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Accredited Nature-Connecting Sensory Ecopsychology Degree Courses On Line: Natural Career Education Personal and Professional Whole Life System Training Grants and Jobs.
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PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:
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As part of the life dance of Nature and Earth, moment-by-moment, we have fifty-four natural senses that are attached to all that has preceded us and all that follows us.
Our senses that have been wounded by abusive relationships remain wounded. When the incident is remembered, we feel and act out that abuse to avoid experencing the pain again, or we addictivly tranquilize it.
To avoid this destructive phenomenon, we can learn how to create therapeutic space for our injured senses to happily reattach to the healing wisdom of their origins in Nature’s self-correcting balance and beauty, backyard or back country.
Our human lives are born as very recent, language-gifted parts of Nature’s ancient and beautiful, yet language-absent life.
Habitually, our ego’s self-determined “superior intelligence” language/story about itself gives itself the right to convert 54/felt-sense Nature/Us into our questionable rules, abstracts and artificialities.
This process fixates us on our scientific stories as they excessively conquer, exploit and war against Nature around, in and as us. Moment by moment they prejudice us against what we label “uncivilized,” “illiterate” Nature. In addition, to avoid feeling the shame of this unreasonableness, we deny this prejudice while we watch our excessive demands for artificial sensory satisfactions make Nature deteriorate before our eyes. www.ecopsych.com/zombie2.html
Hard Science of The Senses
In Pristine Truth and Natureness, by senses I mean the wordless space-time energy that we register and label as feelings. They bring consummated attractions into
our consciousness For example, the sense of "thirst” alerts us to
our ancient and instant naturally established need or attraction for
water. This iimmediately affects the flow of our personal, local and
global water cycle.
“As
exemplified by the sensation of thirst, on cellular and molecular
levels, sensors (senses and their sensations) in an organism,
large(Earth) or small(nanobe), are genetically created receptors that
naturally
detect stimuli.
When the
information that our senses register is out of
balance, they become the main homeostatic driving force for change that
promotes life in balance. Their detection process is a fundamental
source that functions on mechanical, thermal and chemical levels as it
promotes the survival of life.
When they are not blocked or adulterated
by
nature-disconnecting stories the
senses can be depended on as
undeniable, self-evident, recovery and balancing tools."
"Through your 54 natural senses, in a natural area your life is as sensed, loved and balanced as part of the life of Earth as is the life of your fingers, heart and toes devoted to support your personal life."
- Project NatureConnect
Consider this link from How we can come to
our senses and Educating,
Counseling and Healing With Nature.
"My
lifelong communion with trees allows me to know them without sight or
language. The beautiful elucidation of fifty-four senses, below, has
given me gorgeous language with which to tell this love story, one I
have
struggled to share my whole life. I don’t want to ever sound
mysterious, or other worldly. For me this communication has just been a
fact of life. But how to explain it to others? I still feel there is an
element of my understanding that is nameless, and so loving it needs no
words. But to have a natural sense, new brain language to describe this
experience in a way others can understand, is lovely, just lovely."
"Our senses are the only things that register life in and around us. We build our thoughts, feelings and relationships on what they convey. When they are limited, warped or injured so are our lives and happiness.- Project NatureConnect
General Instructions
When you find a sense or sensation in a natural area, find its name and number on the list below and identify the sense as such. This is the strongest way to accurately connect your story way of knowing with the non-story, 53-sense, way Nature works in and around you.
YOUR MAVERICK GENIUS ALIVENESS: Identify and benefit from fifty-four natural attraction senses mission (Webstrings) you have learned to forget to remember.
From Reconnecting With Nature and Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature
by Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D.
Between the years of 1961-1978, researcher Guy Murchie made an exhaustive inquiry. He painstakingly scrutinized scientific studies about natural senses, studies that appeared in many hundreds of books and periodicals during those 17 years.
In 1986, after my National Audubon Society International symposium Is the Earth a Living Organism? Murchie told me that scientific methodology and research had identified over eighty different biological senses/sensitivities which pervade the natural world. He said he additionally verified this through authorities at the Harvard Biological Laboratories. All these senses, he said, he clumped together as 31 senses for literary convenience in his book The Seven Mysteries of Life published by Houghton Mifflin in 1978.
Murchie's dedicated efforts deserve our applause, thanks and trust.
From Murchie's original collection, I identified 53 (now 54) natural senses, webstrings that my students and I had experienced during my 26 years living and teaching on education expeditions outdoors year round. These senses are undeniable truths because we experience them, they are self-evident, genetic properties that we hold. For this reason I warranty the reality of their existence and I have listed them below. Each is trustable in the moment in concert with all of the others. They include the senses of reason, consciousness and literacy.
Every natural sense is an alive and distinct sensation, an inherent natural attraction love that is conscious of what it is attracted to. Each is a strand in the web of life, a genetically rooted webstring that helps to hold the life of the world together in balance, including people, through universal natural attraction communications, guidance and motivations. They are as much a part of any time/space moment of the life of our Planet and Universe as is anything else.
Each sense is a consciousness of our personal love for the life of our planet mother, Organism Earth, that is shared by all. Conscious or sub-conscious, each sense is a variety of felt-sense actualization of the love essence that Eric Fromm called "biophilia," the attraction to all that is alive including the Universe.
The experience of making conscious sensory contact with the Unified Field essence in a natural area blends our senses with the area's peace and power. We heal by becoming conscious of self-correcting attractions there that recycle, transform and peacefully unite our disruptive differences.
Consciousness is but one of 54 natural attraction senses that we share with Nature and that register it. Because the natural world geologically proceeded our recent appearance, what we sense in a natural area is what is doing the sensing. This is a scientific actualization of Panpsychism via self-evidence.
