Reclaiming Awareness Through the Sit Spot Practice

When my children were young, they participated in a nature education program, and every April, they took part in the Sit Spot Challenge. While they have since outgrown their time with Ways of the Wild, the practice of the Sit Spot has stayed with me. It has become a quiet refuge, a place where I return to myself through the rhythms of the natural world.

Sit Spot is the simple act of finding a particular place outdoors where you sit quietly and observe. Ideally, you visit the same spot for 15 to 30 minutes, allowing yourself to settle into the landscape and attune to its shifts. This practice pulls you out of the hurried routine of daily life and reconnects you with both the outer and inner worlds.

The Art of Deepening Awareness

By spending time outside in this way, you consciously strengthen your ability to observe—both what is happening around you and what is happening within. Think of awareness as a muscle. Many of us have let it atrophy, moving through life in a state of disconnection. The Sit Spot Challenge is an invitation to rebuild and retrain this skill.

At your sit spot, you become familiar with one place over time. You begin to notice subtle changes—the budding of leaves, the shift in bird songs, the way the air feels different after a storm. You not only gain a deep understanding of that place but also become part of it. Your animal neighbors come to know you, seeing you not as a threat but as a quiet presence. In return, they begin to reveal their secrets. Sit Spot cultivates curiosity, storytelling, and the ability to tune in. You digest what’s happening in your mind and body while simultaneously taking in the ever-changing world around you. Your awareness expands, and your inner turbulence softens.

The Inner Landscape

One of the most profound gifts of Sit Spot is that it teaches us how to be quiet with ourselves. It builds our capacity to sit with our own inner experience. Much like the natural world gradually reveals itself to us when we sit still, our own inner workings begin to surface when we create space for them.

This is where the practice of Felt Sense comes in. The Felt Sense is the experience of tuning into your body—noticing physical sensations and emotional undercurrents before they form into words. Sometimes, when we turn inward, we feel overwhelmed by sensations and emotions. Other times, we may feel numb, as if nothing is there at all.

For people pleasers, sensing into the inner landscape is particularly valuable. Many people who have spent their lives accommodating others have learned to tune out their own needs, desires, and even physical sensations in order to maintain harmony. Over time, this disconnection can make it difficult to know what you truly feel or want. By practicing awareness of the inner landscape, you begin to rebuild the bridge between yourself and your own needs. You start recognizing when you are tense, when you are suppressing emotions, and when your body is signaling that something is out of balance. This awareness is the first step in reclaiming your authenticity—giving you the ability to respond to life from a place of inner truth rather than habitual appeasement.

A Gateway to Presence

Try this: Find a spot to sit or walk the same path every day for a week. Use all of your senses. What do you see? Hear? Smell? Taste the air, touch the leaves, feel the ground beneath you. Notice the subtle changes each day—the way yesterday’s stillness gives way to today’s wind, how the buds on a branch swell just a little more, how sunlight returns after days of cloud cover. Pay attention to the different bird songs, even if you don’t know who is singing.

Training your mind to notice the subtleties in nature strengthens your ability to notice the subtleties in yourself—the hum in the back of your head, the tension in your belly, the tightness in your throat. It also helps you accept the quiet moments when nothing seems to be happening at all. Because even when growth is unseen, something is always there.

Focusing on the outer landscape helps develop focus in the inner landscape. Just as you shift attention in nature—watching ants march while tuning out the birdsong, tracking changes in budding flowers while momentarily ignoring the brightness of the sun—you can do the same with your own sensations. You can notice the tightness in your chest while letting the ache in your foot step aside. You can stay with the sadness in your throat without needing to attend to the anxiety in your gut. Both exist, but you can tune in to each one individually.

Cultivating a Safe and Accessible Practice

If Sit Spot calls to you, know that your location doesn’t need to be in the middle of the woods. Choose a place that is easily accessible—less than a two-minute walk from your front door. If you live in the city, you can sit on your stoop, porch, or a quiet corner of a park. The key is returning to the same place consistently, allowing your relationship with that space to deepen over time.

Sit Spot is a simple yet profound practice. At most, you will form an intimate connection with the land around you. At the very least, you will create a space to process unsettled emotions. Either way, you are giving yourself the gift of presence. And in that presence, both the outer and inner landscapes can begin to reveal their quiet wisdom.

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I offer one-on-one somatically-based guidance to help stressed out and anxious women calm their nervous systems, so they can get in touch with their deep body wisdom, trust their inner truth, and connect to all that they are. 

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