Sharing my journey

Just a couple of hundred meters from my home flows the beautiful Manning River, this river is as old as time itself and I have been drawn to its energy for most of my life. On the banks of the river near my home is a beautiful circle of trees that I am naturally drawn to and ground myself in their energy.

I still remember the first time my shamanic master led me into the centre of a circle of trees. We walked in silence, the way you do when you are waiting in the energy of expectation. He stopped, placed a hand on the rough bark of an old tree, and simply said, “This is where you listen.”

It wasn’t a concept to be explained; it was a presence to be felt. There, at the centre of those trees, the air itself felt slower, denser, charged, as if we’d stepped into the breathing heart of the earth. My master taught me early that the energy at the centre of a circle of trees is not just “landscape, it’s a sacred place. It’s a field that steadies us, restores us, and holds us without expectation.

Long before that lesson, about twenty years earlier, my Aboriginal elder teacher had shared the same truth with me in the coastal strip of the Manning Valley. He told me that the trees remember. They listen. They speak in their own way. To sit in their presence is to sit in a living circle that has held ceremony since time began. That teaching stayed within me and my shamanic master echoed it, two lineages, worlds apart, speaking the same language of the land.

What struck me, then and still now, is the generosity of trees. They ask nothing in return. They draw light from the sun and minerals from the earth, but the shade, the oxygen, the quieting of our restless hearts,t they give freely. Their energy is a form of service; it’s as if they know their part in the great conversation of life.

Some will say this is poetry, not fact. Yet science has begun to wander down the same path. Recent studies have shown that trees exchange electrical signals through their roots and fungal networks, and that these signals can synchronise across whole forests of trees. In 2024, researchers in Italy’s Dolomites found that spruce trees responded in unison to a solar eclipse, their bio-electric activity rising and falling together as if they were aware of the change in the sky. Were they aware? Absolutely. Everything is connected, all is one and all is responding.

Other studies have revealed that trees adjust their water flow and subtle electrical rhythms to lunar and solar cycles, this knowledge has been known since the beginning of time by our ancestors - we have simply forgotten. The knowledge around the underground exchange of signals and nutrients through roots and mycorrhizal fungi is now well-established among the scientific community. While scientists stop short of calling this consciousness, it is undeniably communication and coordination across a living network, I call it consciousness.

When I sit in the middle of a circle of trees, I don’t imagine them thinking in the way we do. But I do sense their presence - aware, steady and non-judging. The science doesn’t diminish that; it deepens it. It tells me that what my elder and my shamanic teacher passed down wasn’t just myth. They had simply learned to listen to what many of us have forgotten.

In a world addicted to speed and noise, the centre of a circle of trees is a kind of medicine. The trees remind us that real power isn’t forcedl. It’s patient. It holds its ground. It connects.

Perhaps the greatest wisdom they offer is this: to serve from our centre, as they do from theirs, grounded, steady and with no expectation of return.

When was the last time you found yourself grounding and healing in the centre of a circle of trees?