The story world of our Ego, and in general, forgets that the Ego is wearing nature "glasses" that scientifically consist of 54 self-evident attraction sensitivities. Without them it could not sense anything about the balanced and self-correcting dance of the natural world, in and around us. Sensory-deficient glasses that omit from our relationships the existence or homeostatic natural intelligence and consciousness of any of these 54 sensitivity groups produces our unbalanced ways and disorders. We correctly call such stories senseless or non-sense.
If they had the ability to label, the non-story members of the Unified Field's web of life might identify their more than 54 natural attractions, since or before the Big Bang, as their instinct or intention to diversify in the attractive loving ways of the universe, moment by moment.
Our 54 natural senses, not our stories alone, are our way of registering the Unified Field and being in GreenWave communication with ourselves and others including the members of the Web of Life.
The 54 are a multisensory, non-story intelligence that flourishes now as it did before the arrival of humanity. (See balanced sensory wisdom and community relationships in action with the Slime Mold and its food. Learn how and why Nature works cooperatively, even mathematically, in and around us, that our prejudicial stories describe as competition and survival by conquest.)
Objective science produces our amazing technologies and contemporary life by using only 8 natural senses. It omits our 46 other natural attraction senses because they are "subjective" meaning that they can't be measured. This makes Objective Science only a 15 percent accurate whole life science and that inaccuracy produces our runaway problems, in spacetime "100% now" terms, 850% less effective and organic than it could be.
Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson, an accomplished expert in 5-leg thinking, science and speculation, went on a camping trip. They pitched their tent in an open area and turned in for a good night’s rest. In the middle of the night Holmes awakened the good Doctor.
“Watson,” Holmes queried, “What do you see and what do you deduce?”
Watson rubbed his eyes, looked at the open sky and replied, “I see the sky and I deduce that among all the planets and stars in the heavens there must be some planets like Earth. And if there are planets like Earth there is a high probability that there is life out there.”
Holmes repled, “WATSON, YOU KNUCKLEHEAD! Somebody stole our tent!”A 54th sense, "natural attraction" has recently been added. All 54 of them are the diversification of the original life attraction/intention instinct that is the source of homeostasis, the Grand Unified Field of Higgs and Einstein that interconnects the life of the Universe. It makes our 54 senses expressions of the "Hugs" Boson or Field.
As a quiet visit to a natural area demonstrates, whenever our natural attractions in nature genuinely connect our psyche with the web of life, it restores our natural senses and their self-correcting ways. They, in turn, transform our disorders into unified healthy relationships. The latter contain the balance, cooperation and unconditional love that the life of nature's spirit shares with us to sustain life in peace. This is universal intelligence because whatever any of our 54 senses find attractive in a nature is what is doing the finding.
"Our leaders seldom teach us that, scientifically, Natural Attraction is the essence of the Unified Field of our Big Bang Universe as well as the essence of life, love and unity. The six are fundamentally identical and interchangeable synonyms. This suggests that God is the love of all things for each other everywhere."
- Michael J. Cohen
There are, of course, many more that 54 additional natural sensitivities found in the life of nature that humans do not naturally need to register for survival. Ultra violet light and high frequency sounds are prime examples.
Most misunderstood are the naturally attractive contributions of the discomforting senses like pain, distress and fear. We often forget that we might seriously burn our hand on a hot stove if pain did not lovingly signal and motivate us to immediately find some other more attractive place to place our hand. Each of these senses (25-27) serves as an attractive and welcome intelligence, a motivating signal from nature to find additional webstring attractions to support our lives (See Chapter 13 in Reconnecting With Nature).
Although Ames, Gesell, Pearce, Rivlin, Gravelle, Samuels, Sheppard, Sheldrake, Spelke, LePoncin, Wynn and many scores of other researchers have, since Murchie, further validated our multisensory nature, the full significance of it has yet to be recognized by contemporary society. Our prejudicial addiction to our nature-separated lives and thinking keeps webstring natural attraction senses and their value hidden from our immediate awareness. For this reason they and we are frustrated by great dissatisfactions and very challenging problems.
“My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me. The Earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. I can remember how I was astonished.”
- Thoreau
Our economy fuels itself by keeping the life of our 54 webstring senses discontent, further irritating them through advertising and then selling us products that satisfy our irritation. However, when unadulterated, our natural attraction webstrings are an essence of nature in action. Each of them attracts our consciousness to the whole life of the natural webstring world and its self-correcting ways, and this includes the natural systems in ourselves and other people.
Each natural attraction sense is an intelligence that helps us sense and feel the life of Planet Earth as our other body and mother.
Whenever our society encourages our new brain story to conquer the life of nature and the natural, we learn to conquer and subdue our 54 natural senses and their expression of our genetic makeup.
Our 5-leg, abstracting, nature disconnected, objective sense of reason, exalts the few senses that our materialistic stories use to take over our 47 other natural senses and the life of the Nature.
We exploit and demean the remaining 47 natural senses as "subjective," not-scientific. However their 4-leg, sensing/feeling ways tell us about how the life of the natural world works its perfection and enables us to participate in the process. This absurd disconnection makes us only 15 percent whole life intelligent. It explains why we can identify but seldom solve problems in a balanced way.
Overwhelmed and numbed, our webstring senses are a vast missing part of a responsible story about the life of Earth, ourselves and community, about how and when to act where. Without the aliveness of webstrings registering in consciousness we are "half vast."
As Carl Jung and others have noted, our abstract thinking is no more reasonable or discriminating, logical and consistent than are our feelings.
Nature has taught me that our abstract "5-leg" thinking in conjunction with conscious sensory "4-leg" contact with attractions in natural areas can be the "9-leg" way we learn to put our natural senses into culturally reasonable words.
