How to Instantly Improve Your Mood

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is a transcript of a spontaneous talk.

If you have been feeling bad lately, if you have been in a low mood, if you have been feeling sad stressed or anxious, I would like to share with you a very simple practice that could significantly improve your mood.

That’s a practice that pretty much anyone can do, and it involves spending some of your time in nature. If you are living in a village or a small town, that would be a very easy thing to do. Just go outside and find a natural spot nearby. If you are living in a city, it might be a little bit more difficult, but I’m sure you could find some local park to go to — preferably at a time when it’s not very busy, at a time when there are not so many people, perhaps early in the morning.

So go there and firstly walk slowly in it, and as you walk pay attention to your surroundings — pay attention to the trees or the grass or the flowers. Smell their fragrance, listen to the chirping of the birds — just take in nature.

Then, after some time, find an empty spot to sit on, maybe on grass or even soil. Sit down and place your hands on the ground and feel Earth. If you feel like it, take off your shoes and socks and touch the skin of Earth with the skin of the soles of your feet. Feel the texture and the temperature of the ground.

Then lie down with your back on the ground and look up. Pay attention to the leaves of the trees, to the flight of the birds, to the clouds as they are floating in the sky, or to the blue of the sky if it has no clouds.

If you do that, you will immediately feel more calm more relaxed, you will immediately feel your stress evaporating, you will immediately feel a boost in your mood. You will feel more peaceful and more joyful. That is because nature is our home.

We humans lived in nature for hundreds of thousands of years, and although most of us are living in cities of concrete nowadays, mostly indoors in our homes and our offices, we have not really been adopted to the environment of the city, to the busyness and loudness and quickness of it. We are paying a very high price for being such in an environment, yet most of us don’t realize it’s because we have been born in such an environment, and we have been living in it forever.

But when we go in nature we can feel the calming effects of it, we start to feel at home again. And when we start to feel at home with existence, our stress melts away. We finally can reconnect with the beauty and the joy and the stillness of life.

You see, people are paying so much money to go to therapists and psychologists, when the greatest therapist out there is free, and that therapist is called nature. And it’s always available for us, waiting for us — we only need to go in its embrace. And when we do that, we feel the immense benefits that nature has on our well-being.

Now, I want to make clear that this practice is not meant to help you distract yourself from the problems of your everyday life. It is not meant to help you to escape from those problems. But when we are overwhelmed by those problems, and we are in a very dark mood, we cannot effectively deal with them.

We need to face our problems, we need to face our pain, we need to try to find our pain’s root causes and try to deal with it. However, sometimes we are so overwhelmed by pain and the problems of everyday life that we have lost all positivity and strength to deal with those problems. We are drowning in those problems, and by spending time in nature not only will you boost your mood, but as a result you will also be more able to effectively deal with your problems. You will be more able to heal from your pain. You will be stronger when it comes to taking action to change the conditions of your life.

Just doing this practice for a couple of days, you will feel so much better — I assure you about that. But what I would suggest you is to make it a regular daily practice, and by doing so you will see your life taking a way more positive direction.