Tag: Sit Spot Club

  • What Thirty Days of Sitting Outside Looks Like

    Sit Daily Outdoors is thirty ten-minute practices that arrive by email, one a day. Here is what is inside them, why they are short, and how to try the first three without paying.

    Everybody already knows that time outside helps. The advice arrives without instructions. You walk to the park, stand near a tree, and wonder how long counts, whether you are doing it right, and what to do with your hands. Ten minutes later you go back inside, mildly improved, and it never happens again.

    That gap between knowing and doing is the whole reason Sit Daily Outdoors exists.

    The shape of it

    Thirty practices. Ten minutes each. One arrives in your inbox every morning. You open it, you go outside, you do the thing it describes, and you get on with your day. No app to download, no login, no streak counter waiting to tell you that you failed.

    Each practice names three things: a place to sit, how long to stay, and one thing to pay attention to. Sound on the first day. The edges of your vision on another. The temperature moving across your skin as the light shifts. That single attention target is doing more work than it looks like. It gives your thinking mind a job small enough to actually hold, and while it is busy, the rest of you gets to stand down.

    You are not trying to relax. You are practicing coming back to baseline.

    Your spot can be a balcony, a bench outside the office, the same square of grass by the bus stop. A forest is lovely and it is not the requirement. The practices were built for people who live in cities, because that is where most of us are.

    Why ten minutes and not an afternoon

    Because ten minutes survives a bad week.

    Short repeated exposures build a stronger connection to a place than one long session does. Ten focused minutes, several times a week, will teach you more about the tree outside your window than a single ambitious hike next month. The hike is wonderful. It also gets cancelled when work goes sideways, and then nothing has changed.

    There is a second reason. A place only starts talking to you once you have been boring in it for a while. On day two you notice a bird. On day nine you know that bird by sound before you see it, and you know it arrives around the same time you do. That kind of noticing cannot be crammed.

    What it is built on

    My doctoral research at UBC’s Faculty of Forestry included a randomized crossover study across Vancouver’s urban forests. That work sits inside decades of shinrin-yoku research from Japan and Canada, all pointing the same direction: time spent attentively outdoors supports stress recovery and wellbeing.

    The part I care about is translation. A study result is not a practice. Somebody has to turn it into ten minutes you can do before your coffee gets cold, on a Tuesday, in the rain, without special equipment. That translation is what you are buying.

    Three ways in

    The free three days. The first three practices, no payment and no card, and they stay in your account for good. Start them this weekend or next spring. If sitting still turns out not to be for you, you have lost nothing but three ten-minute windows.

    Seven days, CA$14. Practices one through seven, for anyone who wants to know whether a habit is forming before committing to a month.

    Thirty days, CA$39. All thirty practices, plus written notes and reflection prompts. This is the full program, and it is the one that changes how a place looks to you.

    There are facilitator packs as well, for occupational therapists, counsellors, guides, and anyone running groups. Five client seats for CA$175 or ten for CA$299, each with a seat for you. Try the free three days first so you know exactly what lands in your clients’ inboxes.

    Day nine

    Here is what I want for you, and it is smaller than it sounds. One morning around the second week, you will get to your spot and your body will settle before you have decided to settle. The sitting will start on its own. You will notice the light is different than it was last week, and you will know that only because you were there last week.

    That is the whole thing. Sit. That’s it.

    Start with the free three days at sitspot.club. Bring an umbrella if that is the kind of week it is.

  • Side-by-Side: A Nature Practice To Transform Your Relationship

    Side-by-Side: A Nature Practice To Transform Your Relationship

    For the month of January we practiced sitting alone with nature. A participant asked for a practice they could do with a companion. In the words of Westley from Princess Bride: “As you wish.”

    Valentine’s Day usually means roses, chocolate, and dinner reservations. This year, try 20 minutes of shared stillness that costs nothing and might actually make you feel connected.

    This practice is called Side-by-Side. It works for romantic partners, close friends, siblings, basically whoever you feel safe spending time with outdoors.

