PROJECT NATURECONNECT

Greenwich University
Applied Ecopsycology/Integrated Ecology
ORIENTATION COURSE 
©Copyright 1996 Michael J. Cohen

 

Elements of Global Citizenship:
The Science of Connecting With the Web of Life
The Art of Thinking With Nature

 

 

 Part Five

SUMMARY ACTIVITIES

 

 

1. The Summary Activity: Select Here

After completing the activity, send the group a short paragraph that sums up for you the importance of making genuine sensory webstring contact in natural areas to help you think and relate like nature works.

 

 

2. Have you learned to own the Process? Why not Intern or Teach and help others and Earth?

A. Teach: Visit Natural Attractions, Intelligences and Sanity (ECO 508) and consider taking this self-guiding course for credit or non-credit. It consists of reading a short book (Einstein's World,) about applying NSTP to different situations and identifying what attractions you find in each of the chapters. Having completed the Orientation Course, once you complete this Natural Attraction course you can be a teaching assistant in it and earn $20 every time you work with a person who is taking it. It is not necessarily an online nor interactive course, (although students have enjoyed doing it that way,) so you can help teach it to many people at the same time. It may take 30 minutes of your time to help evaluate the final paper in it. Contact the PNC office to get started..

B. Co-facilitate: As an essence of nature, webstrings serve nature's purpose which is to support nature. To complete this course you are given the same opportunity. You are encouraged to co-facilitate this course as an intern in a forthcoming group. Considering nature's purpose, the best way to learn the Process is to teach it. Facilitating assists others who seek the value of webstring relationships. A stipend is available for those who need it in order to become involved in facilitating. Select here for facilitator information.

 

 

3. Do you want to be kept updated on Project NatureConnect or learn to use NSTP professionally?

Can you think of appropriate personal, economic and professional opportunities that are available by applying the skills you begin to develop on this course? No need to guess, simply select here.

If you see value in involving the Process in your professional work or vice versa, or you want to help the Process grow, you are invited to join the Project NatureConnect Professional Group. It is simply a mailing list to which updates notices are sent and folks help support each others in PNC when possible. Contact PNC Headquarters if this is of interest to you. People in Degree Programs should be on this list.

 

 

4. Are you interested in a obtaining a low cost Ph.D., M.S. or B.A. degree online that centers around Webstrings and includes your prior learning

Check out our degree program. It is designed to save you time and money while helping you make discoveries that illuminate your best path to completing a degree. By successfully completing this course you have completed the major requirement for entrance into the degree program and also become eligible for receiving a $1500 grant to assist in the program.

 

 

5. Summary of Techniques

You may also utilize the Applied Ecopsychology process at home or in the Introductory and other courses we offer as follows: Please indicate to your interact group which, if any, of the following process techniques do not seem familiar:

1) CONSENT: Sensitively obtain permission from a natural area to visit it, be it a wilderness or aquarium.

2) CONTACT: Let natural attractions lead you. Make a safe, non-verbal, sensory (old brain), contact with an attractive, consenting natural area or thing. Call one or more senses that were energized in this activity "webstrings" and note how doing this felt.

3) FEEL: Recognize that contact with natural attractions feels good. Thank the natural attraction you found AND webstring(s) involved for the valuable feelings and information they have provided.

4) TRUST: Trust the thoughts and feelings arising from the contact.

5) VALIDATE: Write, in reasonable language (new brain), your thoughts and feelings from the old brain experience.

6) READ aloud what you wrote, note that your translation is intelligent, enjoyable and honest.

7) SHARE your nature-connected story with other consenting people, personally or via the internet.

8) OBSERVE that you now feel less stressed, that your nature-connected story builds supportive contacts and closer relationships with people and the environment.

9) ACT to stop your discomfort from abusive or exploitive relationships with nature or your inner nature. Insist on receiving and giving permission to relate before interacting.

10) RECOGNIZE that you own this nature reconnecting activity; you may repeatedly use and teach it to benefit yourself, others and the environment.

11) ENJOY a minimum of one night's sleep (integrating dream time) before doing the next activity.

12) REVIEW (optional) your GBT Score. Summarize and change the scores on those that may have increased or strengthened due to this activity or other growth experiences.

If any of the above procedures are not familiar, ask your interact group to help you with them.

 

 

6. DRAFT: Summary of Process Basics:

Below are nine basics of the Natural Systems Thinking Process that help people solve the personal, social and environmental problems that result from the difference between the disconnected way we learn to think and how nature works. Please share how you would you edit, add to or modify them.