Our challenge is to recognize that the excessively nature separated parts of ourselves and our culture are unreasonable.
We desperately need to think with nature's wise ability to maintain and restore life, without producing our problems. Applying that 54 sense homeostatic wisdom prevents and stops our society's destructive actions against ourselves others and the environment.
"So I asked him 'What is Gravity?' and he explained it as a physical force that Isaac Newton discovered. He disbelieved when I told him it was a sense, so I asked him to pay no attention to his sense of Gravity (#12) and he soon ended up lying flat on the ground. You try it with yourself or others. We are in trouble because we also learn to ignore the truths and sensibility of our 45 other senses.
This new frontier of mine is so hidden that it is seldom even recognized as a frontier."
- Michael J. Cohen
The absence of more than 45 sensory webstrings from the life of our conscious thinking is the mother of our collective madness, of our runaway wars, pollution, dysfunction, disease, mental illness,
apathy, abusiveness and violence. Without experiencing these unifying webstrings, our consciousness abandons our natural sensory "inner child," and the inner child in other people and species. It hurts and disintegrates the creative sensory passions that normally bring about community, balance and positive change peacefully.
Anybody can choose to help reverse this destructive situation by choosing to learn and teach how, via the Web of Life Imperative, to reconnect with webstrings and nature.
Our 54 natural senses in the congress of homeostasis are our Rosetta Stone of Universe, a pilot wave that enables us to register the same information in different languages, sensations and senses, a key to modern understanding, unification and conflict resolution. It enables an eye, that can see the world but can't see itself, to see itself via 54 "invisible" senses.
I offer the following list of 54 natural senses with this important reminder: Each sense is a distinct, alive 4-leg webstring attraction that in nature has no name for itself, for nature does not use stories, names or labels.
Each webstring can energize the life of many natural parts of us when we use it to connect with the natural world in the environment and people. That touchy-feely, hands-on, 54 sense connecting experience, not this list of senses, catalyzes personal wisdom, growth and balance.
This list only provides information in 5-leg story language. It brings it on our screen of consciousness and feeds and guides our senses of reason and language, our story way of knowing. However, without passion (apathy), 5-leg reason and language are ineffective when it comes to disengaging our habitual and destructive bonds so we may enjoy responsible behavior, growth and change.
For example, even though cigarette labels and research show cigarettes to be harmful, many people continue to smoke them. Reason and language are only 4% of our inherent means to know and love nature's life and each other. Our 52 other 4-leg sense groups complete the process. Without them awake and well in our consciousness, we experience apathy and hurt, we don't participate and our problems continue.
Nature centered 9-leg thinking uses the list of senses, below, in conjunction with visiting natural areas and creating safe moments and space for our indoor conditioning to learn and relate through 54 natural senses in us that we may awaken in nature. To do this is reasonable, for after we experience a natural sensory attraction, knowing and speaking its right name places that sensation in our new brain consciousness. There we can think with it and be motivated by its wisdom. This process non-verbally connects, rejuvenates and educates us. It extends us to safely reach into the natural world in order to more fully sense and make sense of our lives and all of life. It works because once we experience the balanced life of nature's restorative process and wisdom, we own it. We never fully return to our former way of knowing.At birth, some or all of our 54 natural attraction senses begin registering self-evident information about the world. When they register flawed information about Nature accompanied by rewarding love/survival they can attach or addict to that short circuit and its harmful consequences for life.
ECHN enables us to beneficially reconnect our misled sense(s), including our sense of reason, with Nature at any point in our lives and reasonably transform the our Earth Misery short circuit into how to deal with it.
Our nature-disconnected stories isolate us from the whole of life and its self-correcting ways. These 54 natural sense groups reconnect your life with the balanced and beautiful whole life of our planet. Make sense of nature in and around you. You may copy and print out this list to accompany you in a natural area. You may get CEU or academic credit for doing this.
The Fifty Four Natureness Webstring Self-Evident Senses and Sensitivities
The Radiation Senses
1. Sense of light and sight, including polarized light.
2. Sense of seeing without eyes such as heliotropism or the sun sense of plants.
3. Sense of color.
4. Sense of moods and identities attached to colors.
5. Sense of awareness of one's own visibility or invisibility and consequent camouflaging.
6. Sensitivity to radiation other than visible light including radio waves, X rays, etc.
7. Sense of Temperature and temperature change.
8. Sense of season including ability to insulate, hibernate and winter sleep.
9. Electromagnetic sense and polarity which includes the ability to generate current (as in the nervous system and brain waves) or other energies.The Feeling Senses
10. Hearing including resonance, vibrations, sonar and ultrasonic frequencies.
11. Awareness of pressure, particularly underground, underwater, and to wind and air.
12. Sensitivity to gravity.
13. The sense of excretion for waste elimination and protection from enemies.
14. Feel, particularly touch on the skin.
15. Sense of weight, gravity and balance.
16. Space or proximity sense.
17. Coriolus sense or awareness of effects of the rotation of the Earth.
18. Sense of motion. Body movement sensations and sense of mobility.The Chemical Senses
19. Smell with and beyond the nose.
20. Taste with and beyond the tongue.
21. Appetite or hunger for food, water and air.
22. Hunting, killing or food obtaining urges.
23. Humidity sense including thirst, evaporation control and the acumen to find water or evade a flood.
24. Hormonal sense, as to pheromones and other chemical stimuli.The Mental Senses
25. Pain, external and internal.
26. Mental or spiritual distress.
27. Sense of fear, dread of injury, death or attack.
(25-27 are attractions to seek additional natural attractions in order to support and strengthen well-being, attractions to run for your life. They are part of Nature's attractive dance, not "repulsions" )
28. Procreative urges including sex awareness, courting, love, mating, maternity, paternity and raising young.
29. Sense of play, sport, humor, pleasure and laughter.
30. Sense of physical place, navigation senses including detailed awareness of land and seascapes, of the positions of the sun, moon and stars.
