......	Accredited Nature-Connecting Holistic Degree Courses On Line: A remedy for stock market and Wall Street CEO greed that offers a genuine security to offset the loss of credit, money, depression or economic recession. Project NatureConnect Organic Psychology and Natural Attraction Ecology Practical distance learning to increase person/planet wellness. .Index.   #48. . ARTICLE The Nature of Life-In Which Wealth Has Nothing To Do With Money by Janet Thomas SYNOPSIS: This article describes part of the experience and process of Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature, a sensory ecology science designed by an environmental education specialist with a Ph.D. in applied ecopsychology. It explores the underlying cause of stock market, Wall Street, CEO money greed and the roots of genuine security that offset economic recession, loss of credit rating or depression. It is rooted in the discovery that 53 living-earth natural attractions that register in our consciousness as natural senses. They are included in an accredited learning and teaching tool that helps us increase personal, social and environmental well-being by dissolving Industrial Society's unreasonable prejudice against nature. This article helps our thoughts, feelings and spirit learn the how and why of genuinely tapping our thinking into the grace, balance and restorative powers of nature's web of life community. It empowers us to grow a new and reasonable passion to benefit from and strengthen our inborn love of nature and life. HOW TO IMPLEMENT THE ARTICLE THAT APPEARS  ON THIS WEB PAGE: Educating Counseling and Healing With Nature Supportive Degrees, Career Training Courses and Jobs On Line Project NatureConnect offers nature-centered distant learning that enables you to add the benefits of nature-connecting methods and credentials to your degree program and/or your skills, interests and hobbies. We honor your prior training and life experience by providing grants and equivalent education credit for it. You may take accredited or professional CEU coursework and/or obtain a Nature-Connected Degree or Certificate in most disciplines or personal interests. A partial subject list is located at the bottom of this page.     * Improve your income and satisfaction through independent, interdisciplinary or integrated study and Ecopsychology.     * Help people connect their thoughts and feelings with the self-correcting and renewing ways of nature.     * Increase personal social and environmental well being.     * Add the self-correcting sunlight beauty and spirit of the natural world to your life and community. Visit our Homepage for complete information ............. ............... ......... ................... . ......................................... A Lesson From Nature Wealth and Health by Allison Weeks At a Project NatureConnect gathering on San Juan Island in the spring of 2000, our group was interviewed by resident island author Janet Thomas. She was in the process of writing her well- researched and thought-provoking book "Battle in Seattle," and wanted to know how we thought the then-recent WTO protests might impact the future. Mid-way through the interview someone suggested that Janet actually do a nature-connecting activity with us, so PNC founder and director Dr. Michael Cohen suggaested we go to Nature with a question that captured the essence of the WTO protests: "What is wealth?" Reconnecting with Nature activities begin with sensing an attraction in nature. Usually something claims my attention right away, but this time was different. As I walked alone along a forest path asking permission from nature to learn from it about wealth, I waited for something to attract me. Everything looked beautiful, but nothing in particular caught my attention. As time went by I began to realize that this time my attraction was not the vibrant color of a flower, the beautiful song of a bird, the strength of a massive tree, or the softness of the moss on a rock. It was the forest in its entirety. My attraction held, so I sat on a small boulder to listen, as the wordless lesson began. How does one express a non-verbal, purely sensory experience in words? Something is always lost in the translation, but I will try. As I watched, the attraction energies giving rise to the diverse and teeming life before me became apparent: The insect attracted by the flower, gaining sustenance from it as it helped it in kind by assisting pollination. The plants reaching for the life-giving energy of the sun and sharing it with the caterpillar. Roots attracted to the damp, moist earth while holding the earth in place. The dead, leaves and trees transforming before my very eyes into new earth for new life. As I began to become aware of the exquisite interconnectness of it all, my consciousness shifted and I stopped seeing separate entities. Instead, the physical reality before me became a beautiful, continuous flow of energy attractions that gave rise to Life. Everything received just enough energy to sustain itself in health, returning energy in like kind back to the web. Even death of the individual gave rise to the health of the whole. I began to sense myself as part of this whole--and I, too, experienced the seamless flow of energy, the joyous fulfillment of mutual support and reciprocity. "Ah, said my rational brain, never too happy to be wordless for long, and determined to translate my nonverbal awareness. "This is the lesson about wealth you were seeking. True wealth is the seamless flow of energy attractions in mutual support and reciprocity. When a sense of separation, resulting in fear, blocks this flow, the result is greed. Blocking the flow disrupts the intricate and