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Project NatureConnect
Institute of Global Education
Organic Psychology
Special
NGO Consultant, United Nations Economic and Social Council
Practical distance learning to increase person/planet well being.
| SYNOPSIS: This report describes a funded Mother Earth sensory science in action. It discusses aspects an organic psychology tool that helps us improve health wellness and counseling by enabling our thinking and feeling to safely tap into the nature's grace, balance and restorative powers. Participants benefit from and strengthen their inborn love of nature as they master alternative therapist coaching, stress release management and holistic spiritual psychology. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: Educating Counseling and Healing With Nature Supportive Degrees, Career Training Courses and Jobs On Line Project NatureConnect offers nature-centered distant learning that enables you to add the benefits of nature-connecting methods and credentials to your degree program and/or your skills, interests and hobbies. We honor your prior training and life experience by providing grants and equivalent education credit for it. You may take accredited or professional CEU coursework and/or obtain a Nature-Connected Degree or Certificate in most disciplines or personal interests. A partial subject list is located at the bottom of this page.
ARTICLE: Origins of an Online M.S./Ph.D. Organic Psychology Program in Environmental Science and Education - Michael J. Cohen Organic Psychology and the Webstring Natural Attraction Ecology Model. HYPOTHESIS: Backyard or backcountry, by helping us use our natural attraction senses to make conscious sensory contact with the grace, balance and restorative powers of natural systems within and about us, Project NatureConnect's environmental education course “Psychological Elements of Global Citizenship” enables us to increase our wholeness. This contributes to strengthening our ability to reduce natural system dysfunction and increase personal, social and environmental well-being. The methods and materials I have designed over my lifetime in nature are offered in my five cooperative Project NatureConnect/Portland State University Online, Accredited, Educating Counseling and Healing with Nature Courses. They teach a sensory science that strengthens the flow of nature's balancing ways in our thinking and increases personal social and environmental well being. The psychology process in our online courses is organic. This means that within the life of our psyche, to improve our thinking, it strengthens nature's ability to recycle, remove, decompose or transform destructive thoughts and feelings and create new supportive relationships. The courses help students address a detrimental flaw in our mentality and relationships in industrial society. The flaw is that we do not live organic lives. To the contrary, on average, 95 percent of our time and over 99 percent of our thinking and feeling is disconnected from conscious sensory contact with the purifying and renewing life-flow of nature and the natural. This extreme separation deteriorates nature's ability to sustain its optimums of life in a balanced cooperative diversity that rarely produces garbage or pollution or our excessive abusiveness, disorders and mental illness. As I describe in the June, 2000 Greenwich Journal of Science and Technology, at birth we inherit nature's ways and wisdom because we are included in and part of the rejuvenating cyclic flow of nature's dance. To our loss, our excessive disconnection from nature's grace and restorative powers leaves vital parts of our psyche contaminated. This makes our thinking dysfunctional. We create troubles that we can't solve. Backyard or backcountry, the nature-connecting materials and activities in PNC courses enable us to help the dance of nature flow through and renew more than fifty natural senses that we ordinarily subdue by disconnecting them from their nurturing origins in the natural world. The courses help us reintroduce nature's self-correcting ways into our culturally molded consciousness. They enable us to experience our natural attraction senses and sensations as self-evidence, as sensory facts whose effects we can validate as empirical knowledge. By including the purifying process of natural attractions in our reasoning we think and feel with nature rather than against it. Thinking organically addresses human dysfunctions and disorders. We increase the health of the global ecosystem as our thinking improves. A core personal history of Organic Psychology : The Organic Psychology methods and materials of our accredited courses exist today simply because of my emotional challenge of being born left-handed in a right-handed culture. My inherent natural senses feel more attracted and comfortable smoothly using my left hand rather than awkwardly using my right hand. Biologically, left-handedness can be seen as part of nature's wise attraction to create diversity because diversity helps insure the survival of attractive life as life conditions fluctuate. I identify with the destructive effects on left handed youngsters who are unreasonably forced to write or otherwise function right handed. These effects are real to me. I experienced them. They replicate undeniable facts of my life, past and present. Even if all the unreasonable and hurtful left-hand incidents reported for other children are false, it does not change what I have experienced. What happened to me registered on my senses and consciousness and remains alive there in memory. I know it is true because I experienced it, and continue to experience its irrational abusiveness. When I, or others I know, are treated unreasonably, my discomfort and sense of fairness come into play. They serve as a valuable motivations for me to help make unreasonable situations more reasonable. Of course, this is not rocket science but to omit this important truth about the origins of Organic Psychology and its benefits would be unreasonable in an educational process whose purpose is to seek and support reasonableness, accuracy and fact. I grew up in a progressive family and pre-school educational system. We lived in the first planned utopian garden community, Sunnyside Gardens, in Queens, N.Y. It was designed by Louis Mumford and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1924 from the observation that those who are too far removed from nature risk losing their humanity. There, 15 minutes from the roar of downtown Manhattan, two story homes with yards surrounded a lush natural courtyard common area. A rustic park was just down the street. The natural attractions of Sunnyside made sense to my parents, (my father was Cum Laude CCNY and Phi Beta Kappa). They were not alone; the cooperative-living expert, Meyer Parodneck, was our upstairs neighbor and many of my parents close settlement house friends and families lived within a few blocks of us. What counted most in my young life and socialization was not necessarily “the rules” but rather what “made sense” or increased well being in any situation. One of the things that made perfect sense in my extended Sunnyside family and community was that I was born left handed. This was a joy and gift, certainly not a problem. I was loved as a left-hander through advanced, non-institutionalized pre-schooling and kindergarten programs patterned on the reasoning of John Dewey. A new factor came into play, however, when I entered elementary