Enter the Redwoods Forest with Me

Redwoods Tree Energy: Soul Healing Community Elders

Redwood trees are naturally found in only a few places on this planet. The Pacific Northwest region of North America is home to the Coast Redwood and Giant Sequoia. South-Central China is home to the Dawn Redwood. All of these trees are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List (International Union for Conservation of Nature.

If you've had the privilege of spending time in a redwoods grove, you may have noticed their powerful tree energy presence immediately moves you outside the flow of modern time, transported into a time/space that feels both like millions of years ago & like being outside of time altogether.

The ancestors of today’s trees were alive when dinosaurs roamed. Redwood trees with shorter lifespans still count them in hundreds of years, with longer-lived trees reaching 2 or 3 thousand years.

Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok) which is located in Sonoma County, relates that the leaves, also known as needles, are traditionally used in a poultice to heal earaches.

Western medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) also find benefits in redwood trees, including healing effects on lungs as a singular physical organ and also lungs as understood in TCM meridian anatomy. Both systems use parts of these trees to resolve inflammation.

The leaves, sap, inner bark & fruit can all be used for either medicine or food.

Visiting a Sonoma County Redwoods Forest

I’m sitting in a Sonoma County redwoods forest with a small group of friends. We’re quietly sharing the space, taking our personal internal journeys with the redwoods grove and then sharing our impressions together.

I think about the connections of this grove with its surrounding community. This is a network that allows re-balancing, a moving of resources & communications from here to there, within the relationship of mutual aid that exists with the mycelia and many other beings in the extended lifeweb.

I think about how organisms are always shedding and giving back what we don’t need anymore, things that other beings can take and transform into nutrients & vice versa. For example, humans breathing out carbon dioxide and plants giving oxygen.

In my mind’s eye, I see Redwoods as seedlings, starting from the soil of the underworld & the bones of all our ancestors, human and otherwise. They grow slowly over hundreds of years, acquiring experience, knowledge & perspective at each new height, interacting with microbes, fungi, insects, chipmunks, birds and so many other beings.

I feel how they retain the experiences of each level, growing taller and taller, until they are towering adults, respected elders of the Earth.

The question arises, “What does it mean to be an elder?” There's a sense of giving, of sharing their physical resources & their spirit with community members within and across species, with contemporaries as well as those in the younger generations. There’s also some separateness and time for introspection.

My experience in that Sonoma redwoods forest was a soul healing gift.

I felt Redwoods were communicating with me and giving me permission to share their communication with others. I shaped that message into a loving meditative practice.

You can read through the steps of this practice towards the end of this blogpost. You also have the choice to listen to my voice guide you through the meditation by playing the video below.

Redwoods Earth Energy Connection: Winter Solstice & Self Forgiveness

When I give my nature-inspired distance energy sessions, which I call Earth Energy Connection, I ask my clients to choose a plant, animal, or other nature being to guide us, and help us hold and shape the healing intention of our session.

Sonoma County Redwoods is a guide I’ve worked with many times.

If you still carry the weight of past mistakes, an Earth Energy Connection session with Redwoods can bring in the compassionate energy of self forgiveness and bring you to a feeling of greater peace.

One Winter Solstice night, I gave myself a brief EEC session while connecting with Redwoods as my guide. I received a message about self forgiveness that came through in full word phrases, which is unusual. It’s more typical for me to receive colors, other images and body sensations in a more impressionistic style.

The message Redwoods gave me was: “Let the Heart of the World hold you. Release your burdens. Open yourself to the unconditional loving grace of your own divine nature. That is where self forgiveness lies.”

Breathing Into Balance: Bringing In Love

With the following practice, you can set an intention to affect all times, places, beings, and elements in a particular environment. You might choose the past, present, and future of a certain place. It could be on the scale of a backyard garden, a city, continent, planet, or the multiverse.

You choose the way you want to focus and shape this practice each time you use it.

You can:

1) Enhance a feeling of connection

2) Give a gift of love* and healing.

3) Restore your loving nature and center yourself.

Visualize or sense a light-filled web, or something similar. Each being within the web has its own energy presence, a sphere of color or vibration, with threads that connect it to other beings in the web.

Step 1 — Start with your breath, using your exhale to release back to the earth anything unwanted; any fatigue, worry, distraction, or what have you. As you inhale, fill yourself with fresh Life Source energy. Thank the earth for taking on & transforming this energy for you.

Stay present with whatever you notice in this process. Follow your breath with a few cycles of exhalation and inhalation until you feel replenished enough to be overflowing with vital energy, with an abundance to share.

Set a loving intention of connection & companionship to the other living beings & elements around you.

If you feel the need, you can add extra protection by setting up some spheres of light all around the edges of your personal space (like subtle energy lymph nodes,) and let them process & transform the energy traveling in & out for everyone’s benefit. This reinforces the intention that all energy is being sent & received for the greatest good of all beings, including yourself.

Everyone receives what they need for their best health.

Step 2 — Feel yourself as one being of many in an expansive web of connection, aware that you’re in relationship with all these other beings (or places, or elements, etc.) in the web.

As you exhale, send your sense of love, companionship, and dynamic balance to these other beings. As you inhale, receive a sense of love, companionship, and dynamic balance from the universe, and other beings within the web.

Give/exhale, pause, receive/inhale, pause, give/exhale, pause, receive/inhale, pause, in a rhythmic cycle.

Spend as much time as you like in this rhythmic cycle, and notice what you’re feeling and sensing. When you feel complete, gently bring yourself back to your more ordinary awareness.

Drain any excess energy back into the earth beneath you. Repeat this practice whenever you like.

*Love: I’m using this word to describe that quality of energy that acts for the deepest good of all, with the intention that the needs of all are being met, and the opportunity for all to thrive. It holds the contradiction of existing as our individual selves, and also acknowledges our inseparable connection to each other, making us small parts in one huge organism.

The focus on love coming in & going out is the way this practice was gifted to me by Redwoods, however I don’t think it’s intended to be a way of bypassing the reality of distressing feelings & situations. Allow yourself to feel, name & examine whatever comes up, held safely in this life-affirming vibration of love.

Awareness of connection deepens our compassion, our ability to be genuinely present with each other in a heart-centered way. Our connections let us heal each other with shared sorrow, joy, play, and laughter, amplifying that comfort and sweetness through our sharing. To receive, share, and replenish the abundance of the universe is our birthright as beings of this planet.

Explore how Earth Energy Connection sessions work here.

Relax and listen to my voice leading you through a version of this meditation in the video below (15minutes.) Stay evergreen, my friends.

© Katrina Matos

REFERENCES

Viloria, Dana. (2018, Nov 15.)“The Ancient Ones: Redwoods Through the Eyes of a Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok Native.” www.savetheredwoods.org/blog/the-ancient-ones-redwoods-through-the-eyes-of-a-southern-pomo-and-coast-miwok-native/. Accessed 4 January 2025.

“Dawn Redwoods.” Save The Redwoods League. www.savetheredwoods.org/redwoods/dawn-redwoods/. Accessed 4 January 2025.

“About Redwoods.” Save The Redwoods League. www.savetheredwoods.org/redwoods/. Accessed 4 January 2025.

“Redwood.” White Rabbit Institute of Healing. www.whiterabbitinstituteofhealing.com/herbs/redwood/. Accessed 5 January 2025

“9 Oldest Redwood Trees in the U.S.” www.oldest.org/nature/redwood-trees-us/. Accessed 8 January 2025.