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How to invite Mother Nature to help our thinking make greater sense and thereby increase our personal, social and environmental wellness.
"For us to enjoy the peace, wellness and sanity of life-in-balance, our mission while riding the train of our dysfunctional society must include learning how to change the direction of the train track in a good way. This is different than success or wellness being 'to get a better seat on the train.' It can be as simple as occasionally getting off the train and benefiting from, while building or supporting, more organic trains and tracks."
................- Michael J. Cohen
"Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well."
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..............- Henry David Thoreau
Nature: do you forget to remember her?
Researchers have demonstrated that by learning to habitually forget nature we cause many of our personal. social and environmental disorders.
We must remember that people are part of nature, the vital force that pervades the earth and universe.
Nature has extraordinary abilities. It can correct its dysfunctions and create optimums of diverse relationships without
producing garbage, undue stress or abusiveness. This demonstrates that nature is a unifying organic form of what might be called "unconditional love." We usually omit, but desperately need, nature in our lives, thoughts and relationships.
Unquestionably, because we are part of nature our psyche contains nature's vital force. However, our education and socialization teach us to exclude nature from 99% of our thinking.
The result is that we deprive our mentality, spirit and destiny of nature's recuperative powers. Instead, we condition our thinking to fear, conquer and exploit nature; we lose conscious sensory contact with nature's unifying perfection, balance and beauty.
Is it any surprise that we suffer serious troubles on many levels?
If you are a normal citizen of contemporary society, the frenzy of your daily existence and socialization causes your thinking, moment by moment, to block or overlook your relationship with nature or take it for granted. For example:
- how often do you feel good because you sense nature's restorative powers that rejuvenate and renew every part of the global community including your psyche and spirit?
- Do you remember that when the landscape or your skin get scraped, nature restores them?
- that when you get sick nature helps you recover?
- that nature constantly heals and purifies itself?
- that nature creates and sustains unpolluted, attractive relationships?
- the nature has regenerative powers?
- that nature is and has great spirit and creative energies?
- Are you, right now, feelingly filled with love and respect for the air that you are looking through as you read these words, or have you learned to overlook this air and deprive yourself these good feelings?
- Do you feel wonderful and supported because this air before your eyes is a gift from nature and the eons that is giving you your life and your potential for joy? If you have forgotten this you may refresh your memory by holding your breath for a minute.
- Do you realize that nature. in addition to breathing air, provides 52 different joyful fulfillments or satisfactions?
The stress-filled, polluted world that our thinking produces shows that our mentality has learned to overlook its inborn ability to register hundreds of nature's wise and amazing creations, like air, sunshine and trees, along with the refreshing rewards each offers. Due to this profound omission, our mentality has become
dysfunctional.
Why doesn't nature heal this dysfunction like it heals most other things in life? Isn't it because we live extremely nature-separated lives?
Spending over ninety-nine percent of our thinking out of tune with nature and over 95% of our time indoors, blocks, redirects, addicts or brainwashes our mentality to obtain love from substitutes for nature, substitutes that we invent, obscess for and crave. However, our inventions seldom contain nature's unifying balance and recuperative powers so they produce side effects like pollution, stress, disease and habitat destruction.
Our major loss of nature's life-gifts traumatizes us into denial. We deny that we are rewarded for fearing and exploiting, rather than embracing, nature and its systems in people and places. We deny that we are psychologically addicted to nature-disconnected thinking that produces personal, social and environmental dysfunction.
Even when we visit a natural area, our mind is conditioned to be elsewhere. Instead of thinking in tune with nature, we remember past incidents or hurts, contemplate problems, take pictures, quell fears, discuss unrelated topics, try to physically "conquer" nature; we philosophize or place artificial and abstract names on nature's nameless ways.
The critical question is this: "How can nature even begin to help our psyche heal, our spirit strengthen, and our relationships unify when our thinking continually and habitually separates us from nature's ability to help us?"
