Energetic Benefits of Being Outside: Restore Your Wholeness
What if I told you that you can give your whole family an energetic cleansing and recharging session, completely for free? You can do it all at the same time and have fun doing it. I’m talking about the incredible, energetic benefits of being outside.
That’s right. Put away your screens and put on your walking shoes. Because going outside, breathing in the fresh open air and feeling the sunshine on your skin, will give you a boost of energy like nothing else.
Until I learned about where our life force comes from and how to access it, I had no idea that there were so many benefits to being outdoors. Discover how you can be a healer for your whole family by getting outside and into nature.
This post is all about the energetic, emotional, cognitive, and physical benefits of being outside.
The Amazing Benefits of Being Outside
My favorite outdoor activity is gardening. I love feeling the cycles of the seasons, dreaming of the beauty and bounty soon to come, and even the toils of working with soil and related challenges.
The digging and shoveling can sometimes be hard on my back. But after a long day of touching the earth and smelling the plants, I always feel so happy. Life seems just right.
Is this like the endorphin rush that runners get? I wouldn’t know, because I don’t run. But I’m glad that I have my own way of getting it.
Research shows that being outside, especially in nature, is great for our well-being in all ways possible. Let’s first explore its emotional, mental, and physical benefits. We will cover the energetic benefits last.
Emotional Benefits of Being Outside
I don’t know about you, but taking a walk outside does wonders for my mood. Stress from worries or overwhelm seems to take a back seat, at least while I’m looking up at the swaying tree tops or the hawk flying by.
Scientific research supports this experience. Exposure to nature has been proven to help calm the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the body’s vital organs and manages our “fight-or-flight” response. One study found that “people who visit public greenspace more often had lower stress, anxiety and depression scores” than people who don’t.
Being in nature changes your brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, an important player in emotional regulation, according to another study. This means that exposure to nature literally soothes your brain, without your having to do anything other than sense it.
Mental Benefits of Being Outside
Research also shows that exposure to nature and green space helps improve our cognitive functions, including memory, attention control, and cognitive flexibility. For example, people performed better on certain tasks that required working memory and cognitive flexibility after exposure to nature.
Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how this happens. But one theory suggests that it’s because stress and cognitive functions are related. So, nature lowers your stress level and improves your brain.
Physical Benefits of Being Outside
Less stress means better physical health. Studies show that being out in nature promotes physiological relaxation that then leads to decreases in blood pressure levels. Getting more sun on your skin helps make vitamin D and can help you fall asleep faster.
Interacting with nature—breathing in fresh air, touching soil—also diversifies your microbiome, acting as the probiotic supplement that nature intended. If you’d like to learn more, check out Eat Dirt and 10% Human. They suggest that contact with dirt, tree pollen, and bacteria outside our doors provides the best probiotics our bodies need.
More broadly, access to green spaces has been associated with increased physical activity and improved general health for people who live around them.
Access to nature and green space is definitely a privilege that most of us take for granted. But in addition to all these, there are important, energetic benefits of being outside that often get overlooked.
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The Incredible Energetic Benefits of Being Outside
Energetic Benefits of Being Outside
My latest intrigue in energetic studies is Pranic Healing, founded by Grand Master Choa Kok Sui (GMCKS). Unlike Reiki, perhaps, this new energy healing modality gets into the nitty-gritty of prana (ki, chi, or life force energy), how it works, and the do’s and don’ts, making it a fascinating study.
According to GMCKS’ Miracles Through Pranic Healing, there are three major sources of prana that we have access to. And they are all easily and directly accessible by just being outside!
Solar prana, air prana, and ground prana. I’ll explain a little more below.
Solar Prana
Solar pranais gained from sunlight. This strong source of prana “invigorates the whole body and promotes good health,” according to Miracles (page 2). It can be obtained by sunbathing for short periods or drinking water that has been exposed to sunlight. (I thought of sun tea, dear reader. Do you ever make them?)
Because the energy is strong, it is not advised that you get too much of it. (I’m thinking of how exhausted I feel after a day out in the full sun.)
Air Prana
Air pranais contained in the air, and according to Miracles, this is why all living things breathe, in one form or another. It is absorbed directly by our lungs and transmitted to our energy centers, or chakras. Different ways of breathing allow more or less transfer of air prana.
When it’s windy outside, and you’re in the middle of it, it’s easy to feel the power of air prana. The moving air also helps cleanse our energy by taking away all that does not serve us.
Ground Prana
Ground pranacomes from the earth and is absorbed through our feet. Walking barefoot on the earth allows greater access to the ground prana. One can learn to draw in more ground prana, which will “increase one’s vitality, capacity to do more work, and ability to think more clearly,” according to the book (page 4). *
(*I’ve always associated barefoot-ground contact with the earth as a grounding exercise. It has really helped me when my personal energy feels all out of whack. I can literally feel the currents balance out and quiet down just moments after I step on to the grass. I am not sure how that would be different, or similar, to absorbing ground prana. But I promise to update if I find out!)
Miracles Through Pranic Healing explains that water absorbs prana from the sun, air, and the ground that it comes in contact with. Plants and trees then get prana from these sources. People and animals get prana from these elements and food.
It says that fresh food contains more prana than preserved food, which totally makes sense. Maybe this is another reason why highly processed foods are not good for us: too far from their original source!
Interestingly, certain trees, such as pine trees or old and healthy trees, have lots of excess prana. According to Pranic Healing, tired or sick people can benefit from this by resting underneath big, beautiful trees!
(You can ask the tree to share its prana with you, which will improve the flow. Then, you can rest your palms on the trees to feel the energy coming in.)
Final Thoughts
Isn’t this fun stuff?
It also makes tremendous sense to me. For the longest time, whenever I was asked to visualize a safe place during guided meditations, I would go to a spot under a giant tree, full of green leaves on a sunny day. The leaves would look all translucent and sparkly in my mind’s eye, and the breeze would just gently brush up against my cheeks.
When’s the last time you actually did that?
As I write this, it is less than 30 degrees Fahrenheit with roaring winds outside my home. But spring is coming.
I hope you get a chance to take your whole family outside for a walk, stare at squirrels playing chase, or smell the scent of the wet, spring soil, soon.
Scientists say that about 2 hours a week is about all you need to fully reap its benefits. That doesn’t sound difficult to me.
This post was all bout the amazing benefits of being outside. Hope you enjoyed it.
