Tag: Sit Spot Club

  • 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.
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    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.”

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    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.

    Explore guided practices and facilitator tools in our All Programs catalog, or read more about Tara Tiger Brown, PhD.

  • If Sit Spot Club Were A Recipe

    If Sit Spot Club Were A Recipe

    Sometimes, when we try to explain Sit Spot Club to people, we watch their faces twist in polite confusion.

    “So… you all just sit?”

    Yes. That’s the point. But “just sitting” doesn’t sound very exciting in a world built on notifications and nine-second videos.

    Recently, I’ve started to think of it as a recipe; simple, nourishing, and easy to share. A recipe feels familiar because it encourages you to try rather than overanalyze. Like any good recipe, Sit Spot Club has only a few essential ingredients, but its flavour changes depending on who creates it and where it takes place.

    Here’s how it goes.

    Ingredients:

    • 1 heaping cup of curiosity about your surroundings
    • A generous pinch of time you swear you don’t have
    • A handful of people who are willing to unplug and just sit
    • 3 tablespoons of ritual (daily, weekly, or moon-based, to taste)
    • A drizzle of playful accountability
    • Optional garnish: nature journal, umbrella, tarp

    Instructions:

    1. Prep your space. Choose a patch of the world that you can frequent, such as a park bench, a backyard corner, or the same spot every time. Let it become familiar, like a kitchen where the light always hits the same mug.
    2. Simmer in silence. Sit. Breathe. Notice. You’re not meditating; you’re steeping in reality until the details emerge – the wind moving through the tree canopy, a squirrel scurrying around a tree trunk.
    3. Season with community. Invite others to taste the stillness. Swap notes, sketches, or sounds from your sit spots.
    4. Serve slowly. The flavour deepens with time. The goal is presence – the satisfying umami of simply being where you are.

    Chef’s note: Most people try to microwave mindfulness. Don’t. This dish only works when it’s slow-cooked. The Sit Spot Club isn’t fast food for the soul but instead the sourdough starter of attention.