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..TOPIC Environmental news and media: scientific
health, learning, spirit
..and parenting breakthrough
.
..March-December, 2005
..For immediate news and media release:
..By Mardi Jones, Ph.D.*
..CONTACT: Mike Cohen, 360-378-6313 nature@interisland.net
.
Dear Media Editor or Administrator,
I recognize that none of us,
including yourself, is immune to the destructive relationships
that undermine our society and happiness. However, even though
you are a product of them and, at times, inadvertently engaged
in them, surely you recognize that, as if insane, many parts
of contemporary education and socialization destroy the well
being of natural systems in us, systems that also support the
well-being our living planet and its life community. The noted
Ecological Psychologist, Dr. Michael J. Cohen, has identified
a horrific cause for this deterioration, one that is easily fixable.
Our major problem is an omission by the scientific community
in the way it explains how the world works. This omission has
us unnecessarily suffer many personal, social and environmental
dysfunctions. I write you because anybody can easily correct
this omission once they become aware of it. The wonderful benefits
from doing this speak for themselves.
I respectfully request that
you make an extremely important contribution to personal and
global sanity by helping people recognize and correct this omission.
A significant key to peace and wellness on Earth simply is to
let people know that they inherently contain what is needed to
implement peace and well being, and that a tool is readily available
to bring this overlooked part of themselves into play.
SYNOPSIS:
If you slice off part of a
ball, you make both the ball and the slice dysfunctional. Neither
will roll with the same perfection as when the ball was whole.
The same holds true for our excessively indoor lives and the
way their side effects injure us and Earth. Our social rewards
strongly condition us to stressfully slice our body mind and
spirit from the natural systems that sustain our living planet
and ourselves in a healthy balance. This makes us deny that this
is a real problem and that it can be corrected.
A new, powerful tool is readily
available that helps any caring person or institution address
our global disconnection tragedy and its destructive results.
Called the Natural Systems Thinking Process (NSTP), the tool
helps us genuinely reconnect our thinking and our destiny with
our planetary home and enjoy the benefits of greater wholeness,
belonging and person/planet restoration. Via the Internet, NSTP
increases our well being and our contribution to a healthier
world, by enabling us to visit authentic natural areas, backyard
or backcountry, and, in community, thoughtfully reconnect our
more than 45 disconnected natural senses with their origins in
the nurturing and recuperative powers of authentic nature. The
sensory recovery, fulfillment and resilience this produces reverses
the detrimental effects from us, on average, spending over 95
percent of our time and consciousness indoors, out of tune with
the perfection of nature's sanity, beauty and regenerative ways.
This is a practical, unifying contribution to solving many problems
we suffer because NSTP is beneficially added on to any discipline,
creed or endeavor.
In further explanation, please
permit me to share with you the following microcosm of our nature-disconnected
situation:
Each of us is born with the
innate capability to experience the sense of thirst, yet scientific
thinking has eliminated thirst from the description of how we
and the world function. For example, if you search the literature
that describes nature's water cycle or the web of life, you learn
how the world works with regard to water. It says the sun evaporates
water from the sea -> to form clouds -> that then rain
water upon the land. There, water flows through life forms, ->
nourishes and purifies them and itself, and then -> runs back
to the sea to start the water cycle again through the further
purification and evaporation.
.
Scientists recognize that as part of its natural system activities,
water flows through people, nurturing our life and removing our
waste products with which it feeds other life forms. But, deceptively,
their description omits that the sense/sensation of thirst is
part of how water's natural system works. If water did not exist,
the sense of thirst would never have evolved. Thirst attracts
water into us and the sense/sensation of excretion attracts water
and waste products to leave us. However, to our great loss, our
story about how the world works omits that our ability to sense
and feel the sensations of thirst or excretion is part of the
way that water flows and supports life in balance. Our thinking
and consciousness learn to omit that our sensations and feelings
with regard to thirst and excretion help water cooperatively
serve us and the rest of nature, that what we sense and feel
is part of the process.
.
In most descriptions of the water cycle, our society never identifies
the important role of the sense of thirst or excretion. Instead,
we learn to eliminate from our thinking our natural means to
sensuously register in our consciousness how we are part of the
water cycle and nature. This omission conditions our thinking
to disregard that our senses and feelings are not only ours,
that they are also part of the way the world supports life in
a healthy and peaceful balance. We therefore don't exclusively
own them, rather, we share them, along with most other things,
with global natural systems.
What is frightening is that
the illustration, above, is not an isolated case of sensory omission.
Dr. Cohen demonstrates that this same omission occurs with respect
to our natural ability to sense, feel and register over fifty
additional senses and natural systems that are equally as important
as "thirst" to the well being of life on earth, including
our lives. The fifty natural sensitivities he identifies include
the senses of community, place, beauty, trust, belonging, reason,
temperature, compassion, wholeness, nurturing, respiration, consciousness
and danger. Human thinking that includes most of our 53 natural
senses helps nature sustain our mind and spirit as part of its
perfection within and around us. But, we, including our scientists,
"objectively" do not learn to nurture our natural sensory
abilities and our major problems result. They are relatively
unknown in natural systems and nature-centered societies.
