Nature Degree: Building Leader Vacation Norm; New Nicotine Smoke Worry Creature

Ten Reasons Why You Might Want to Try Ecopsychology in 2012

- Anonymous Project NatureConnect Participant

1.      It is simple. “Go to nature”. How many psychologies can be summed up in 3 words?

2.      It is natural. “As human beings in today’s new society, we live more than 95% of our lives inside of a building. We raise our families, educate ourselves, do our work, worship our gods and learn to think separated from nature. That is unnatural. The human being is the only creature on the planet that is so desperately nature deprived. No wonder we need our vacations and time in the back yard/ back country, at the lake, to renew our selves.

3.      It is inexpensive. No need to make appointments and fit it into your schedule. No need to get in your car and go someplace and worry about where you are going to park. We are so trained to fit nature into our schedules by our societal norm that we will have to fit it into the schedule to begin with. But as we grow in our ability to embrace nature and be embraced by nature we will grow in our understanding of how deprived we really are. It costs an individual or leader nothing to purposefully spend 10 minutes or more a day outside with nature. (Yes, even in the snowy cold of Minnesota, just dress appropriately). Maybe this is why people still smoke, just as much as they are addicted to the nicotine, they like the freedom to step outside someplace for 10 minutes a few times a day and get away from the rest of us. (Who’d of thought)? Many employees skip breaks, not smokers).

4.      It is all about me. As selfish as this may sound, it is true. The more new time we spend in nature, the healthier we become. The norm becomes to be more social, more cooperative with others, more creative, more at building peace with ourselves and with everyone we come in contact with. To quote from a few commercials, (“Try it, you’ll like it”. “I guarantee it!” “Just Do it”.)

5.      It is all about you. By taking care of my need to be connected with nature instead of separated, I am more able to be a leader and friend to meet other’s needs because I have serenity. We learn through nature and reason to live in the serenity we crave and are so desperate for. So desperate that we worry and seek other false ways to have the natural serenity that we can freely have by simply stepping outside and allowing this loving planet to embrace us with her beauty and natural wonders. Addictions are reduced, even arrested, and mental health is stimulated and improved by simply “going to nature”. It is evidence based!

6.      It’s all about us. I can’t do this without you and we can’t do it without each other and for sure, we can’t do it without nature. “Going green” is simply relearning what we have misguidedly set aside. Nature has no waste. This planet got along great without human beings for billions of years. We are responsible for all of the unnatural disasters the planet encounters these days. We are responsible to learn to cooperate and find our sanity again in nature. We have societies of creatures that have been on this planet far longer than we have to learn from.

7.      It is about cooperation, not competition. Dr. Michael Cohen has lived Eco psychology and shared it with millions in simple “back to nature” learning experiences. He inspires and delights students who humbly learn to “connect with nature” through developing our understanding of what it means to have 53 natural senses to live with rather than the 5 we give ourselves credit for and the mysterious 6th sense (that is actually at least 48 more senses that we can use when we acknowledge we have them).

As we learn to experience nature through the 53 senses, we learn to experience each other through the same senses. (we are nature too!) We learn to follow our natural attractions. “We learn and grow”, adapt if you will to the vacation of natural ways of living that we have unknowingly surrendered and stifled and smoke away as smokers. We learn by forming into small, natural cellular groups that explore experiment, share and become enlightened by each other’s shared experiences. We learn to reach consensus in conflict when decisions are required for the well-being of the group. We learn to cooperate with nature and each other rather than to compete, conquer and divide.

8.      It has the power to change. Eco psychology frees me to be the best me I can be. Without an appointment or nicotine it frees you to do and be the same as it respects our unique differences and helps us embrace our unique likenesses. When we are in accord and cooperating with each other, we can change the world one person at a time to grow in our understanding of how desperately nature deprived we are. I can’t change you and you can’t change me, but together, 2 or more working with nature, we, have the power to change the world.

9.      It will cost us everything. (I know what you are thinking. #3 says it is inexpensive, so how can it cost us everything)? Until we admit what a disastrous job we have done in destroying our planet and we learn to cooperate instead of compete with nature, we will continue to amass garbage and pollute the environment with no regard for the future of the planet. Until we understand that we have the power to turn around and humbly learn from nature (rather than trying to teach nature the way we humans think it should be), we will continue to pay the price of our own devastating destruction of this beautiful blue planet. Unless we change, we die. Change will cost us everything. Either we surrender everything we think we know so that we might gain a better understanding, or we pretend to surrender and we maintain our blind, fervent march towards total destruction. Nature changes continuously, cyclically, with rhythm, rhyme and reason, gracefully season by season. We have so much to learn.

10. It is about unconditional love. “To know her is to love her”. Who doesn’t love Mother Nature? Who doesn’t she love? The biggest bully in the sandbox still has a soft place somewhere in his heart for “mom”. All of the fish in the sea look up to her, prey and predator alike. She is connected through strings of the web of life with unconditional love to every fiber of this beautiful planet’s natural being and that includes you and me. We just have to recognize and acknowledge her free, unconditional love and work with her instead of against her. We don’t have to worship her. We simply have to let her be a nurturing, conscious part of all of our lives, to be more than a once a year vacation destination “sold to us” by a force that is greater than ourselves, our society as we know and understand society.

Nurture your felt love for Nature. Never deny it. That love is the eons, the purifying intelligence, beauty and diversity of Nature sustaining us in its perfection. Our excessive disconnection from this love produces our hurt, greed and destructiveness to ourselves and Nature. To regain our integrity we must learn how to engage in an easily accessible process, one that scientifically reconnects us to that love and restores its peaceful voice in our thoughts and soul, for we don't fight to save what we don't love.

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