exquisite balance of the web of life, and soon many problems arise"poverty, crime, degradation of the environment which sustains our very lives The list of negative consequences is almost endless. Even those who take and hoard more than they need without giving back equally to the web, thinking this makes them "wealthy, are really impoverished of spirit and bereft of true joy and fulfillment. Energy flow, besides being the basis of wealth, is also necessary for health"individual, social, and environmental. When energy is blocked"again, because of fear, which is the major symptom of disconnection, and trauma"the result is illness. Health and wealth are really identical, the result of seamless energy flow"mutual support and reciprocity. I returned to the group at the appointed time. As we shared the wisdom of global consciousness that we had experienced through our attractions in nature, our personal values shifted closer yet to those of the Web of Life of which we are a part. And we felt wealthy beyond measure. ............................................................................. The Nature of Life-In Which Wealth Has Nothing To Do With Money by Janet Thomas (From The Battle In Seattle, Chapter 18, Fulcrum)   "Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well." -Henry David Thoreau ..........Over the holidays of the new millennium, Dr. Michael Cohen wrote a book about the vital missing link in the WTO. He wrote it because he was unable to be there in person on N30; and because his partner, Serena, went to her family home for Christmas without him. He had time on his holiday hands so he put them to work. The result was Einstein's World-Educating and Counseling with Nature. A Scientific Integration of Economics, Nature and Psychology, Peace, Wellness and Spirit. Cohen is an applied ecopsychologist. His work is rooted in the belief that nature's intelligence is missing from the way we have been taught to think. That we have essentially bitten the hand that feeds us and if we don't wake up and smell the seaweed, we're done for as a human species. ..........There's lots of growing scientific evidence to support the dire effects of our distorted thinking: global warming and its devastating consequences has already started. The relentless connectedness of everything and everyone on the planet is evident in just the few degrees of climate change that it will take to forever change life as we have come to know it. Species are dropping like flies. Our great rain forests, a big source of oxygen on the planet, are losing their lives, and therefore putting our own in jeopardy, let alone all those of the indigenous people throughout the world to whom the forests are truly home. We're screwing up. We're messing with the web of life, with the way things work naturally-which has only taken a few billion years to perfect. .......... Lots of people are telling us these things. Why aren't we listening? .........Because, says Cohen, we have learned not to feel and think with all our senses. And not just our five well-worn senses, but the unlimited experiences offered by our 53 (at last count) natural senses, from our sense of time to our sense of play. From our sense of gravity to a sense of our emotional life. From our senses of reason, language and consciousness to our senses of humility, humidity and humor. We are awash in sensory experience-most of which we've managed to nip in the bud, so to speak. Cohen, who's somewhere in his seventies and still sleeps outside at night, has a pretty little plant growing out of his car door hinge. And he didn't plant it. Life will find it's way, indeed. But will human life? That is the question. ..........I first met Mike Cohen on the dance floor. Every Tuesday evening on our island, Bob and Barbara Dann, who are both somewhere very gracefully occupying their seventy-somethings, have folk dancing at their house, which was built for the occasion. Their living room is 15 feet by 40 feet and ever since they retired here, the world has been welcomed at their door to dance-as long as you don't track crap in on your shoes. Every Tuesday, we go to the corner table where Bob has listed dances from all over the world on cards and arranged them according to country. We each pick a few for the evening, or not, if we don't feel like it, and for a few hours we enter into the dancing spirits that come as gifts from around the world. It's fun. And it's a great way to get touched if you're not getting enough.......... ..........Mike Cohen knows all the dances and is very light on his feet. He also sings folk songs, too many to count. So I knew him as a playful spirit, a man who seemed to land lightly wherever he went. His 35 years of teaching the psychology of the natural world and our place in it, is something I learned about only when I told him at the Danns one night that I was working on this book. "Oh," he said. "I just wrote a book about the WTO," and within a few days I had a copy of Einstein's World, and one of his earlier books, Reconnecting with Nature-Finding wellness through restoring your bond with the Earth. The WTO synchronicity strikes again. ..........Einstein's World is an obsessed little book, quickly written, self-published, spiral-bound, passed out free to all takers, an act of love in a time of desperation. Cohen's earlier book, Reconnecting with Nature, is the one with blurbs on the back by best-selling author Dr. Larry Dossey, and Dr. Robert Muller, the winner of the Albert Schweitzer Peace Prize, who was the Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. It's through a distinct, practical process in this book that Cohen brings us to our expanded senses and to the natural law of attraction