Reconnecting With Nature
Finding Wellness Through Restoring
Your Bond With The Earth
Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.
RESULTS:
In 1977 Robert Binnewies, Vice President of the National Audubon Society called a program using the reconnecting with nature process Dr. Cohen presents in this book: "The most revolutionary school in America." As a result of students and teachers educating themselves in nature reconnected ways:
- Chemical dependencies, including alcohol and tobacco, disappeared as did destructive social relationships.
- Personality and eating disorders subsided.
- Violence, crime and prejudice were unknown in the group.
- Loneliness, hostility and depression subsided. Group interactions allowed for stress release and management; each day was fulfilling and relatively peaceful.
- Students using meditation found they no longer needed to use it to feel fulfilled.
- Participants knew each other better than they knew their families or best friends.
- Participants risked expressing and acting from their deeper thoughts and feelings; a profound sense of social and environmental responsibility and support guided their decisions.
- When vacation periods arrived, nobody wanted to go home. Each person enjoyably worked hard to build this supportive, balanced living and learning utopia. They were home.
All this occurred simply because every community member met their commitment to make sense of their lives by establishing attractive relationships that supported the natural world within and around them.
WHAT OTHER EXPERTS SAY:
"The activities work, they move students. I see a significant improvement in their self-esteem and value. They discover an integrity outside themselves that they find to be a truth within themselves."
Mark Walsh, Director of Wilderness Therapy, New Mexico
"This treatise is critical thinking as if nature mattered. The author presents a profound sensory tool that implements the dreams of Theodore Roszak, John Dewey and James Redfield....Wendall Berry too."
Dr. Daniel Levine, Superintendent of Schools, Lopez Island, Washington
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Reconnecting With Nature was the introductory portion of the 1995 edition of Well Mind, Well Earth. Select here for reactions to that edition of WMWE. Reconnecting With Nature now serves as a companion volume to the1997 edition ofWell Mind, Well Earth.
CONCLUSIONS:
Many dedicated activists for environmental and social causes say their actions are motivated by a deep love of life, nature and Earth. Each of us, and every other life form, is born with that love. In contemporary people it has been squelched by the "civilizing" process that teaches us to excesssively separate from, exploit and conquer nature including people's inner nature. Our squelched inner hurt fuels most of our runaway disorders for pain is never satisfied. We subconsciously select to know the world as a dangerous place in order to explain away our pain. Significantly, most adults can not unashamedly say that they love the Earth. That shame translates into apathy, a loss of motivating sensation.
Research shows that you can not simply ask people to love the Earth and, out of that love, act in behalf of life and balanced relationships. The plea seldom produces action. Most people are no longer conscious of that love and its ethic. Without it, apathy prevails.
To meet this challenge, Reconnecting With Nature enables you to create safe environmental contacts that allow our love for life to rejuvenate and once again be felt. That love produces the motivation and participation needed to balance personal, environmental and social relationships. If we want ourselves to achieve such relationships, it is wise to restore our love for them.
You may start the process by involving yourself and others in the book's free Earth Day Activity .
A RESTORATION ECOPSYCHOLOGY UPDATE FROM LARRY DAVIES, COUNSELOR (from Chapter 15 Reconnecting With Nature)
The Alternative School, December, 1996
During Dr. Cohen's Project NatureConnect workshop with one of our recovery groups, we visited a trashed natural area next to the student's proposed new school. The area was slated to be paved as a parking lot, and we did the nature reconnecting permission activity there. As a result, the student's felt that the area, like themselves, wanted to recover from the abuse it received from society. They sensed that, like them, it had been, in their words: "hurt, molested, invaded raped and trespassed," "It wanted to become healthy or die," "It felt trashed and overwhelmed," "It had no power, it needed a fix or help to recover." Since then, the area and their inner nature has given them permission to enlist the support of social and environmental agencies to save the area from becoming a parking lot. Instead they will remove the garbage and help it recover as an indigenous natural area. It will be nurtured and nurturing, support wildlife, an educational and therapeutic nature sanctuary for the school and a host for doing these sensory nature reconnecting activities.
The students recently wrote and received a grant to help make this desire of theirs a reality. Here's what they said in the grant's vision statement:
"We are a recovery group based on reconnecting with nature. In our recovery efforts, nature plays a major role. We have choosen a small piece of wilderness that reflects us as a community. This wilderness community is being choked by alien plants and stressed by pollution, abandonment and major loss. We too are being choked by drugs and stories that pollute our natural self. We feel abandoned by our society and cut off from nature which fills us with grief. As we remove the runaway garbage, blackberries and ivy we will work on removing the toxins from our lives. As we plant healthy trees we will learn new healthy ways to survive. By protecting this ecosystem we will find the strength to open our minds, hearts, and souls for the survival of our Mother Earth and ourselves."
