The Wild Within: On Life, Recovery, and the Slow Work of Remembering
Wildness is often imagined as something distant – a place we travel to, a threshold we cross. But wildness is not elsewhere. It is intimate. It moves through breath and blood, through cycles of contraction and release, through the quiet labour of repair that happens beneath our noticing. It lives in bodies as much as in forests.
The Wild Within began as an exploration of that intimacy – and slowly revealed itself to be something more: a love letter to the wild, both outside me and within me, that had saved my life.
For many years, life felt like something I was enduring rather than inhabiting. Illness arrived quietly and then stayed. Trauma taught my nervous system to brace, to harden, to disappear when sensation became too much. I learned how to function. I learned how to cope. But I did not know how to feel safe inside my own skin. My body became unfamiliar ground – something to manage rather than trust.
And yet, even then, there was one place where I did not feel at war.
My breath slowed. My senses widened.
As a child, long before I had language for trauma or dissociation or the intelligence of the nervous system, I sought out the feral edges of the city. The cracks in the pavement where dandelions forced gold through concrete. The railway embankments stitched with Yarrow and nettle. The forgotten corridors where green life rose without permission. I did not have a theory about why I was drawn there. I only knew that when I sat among plants, something in me softened. My breath slowed. My senses widened. The vigilance loosened its grip.
I felt less alone.
Years later, when illness deepened and the old patterns of contraction returned, it was the wild I turned to again. Not in dramatic gestures, but in small, repeated acts of attention. Walking. Sitting. Listening. Crushing a leaf between finger and thumb and breathing in its volatile oils. Letting the scent move through me before I tried to name it.
Recovery did not arrive as revelation. It came the way a stripped field becomes meadow — slowly, through relationship.
Life remembers itself.
I began to notice how damaged land heals when given time and space. Places exhausted by chemicals or compacted by concrete do not require instruction manuals. Remove the constant harm. Allow light and rain. Let roots return. Grasses come first, then insects, then birds. Fungi lace the soil with quiet intelligence. Life remembers itself.
Watching this, I began to wonder: what if my body held the same memory?
Trauma had taught my system to contract in order to survive. Illness had reinforced that narrowing. I had assumed recovery meant effort – pushing, striving, fixing. But the wild told a different story. Healing, it suggested, is less about force and more about conditions. Safety. Slowness. Enough space for life to re-emerge.
Plants became my teachers in this. They did not ask me to explain myself or improve. They asked only for presence. They offered sensation: bitterness on the tongue, the resinous scent of crushed rosemary, the unmistakable shift in breath when something living meets you without demand. Sitting with a plant and noticing what it stirred in my body was not analysis. It was communion.
Writing followed that same current.
Writing and Healing
I did not sit down to write a book in order to instruct anyone on how to heal. I wrote because I needed to honour the love that had carried me. The page became another clearing. A place where fragments of memory could lie in the open air without being tidied too quickly. Where grief did not have to resolve itself into a moral. Where the body could speak in image and rhythm before the mind imposed narrative.
Some days the writing felt less like composing and more like composting – turning over old material, letting it break down, trusting that what had once been painful might become fertile. I did not outline the book in a rigid, linear way. I followed threads of attention. I listened for what felt alive. Writing, like rewilding, required trust in processes that are not always visible.
As the manuscript grew, I saw more clearly how entangled personal recovery and ecological restoration truly are. The stories we tell about land shape the stories we tell about ourselves. If we believe a damaged landscape is beyond redemption, we are more likely to believe the same of our own bodies. If we recognise that disturbance does not erase intelligence — that resilience persists beneath apparent devastation — then renewal becomes imaginable.
This changed how I lived. I began to honour rest as winter rather than failure. To understand autumn as necessary release. To see that spring does not arrive because we demand it, but because life, given half a chance, inclines toward renewal.
The Wild Within
The Wild Within is not a book about conquering trauma or achieving a perfected self. It is about remembering that we are ecosystems. That our bones are mineral, our blood iron-rich as soil, our nervous systems shaped in conversation with birdsong and wind. When we feel recognition in wild places, it is not romanticism. It is kinship.
The book is my attempt to tell the story of that kinship – and to say thank you.
I wrote it because I wanted to belong to my own life again. I wrote it because the wild had loved me when I did not know how to love myself. I wrote it because recovery, like rewilding, is not only personal but collective, and the stories we tell either shrink or widen what we believe is possible.
If there is an invitation in these pages, it is this: trust what is still alive. Trust that beneath coping strategies and contractions, something intelligent and tender persists. Create the conditions for that life to return. And when it does – slowly, quietly – honour it.
Writing, like healing, is not an act of control.
It is an act of devotion.
And devotion, tended patiently, has a way of bringing both land and body back into bloom.
(c) Brigit Anna McNeill
https://www.instagram.com/brigitannamcneill
Author photograph (c) Brigit Anna McNeill
About The Wild Within by Brigit Anna McNeill:
Echoing the journey of a plant itself, this is a personal exploration of rewilding and recovery from eco-psychotherapist and herbalist Brigit Anna McNeill. With beautiful illustrations, this gloriously uplifting book will both inform and transform reader’s daily lives.
In a series of short, beautifully written, viscerally alive chapters, eco-psychotherapist and herbalist Brigit Anna McNeill tells her own story and explores the lives of the plants in her wooded Devon landscape.
She explains how the natural cycle of dispersal, growth and bloom can inspire our recovery from trauma, stress and illness. By focusing on totemic plants and wildlife, Brigit delivers a botanical journey to healing.
She changes our attitudes to ourselves, to the potential wildness within us and shifts our interaction with even the most ordinary wildernesses – from backyards to window boxes to parkland.
With beautiful illustrations, this gloriously uplifting book will both inform and transform reader’s daily lives.
Order your copy of The Wild Within online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
