Bird Highways, Forest Balance, and What Sessions Keep Saying

There’s something about talking to Olivia Sayward that makes me want to immediately go stand in a forest. She’s in Berlin, she’s doing mushroom meditations with small groups, she’s cat-sitting her way through the year learning about nervous systems from ten different felines, and she’s paying attention to what sessions are actually saying right now. Which is, overwhelmingly, one thing: get outside.

Olivia made an observation in our latest conversation that stopped me in my tracks. She said that the moment you walk into a forest, you become part of the ecosystem. And because the forest is constantly working to find balance, it starts balancing you too, because you’d throw the whole thing off otherwise. I love that. It’s not some abstract spiritual concept. It’s almost mechanical. The forest has a job to do, and when you step into it, you become part of that job.

She also shared a session that’s stayed with me. A woman experienced a tribal life in North America, being displaced as Europeans arrived. And Olivia noticed something strange… the woman wasn’t traumatized by it. Even with everything happening around her, there was this deep calm. The Higher Self explained that being in nature constantly, lying on rocks, walking through forests — meant her nervous system was so regulated that pain and difficulty simply couldn’t take hold the same way. Things weren’t sticking.

I think about that a lot, honestly. How many of us are holding things that might just… release, if we were outside more. Not meditating in a specific way, not doing anything formal. Just being in it.

Olivia’s also been doing guided meditations with groups in Berlin to connect with specific plants and mushrooms. Not psychedelic work, just tinctures and tea and sitting with the energy. She told me the plant meditations draw the quieter, more sensitive people, and the mushroom ones have everyone giggling and buzzing with connection by the end. Different personalities entirely. I wonder what that tells us about the intelligence of these organisms and how they interact with us.

We talked about a lot of other things too — my cardinal story, trees as antennas, my cat Odin who healed from major surgery in six days, and an upcoming webinar about where BQH and plant medicine intersect. But the thread that kept pulling everything together was this: the earth is already further along than we are. The animals are already there. It’s the humans who need to catch up. And the humans in cities even more.