Cohen shows that our thinking's
omission of our many natural senses stressfully deteriorates
our psyche, lives and ability to relate to reality sensitively
and sensibly. For example, we live in the false belief that we
think and know through only five senses while fully aware that
none of the five is the senses of thirst or excretion. Being
short changed and desensitized in this way, our thinking neglects
to culture and nurture over 45 important natural callings that
would ordinarily help us sustain our sanity and balance with
natural systems within and around us. Instead, we learn to shut
down and/or trespass these natural senses and systems while we
applaud over 99 percent of our thinking being out of tune and
contact with nature's sanity, beauty and restorative powers.
A monumental nature-connected
thinking and learning process that Dr. Cohen has implemented,
called the Natural Systems Thinking Process, helps us overcome
our nature-disconnection disorder and come to our senses. This
tool enables us to know and benefit from the web of life by going
to authentic natural areas, backyard or backcountry and genuinely
reconnecting our natural senses to their nurturing origins and
recuperative powers in nature. This results in greater well being
for people and the environment since NSTP can be easily added
to any act or relationship.
NSTP deserves your attention
and support as an inexpensive and easily learned means to overcome
our disorders and dysfunction by coming to our senses. It reduces
health care costs and many other social welfare and environmental
budgets.
It takes extraordinary perception,
thoughtfulness and courage to bring Cohen's counseling, educating
and healing with nature tool to the attention of the public and
our leadership. I have written you because that kind of courage
seems to be your forte. I believe you can be of service and make
a distinct contribution by sharing this information with the
public and appropriate people you know who would welcome it.
Here's a scoop for you. On
March 7, 2005 the NSTP program will be additionally funded as
well as available for world-wide application via the Internet
through West Coast University, a distance learning program internationally
accredited by the International Council for Open & Distance
Education (ICDE), an agency recognized by UNESCO & UNO. (see
http://www.ecopsych.com/2005wcurelease.html
Dr. Cohen can be reached at
360-378-6313 nature@interisland.net
http://www.ecopsych.com
An article that encapsulates
NSTP is located at http://www.ecopsych.com/insight2005.html
KEY:
Online Information Guide
for Application and Admission
REFERENCES:
1. Article:
http://www.ecopsych.com/insight2005.html
2. Cohen:
http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
3. Senses:
http://www.ecopsych.com/insight53senses.html
4. Outcomes:
http://www.ecopsych.com/survey.html
5. Grants:
http://www.ecopsych.com/2005grantapplic.html
6. Organic
Learning:
http://www.organicpsychology.com/
Sincerely,
Mardi Berkhouse Jones
nature@interisland.net
Contact person:
Michael
J. Cohen
Director,
Project NatureConnect
360-378-6313
nature@interisland.net
http://www.ecopsych.com/
*Mardi Berkhouse Jones,
Ph.D. is an environmental
educator, writer and counselor who has pioneered the used of
applied environmental psychology and the Natural Systems Thinking
Process in her private practice in Western Washington State,
USA. and as faculty for Project NatureConnect, and Akmai and
West Coast University.
Recipient of the 1994 Distinguished
World Citizen Award, Ecological Psychologist Michael J. Cohen,
Ed.D. is a Director of the Institute of Global Education
where he coordinates its Integrated Ecology Department and Project
NatureConnect. He also serves on the faculty of Portland State
University, West Coast University and Akamai University. Dr.
Cohen has founded sensory environmental education programs independently
and for the National Audubon Society and Lesley University (AEI),
conceived the National Audubon Conference "Is the Earth
a Living Organism," and is the award winning author of the
Web of Life Imperative, Reconnecting With Nature and Einstein's
World. He is an accomplished folk song artist and contra
dancer who presents traditional music and ecology programs for
the U.S. National Park Service and Elderhostel on San Juan Island,
Washington.
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The Nature Of Nine Leg Knowing. How Do
We Belong and Heal?
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"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.'"
- Theodora Kroeber
"It is quite clear to
me after several years in the environmental movement that all
physical problems of man's impact on the environment - pollution
of the air and waters, the desecration of the land, the contamination
of the food chain - all start within the environment of man's
mind."
- Maurice Strong,
Founder or the United Nations Environment Program,
Co--chair of the Commission on Global Governance,
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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 theenvironment 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.
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"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
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Mood Disorders: Are You Suffering from
Denial of Your Separation from Nature?
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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 |
1. Contemporary society
and its citizens are in denial. We are aware that we are part
of nature and that although we are disconnected from nature,
we deny that this separation bears ill effects upon our physical
or mental health and inner peace. We are also in denial if we
know our separation from nature is producing destructive personal,
social and environmental disorders but we don't use readily available
nature-reconnecting tools to help us treat these 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.
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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
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Act
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.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.
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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
"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.
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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.
en furthers their and our problems
as time passes.
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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.
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