31. Sense of time and rhythm.
32. Sense of electromagnetic fields.
33. Sense of weather changes.
34. Sense of emotional place, of community, belonging, support, trust and thankfulness.
35. Sense of self including friendship, companionship, and power.
36. Domineering and territorial sense.
37. Colonizing sense including compassion and receptive awareness of one's fellow creatures, sometimes to the degree of being absorbed into a superorganism.
38. Horticultural sense and the ability to cultivate crops, as is done by ants that grow fungus, by fungus who farm algae, or birds that leave food to attract their prey.
39. Language sense, used to express feelings and convey information in every medium from the bees' dance to uniquely human articulation, stories and literature.
40. Sense of humility, appreciation, ethics.
41. Senses of form and design.
42. Sense of reason, including memory and the capacity for logic and science.
43. Sense of mind and consciousness.
44. Intuition or subconscious deduction.
45. Aesthetic sense, including creativity and appreciation of beauty, music, literature, form, design and drama.
46. Psychic capacity such as foreknowledge, clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychokinesis, astral projection and possibly certain animal instincts and plant sensitivities.
47. Sense of biological and astral time, awareness of past, present and future events.
48. The capacity to hypnotize other creatures.
49. Relaxation and sleep including dreaming, meditation, brain wave awareness.
50. Sense of pupation including cocoon building and metamorphosis.
51. Sense of excessive stress and capitulation.
52. Sense of survival by joining a more established organism.
53. Spiritual sense, including conscience, capacity for sublime love, ecstasy, a sense of sin, profound sorrow and sacrifice.
54. Sense of homeostatic unity, of instinctive natural attraction aliveness and survival. The singular Natureness essence-diversity attraction dance mother of all our other senses (NNIAAL) and the Big Bang in this now moment. The love of love, (See NNIAAL equation and its operation in microorganisms.)Again, the core principle is simply that whatever any of our 54 senses find attractive in nature is what is doing the finding and attraction is conscious of what it is attracted to so it can attach to it.
This list explains how, sense by sense, nature 9-leg connects with itself in us, through us and to people and places around us. It suggests that we can consciously engage in this process. It validates Dr. David Viscott's proposal that feelings are the truth, that we don't live in the real world when we ignore what we are feeling. Our nature-separated lives disengage and de-energize these senses. Applying the organic psychology of the Natural Systems Thinking Process allows nature, the mother of these senses and feelings, to nurture and strengthen them, to rejuvenate them to normal. The process gives them enough energy to appear on our nature desensitized screen of consciousness and green our thinking.
"Feelings are a bodily thing, and respecting them is called, and is, kindness."
- A. S. Byatt
By not incorporating our 54 natural attraction senses in his deliberations, Albert Einstein was limited and unable to "prove" or demonstrate his Grand Unifiied Field Theory with Physics and mathematical equations. He seemed unaware that his heroic attraction, self-defense and attempts to do this was the orgasmic "Grand Unified Field" expressing itself in and through him, moment by moment.
Our challenge, as was Einstein's, is to let our senses help us act based on their self-evident, unifying properties to contradicting and limited stories along with their detrimental results."
Individuals trained in ECHN will enable the world to build peaceful, green, relationships and economies because our natural senses have unifying powers. If you want to best register and know what they and you are, if your are attracted to reading to the end of this sentence, this attraction that your now experience is them in action.
The Senses at Home in Nature:
"The
experience I’m recalling is a trip I took with a friend to Mt Lemmon in
Tucson. After a half mile hike back into the forest at the 9,000 foot
in elevation level we found a mammoth rock. It was the size of a house
and half buried in the earth. We both laid on our brother rock for
about 20 minutes. It was a cool sunny (one cloud) day and we were
surrounded by a forest of massively beautiful pine trees.
The
rock was oh so warm and comforting to embrace as the sun shone on my
body.The contrast of the warm rock and the cool breeze was so
wonderful. Wind softly blowing in my ears. The ultimate reward was
loosing all my stress and anxiety from my entire body. A physical
therapist would have charged me $150 to do what nature did for zip.
My
senses registered colors, sounds, feelings, aromas, sensations, moods,
contracts, textures, sizes, distance. I stopped controlling the
world and let mother earth breath for me. I felt the texture of the
rock and the sensation of holding up the world on my back. It was
weightless and comforting to support. The sounds of the nearby creek
and the many bustling creatures were a symphony of natures’ voices all
welcoming me to stay as long as wanted. The smell of pine was in the
air. All senses were on maximum open channel and I melted into moment
with ease.
It was only my natural sensory attraction
connections to the natural area that provided these rewards. I have
never, in all my years of public or higher education been taught
anything about what I just experienced.
AN ACTIVITY FOR
SENSING THE SENSES
"With
20 years experience with outdoor education and adventure based
learning, I have facilitated "willow in the wind" activities many
times. A person stands stiff in the center of a circle of people, close
their eyes and leans over as if to fall down. The people in the circle
prop up the middle person to prevent falling and state the name of the
natural sense they are attracted to and represent that is supporting
the person.
Unfortunately, I could not form a group at this time so I decided to
improvise as follows:
I discovered that properly functioning senses are essential for a meaningful and appropriately balanced life and require maintenance through frequent and experiential interaction with the natural world. The characteristics of western culture tend to diminish and distort the proper functioning of our 54 natural senses, which in turn distorts the accuracy of our perception and limits our whole life intelligence.
