We are introduced to the sun in cognitive terms. It is a star and the earth revolves around it. It is 5 billion years old.

But we can also have a sensory introduction to the sun. We can meet the sun through our skin, in a tactile, rather than cognitive relationship. Remember the last time you were sitting in the sun. Remember how sunlight falls on your face, your eyes, arms, feet. Stay with that experience. What kind of sensations does the body experience in response to sunlight?

When I sit in the morning sun, at 9 AM or so, the sunlight touching my skin brings up sensations of warmth, movement, aliveness. The body literally warms up in response, blood flows more swiftly, the nervous system comes alive. As one quietly sits with these sensations, the body comes alive in the light and life brought by the sun.

Attending to the relationship between one’s body and light from the sun opens up a way of connecting to a reality that is far larger and older than us. It is a connection rooted in a deep physicality, in the pulsations of one’s body, rather than a connection in our minds.

As walking barefoot on bare earth helps us connect to the vast earth, offering our bare skin to sunlight also opens us up to a vastness, where rather than the earthiness and strength of the earth, we can feel into and absorb the intensity of the sun.

The universe is made of coagulations and expansions. The coagulations of matter are what create stars and the planets and other bodies that revolve around them. Expansions create vast, empty, dark space between the coagulations.

The day sky opens us up to our nearest star in all its brilliance. The night sky opens us up to the expansiveness of the universe, where stars are far and the silence and vastness of space is right in front of our eyes.

We can also bathe in the night sky and moon light, and quietly observe the effect this darkness, softly lit by moon light and star light, has on our eyes, on our face, on the rest of our bodies.

Putting aside the bright lights of screens and indoor lighting, we can feel the deep restfulness that is brought to us when we absorb the night sky.

We can form a way of life where living is guided by the rhythms of the day. The soft light of dawn slowly opens up the realm of activity for us, and as the sun gets bright and intense we also work intensely on our commitments. We go out as often as possible for a little interaction with the sun, allowing it to infuse our bodies. Evening brings restfulness, and the darkness after the sun has set is a time for rest, leisure, reflection, and loving each other.

A movement in alternate health, described in the work of authors John Ott, R. D. Lee and Jack Kruse, among others, advises pivoting our lives around harmonising our circadian rhythms to sunlight – going out, first thing in the morning, to absorb morning light; eating most at mid-day and never after sunset, using only orange and red lights after dark, lights that mimic the colours of fire, rather than the bright white lights that we often use; and so on. A correct ‘light diet’ is meant to improve our health in various ways.

One could also add that such a life – a life of being deeply rooted in our physical relationship to the rhythm of light – can benefit our mental health significantly. Psychotherapy, arising from western academia which is grounded in words and analysis, has only slowly come to appreciate the healing potential of nature.

Slowly, therapists are realising the possibilities of a therapy session done as a walk in the forest, ‘re-wilding’ our lives. In Japan, Morita therapy has formed a system of working with psychological distress that pivots around the thought that our basic sensory perceptions of nature can serve as a stable ground of our being, even if emotions are stormy and traumatic events continue to bring up powerful feelings on upper layers of our being.

The squirrels and birds living in the trees don’t have mental health problems. As dawn approaches, they start to awaken, they scamper around, they sing their birdsong, and the trees they live in slowly come alive in the soft light of dawn. As the day closes, they too quieten and go into their safe spaces, and rest for the night. Trees acquire an inwardness in response to the night.

It is not that squirrels don’t grieve their friends being run over by a vehicle. It is not that birds do not tend lovingly to their children and don’t worry about them when they go out looking for food. These griefs and anxieties do not become mental illness, because there is a deeper reality these beings are living with attunement to.

We too can come to see that sunlight falling on our bodies is not merely a physical event. It is a physical event that carries emotional ripples, if we listen. It fills us up with the vastness of the sky, the calmness of something far more ancient than us, the intensity and aliveness of a ball of fire sending out light and life to us.

By entering this experience at a few different times in a day, in relation to different intensities of light, we can allow ourselves, our experience of a day in our life, to be shaped by the rhythm of this light. In doing this we enter into a relationship with the universe as it presents itself through the sun. We see our position as a speck in a land that is vast and ancient, but a meaningful speck that is itself a harmonious expression of the infinity from which it rises and to which it goes back. A speck that will inevitably suffer, like all other specks, but it need not wrestle with that suffering and tie itself in knots.

It takes a lot of big words to express what the squirrel knows. Words only obfuscate the sharp awareness the tree has of the contours of light that come to it from the sky. Words barely touch upon the profound participation of a cat in the mysterious, ever unfolding, infinite universe.

But the squirrel, the cat, the tree are our siblings on this earth, and we can be like them. We are like them if we tune in to our depths, beyond the words and the analyses – simple and connected to a reality larger than us, through our bodies.