WAKA · In Nature We Believewaka.gaiaeducation.org/collection/sit-spot/
Sit Spot
The same place, every day, for as long as you are here
Build the one habit that outlasts the training week, and give every other nature-connection method something to accumulate in.
- Duration
- 20–40 min daily
- Group size
- Any
- Setting
- outdoors
- Energy
- still
- Materials
- A sit matOptional — a small notebook
If a participant takes one thing home from a week of nature facilitation, this is the one worth taking. It requires no equipment, no landscape, no facilitator and no budget, and it works in a city park.
How it runs
- Day one: everyone chooses a spot. Close enough to reach in five minutes. Somewhere you can sit comfortably. It does not have to be beautiful — the scruffy corner behind the barn often works better than the view.
- Go every day, at roughly the same time, alone. Twenty minutes minimum.
- There is no task. Not meditation, not journalling, not identification. Sit. Get bored. Stay a bit past the boredom.
- The one question afterwards, asked in the morning circle: what was different today?
Why the same spot
The first day you see a place. The third day you see the place changing. By the sixth you are noticing an absence — the bird that was there yesterday and is not today — and noticing an absence is the beginning of actually knowing somewhere. A different beautiful spot every day gives you six first days.
Facilitator notes
- Protect the time in the timetable. It is the first thing cut and the only thing that reliably survives the week.
- Do not add a worksheet. The moment it has a deliverable it becomes homework.
- Pair it with Story of the Day — sit spots become far stickier when there is somewhere to tell about them.
- Send people home with the instruction to find one where they live, in the first week. That is the actual outcome of the training.