My experience with nature shows me that I am a person who gets good feelings from being outdoors in a natural area and who enjoys exercising my senses by interacting and connecting with natural objects in a natural area. I get pleasure from seeing a tiny snake using its tiny tongue to sense the area around it. I would be deeply distressed to lose my ability to experience being in tune with nature."
Anonymous Field Study Report
"To
experience the 54 senses, I hung out with the clouds today.
It
began this morning when Dave came back from his run saying that it was
going to be a pretty sunrise. Sure enough, he was right. We could not
stay content to view it from the inside of the house. So, we bundled up
and went out on the deck (sense of season).
The
sky was filled with pink multi-dimensional clouds that seemed to
radiate out from the mountain tops toward us, above us and all around
us (sense of light and moods attached to colors, space/proximity sense,
sense of form and design). Absolutely incredible!
"Wow!" I said
to Dave.
"It seems to be radiating right toward us."(language and articulation
sense & sense of self including friendship, companionship, &
power)
I
couldn't contain myself on the deck and found myself running through
the crisp morning air (sense of temperature,) to the top of the
ball field behind our house to get a clear view (sense of motion and
space and awareness of ones own visibility).
I
sang out my thanks and called out my request for permission to do the
nature-connecting activity (sense of emotional support, belonging,
support, trust,
thankfulness). As I twirled on the ball field, arms outstretched, the
sky turned from pink to gold (sense of motion, play, pleasure,
laughter, place, coriolus sense or awareness of effects of the rotation
of the Earth). The rising light danced off the expanding shapes.
I
called out loud, "Thank you dear clouds for helping us to feel our
connection to all things and to all living beings!!!!"(sense of
appreciation, humility, and ethics)
Dave called back from the deck his
expressions of appreciation as well.(aesthetic sense, appreciation of
beauty)
I
felt as if we were being sent a message that we were being watched over
and supported. (sense of intuition, deduction, sense of mind and
consciousness)
Quote:
"Yahweh not only was, or expressed the original desire to be, Yahweh
may also be the source of the exclamation 'Yahoo!' We consider
God to
be the essence of love and life and the word essence can mean 'to be
more fully."
When I experience these
53 senses and I write about my experience and share my
writing I
know I am being supported by nature.
This enhances my self-esteem and trustfulness
of nature. It
re-educates me to the fact that the power that flows through nature,
including me, cares....it cares about me. In turn I care about it and act
accordingly.
I awoke next morning feeling a greater trust in life.
In the trustable space in my mind, I
will put an image of me twirling under an
expanding pink and gold sky- to remind me of the sense of freedom and
awareness of support that comes from dancing in the 53 senses.
Love you guys so
dearly. Thanks for giving me your ears and hearts to share with."
This story is no laughing matter when you recognize that we are born with 54 natural senses and our scientific objectivity cuts us off from the natural world's subjectivity so our intelligence habitually thinks and relates with the nonsense of only eight of the 54.
A scientist put a frog on the ground and said "Jump frog jump". The frog jumped four feet. The scientist wrote in his notebook, "Frog with four feet, jumps four feet."
The scientist cut off one of one of the frog's legs and said "Jump frog jump". The Frog jumped three feet. The scientist wrote in his note book, "Frog with three feet, jumps three feet."
So the scientist cut of another leg and said "Jump frog jump". The scientist wrote in his notebook "Frog with two feet, jumps two feet."
The scientist cut off one more leg and said "Jump frog jump". The Frog jumped one foot. The scientist wrote in his notebook, "Frog with one foot, jumps one foot."
The scientist cut off the frog's last leg and said "Jump frog jump". The frog did not jump so the scientist said "Frog jump. Frog jump. FROG JUMP!" Nothing happened. The scientist wrote in his notebook, "A frog with no feet, goes deaf."
Planet Earth has a life. It and we are in trouble because our sensitivities to its life in and around us has been removed from our awareness by ECH without Nature. Fortunately, the whole-life art and science of ECHN makes time and space for sensory contact with natural areas to regenerate our deadened senses back into our thoughts and relationships.
Experiential and Literature Observations by Project NatureConnect graduate students, for each of the 53 natural senses, validate the senses, as exemplified in the descriptions of the three, below, none of which is one of the "five senses."
REFERENCES:
Takemura, S. (n.d.). A
sense for reading the atmosphere, Retrieved November 8, 2006, from the
World Wide Web:
http://www.sensorium.org/linkedsense/library/air.html
Robbins,
L. (1994, April). Precipitating factors in migraine: A retrospective
review of 494 patients. Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, 34
(4), 214.
References and Bibliography
Cohen, M. J. (1995) Why Don't We Create Moments That Let Earth Teach Us?Cooperative Learning: Vol. 15 No 2 Santa Cruz, CA: International Association for the Study of Cooperation in Education.
,
Cohen, M. J. (1995). Counseling and Nature: The greening of psychotherapy.Interpsych Newsletter, http://www.ecopsych.com./counseling.html
,
Cohen, M.J. (1995A). Are You Missing the Missing Link? Proceedings, October, 1994 Conference of the Coalition for Education in the Out Of Doors, Friday Harbor, Washington: World Peace University Press.
,
Cohen, M. J. (1994). Well Mind, Well Earth: 107 Environmentally Sensitive Activities for Stress Management, Spirit and Self-Esteem. Friday Harbor, Washington: World Peace University Press.
,
Cohen, M. J. (1994a). The Distinguished World Citizen Award: Responsible fulfillment and guidance from nature connections, Taproots. Fall 1994, Cortland NY, Coalition for Education in the Out of Doors.
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Cohen, M. J. (1994b). Validations: The experience of connecting with nature, (Tech. Rep. No 21). Friday Harbor WA: World Peace University Press, Department of Integrated Ecology.