Rationale:

The heart of our unsolveable problems is psychological. We are in denial. We deny that we are addicted to a story that says for us to live we must conquer, exploit and subdue nature, including our inherent human nature. Every other part of nature survives in balance through attractions that unite build and sustain consensual, mutually supportive relationships. NSTP enables us to think and act this way by identifying and addressing our denial and addiction.

1. Nature can be seen as a unifying attraction process that organizes, preserves and regenerates itself to produce an optimum of life, diversity and balanced cooperation without producing garbage, madness or death as we know it. Nature's way of expressing love prohibits the pollution, abusiveness and stress that deteriorate life.

2..We are born part of and attached to nature but learn to spend 99.9% of our conscious time and thought detached/disconnected from nature. Our psyche is dismembered from its origins. It silently suffers its profound loss of contact with its nurturing sensory and sensibility roots in nature's ways and intelligence. However, any word or incident that reminds us of our psychological dismemberment breaks the silence. It triggers the emotional pain of it into consciousness and we feel it. As reflected by the state of the world, indoors or outdoors, our mentality is guarded, stressed, ill, wanting and destructive due to our painful deficiency of nature's peace, wisdom, and beauty (10, 16F).

3.When we provide material, social, or financial rewards for nature-disconnecting stories and technologies, we become psychologically bonded to them and their destructive effects. Things that experience these effects suffer.

4.The web of life is a global ecosystem of which people are part. To be part of a system one must in some way be in communication with the system. The Natural Systems Thinking Process enables a person to restore their inherent 53-sense ability to consciously register, enjoy, and respond to communication with nature. It accomplishes this by helping us bring into our awareness the webstring attraction loves that we share with the web of life and make sensory contact with them in nature, backyard or backcountry.

5. People experience webstrings as sensory attractions, uncomfortable sensations are webstrings that attract us to seek additional webstrings and continue to participate.

6. Attractiveness is conscious of itself. When people think in consent and connection with webstrings they experience an attractive global consciousness that leads to unity at every level of endeavor.

7. There is an age old purpose and non-verbal process that sustains nature's web of life and its members, including people. That attractive purpose and process is to support life in balance. In this regard there are no known substitutes for the real thing. People must connect with genuine nature or suffer from the imperfections of the substitutes we create for it.

Since in this model there is no substitute for the real thing, if a person is not in conscious connection with webstring attractions, they are probably playing God in some way without the wisdom to do so.

 

8. Because we are nature renegades, to reconnect with nature, relationships must be entered by gaining consent and measured by their long term effects on global life in balance.

9. To reverse our imbalance and its discontents, continuing, thoughtful, shared, sensory contacts with webstring attractions in natural areas reconnect our thinking with nature's ways. This produces more sensitive and responsible personal, social and environmental relationships. A person can learn to trust and use nature connected experiences to help produce unity and balance.

 

 

7. Director's Summary

Thanks for the courage and conviction to take this course and validate your global citizenship webstring attractions. I look forward to further contact with you on other courses and functions of Project NatureConnect and share with you, below, my summary of the need for global citizenship that includes the web of life.

Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.
Director

 

In summary for myself:

Some environmentally enlightened friends of mine own land that lies next to a national park. Recently, I tried to convince them not to clear cut their parcel for the big dollars in second home building. The glazed look on their faces indicated my suggestion did not register. Missing in their mentality were the webstrings necessary to modify their action.

My friendss' look reminded me of a man who was pinned in the wreckage of a train. Only his upper torso was visible. During his rescue he said he felt OK, he even joked with his rescuers. Then he died. When they freed his body, they found his legs had been amputated. Traumatic shock to many webstrings had prevented him from being aware of his demise. My clear cutting friends, with respect to their relationship with nature, were similarly in traumatic shock. So are most members of industrial society. In far too many of us, that glazed look not only appears with respect to our abuse of the environment. It also appears with respect to our abuse of substances and each other.

Nature does not display our runaway problems. Biologically and psychologically, every human being is to nature as our leg is to our body, or our toe is to our hand. We are born of, and consist of, the materials and at least 53 natural sensory relationship webstrings that pervade the natural world. We mainly differ from nature in that we educate ourselves to think differently than how nature works .

TRAUMATIC PSYCHOLOGICAL SHOCK: Unlike members of nature centered cultures, at birth we are physically and emotionally "amputated" from the environment. Our traumatic separation desensitizes us to natural life, including the nature of our children, each other and our inner nature. We uncontrollably violate the world with the anger and frustration from our lack of natural fulfillment and wisdom and the subconscious hurt we feel and protect. Often, to our cost, we emotionally attach, addict to or depend on persons or substances that fulfill our wanting, nature disconnected senses. With respect to nature, we live in a state of Traumatic Psychological Shock (TPS). It pollutes healthy reasoning, environments and budgets. It is reversed by nurturing and restoring our 53 natural senses back to wellness and contact with Mother Earth. We lose conscious contact with our planetary home and community.

