Recently, I offered a Shamanic Reiki absentee healing for a piece of land belonging to a dear friend. Several of the trees on her property had been damaged by tornadoes, storms, and high winds, and she was understandably heartbroken. She loves these trees deeply, and when I offered to hold a healing container for them, she enthusiastically said yes.
During the Shamanic Reiki healing journey I performed, something happened that I didn’t expect.
I shapeshifted into a tree.
Not in the sense of just imagining or pretending. I became a tree.
It began as a tingling along the right side of my lower jaw and chin, almost like moss or vines creeping upward. The sensation moved across my face in little effervescent bubbles until it reached my hairline. Then I felt myself being pulled upward by a powerful column of wind, as though my leaf-hair had become completely vertical inside a vortex. My neck stretched upward.
There was no fear, no pain, no worry, and no preference. There really wasn't even a story.
There was just sensation.
And then came the message:
🌳 "Trees are trees. Do not place your humanness upon them." 🌳
I understood something in that moment that I hadn’t known simply by thinking about it.
We naturally anthropomorphize the world around us. We call trees beautiful. We mourn when they lose limbs. We feel horror when one is cut down. We may describe a damaged tree as "wounded" or "suffering."
And none of that is wrong.
Our human love for trees is real. In fact, I think we desperately need more of it! We need people who feel connected enough to trees to protect them and refuse to see them merely as resources to be harvested. Our relationships with the natural world matter.
But a tree is not a little human.
The experience of shapeshifting gave me a glimpse of aliveness without all of the human narration layered on top of it. The tree didn’t seem concerned with whether its form was majestic or ugly, whole or broken, thriving or diminished.
There was no preference.
There was simply life.
A slow, neutral, completely different way of being alive.
The tree said, in essence: "I am here. I breathe. I feel as a tree feels, not as a human feels. I am whatever form I am. The cycle of life and change is all I live."
That perspective has stayed with me.
Not because I think we should stop loving trees in our very human way, but because there's something humbling about remembering that our experience of the world is not the only experience happening.
We are constantly interpreting life through the lens of being human, making meaning and projecting our own experience onto everything we encounter, often from a place of genuine care and connection.
Perhaps this is part of what shamanic practice offers: not an escape from being human, but the possibility of encountering the world from a perspective we could never reach through our human imagination alone.
For one brief experience, I simply was a tree.
And the tree had nothing to prove, nothing to become, and nothing to lament.
It was alive.