,
Cohen, M. J. (1993). Integrated Ecology: The Process of Counseling With Nature. The Humanistic Psychologist, Vol. 21 No. 3 Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
,
Cohen, M. J. (1993A). Green in green (Tech. Rep. No. 18) Friday Harbor WA: World Peace University. Department of Integrated Ecology.
,
Cohen, M. J. (1993B) Counselling with Nature: Catalyzing Sensory Moments that Let Earth nurture. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1, Abingdon Oxfordshire UK: Carfax Publishing.
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Readily available, online, natural science tools for the health of person, planet and spirit 360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com The Natural Systems Thinking Process Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director send email
|
The Nature Of Nine Leg Knowing. How Do We Belong and Heal?
|
"Ishi, (the last
hunter-gather Native American) was sure he knew the cause of our
discontent. It stemmed from an excessive amount of indoor time. 'It is
not a man's nature to be too much indoors.'" "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." |
Because we live in a nature-separated society, we seldom learn that it is the personal and collective relationship of our mind with nature that determines our sanity, our future and the future of the earth. Much has been written about how we need to help the planet regenerate itself. Too often we overlook that restoring it is the lasting means to improve the environment of our mind, our wellness and our destiny.
How conscious are we about the interactions of our mentality with the natural world? How do we passionately incorporate nature's intrinsic health and recuperative powers into our sense of self, other and livelihood? Do we acknowledge this deep and penetrating partnership in a renewable path to sustainability that serves people, the environment and peace?
These are compelling questions for us as our society is in denial of our mentality's relationship with nature and we face a most precarious future.
We Lose What We Most Love
As nature's resources are diminished so is the quality of our lives as
part of nature. As the quality of our lives diminish, we become
desensitized and fearful. We further lose touch with our natural
ability to connect to the web of life within which we are so
intricately bound. It becomes a cycle of loss. The nurturing link
between our human lives and our earthly home gets broken. We are driven
to seek more and more satisfaction in the material world, which means
we consume more and more of the resources we need to sustain natural
world and our inborn love of it. We get further and further away from
our innate sense of meaning and being. We lose what we most love-about
ourselves, the world to which we belong and our sense of the sacred in
everyday life.
Nature's Saving Grace
In these difficult times, we are virtually on the edge of losing our
ability to save both ourselves-and our earthly home. Yet the saving
grace is simple: We will save what we love. And when we learn how to
stop long enough to genuinely reconnect to the nurturing sustenance of
nature, we emotionally reconnect to what is most deeply satisfying in
our human experience-belonging. We re-learn to love the very essence of
who we are as living breathing perfect beings on a living breathing
perfect planet. It is a generative partnership that happens when we
reawaken and enliven all our senses with the awareness of nature's
grace, intelligence and sustenance. We find and feel that we, too, are
part of the very grace and intelligence we celebrate in nature. We
belong. Because this reconnecting process is often foreign to
contemporary life, an enabling tool has been devised to help us engage
in the process.
Restoring Our Sensory
Connections To Nature's Renewing Powers.
Project NatureConnect, a pioneering process in environmental psychology
and education, has developed an ecopsychology program that is first of
all committed to helping us-as individuals-restore our connection to
our place in nature's transcending grace. Then, through its sensory
nature-connecting, ecotherapy activities, we learn how to genuinely
unite our thinking to the web of life that is always around us, always
nurturing us, always waiting to help us wake up. We help ourselves bond
to living in awareness and equilibrium with nature, in hope and in
love. Living in that organic awareness we create a lasting future for
our loved ones and for our extended human and ecological family.
The Organic Science of Nature's
Regenerative Ways.
Backyard or back country, the idea and goal of Project NatureConnect is
special because it is doable by choice. It offers a web of
possibilities-for everything from personal growth, stress management
and depression recovery to professional gain. It is based on the
NatureConnect work developed by Michael J. Cohen over a span of 50
years of studying, teaching, writing about and experiencing the
regenerative power of our natural experience in the natural world. His
work is a science and an art, the result of decades of practice working
with communities of people in natural areas, all culminating in a
process that helps us recover what it is we have forgotten, what it is
we love, what it is we can save. (www.ecopsych.com)
Healing Our Relationships
It is time for us to come out from behind the addictive socializing and
economic forces that keep the environment of our mind disconnected from
the Earth and each other. It is time to re-learn how to let the wisdom
and renewing energies of nature transform our destructive patterns into
balanced and loving relationships that can help restore both personal
worth and global harmony.
| "The
indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and
rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford
forever!" -Henry David Thoreau, Walden |
- from Janet Thomas Author, The Battle in Seattle
Act now: courses, degrees, grants, recovery coaching
The Essence of the Nine-Leg Equation
This tool offers a powerful process that deals with the problems of inspiration hope and integrity through books degrees and courses online
It is a health improvement formula that strengthens your vote, conflict resolution and nature healing as well as restores balanced relationships free of stress and dysfunction to earth, peace and environment workers.
This power equation contains the genius and support of Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau for use in self-help and supporting hope, cooperation, research psychologists, naturalists and good government,
It acts as a health and life experience intelligence that increases resilience, friendships, love wellness ethics education awareness counseling citizenship transformation and constructive bonding.
It rejuvenates anxiety burnout suffering disorder abnormalities that deteriorate mental health social justice peace community trust economics and cooperation.
Act now: courses, degrees, grants, recovery self-help
How does the Nine-Leg Balance of Life Equation help you improve the quality of your life and all life?
-Enjoy 53 sensory parts of
nature, like thirst, each a distinct way of knowing and relating that,
when intact, helps us sustain the wellness, balance and resilience of
natural systems in us and the environment.
-Transform the abnormal, desensitized corporation economics and other
omissions in the way our nature-disconnected society teaches us to
think.