A maverick genius has responded to this important question with a simple answer. Working in natural areas for over forty years throughout the seasons, his associates and he have created an organic psychology, the Natural Systems Thinking Process, a readily available nature-reconnecting tool. This accredited, love-of-nature science helps us, while in contact with a natural area, to rejuvenate over 45 natural senses we have numbed. We support and make stronger our natural ability to love and make sense.
Our excessive mental disconnectedness from nature usually deadens as many as 53 natural senses we biologically inherit. Once awakened, these senses enable us to reconnect our thinking with the renewing powers and beauty of natural systems within and around us. We and nature reap many rewards from this process including stress reduction, closer relationships and increased wellness. We heighten sensitivity, critical thinking, mutual support and energy. We increase our love of nature and our protection of what we love. We increase nature's love and care of us.
The effects of this nature-connecting art speak for themselves in many books and web pages. Most people can easily learn
to use and benefit from it; they can even earn an inexpensive training certificate or degree on line that will strengthen their livelihood, credibility and contribution to social and environmental wellness. They may incorporate this skill in any profession or relationship.
Our troubles will continue until we and our leaders engage in a process that respectfully enlists nature and its regenerative powers to help us improve our thinking and transform our destructive psychological addictions into constructive relationships. A hands-on, nature-connected learning book, the Web of Life Imperative, gives anybody the means to accomplish this through nature-connected education, counseling and healing. By design, it is taught and learned as well via the Internet as it is in a traditional or outdoor classroom. It's Organic Psychology is a practical contribution to solving a wide range of disorders because the Internet makes it readily available to over 600 million people.
A book review/press release about the process of nature-connected thinking helps you follow nature's path to self, social and environmental improvement.
A REVIEW OF FACTS ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE
The percentage of our lifetime that mother nature tries to nurture and heal us physically and emotionally, as she does all of nature.
.....100%The average percentage of a contemporary citizen's lifetime that is spent indoors, separated from the supportive beauty, wholeness and recuperative powers of nature:
.....95%The average percentage of a contemporary citizen's thinking that is not connected to and in tune with nature:
.....99.9%On average, the number of hours in our lifetime that our thinking is in tune with nature.
.....11.6 hours.The estimated percentage of the U.S. population who have had at least one beneficial or good experience in nature.
.....99%The percentage of people who at some level think we are part of nature and that the excessive separation of our mentality from nature produces stressful thoughts and feelings in our psyche that disturb our ability to make sense.
.....95%The percentage who do not use nature-connected sensory activities to help them deal with this disturbance and increase personal and environmental wellness.
.....99%The percentage of the 1% who engaged in the Natural Systems Thinking Process and found that it helped them improve their self-esteem, hopes or life. (Visit this study).
.....95%
As demonstrated by the quotes below, the mutually supportive, renewing relationship between nature and our psyche is well recognized.
However, missing below is "how to do it," the recognition and use of a readily available enabling tool whose process today helps us strengthen our love for nature and its healing powers. That tool empowers us to unify and improve personal, social and environmental wellness.
"The human need for nature is linked not just to the material exploitation of the environment but also to the influence of the natural world on our emotional, cognitive, aesthetic, and even spiritual development."
- Edward O. Wilson
Harvard University Pulitzer Prize Recipient (To the American Psychological Association National Convention)
"It is quite clear to me after several years in the environmental movement that all physical problems of man's impact on the environment - pollution of the air and waters, the desecration of the land, the contamination of the food chain - all start within the environment of man's mind."
-Maurice Strong
Founder: the United Nations Environment Program
Co-Chair: U.N. Commission on Global Governance
"Our task must be to free ourselves from (our) prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
...- Albert Einstein
"In order to achieve more effective environmental protection and conservation, internal balance within the human being himself or herself is essential."
...- Dalai Lama
...Nobel Prize recipient
"Until mankind can extend the circle of his compassion to include all living things, he will never, himself, know peace."