    When you sit side-by-side in nature, your nervous systems sync up through bio-behavioral synchrony. Heart rates stabilize. Breath patterns influence each other. You both downshift from stress into calm.

    Co-regulation is free. No reservations required.

    What you need:

    • A sit spot (bench, log, grass, anywhere outdoors)
    • 20 minutes
    • Optional: blanket or cushion

    What you don’t need:

    • Perfect weather
    • Wilderness
    • Meditation experience
    • Romance

    Doing this solo? Sit, breathe, ground, and then do your own treasure hunt. Same practice, just you and the earth.

    Let’s Try!

    Find any outdoor space where you can sit side-by-side. A park bench, a log, your front steps, a patch of grass.

    Set aside 20 minutes (put a timer on if you wish) and put your phones aside.

    If you brought a cushion or blanket you can place them down. Get as comfortable as you can. In the words of Davidji, “feather your nest.“

    Just Breathe

    Spend a couple minutes just breathing and the feel of the person next to you. If it doesn’t feel comfortable at first, give it a chance. You won’t be sitting like this for long.

    Treasure Hunt!

    One person keeps their eyes closed or with a soft gaze. The other goes on a brief treasure hunt nearby looking for a natural object.

    Find something small from nature that is loose (no picking!) such as a pinecone, interesting leaf, smooth stone, piece of bark. Something with texture.

    Return quietly. Gently place the treasure in your partner’s open hands. Don’t tell them what it is. Don’t whisper hints.

    Eyes still closed or with a soft gaze, ask your partner to explore the treasure with their fingers. Is the texture rough or smooth? Does it feel warm or cool? Is it heavy or light? Is it round, flat, ridged?

    Guess what the treasure is before you open your eyes.
    ​
    Ask your partner to open their eyes and look at what they’ve been holding. Did they guess correctly? Were they surprised? Share why you chose this particular treasure for them.

    Trade roles. Now it’s your partner’s turn to go on a treasure hunt and you stay with closed eyes or a soft gaze. Repeat the same process: explore, guess, discuss.

    Sit in Silence

    Sit together again, holding your treasures. Close your eyes or have a soft gaze. Agree on how long to sit in silence. When your time is complete, ask each other one question: what are you noticing?

    That’s it. That’s the practice.

    Just 20 minutes of shared attention on the world around you instead of the relationship between you.

    Why This Works

    When you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with someone, your heart rates begin to stabilize together, your breath patterns influence each other, and stress hormones drop (Uvnäs-Moberg et al., 2015; Feldman, 2012).

    This is the same mechanism that helps bird flocks move in unison and keeps animal herds calm. Your nervous systems recognize safety in proximity.

    Sitting side-by-side (instead of face-to-face) removes the pressure of eye contact and “performing” connection. You’re both looking outward at the same world, which creates what researchers call joint attention, which is a shift from worrying about the relationship to experiencing the same reality together (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989).

    Translation: Less awkward. More calm. Possibly transformative.

    Did you try Side-by-Side?

    Share:

    • What surprised you about sitting side-by-side instead of face-to-face?
    • What treasures did you find?
    • What did you notice?

    If you post your practice or treasures to Instagram be sure to tag @sitspotclub.

    *Characters adapted from public domain Fleischer Studios illustrations (1930s)

  • Why Being Still Helps You Hear Faint Sounds

    Why Being Still Helps You Hear Faint Sounds

    Did you know your brain actively suppresses your hearing when you move? Being perfectly still helps you hear faint sounds better!

    1. Lowering the Noise Floor (The Physical Fix): Every movement—a shifting shirt, a deep breath, or a joint crack—creates low-level sound (up to ~6 dB) right next to your eardrum. This raises your body’s “noise floor,” making it impossible to distinguish weak external signals. Stillness physically removes this self-generated competition.

    2. Disabling the Brain’s Mute Button (The Neurological Secret): The fascinating part: when your Motor Cortex plans any movement, it sends a preemptive signal called Corollary Discharge to your Auditory Cortex. This signal temporarily suppresses your sensitivity to sound, muting the expected noise from your own body (such as your voice or footsteps).