Our study of 4237 participants shows that psychologically, our excessive indoor upbringing makes us indoor addicts. Our earth separated new brain literacy overpowers our natural thinking processes. Through TPS, it subdues eons of natural beauty, balance and profound old brain sensitivities. Nature-assaulting stories flood our consciousness, overriding, rather than integrating, the web of life's intelligent contributions. Invasiveness and abusiveness often become our destiny. We live with, and act out, their stress and discomfort. We learn to shug our shoulders and say "That's life." Our nature-conquering society stops us from learning that "That's life within our Earth disconnected cultural cage and thinking."

In contrast, a student with a high Globally Balanced Thinking Score did a nature connecting activity on the Introductory Course. Consider the following repeatable, teachable, discovery that resulted. What might Earth and our interpersonal relationships be like if many people learned to do and teach these activities?

Materialism and Consumerism:
"As I continued the forest activity, I found myself attracted to the various songs of the birds and then gradually to the various stones and nuts and shells in the path. I would stop in the path, pick up the stone, admire its beauty and then feel clearly called to return it to its appropriate place. So often other times I have felt I needed to put it in my pocket and carry it home. Now I had a real sense of appreciating each rock, each shell, each leaf in its place for the time I was there. I felt suddenly freed from the need to possess something. I had a growing sense of letting it be and to just be still and glory in the fullness of the moment. As I allowed myself to connect, appreciate, thank and move on with so much of what surrounded me, I felt a letting go into being present. In this transformation, I began to feel a part of the scene more and not my other self that needed to possess. I learned that I do not need to possess something to have the joy of it."


Studies that you may revisit show that the Natural Systems Thinking Process inexpensively reverses TPS. It strengthens creativity, critical thinking and self-esteem. Environmental literacy, citizenship, and learning abilities increase while apathy and "extravagant clear cutting" wanes. Not surprisingly, test results affirm observations that the process reduces our abuse of Earth and people as well as substance abuse, depression, sleeplessness, anger and loneliness. The Process promotes local and global citizenship, the environment and the economy. Our spirit soars and natural areas gain added value.

I invite you to consider several other significant quotations from the email journals of Course participants that are located on this site

If you have done well in this course it indicates that you have developed a rare, nature connected, degree of consciousness and balanced relationships that can help others who seek it. Project NatureConnect welcomes your further participation to this end and will support your endeavors as best we can.

 

Below is a summary statement about this process followed by an agreement indicator. For future reference and growth, read the SUMMARY and then mark on the indicator the degree of agreement you have with the statement. Record and retain your score on a separate piece of paper.

SUMMARY U: The Natural Systems Thinking Process helps us offset our traumatic psychological shock and bring us into moments in balance with nature.

OPTIONAL: On a piece of paper, record the SUMMARY letter above (U) along with the number (below) that indicates your agreement with the summary statement.

1.........2..........3........4.........5.........6.........7.........8..........9.........10.
disagree..........................so partially agree...........................fffully agree

Your Score: You may determine your Nature Reconnection Fulfillment Appitude by adding up the scores of Q, R, S, T, and U, then doubling the sum. Make that number a percentage or a decimal number. It indicates your potential for enjoying the rewards of balanced personal and global thinking through the use of the Natural Systems Thinking Process. Repeat the activities offered in this Orientation Course and see if your Score rises and how that makes you feel. You may continue to increase your score through the additional courses, materials and degree programs offered by Project NatureConnect.

 

Optional Reading Bonus:
Take a wide-ranged look at the role of natural attractions.

 

Additional Training:
Sustain your supportive relationships, community and processes. A new interact group is presently forming to do the Introductory Course and you are welcome to join it individually or along with other members of this course. The Introductory course consists of learning the material in Reconnecting With Nature by applying the genuine first hand experience process you have learned in this Orientation course. If this is of interest to you sign up now while openings are still available. All you need do is contact the office and let us know to hold you a place. We will use your application on file for this course (please update it if it has changed) to place you on the next course, no further application is necessary.

NEXT STEP: Take me to the Orientation Course Evaluation Activities Page

 

Link out of order? Use the Index or the link sequence below.

Course Sequence Links:

INDEX | PROJECT | DESCRIPTION | GROUP PROCESS | PREREQUISITES | PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | SUMMARY | EVALUATION | ACTIVITIES | POST COURSE | RESOURCES |