...Project NatureConnect (PNC) ...Institute of Global Education ...A non-profit, special NGO consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Council ...P. O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 ..360-378-6313 ...nature@interisland.net .www.ecopsych.com   Overview  Shortcut  Public Grants  Jobs / Careers  Sustainability  Courses/Degree .

"Anyone who has ever enjoyed a good experience with nature --backcountry, backyard or with their pet, or with the wind, sea or stars-- has the ability to benefit from this website's unique enabling tool. We unnecessarily suffer many troubles because we teach our thinking to excessively disconnect from the balance, grace and restorative powers of nature within and around us." - Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.      Enter this site Discover what its Overview and Contents offer you.   Informative Pages within:. KEY: Online Information Guide for Application and Admission . Your Personal Inventory: discover how much you know already . NEW Grants, Loans, Funding,Accreditation . 9-Leg Relationships: uncover an essence of our troubles .. Meet the challenge for sustainability and peace. . KEY: Outcomes and Benefits . Courses and Degree Programs on-line . KEY: Jobs and Careers . Reviewed Articles and Self-Guiding Books . New Programs .. Application   The Advantages of Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature  Applied Ecopsychology in Action   Empower yourself by engaging in the gentle art and science of pollution free, nature-connected Organic Psychology. Learn online through hands-on, environmentally friendly enabling tools, books and activities for well being. Benefit from low-cost, accredited, online personal balance and CEU hours and courses, Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. degree programs, grant and scholarships. These programs include your past training and life experiences. Promote peace: help yourself and others use a practical and effective enabling process that helps you remedy the stressful and abusive estrangement of your thinking from the peace and restorative powers of natural systems within and around you. . Master authentic nature-connected learning for: - Increasing personal and professional benefits. - Training or administering in your field of interest. - Self-help Stress Management and Personal Growth. - Life or Personal Coaching and Leadership. - Teaching, Healing, Mentoring, or Facilitating. - Counseling: Pastoral, Marriage, Therapy, Recovery, .Family or Spiritual Counseling. Retreat Centers. - Course Instruction, Workshop Presentations. - Meditation; Complimentary and Alternative Medicine. - Improved Parenting, Outdoor Leadership, .Environmental Education, Mental Health Interning - Independent Contracting Organic Psychology - Founding or Directing Stress and Healing Programs. - Courses for Training or Degree Programs.           The journal entry quote that appears below is valid, unadulterated evidence for our consideration.  It comes directly from the field experience of a person who thoughts and senses registered, first-hand, the events the entry describes. "This nature-connecting activity helped me become aware of my attraction to the crescent moon as it hung over two hills near my home. Soon, its mellow glow, framed by peaks and trees, embraced me in a wordless, ancient primordial scene. Timeless power, peace and unity swept me up. I just wanted to stay in that state of awe, I felt in balance with all of reality. I was simply "BEING." No tension, no pressing goal, just truly belonging to the global community. This natural attraction captured my stress laden pulse and seduced it to the rhythms of Earth. The sleeping disorder I have battled all my adult life dissolved in this restorative power. For the first time in decades, I gently fell asleep after dark and arose shortly after dawn. I celebrated the breakthrough and I thanked nature. I thanked the activity, too. I'm attracted to it because it helps me reconnect whenever I choose." Although this journal quote goes against our cultural bias to discredit, exploit or conquer nature (nature being natural systems and their intelligence around and within us), it conclusively demonstrates this fact: sensuously connecting with natural systems helped the writer reduce his or her sleep disorder and deepen his/her respect for nature.   As with the sleep disorder example, Project NatureConnect guarantees that the Organic Psychology tools offered on this website help us deal with any disorder, dysfunction, trouble, conflict, stress, syndrome, issue or dependency, and improve our relationships with the environment, too. By interlacing our mind with nature, the process of Organic Psychology enables us to recycle the detrimental ways we think and feel. We learn how to painstakingly com post into fertile thoughts the garbage that destructive aspects of society have dumped into our mentality and spirit. This results in lasting, beneficial effects that increase our personal, social and environmental health. We enjoy potent, cost-free antidotes that, to our loss, we omit in our excessively nature-separated lives.  Proceed to Application and Admission   Our Challenge for Well-Being We are born as part of nature's perfection and integrity but we learn to spend over 95% of our lives indoors, separated from nature's normally ongoing support of our mind, body and spirit. In our weakened state, we become overwhelmed by society's demands. Disconnected from nature's balancing and restorative powers 99% of the time, our thoughts and feelings cannot adequately address the excessive or destructive expectations placed on us by others or by parst of ourselves. Too often we forget that nature has the profound ability to heal itself, be the injury a bulldozed landscape, a scraped knee or an emotional hurt. However, nature cannot help us heal or improve while we are disconnected from these powers in its wholeness. Our core challenge for sustaining our well being is to recognize that we are in denial. We deny that the way we learn to think produces personal, social and environmental dysfunctions. We deny that we are psychologically conditioned or addicted to stories, technologies and relationships that separate us from thoughtful connections to nature's balance, peace and renewing energies. We deny that readily available sensory tools enable our thinking to tap into nature's beauty and regenerative ways. We deny that this helps us transform our troubles into constructive relationships. Proceed to Application and Admission   Rationale This website's nature-connected thinking tools strengthen our ability to protect, and benefit from, the unifying ways of natural systems around and within us. Here, we discover how to belong, to find in nature within and about us a missing enhancement to our psyche and intelligence that contributes to saner living.   