The Medicine Waiting For Us Outside
What if some of the most powerful healing available to us isn’t found in a clinic, a supplement, or a practice room — but simply outside?
Neuromuscular therapist Lee Albert has spent three decades working with tired, guarded, overworked bodies. His conclusion: a lot of what we call fatigue, stiffness, and vague unwellness traces not to posture or muscle imbalance, but to something far more elemental. Our cells — specifically our mitochondria, the energy engines inside nearly every cell — evolved over billions of years to run on three things we’ve quietly stopped giving them: contact with the earth, exposure to the sun, and real, moving air.
“The body heals in relationship with the natural world, not apart from it. You don’t need a prescription to stand barefoot on wet grass at seven in the morning.”
Albert describes what he calls The Great Forgetting — the evolutionary blink in which rubber soles, sealed walls, and recirculated air severed something ancient and essential. The body never got the memo. Every cell is still running on old instructions: a certain electrical connection to the ground, a certain rhythm of light and dark, a certain freshness with every breath.
He outlines three elemental practices:
Grounding — bare feet on soil, sand, or grass — allows free electrons from the earth’s surface to enter the body, reducing oxidative stress and shifting the nervous system from fight-or-flight toward rest-and-repair.
Morning light — the red and near-infrared wavelengths in early sunlight penetrate the skin and directly speed up cellular energy production. Sunrise is also the body’s strongest signal for resetting its internal clock.
Fresh air — even 15–20 minutes outdoors measurably eases the low-grade tension that sealed, screen-lit hours accumulate, lowering cortisol and deepening sleep.
“Start with light, ground, and breath,” he writes. “Get outside within the first hour of waking. Let your bare feet touch grass. Breathe slowly, deliberately — like the air itself is doing you a favour. Because it is.”
For those of us working in ministry, accompaniment, and spiritual care, there’s something quietly profound here. The sacred has always known what science is only now learning to name.