You're walking through the trees and something shifts. It's not fear exactly. It's more like the feeling that something is paying attention. You might brush it off, keep moving, tell yourself it was the wind or your imagination. But the feeling doesn't quite leave.

Laurel Leaman, Elemental Realm Oracle and facilitator at Lightbody Academy, has spent years documenting what happens when people stop explaining that feeling away and start paying attention to it instead. What she's found points to something most of us were never taught to consider: the forest isn't empty. It never was.

What You're Actually Feeling

The sense of presence people describe in nature, that inexplicable awareness that something is there, has a framework in Laurel's work that makes it less mysterious and more navigable.

The elemental realm, as she describes it, isn't a distant or separate place. It's an overlapping one. It exists alongside this reality, sharing the same space at a different frequency. The beings within it such as fairies, Sasquatch, gnomes, tree beings, water beings, are present in the natural world around us. They're especially dense in green spaces, forests, and anywhere water moves.

They notice you before you notice them. And they're selective about who they let in.

The feeling that rises in your body when you enter a charged space isn't random. It's information. Laurel describes it as an energetic tingling that moves through the body; a signal she's learned to recognize as meaningful. When that feeling amplifies as you move through a particular spot, you're standing in what she calls a thin place: a location where the frequency between realms is closer than usual, and contact becomes possible.

Why This Is Happening More Now

Something is shifting. Laurel is direct about this and it comes from a message she received from an Elven King that stopped her cold.

The time for pining is over.

Pining, as she explains it, is the sorrow over what was. There was a time when humans and elemental beings existed in the same physical reality, moving through the same world, aware of each other. That era ended gradually, through conflict, through human choices that made coexistence difficult, through a collective forgetting so complete that most people now treat these beings as mythology.

But the forgetting was never permanent. And the separation was never clean.

What's happening now, according to Laurel, is a deliberate reopening. The elemental realm wants to reconnect; not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity. When humans damage the natural world, it doesn't just affect this realm. The elemental realm is structured like a reflection of ours, overlapping and interconnected. Destruction here creates what Laurel describes as holes, like Swiss cheese, in that realm. The damage runs both ways.

So the increase in people having unexplained experiences in nature, the rising number of Sasquatch encounters, the growing sense that something in the forest is watching isn't random. It's intentional contact. The time for both sides pining over what was lost has ended. Now comes the work of coming back together.

What They're Actually Asking For

Here's where it gets practical. Laurel was given a direct message during an encounter with a human-sized fairy in Ireland, and it was blunt: don't come swallowing.

Don't come grasping. Don't come groveling. Don't treat these beings as more magical or more powerful than you and approach them from that place of smallness.

Come as equals. Come for community. Come because there's something to do together.

This is different from how most people approach the idea of connecting with elemental beings. The instinct is to approach with awe and deference; to treat the encounter as something being granted to you by a superior intelligence. That instinct gets in the way. These beings want relationship, not reverence. They want collaboration, not worship.

The other instruction Laurel received, this one from Sasquatch, is equally disorienting for the rational mind: forget everything you know. Not as a spiritual platitude, but as a literal instruction for how to enter nature. Everything you're seeing in a forest isn't what you've been told it is. The fern isn't just a plant. The tree isn't just a tree. There are beings associated with everything, living in ways human awareness hasn't been trained to perceive. Going in with what you already know closes the doors that curiosity would open.

How to Start Paying Attention

The practice Laurel teaches is called Walking in Beauty, and it's less about technique than about state.

Before entering nature, you go behind your eyes — pulling awareness inward, away from the surface of your thoughts and into the body. You move your attention downward, filling the energy field with light and with a cultivated feeling of joy. Not performed joy. Real joy, generated internally and allowed to radiate outward.

When you enter nature from that state, two things happen. First, you become a frequency match for the beings that exist in that realm — which means they can perceive you, and contact becomes possible. Second, the joy you're generating gets met by the energy of the natural world itself, amplified from the outside as well as the inside.

Go alone. The presence of another person pulls your awareness outward into conversation and connection with them, which breaks the internal state you're trying to cultivate. This isn't a social activity, it's a personal one.

And pay attention to what your body does. The feeling that rises when something is near, that tingling, that amplified sense of aliveness, is real information. Trust it. Follow it. Start taking video when it comes up, because what you feel energetically can often be captured on camera even when it can't be seen with the naked eye.

The Invitation

The beings in the elemental realm are not waiting to be discovered like artifacts. They're actively choosing who to engage with and when. That selection is based entirely on your energy field, your intention, and whether you're approaching them as an equal rather than a supplicant.

The door has always been there. What's changed is that more beings are standing on the other side of it, ready to open it  and more humans are finally ready to knock.

If this is calling to you, Laurel runs the Forest Wisdom Circle on the first Thursday of every month at 10 AM Mountain Time, a free space for people who are beginning or deepening their relationship with the elemental realm.

Explore Laurel's work and join the Forest Wisdom Circle at Lightbody Academy.