SUMMARY This Website: Breaks through our denial that we are addicted to technologies, relationships and stories that have stress-producing destructive effects. It offers us innovative tools to help us tap our thinking into nature's restorative ways. Guarantees that the nature-connecting tools and processes it offers are readily available to help us come into a supportive balance with ourselves, each other and the environment. Shows that we uniquely benefit from adding this website's easily learned organic psychology to our lives and livelihoods. Demonstrates that the heart-desired science of this site's Natural System Thinking Process enables us to restore our deteriorated natural consciousness and resilience. This helps us reduce dysfunctions and disorders in ourselves and others. We enjoy the ability to increase a peaceful and rewarding well-being within and around us. Documents that what we need for a healthy sustainable tomorrow is simply for more of us to learn how to use these sensory tools and tap into nature's wellness powers today. Our disconnection from these powers sustains our major problems. Proceed to Application and Admission   Our advantage Project NatureConnect uses the convenience of local natural areas, backyard or backcountry, to help us learn how to inexpensively apply practical, accredited, counseling, education and self-help tools via the Internet. This relieves us from spending excessive time, money, lodging, risk, unfamiliarity and transportation resources to travel elsewhere for training. In Organic Psaychology, local challenges and experiences remain familiar, friendly and easily available to us when we need them again. We daily help sustain natural systems within and around us and others and they, in turn, help us sustain and restore our well-being. Entering this program links us, by email, to the support, work and experience of all its participants graduates and faculty locally and internationally. They mentor, guide and support us when we request assistance and we learn how to do the same for them. Proceed to Application and Admission.   . Sustaining personal and global integrity "I recently participated in a hurried, almost stressful training program for people whose differences kept them arguing amongst themselves. They had little interest or time to hear an explanation from me about the unifying and healing benefits of our reconnecting with nature process and they therefore decided to omit it from their agenda. In the midst of this hubbub, a young bird flew into the meeting room through the door. It could not find its way out. Without a word, the behind-schedule, argumentative meeting screeched to a halt. Deep natural attraction feelings for life and hope filled each person for the moment. For ten minutes that frightened, desperate little bird triggered those seventy people to harmoniously, supportively organize and unify with each other to safely help it find its way back home. Yet when they accomplished this feat, they cheered their role, not the role of the bird. They felt like hero's for the moment and congratulated their humanity for its wisdom and compassion. In their story of the incident, the role and impact of the bird went unnoticed while they cheered the human spirit. The group returned to the hubbub and conflicts of the meeting, as if nothing special had happened. They completely overlooked that the bird had united them while it was there, something they could not do without its presence. Similarly, we who learn to consciously invite nature into our lives know its grace helps us overcome our stress and conflicts by uniting our mind body and spirit with our restorative origins in nature. As a result, we increase our appreciation and love for nature which motivates us to further protect the environment." From Reconnecting With Nature by M. J. Cohen   "I was never taught to ask permission to relate to people or the environment. I just take that for granted, as we all do. However, this activity required my senses to learn how to ask an attractive tree covered area for its consent for me to walk through it. The area continued to feel attractive, but something changed. It was the first time in my life that I totally felt safe. It felt like Earth's energies were in charge of my life, not me. It gave me a wonderful feeling of having more power to be myself. I felt in balance with nature and the people here because I could distinctly feel their energies consenting to support me. I never experienced nature and people that way before. It was like a powerful law protected not only my life, but all of life. I felt very secure and nurtured as I walked under those trees. I learned that when I seek permission from the environment and people I gain energy and unity, I belong." ------- Project NatureConnect Participant Proceed to Application and Admission   "This program offers an environmentally sound, educational process that reduces apathy, catalyzes peace and promotes mental health. It fulfills our personal and economic needs, deeper ideals and spirit; it deserves the attention of every person who seeks to reverse our troubles." Dr. Robert Muller - Assistant Secretary General Emeritus of the United Nations. - Recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Peace Prize and UNESCO prize for peace. - Chancellor of the University for Peace, United Nations.   "If you slice off part of a ball, you make both the ball and the slice dysfunctional; neither will roll with the same perfection as when the ball was whole. The same holds true for our extremely indoor lives and the way they slice our heart, mind and spirit from the pulse of our living planet, Earth. Today, a readily available means to genuinely reconnect our psyche with the nature of our planetary home increases our well-being, wholeness and belonging." From The Web of Life Imperative by M. J. Cohen     Benefit from making nature part of your life Enjoy a powerful book or online course that helps your mind walk nature's path to simpler living and greater sanity. As a hobby or profession, produce rewarding socially and environmentally responsible relationships, stress reduction and livelihoods. Distance learning Ph.D., M.S., and B.A. degrees, courses, grants, scholarships, jobs, books, training and internships.   Proceed to the Overview Proceed to Application and Admission     Program Founder and Director: Recipient of the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award, Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. is a Director of the Institute of Global Education, where he coordinates its Integrated Ecology Department and Project NatureConnect. He also serves on the faculty of Portland State University, Akamai University and West Coast University. Dr. Cohen has founded sensory environmental education programs independently and for the National Audubon Society and Lesley University (AEI), conceived the National Audubon Conference "Is the Earth a Living Organism," and is the award winning author of Reconnecting With Nature, Einstein's World, and How Nature Works. He is an accomplished folk song artist and contra dancer who presents traditional music programs for the U.S. National Park Service and Elderhostel on San Juan Island, Washington. CONTACT: www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html nature@interisland.net 360-378-6313, Pacific Time Zone .       Share this website with a friend: ,         INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council PROJECT NATURECONNECT Readily available, online, natural science psychological tools for the health of person, planet and spirit P.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 360-378-6313 nature@interisland.net www.ecopsych.com AN ORGANIC ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION The Natural Systems Thinking Process Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director Inquire by email All programs start with the Orientation Course contained in the book The Web of Life Imperative. . .. ..

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