The Root Beneath the Root

What the Gap Knows — Notes from the Kyosei Era, Part 4

A study published earlier this year surveyed 36,803 people across 75 countries.

The question it was trying to answer: does connection to nature predict well-being? Not happiness in the moment. But purpose, hope, mindfulness, resilience, optimism — the qualities that seem to determine whether a life holds together under pressure.

The answer, across nearly every country and demographic: yes.

But the part that stayed with me wasn’t the headline finding. It was the qualifier. In countries with less access to nature — where environmental quality is lower, economic inequality is higher, natural scarcity is more pronounced — the psychological effect of nature connection was stronger, not weaker.

Where nature is scarce, the relationship with it matters more.

What “Connection” Actually Means

The study wasn’t measuring park visits. It was measuring something more internal — what the researchers called nature connectedness: a sense of belonging to the natural world, not as a visitor but as part of it. The sense, even in a degraded environment, of not being separate from living systems.

This is not the same as having a nice view. It’s closer to the experience of being included in something larger than yourself — something that was there before you and will continue after.

I think about this distinction often in Kamakura, where I live. The hills, the temples, the ocean — they’re all visible. But visible and felt are not the same thing. Some people move here and something shifts in them, almost immediately. Others live here for years and it remains backdrop.

The place is the same. The relationship is different.

HARA as Detector

The Japanese concept of hara (肚) — the gut center, the seat of instinct and deep attention — is not, I’ve come to think, primarily about strength or resolve. It’s about detection.

When hara is functioning, you receive the world rather than processing it from a distance. The difference is subtle but significant. Processing treats incoming experience as data to be sorted. Receiving treats it as something you are in relationship with.

My colleague Koji Miki sometimes describes this as the difference between seeing nature and being in nature. You can stand on a beach and evaluate it — temperature, quality of sand, whether it matches the photograph. Or you can stand there and let something happen.

The second requires a different quality of attention. One that is, frankly, harder to maintain when you’re connected to a device and oriented toward what you’re supposed to be doing next.

Kamakura as Amplifier

A pattern I’ve noticed in people who come through our programs:

Those who have recently moved to Kamakura tend to respond more quickly and more deeply than those who grew up here. The newcomers arrive with a difference already active inside them — an unresolved tension between the life they left and the life they’re reaching toward. The place amplifies what that tension was already pointing at.

Those who grew up here often need to leave first — usually to a city, sometimes for decades. The return creates the gap that constant presence had smoothed away.

Both paths work. What they share is the experience of contrast — of suddenly noticing something that had become invisible.

Without the gap, even the most extraordinary environment becomes background.

This is, I think, related to what the research is describing. The experience of nature connection that matters isn’t quantity of exposure. It’s the quality of attention that exposure activates. And that quality is often sharpest in people who’ve had to find their way back to something — not those for whom it was always simply there.

Three Ways of Knowing

A piece of writing I encountered recently described the experience of talking with French friends — the relentless questioning, the “but why does that follow?”, the conversation that never arrives until the logic is fully assembled.

Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. A civilization built around the commitment to doubt until something solid remains.

I recognize the style. I also recognize it isn’t mine.

Japanese conversation, by contrast, often moves through shared feeling — through the space between words, through what doesn’t need to be said because it’s already understood. Understanding as a state of non-dissonance rather than logical confirmation. The air does the work.

But there’s a third way I’ve been slowly learning to trust.

Call it the hara protocol. It doesn’t wait for logical completion. It doesn’t coast on shared atmosphere. It’s more like a physical resonance — a moment when something aligns or doesn’t, independently of whether you can explain why.

A conversation lands differently in the body than in the head. A decision sits quietly or it doesn’t. Not because of what you think about it, but because of how it registers somewhere below the argument.

The challenge is that this third mode requires the first two to not be running too loudly. Logical analysis consumes the signal. Social harmony overrides it. Hara functions best when the other channels are, at least momentarily, quiet.

The Deepest Infrastructure

What the nature study describes — and what these reflections on hara seem to point toward — is something that might be called psychological infrastructure. Not therapy. Not productivity. Something more like the substrate that allows both to function.

When that substrate is intact — when you have some genuine sense of being included in something larger than your calendar and your to-do list — you handle adversity differently. Not because you’re tougher, but because you’re more firmly somewhere.

The study found this was most pronounced in the most difficult conditions. Not in wealthy countries with abundant green space. In places of scarcity and inequality, where access to nature was limited, the bond to nature mattered more.

This suggests we are not talking about a luxury. We are talking about something closer to a root — the kind of root that becomes most visible when the soil around it is depleted.

What I’m Still Sitting With

I don’t fully understand what it means to help someone develop a relationship with their own hara. I’ve been working in this direction for years and I’m not sure I have a method.

What I notice is that it seems to involve creating conditions rather than instructions. A place that creates slowdown. A quality of attention that isn’t oriented toward achievement. The presence of others who are also willing to not know.

Kamakura, for me, is that kind of place. But only because something in me needed it to be. Without the gap — without the contrast to something else — it would just be a town.

The root needs something to push against to know it’s a root.

I want to name a discomfort, though.

When I write sentences like these — about hara, about nature as infrastructure, about Kamakura as an amplifier of something essential — they connect quite beautifully. Maybe too beautifully. I notice myself thinking: is this thinking, or is this narrative? Is hara an actual thing I can locate, or a concept I’ve organized my experience around?

I genuinely don’t know.

There’s a version of what I’m describing that slides toward something like nature mysticism — a romanticization of the body, of place, of pre-cognitive wisdom. I don’t think that’s what the 75-country data is pointing at. But I’m not fully confident my own attachment to these ideas is free of that drift.

What keeps me here anyway is not certainty. It’s that the alternative — treating every experience as data to be processed, every decision as an optimization, every conversation as a transaction — produces a kind of life I don’t want and can’t find my way back from.

So I hold both. The hara question as a genuine question. And the direction it points, cautiously, as still worth walking in.

An Invitation

Zen Immersion is our attempt to create a deliberately designed version of these conditions — a few days in Kamakura in which slowdown is structured in, contrast is available, and the questions you’ve been carrying have some room.

It isn’t a replacement for ongoing practice, whatever that looks like in your life. It’s more like a moment of recalibration — a chance to feel the difference between processing and receiving.

If that sounds like something you need, you can find more at zenschool.jp/immersion.

[embed]Zen School: 7-Month Transformational Journey in Kamakura, Japan 7-month Zen immersion in Kamakura, Japan. For practitioners called to Japan. Learn meditation, Ikigai & Reflecting…www.zenschool.jp

With gratitude to Koji Miki, whose questions keep this thinking honest — and to the AI interlocutors who helped me find language for things I’d been carrying for years.

About This Series

What the Gap Knows — Notes from the Kyosei Era is a four-part series exploring what it means to navigate the AI era with awareness, embodied judgment, and a different relationship to incompleteness.

• Part 1: You Were Never Meant to Be Complete
• Part 2: Someone Has to Decide
• Part 3: Three Hours Too Late
• Part 4: The Root Beneath the Root ← you are here

Written by Shigeru Utsunomiya, co-founder of zenschool

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