which is damaging to the eyes). Or if you’re in a building that blocks your view of the sky, be mindful of the sun during the time it’s setting. If you’re usually glued to your computer screen at this time of day, set a calendar reminder to shift your mental focus. You may feel a sense of loss as the sun goes down, as if a friend has gone away . . . with the promise of returning tomorrow. That’s what makes this technique resonate on such a deep level: you face the falling darkness with the absolute, irrefutable knowledge that the light will return. Performing this exercise at least three times a week will change how you experience life—in the best way. To get the most out of it, summon the Angel of Trust. When the sun appears above the horizon the next morning, even if you’re asleep when it happens, your body will be attuned to the earth’s rhythms. You’ll click with the fact that as promised, your friend has returned. The sun has risen every day of your life. It will continue to do so for the rest of your time on earth. Connecting with this truth that the sun will never let you down, the soul will relearn critical trust, which will activate healing energy.

Gazing Beyond The Stars

It’s not uncommon for a person’s soul to become damaged by adversity or stress, especially when that person has been dealing with mystery illness for years on end. That’s why God created a built-in safety mechanism for our souls. The majority of your soul is here, within you, on earth. Far up in the ether, though, beyond the stars, God has safeguarded the essence of your soul. The angels protect it there in the heavens so that no matter what happens down here, your soul will be secure. It’s a little like keeping a second key to your house in a lockbox in the garage so that if your regular key goes missing, you can still get into the house. Or like securing your laptop with a password and keeping a backup encryption key in case you forget your login credentials. Along those same lines, God keeps the essences of our souls up beyond the stars in case we lose ourselves. And there are so many ways for people to lose themselves here on earth. People’s souls can fracture as they go through life, or pieces can even go missing. Injuries—whether physical or emotional, from past lives, work, or childhood—send people soul-searching. Addiction, too, comes in every shape and size—and can rob people of their souls. There’s alcohol and drug addiction, but also food addiction, gambling addiction, addiction to seeing oneself in a negative way, and many more. Addictions are a poison that can take people so far away from themselves that they become almost soulless. Yet you can never really lose yourself. You always have the ability to reunite with your soul because of God’s safekeeping method, which Spirit has asked me to reveal here. You don’t have to search for that sense of wholeness anymore. To reclaim your soul, spend time each night gazing up at the sky. First get familiar with the stars; your soul has a direct telepathic connection to them. Let their light and the wonder of their existence resonate for a few moments. Then shift your focus to the space beyond the stars. Envision that your true home lies way up there, in a place free from suffering. It’s the place some call Heaven, God, the Light, or the Infinite. You may have uncomfortable associations with those words and prefer not to name the destination. Either way, remind yourself that part of you resides in this sanctuary, unharmed by earth’s adversities. When you eventually pass from this earth, that’s where you’ll go. Tell yourself, This is a home I belong to, and will someday warmly return to. Spend as much time on this exercise as you like. The goal is repetition and reinforcement. You can stargaze for just three minutes a night and find that your soul rejuvenates in dazzling ways.