-Rejuvenate natural life sensitivities and Earth-integrated, whole ways
of knowing
-Master how to reconnect your mentality to its nurturing origins, to
the regenerative vigor, sustainability and integrity of nature.
-Help yourself, and those close to you, benefit from the renewal that
lies in the magnificence of a beautiful day, the wisdom of an ancient
tree and the fortitude of a weed.
-Through life experience discover how to let the "higher power" in
nature's healing energies help your thinking transform your stress,
disorders, suffering and harmful bonds into constructive personal,
social and environmental rewards.
Strengthen your inborn natural genius.
-Use powerful tool and process books, degrees and courses to tap into
potent self-help healing and conflict resolution powers of nature.
-Research and restore forty-eight inherent sensory intelligences into
your awareness that we normally learn to deny and subdue so they
deteriorate.
-Enjoy community ways of knowing and relating that, when intact,
sustain the wellness, peace, balance. health and resilience of natural
systems within and around us.
-Quadruple the power of your vote.
-Realize more completely your hopes and values.
Increase your resilience, support, social justice and friendships.
-Reduce stress, anxiety, burnout, dysfunction and loneliness.
-Improve your ability to think clearly and implement the power of love.
-Strengthen personal, environmental, coaching and government wellness.
-Produce cooperation and responsible professional opportunities and
ethics.
-Discover environmentally sound directions goals and satisfactions
-Enjoy nature-connected education, psychology and healing courses and
degree programs
-Increase personal and global peace and inspiration while reducing
dysfunction.
Add important new self-improvement dimensions to counseling, healing
and citizenship relationships.
Act now: courses, degrees, grants,
recovery coaching
Open Articles and Letters
Nature's Grace: A Nine-Leg Equation Provides an Answer to Hopes, Prayers and Dreams.
Dear Editor
The lack of finding inner peace, sustainable economics, trust, social justice and personal and environmental wellness had alarmed me. I sought and finally found a tool that transformed my depressing stress and anxiety into responsible stability. I thought I was stressed because the more I became aware of the destructive things happening to Earth and to people and places I loved, including myself, the greater became my lack of hope and feeling either mad, sad or depression. This divorced me from both my spirit and partner. I felt anger with God and beauty, a fear and disrespect of God for letting so much war, suffering and environmental deterioration occur that I was powerless to change. In time, I became aware that I was in denial. I denied that I, like many others, had an addiction to immediate rewards from my dysfunctions. They robbed me of the resilience to tolerate what I could not change. In fear, I came upon the description, on this page, of an amazing equation that combines the genius of Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau. Lost in depression, I only paid attention to it because it received super positive reviews from many conferences, spiritualities and publications that I respected, especially Psychology Today, Humanistic Psychology and the Journal of Environmental Education. In retrospect, it was a love answer from nature's grace and beauty to my hopes, prayers and dreams.
Mr. Editor, Does writing about this make sense to you? Isn't it something your readers can benefit from?
Charles Drew, Acton
Act now: courses, degrees, grants, recovery self-help
The Equation for Personal Growth and Self-Improvement
A Sensory Education and Counseling Tool Strengthens Holistic Health, Inner Peace and Sustainability
Although we are part of nature, we are normally educated to spend, on average, over 95 percent of our time and 99 percent of our lives thinking and feeling while separated from nature's grace, beauty, and restorative powers. Our mentality's profound loss of nature divorces us into apathy through denial. We deny that we are rewarded for fearing and exploiting, rather than embracing, the supportive ways of our planetary mother and her kingdoms. We deny that we are psychologically addicted to nature-disconnected thinking that creates our personal, social and environmental dysfunctions.
Contemporary society has taught us to be experts in conquering nature, including the balanced ways of our natural self and its love of nature. The result: because we don't protect what we don't love, nature, our collective sustainability and our personal wellness suffer. To stop this insanity the Einstein-Thoreau Equation makes readily available the means to genuinely connect our thinking and feeling to Mother Nature's recuperative powers, perfection and love of us as her children. Using the Internet as a learning tool, we tap our psyche into nature's beautiful sane and balanced web of life that produces an optimum of diversity and benefits without producing garbage, a web some people call God (www.ecopsych.com).
Through easily learned, nature-connected Organic Psychology methods and materials, the Internet makes it possible for any individual, or 600 million people, to think in ways that invigorate resiliency and spirit and that reduce our addictive trespasses, denial and apathy. By genuinely reconnecting our thinking to natural systems we restore and trust more than forty-five natural senses that have been numbed out of our consciousness by our extreme disconnection from nature. The self-improvement renewal of these senses increases our sensitivity, sensibility and love energies. This ecopsychology helps unbalanced parts of our minds and hearts benefit from nature's ability to rejuvenate and balance itself, including us, for we are part of nature. We reduce our stress, depression and abusiveness. We transform our apathy into constructive participation. Backyard to back country,-we strengthen our life, our organizations and global society.
Act now: courses, degrees, grants, recovery coaching
An Equation Helps Us Meet Our Great Challenge
"Our body, mind, spirit and ability to love come into the world through nature. They are part of nature's beautiful perfection, wisdom and restorative powers. However, the extreme disconnection of our thinking from nature injures these attributes. Like tearing a leg from a live rabbit, we wound and damage our ability to think clearly. Its dysfunction deteriorates our wellness, our inner peace and the environment.
Our bonding and denial present us with great challenges. To replace our lost gratifications from nature, our socialization rewards our disturbed psyche to attach or addict to contemporary ways along with their destructive side effects. Our greatest challenge is that we learn to deny that the self-improvement means is available to reconnect our thinking with nature's regenerative powers and thereby co-create ourselves and the world in a peaceful balance that eliminates these side effects."