The students in this program have quit using drugs and their test scores show significant improvement in the areas of self-esteem, depression, stress and sleeplesness. Every student's attendance and academic progress has also improved. Reconnecting With Nature has proven to be a wonderful tool for prevention and recovery.
FROM THE PUBLISHERReconnecting With Nature puts our society in context. Dr. Cohen is a master at translating the complicated paradigms of current thinking into understandable, down to earth terms and experiences . By learning how nature-related thought evolves, we learn to build a stronger harmony and balance with the natural world, ourselves and each other. Personally or professionally, Reconnecting with Nature is the most useful ecopsychology resource available for people of any age. Its repeatable 30 day program produces a powerful resiliency that grows and lasts. It presents a long sought Celestine process, a key to Ishmael's vision.
"If you are missing the natural joy and wisdom in your life, it is because you have been taught to ignore it." states Cohen's treatise on the bizarre personal and global effects of our excessively separated relationship with nature. Cohen says: "At birth we each biologically inherit a delightful wise and loving way of thinking and relating that we share with the natural world. Unknowingly, we are taught to bury it alive deep within of us."
Do you recognize part of yourself in any of the statements below? Reconnecting with nature will strengthen that part of you:
- I care about the world being a safer and happier place to live.
- I desire to learn and teach others how to act more lovingly with respect to people and natural areas.
- I unashamedly love Earth and
the life spirit that flows through people and nature.
Select here to read Dr. Daniel Levine's interview with Michael J. Cohen about the nature of Applied Ecopsychology
Select here to read the psychology journal Applied Ecopsychology article Counseling and Nature, that is part of Chapter 10 of Reconnecting With Nature
QUESTIONS
With respect to reversing our runaway problems, isn't the education and information we usually receive is no more effective than the warning labels on a pack of cigarettes?Guaranteed:
The natural genius buried within you modifies behavior because it knows how to survive in cooperation with the natural environment. Your inner nature knows the answers to each of the questions below. The process that Reconnecting With Nature describes frees that genius to enter your thinking and relationships.
- - Do you deserve to have good feelings? Why?
- - What is the key factor that makes people different or separate from nature?
- - What value is there in you safely feeling closer nature?
- - What is the greatest truth in your life that you can trust? (Clue: the answer is neither God, love, honesty nor nature,)
- - What is the difference between a thought and a feeling?
- - We are part of nature's life system so we must somehow be in communication with it. How does nature communicate with us and vice versa?
- - Are feelings facts?
- - Water is part of nature and you are part of the water cycle, water comes into you, through you and out of you. What natural genius in you helps makes water do this?
- - What natural intelligence in you helps regulate the flow of water through you so that you neither bloat, explode nor dehydrate?
- -How many natural senses can you name that you can know and learn from?
- - Why do we continue to assault nature and people when we don't like doing it or its effects?
- - Is there a relationship between our runaway social and environmental problems?
- - Does nature within you know how to relate responsibly to nature in others and the environment?
- - Can you be sane if you live in an insane society?
- - Is our innate ability to sense and feel of, by and from nature?
- - Does our formal education or our leadership competently address the above questions?
- - What is consciousness and who invented it?
- - Do miracles happen in contradiction to nature?
- - What is the relationship between nature and the human spirit?
- - Do your problems result from the difference between how you think and how nature works?
- - Since nature produces no garbage, does nature practice unconditional love?
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Reconnecting With Nature
Table Of Contents
- Chapter 1. The Thinking Revolution
- Chapter 2. Maverick Genius
- Chapter 3. Thinking As If Nature Mattered
- Chapter 4. Replenishing Earth and its People: The RWN Factor
- Chapter 5. How Nature Works: The Wisdom of Natural Senses
- Chapter 6. The Powers of Natural Senses
Chapter 7. Reconnecting With Nature- Chapter 8. People and Nature as Community
- Chapter 9. Education and Nature: The Greening of Psychotherapy
- Chapter 10. The GO to GG Formula
- Chapter 12. The Tropicmakers
- Chapter 13. The Psychology of Nature Negatives
- Chapter 14. The Natural History of Personality
Chapter 15. Outcomes
Chapter 16. An RWN Expert States His Peace- Chapter 17. Self, Meet Yourself
- Appendix A. Going for the Green
- Appendix B. A Case History of RWN
Appendix C. The Ecology of Spirit
Appendix D. References and Bibliography- Select Here to order this book with discounts
- Chapter 2. Maverick Genius
 Readily available, online, natural science organic psychology tools for the health of person, planet and spirit 360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION The Natural Systems Thinking Process Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director send email
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