that is at the very foundation of our existence. ..........Cohen is a renegade. Although he has founded environmental psychology degree programs with the Lesley College Graduate School, Greenwich University, and the Institute of Global Education (a nongovernmental organization that does consulting to the United Nations Economic and Social Council), he unteaches. Sitting outside in one of his nature-reconnecting classes (called Project NatureConnect) is a study in forgetting what we've learned and getting intimate with what we know. This, he documents, is the way home to sanity on this planet, where we are going completely and self-destructively crazy. And the key is not so simple as stopping to sniff the nearest flower, it's also in learning how to ask permission of the flower to sniff it in the first place. It's in acknowledging the astonishing force of life in all its glory on this planet, and our partnership with it. Which in turn heals the spirit, restores the senses and brings meaning back to the natural world-where we always belong. So go tell that to the World Bank. ..........One of Cohen's doctoral students is doing precisely that. Gerry Eitner is introducing Cohen's Natural System Thinking Process (NSTP) into the training programs offered by the World Bank. The goal is to raise awareness of the need for responsible relationships with Earth's people and ecosystems, right in the place where the buck both starts and stops.  ..........On the other side of the WTO coin, another doctoral student, Allison Weeks, is bringing Cohen's natural systems thinking to WTO protest organizers and organizations in the northwest. They, too, get tired and forget to smell the seaweed, forget to get nourished back as they go about the business of encouraging global fair trade and freedom in the human marketplace.  ..........Cohen's other students are doing likewise in a variety of environments: James Rowe with Outward Bound, Dr. Kevin Bethel with the American Medical Association, Kurtland Davies with counseling programs, Peggy Garrigues-Cortelyou with pastoral ministry, Larry Gray with environmental education, Mardi Jones and JaneAnne Jeffries with teacher education, Chuck McClintock with holistic medicine, Theresa Sweeney with mental health, the list grows daily. ..........Cohen started his first official outdoor program for youngsters in 1959 in Killington, Vermont because he wanted to live the outdoor life; it eventually became the National Audubon Society Expedition Institute. Before that he was the Director of American Youth Hostels in New York. Before that he was a camp leader in the progressive camping movement under the tutelage of Josh Lieberman. His exposure to folk dancing and singing happened through his parents participation in the Settlement Houses established by Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1920s and 30s where people coming to the United States for the first time could go to keep alive "the old time ways." ..........Cohen's mother and both his father's parents, who were born in Russia, came to the U.S. to escape the pogroms. For the most part, Cohen was left alone to decide how to grow-up, which to him meant growing up outside. For fifty years he has taught people how to connect to the natural world, and feel naturally connected. His theory, in an acorn shell, is that if we feel connected to nature, and our intimate partnership with it, we will not need a garage full of stuff to feel connected to our lives. Power will prevail, but it will be the power of natural attraction. A state of inherent grace, where we fit in to the web of life and keep our inherent sensory awareness well-tuned for the occasion. ..........It's this awareness of attraction that Cohen tries to get us to recognize. The very first thing he teaches is "Go out and find something in nature that attracts you, obtain permission to be there and find out what it has to tell you." Pretty weird stuff. Even the Ph.D. students who have worked with his concepts for years, have to struggle through their addiction to the intellect before they can allow a more sensory receptivity to take over. "No matter how often I've done it before, it's always a challenge," said Larry Gray who comes from northern Canada to take Cohen's workshops. "And it always works."  ..........In Einstein's World, which-surprise, surprise-quotes copiously from Einstein, we are led down the path of science and economics at play, where if we could just get the WTO to put "webstrings" on its agenda, we could all get back to work on the real stuff of our lives-enjoying the ride. The being here. Together. .........."Webstrings" is the word Cohen has coined to describe the far reaching effect of our connections to one another, to place, to planet, to planetary possibilities, and on out there forever. "To see the world in a grain of sand." (William Blake) To think with Nature: "The unseen intelligence that loved us into being." (Elbert Hubbard). This does not endear him to the scientific community, most of whom are working to isolate, not integrate. Most of whom are suspect of such off-the-grid goals as recognizing our attraction to the motion of the grasses in the wind, seeking permission to be there and then sitting quietly to receive the wisdom waving around in the breeze. The mind, of course, goes quickly to metaphor, the vulnerability, strength and flexibility of the grasses; the power of being rooted to the earth but open to the brilliant changes of each moment; the wonder of wind-where does it come from? The sky wide, the wide mind, the moment that it's all in this together. That we're all in this together. Tell that to the scientists fighting with each other about mapping the human genome.  ..........But Cohen is making headway. The United Nations recognizes his work, and his courses are officially and unofficially on traditional campuses via the Internet or trained instructors. In 1985, when he founded the Gaia Conference, "Is the Earth a Living Organism?" he was called a maverick genius. In 1996, he was awarded the U.N.'s Distinguished World Citizen Award. ..........I was invited to sit in on one of Cohen's graduate seminars. He does lots of his teaching via the Internet but a couple of times a year his students come to-unbelievably, my own backyard yet again-San Juan Island for five days of deep nature study. This particular session was held in a big log cabin at Lakedale, a middle of the island rustic retreat and lakeside resort. He introduced me around, told them about the WTO book, and asked me if I was willing to participate in a nature activity. "Sure," I said, not really wanting to at all. ..........Throughout my life I have cultivated a profound sense of nature snobbery. I like my nature to myself. I've considered it a private matter, a non-verbal experience that cannot be shared. A sacred place where I feel better. An oasis of purity in a defiled world. I have gone to great lengths to preserve my solitary experiences in nature. Now I was being asked to get communal about it all and I felt a huge resistance. But Cohen had yet another question. "What are you here for? What do you want from us?" ..........I had been thinking about David Korten's talk at St. Mark's Cathedral, about the difference between being rich and being wealthy. His ideas were familiar yet the two positions seemed so incompatible as to be irreconcilable. "What is wealth?" I blurted out. Cohen shrugged, "Okay, what is wealth?" he asked everybody. And sent us off with an activity in the natural surroundings to find out. ..........About twenty minutes later we all gathered back together to share our findings. There were twelve people in the room, from all parts of the U.S. and Canada, all with professional backgrounds, all linked together through their work with Project NatureConnect. Wealth, it turned out, was a lot of things: the feeling of a cedar branch against the face; a small tree planted by hand that needs attention to survive; the flow of connection, when we stop it with greed, all our addictions come back; knowing the right to exist in the network of sentient beings; waking up to my own experience and knowing that "no-one can tell me I didn't have it; when I come to this place I feet wealth supporting me; the courage to stand alone; getting into deep water; the berry that is ripe enough to just drop by itself into my waiting hand, then I know it is meant just for me; a large, mossy, mother rock; forgetting myself.  ..........One woman was quiet, and spoke last. "I've been sitting here for twenty minutes mulling over what I got," she said, in tears. "I went to the water, to a tree, to a slug, to the earth, and I'm not getting it right now." What she got was grief from being disconnected. "The wealth," she said, "is the answers you get from nature. Even when they hurt."  ..........Somebody also had a realization about being rich. "I followed the sound of a bird as it went from place to place in the woods, but I couldn't quite catch up. It was like going after money. Pretty soon I didn't even watch where I was going." ..........The reductive challenge we face everyday in contemporary life to describe, weigh and measure the secrets of our lives means that they lose their power, their numinous nature, their stature. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science," says Albert Einstein. There is nothing mysterious about money, but try sitting with a cedar tree for ten minutes and listening to what it has to tell you. ..........The truth is that nature is always restoring. Always attracting, recovering, healing. It is our biological and psychological ability to regenerate. And when we connect to the natural world with our reasoning, consciousness and language, together with all our other senses, we are opened up to real power. A power far beyond the almighty dollar, a power that we can both take with us and leave behind, the power of peace and the legacy of peace. .........."The more alive we are," said Michael Cohen, "the more rewarded we are by the wisdom of earth and nature, the less dependent we are on the power of money and prestige, and the less damage we do to one another and to the planet. When are we going to learn this in contemporary society?" Act now. Master Organic Psychology by doing it. Explore it from our homepage Read Additional Student Reports Contact us at 360-378-6313 <email> http://www.ecopsych.com Achieve a Degree or Certificate to strengthen your professional interests, or your hobbies or pastimes, by connecting them with nature. Implement your strongest hopes as you increase personal and global well being. Remedy Wall Street CEO and stock market greed; offset  economic depression, recession or the loss of credit rating by strengthening natural emotional security through this program that Ben White endorsed and represented. Topics, subjects or leisure pursuits can include those listed below or other areas of interest:   Yoga Reiki Self-Improvement Self-Confidence Self-Esteem Weight Loss Ecotherapy Intimacy Holistic Leadership Organic Psychology Friendship Happiness Unitarian Universalist Pantheism Mental Health Peace Climate Change Shamanism Earth Day Activities Retreat Centers Energy Medicine Natural Systems Parenting Child Development Alternatives Dog Cat Pet Care Return to the top of this page ................................................. 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