- Michael J. Cohen
Mood Disorders: Are You Suffering from Denial of Your Separation from Nature?
| Excessive separation from nature produces the discomforts of fatigue, apathy, stress, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, anger, mood swings, mistrust, loneliness, broken relationships, destructive dependencies and sleep, eating, learning and attention disorders |
2. Because we are members of a nature-disconnected society in denial, we are psychologically bonded to our society's ways and we each suffer from and perpetuate the dysfunctions, insanity and discontents of our society.
3. Many people display mood disorder symptoms or other discontents that are not normally found in nature-connected people. These individuals are usually in denial that they suffer because they are, or have been, excessively separated from nature and its regenerative healing and restorative powers. The symptoms these individuals endure include the discomforts of fatigue, apathy, stress, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, anger, mood swings, mistrust, loneliness, broken relationships, destructive dependencies and sleep, eating, learning and attention disorders.
4. Contemporary society consciously and subconsciously socializes us to believe that nature is an enemy to overcome, conquer or develop.
| - We are in
denial that we mistakenly consider it progress and economically sound
to subdue natural systems within and around us and thereby lose the
resilience and immunity provided by the recuperative powers of these
systems. - We deny that if disconnection from nature produces discontents, that authentic reconnecting with nature enables nature's renewing powers to help us transform our discontents into happier, more reasonable, ways of being and relating. - We deny that nature-reconnecting tools are readily available to us and that we that can use them to help ourselves reverse our disorders. |
.
5. An individual that only addresses their personal dysfunctions without addressing the nature-disconnected roots of these dysfunctions too often furthers their and our problems as time passes.
Act now: courses, degrees, grants, recovery self-help
............................................................................
Although each of us is part of nature, our socialization erodes our personal, social, spiritual and environmental relationships because it excessively separates us from the recuperative qualities of nature. This disconnection causes us to lose the benefit of the purifying powers in nature that would ordinarily help us rejuvenate and regenerate our presently deteriorating thinking. Our relationships with ourselves, others and the environment would improve.
We live over 95 percent of our lives indoors, separated from nature; over 99 percent of our thinking is disconnected from how nature works to produce its non-polluting perfection. To our great cost, we omit nature's grace from our personal, social, spiritual and environmental lives.
At www.ninelegs.com a spectacular nature-reconnecting tool gives us the nine leg ability to tap into the unifying recuperative aspects of nature that sustain its balance and beauty.
Nine leg thinking and relating restores our power to co-create and sustain ourselves in balance with all of life.
The nine leg tool helps us reconnect ourselves to the nurturing biological and psychological origins of our mind over the eons. This improves our ability to think sustainably and improve our health and integrity. We raise our consciousness and can produce more rewarding, cooperative life-supportive relationships.
In as little as fourteen days most people can learn how to enjoy the benefits of thinking like nature works. Surely, this is as important and revolutionary as Einstein's e=mc2 or the discovery by Copernicus that Earth and we are neither the center nor most important thing in the Solar System.
"Even though I'm a nincompoop,
I'm not very special at all. Any dumbell can see the reason our major
problems don't subside. It's because our leaders don't resolve
conflicts or issues by using the extraordinary unifying and
strengthening powers of nine-leg thinking and relating. I don't use
them because I'm an idiot. But, what's their excuse, or, dare I ask,
what's yours?"
- Alfred E. Newman.
over
OTHER SIDE
"I find that being stupid makes
me really feel left out and different all the time. I just can't
register all the wonderful things that technology and the media provide
for the normal person. For example, I'm so retarded that I couldn't
even understand that E.T. was an extraterrestrial like Spielberg and
the movie and the stories said. To me, the powers E.T. had were the
same as those of Earth, he was just like the plant animal and mineral
community. Llike them, he was very vulnerable to technology. But I'm so
dumb that I thought then, and I still think today, that E.T. was a
terrestrial; he was Planet Earth. He was in no way so special as to
become a movie star. After all, doesn't Earth all the time do what he
did if we let it? Nine leg thinking lets us do that, too.
- Alfred E. Newman.
QUESTION: What is so important about nine-leg thinking?
ANSWER: Nine-leg thinking is a supportive, therapeutic key to creating personal happiness through a rewarding and sustainable future for all people and the planet.
To understand the momentous significance of nine-leg thinking, consider this intelligence test question regarding mathematical aptitude:
"If you count a normal dog's tail as one of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?"
"Five," of course, is the correct answer.
Intelligent people answer "five" because it is valid in mathematical and scientific reasoning. Society applauds and economically rewards us for giving correct mathematical or technological answers. But something is radically wrong with this answer; something is missing. Because, somehow, even a dog knows that a dog has four legs.
Our sense of reason recognizes five as correct only until we are greeted by our friendly family dog, or the mean mutt down the street. Five legs only works in theory. When we experience a real dog, or a wolf, or a centipede, or any other natural being, many of our inherent natural senses come into play: our senses of sight, touch, motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, fear, consciousness, community, trust, contrast, love, reason and recognition. Are you aware we have 53 natural senses?
No matter how conceptually clever we are with our five-legged thinking, it is our four-legged sensory awareness that grounds our experience in the true nature of reality. That reality knows any normal dog has no more than four legs and no matter how you look at it, a tail is not one of them.
When it comes to supportively relating in balance to nature and its systems around and within us, we rarely think in 9-leg (4-leg plus 5-leg) ways. We can kill or hurtfully stress a dog if we make it run too fast or too far because we think that it has five legs. Isn't that what we are doing to ourselves and the environment?
Nine-leg thinking and relating helps us come back into personal and environmental balance by revitalizing our multitude of natural senses through genuine contact with authentic nature.