...-Albert Schweitzer
...Nobel Prize recipient
"Wilderness is the ultimate encyclopedia, holding answers to more questions than we have yet learned how to ask. That's the magic in you. You've got it; let it out."
...- David Brower"We have repressed far more than our sexuality: our very organic nature is now unconscious to most of us, most of the time, and we have become shrunken into two dimensional social or cultural beings, aware of only five of the hundreds of senses that link us to the rich biological nature that underlies and nourishes these more symbolic and recent aspects of ourselves.".
...- Norman 0. Brown
...Author of Love's Body
"We are dysfunctional socially and environmentally because we are cut off and isolated from the world of nature and the natural."
...-Albert Gore,
...Vice-President, United States
"The "Great Nest of Spirit" includes matter, nature, body, mind, soul, and spirit, yet they're always situated in the context of the four quadrants (or nature, systems, self and culture) and they are all correlated with one another."
...Brad Reynolds explaining Ken Wilbur, the "Einstein of Consciousness"
"Nurture your felt love for nature. Never deny it. That love is nature's voice, our origins in nature, the eons, the purifying intelligence, beauty and diversity of natural systems sustaining us in their perfection and wellness."
...-from The Web of Life Imperative
"He looked upon us as sophisticated children -- smart but not wise. We knew many things, and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true."
...-Saxton T. Pope (said of Ishi, America's ...last hunter-gather Native American)
"Over the years, I've spent a lot of time fighting. Fighting against logging, pollution, nuclear power...as long as we fight all the time there's going to be a winner and a loser...(we must) build bridges across to the people who are fighting."
...- David Suzuki
"Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts. We're also sand and wind and thunder and rain and the seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things."
...- Least Heat Moon
How to do it:
"A small group of people gather in a park by a river. The cottonwood trees sway in the wind and brightly coloured leaves are everywhere on this crisp autumn afternoon. The group includes a woman recovering from chemotherapy and a man recovering from a stroke, a poet, a community activist, a First Nations musician, a secretary, a mental health professional, and a naturalist.
I give a brief talk based on change and impermanence in nature from a chapter of "Reconnecting with Nature" by Dr. Michael J. Cohen and then explain today's activity. We silently separate, asking permission to learn from nature. Some sit by the river and meditate on the flowing current and standing waves, others move into the woods and consider the trees and falling leaves.
After about 20 minutes we gather together again and share our experiences and impressions. The talk is profound and the listening is respectful. Everyone's experience was different, but everyone's was the same, too. We say goodbye and return to our separate lives, feeling safer and happier and more connected than when we arrived.
I learned to share my connection to nature in this way through online courses with Dr. Cohen's Project Nature Connect. The process was the same in the internet courses as in these nature meditations. We read a chapter in a book, spent some quiet time doing an activity in nature, and then shared our experiences via email. As we repeat these brief sessions Cohen's Natural Systems Thinking Process helps people re-establish their connection with nature and learn to live more enriched and connected lives. Dr. Cohen's work has made a significant and enduring contribution to my life and to the lives of many other members of my community."
- John Scull, Ecopsychologist
"The Web of Life Imperative offers more tools, knowledge and personal power for good than most therapies and spiritualities. It enables us to reverse our destructive relationships by empowering us to make thoughtful sensory connections with genuine nature. This connection responsibly satisfies the aching, ever-wanting hole in our psyche that has been produced by our excessive separation from nature, a hole that leads us astray"
- Susan Chernak McElroy,
Award winning, N. Y. Times best selling author of Animals as Teachers and Healers and Heart in the Wild.
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INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council
PROJECT NATURECONNECT
Readily available, online, natural science unifying tools
for the health of person, planet and spiritP.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com
ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION
The Natural Systems Thinking Process
Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director
send email
All programs start with the Orientation Course contained in the book
The Web of Life Imperative.
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