    When you achieve stillness, you switch off this suppression mechanism, allowing your Auditory Cortex to operate at maximum sensitivity for unexpected sounds coming from the environment.

    In short: When you stop moving, your brain stops muting the world!

  • What Beethoven Felt in the Woods

    What Beethoven Felt in the Woods

    When most of us think of Ludwig van Beethoven, we picture the scowling portraits, the wild hair, the man battling his own deteriorating hearing. What we rarely imagine is him circling a Viennese park in a downpour, humming silently to himself, composing in his head. But this image captures something essential about Beethoven: a composer who found in nature what the world had taken from him.

    He emerged from hours among the trees with the resonance he needed.

    Beethoven was not a casual park-stroller. Walking in forests and countryside was as fundamental to his creative process as paper and ink. Whether in the hills surrounding Vienna—Kahlenberg, Leopoldsberg, the rural Helenental valley—or returning to his native Bonn, these walks were not breaks from his work. They WERE the work. He emerged from hours among the trees with fragments of melody, emotional clarity, and what he called “the resonance he needed.”

    He was practicing what we now call nature therapy

    There’s something quietly radical about this habit. In the early 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, Vienna was growing noisier, dirtier, and more polluted. Beethoven could have responded as many did: retreated entirely into the city’s concert halls and drawing rooms. Instead, he did the opposite. He walked toward the woods. He listened to bird calls. He sat by brooks. He was, without knowing it, practicing what we now call nature therapy; finding in forests what no doctor or hearing aid could provide.

    More the expression of feeling than painting.

    His Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” is the physical manifestation of these walks. Completed in 1808, it’s the story of a day in the countryside told through five movements. “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the countryside.” A murmuring brook. A thunderstorm with lightning and rain. The symphony doesn’t depict nature in a literal, photographic way. Instead, it captures the emotional truth of being immersed in the peace of a forest, the specific awe of a storm. He described the Pastoral Symphony as “more the expression of feeling than painting.”

    Beethoven used bird calls as musical material. The flute carries the nightingale’s voice. The oboe becomes a quail. Clarinets transform into cuckoos. Even his Fifth Symphony, with its famous “da-da-da-dah” opening, may owe something to the call of an ortolan bunting he heard during his walks. Nature wasn’t scenery for Beethoven. It was vocabulary.

    For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo that man desires to hear.

    In one letter, he wrote: “How delighted I will be to ramble for a while through the bushes, woods, under trees, through grass, and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo that man desires to hear.”

    That phrase—”the echo that man desires to hear”—is worth sitting with. Beethoven was deaf. The natural world, paradoxically, was where he found the deepest acoustic and emotional resonance. Trees and rocks and brooks gave back what silence had taken.

    Sitting in nature is a way of tuning ourselves to frequencies we otherwise miss.

    For those of us in the Sit Spot Club, this resonates. We’re doing something Beethoven understood intuitively: that sitting in nature isn’t a luxury or an escape. It’s a way of tuning ourselves to frequencies we otherwise miss. A way of hearing the echo we’re looking for.

    Want to experience what Beethoven did? Next time you’re in a forest or by water, listen like a composer. What birds do you hear? What feelings arrive when the rain begins? Your own resonance might be waiting there.

  • Sit. That’s It?

    Sit. That’s It?

    People experiencing chronic stress and burnout struggle to access simple nature-based stress relief due to barriers like not knowing what to do outdoors, fear of going alone, cost, or social isolation, while the wellness industry pushes expensive quick fixes instead of preventative nature connection that supports longevity and sleep hygiene.

    Sit Spot Club is when you pick one special place outside—like under a tree, by a rock, or on the grass—and just sit there for a little while.

    You don’t need to talk or play with anything. You just listen to the birds, watch the leaves, and see what tiny things happen when you stay still.

    It’s kind of like making friends with a place. The more you visit, the more you notice, and the more the world starts to say hi back.