Abstract
This presentation invites participants into a contemplative exploration of eco-spirituality through the lens of love and belonging. Drawing from my postdoctoral research, Sitting with Trees: An Eco-Autoethnographic Study about Optimal Aging and Black Womanhood, and my award-winning dissertation, Black Joy in Green Spaces: An Endarkened, Visual Narrative Inquiry about Black Women and Joy, I explore how the natural world serves as teacher, mirror, and companion in the cultivation of spiritual awareness and holistic well-being. Rooted in lived experience and environmental embodiment, this work blends narrative, meditation, and ecological observation to examine how the act of sitting with trees becomes an act of communion. Each sitting transforms into a dialogue between breath and bark, presence and patience, self and Source. The Omnipresence of Love speaks to the universal energy that animates both human and nonhuman life. It suggests that when we slow down and listen, love reveals itself as the connective tissue between all beings. Through story, imagery, and reflection, this session invites participants to reimagine spirituality not as ascent or escape, but as deep rootedness—an embodied practice of belonging to the Earth, to each other, and to the pulse of divine presence that holds us all. In resonance with cognitive and ecological research, this presentation affirms that our spiritual connection to the living world is neurophysiological, ancestral, and enduring. Echoing the relational ontology found in Indigenous and ecological traditions.
Presenters
Christal OmniChief Emotional Officer / Visionary, The OMNI Institute of Well-being, Illinois, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Indigenous Spiritualities in Global Perspective
KEYWORDS
Eco-Spirituality, Relational Ontology, Environmental Embodiment, Eco-Womanism, Belonging