school at age six. There I discovered that being left-handed had an unpleasant drawback in our society, where right-handedness is central and dominates. In first grade, as we learned to write, we also learned to use dip pens. All the inkwells in the classroom, to prevent spilling, were imbedded in a hole drilled on the upper right corner of the desk. To write lefty, I had to reach my left arm and pen across my handwritten paper to the right corner ink well. In so doing, my left hand and arm dragged across the wet-ink on the paper, smudging it and getting ink on my shirt and hand. To avoid smudging, my teacher said that I should learn to write with my right hand. I tried doing that but it felt awkward and uncomfortable. It felt like trying to talk correctly while you have your tongue jammed up behind your upper front teeth. Try that sometime. For this reason, I continued to write ink-smudged papers with my left hand. My suggestion that an inkwell hole be drilled on the left side of my desk was not appreciated. Over time, with my teacher's urging, I began to write with my right hand, even though it felt unnatural and wrong. My teacher gave me verbal approval for this change. In addition I received the rewards of my parent's applause for the better grade that appeared on my report card. There were, however secondary effects. I felt like a natural part of me was imprisoned in a stupid jail and subject to right handed rules for no good reason. Whenever I wrote, or even thought about it, it uncomfortably irritated my natural senses of motion, sound, direction, color, belonging, trust, community place, consciousness, reason, touch, sight, distance, gravity, breathing and self. All these sensitivities are sensory facts involved with penmanship and their un-fulfillment stressed me. Additional facts include that my back posture changed, my shoulders slumped, I suffered unexplainable leg cramps and I developed a speech defect. I received therapy and recovered from the cramps and, to a lesser extent, the speech and back problems. I learned a hurtful lesson. Something was wrong with me in this school setting and the law said that I had another eleven years of it to face as a major part of my life. Two years later another dilemma arose. Experimentally, the school introduced a new way of learning math that proved ineffective so my whole third-grade class was required to either relearn math in summer school or else repeat third grade. My parents objected to this for me since our family lived upstate in the country for the summer. They volunteered, as an alternative, to teach me math from a workbook while we were away. If I passed the math test at the end of the summer, I could continue on to fourth grade. That summer in the country was bizarre in comparison to my prior summers there. Instead of playing in nature or going to camp all day, every morning, under my mother's supervision, I spent a few hours studying math from a workbook. The difference between how I felt in the mornings compared how I felt in the afternoon freedom and aliveness of natural areas was striking. The mornings felt like, "Due to my right-handed school's error, I am in a straight jacket surrounded by where I really want and deserve to be, but I can't be." This brought me to tears and tantrums. I did learn and pass math admirably, but I also deeply learned the value of how good it felt to be in nature in comparison to how restrictive it felt imprisoned in dry school work through no fault of my own. I recognized this feeling as the same discomfort I sensed when I was required to write with my right hand although, again through no fault of my own, I was naturally left-handed. My self-image was that I was some kind of a freak. I did recognize that that many other left-handers and other children suffered much greater challenges, trauma and repercussions from our society's various forms of “righteousness.” That helped very little, however, I did appreciate the permissiveness of my parents' close-knit community. From these and similar incidents, I became aware that I was vulnerable. My natural attraction to feeling good by expressing my natural self could be erased by incorrect but powerful parts of society that were “right.” Some people diagnosed me as having trouble with authority rather than being troubled by stupidity. My psychological test results, graduate school performance and outstanding army record demonstrate that they were wrong. Yet another formative incident occurred during my elementary school period that is worth noting. I caused trouble by freeing from a rat trap, a struggling bird whose wing was caught in it. In disgust, I threw the trap down a sewer. When a brute of a fellow, angry about the loss of his trap, learned who had disposed of it he abusively reproached my mother. He made her cry as he scolded her for bad parenting. But, mother didn't punish me. Instead, she simply asked me to understand the reason why the neighbor was angry. She also praised me for caring about the bird's welfare as well as for my thought that the neighbor should have placed the trap where birds could not get into it. Many similar childhood experiences allowed me to observe or enter beneficial relationships with nature and with people who appreciated the natural. In retrospect, all the folks I knew in Sunnyside were that way. As I returned home from elementary school one day, some bullies in the schoolyard roughed me up saying, "Kike! You jewboy, you killed Christ." In tears, as I continued home I was drawn to a parallel path through a wooded park by the railroad. Things were peaceful in that little grove and by the time I emerged from it, I felt much better. Next day, when I asked my teacher why the park made me feel better, she said, "Because you escaped, it took you away on a short vacation from your problems." But, significantly, like most people, my teacher never told me just what it was that that little natural area took me to. Because our society's story says it is “right” for us to be disconnected from nature, most of us don't know what or where "to" is. Instead, as the state of the world and its people demonstrates, we learn to righteously connect our multitude of natural attraction senses to substitutes for nature and the natural, substitutes with detrimental side effects that injure nature's supportive ways around and within us. Until we remedy these injuries and improve our excessively nature-disconnecting relationships, we continue to suffer from wounds in our psyche and the disorders they produce. By fourth grade my writing was so illegible that the school had to let me try to write with my left hand. In six months time I was writing better as a “lefty” than I had from years of training as a “righty.” This further justified to me the value of my attraction to listening to my natural attraction self. I had been right all along as a lefty. Believe me, this was one sweet victory! From that point on, I cruised through elementary school. I graduated with an award for achieving the school's highest reading level, that of an eleventh grader. As I became more literate and aware of the world and myself, I became aware enough to recognize that I felt and acted better when I followed and fulfilled my natural attractions, especially my attractions to nature. At the age of 15, I announced my decision to dedicate my life to work and relationships that led to the field of camping because it allowed me to express and fulfill my natural attractions in natural areas, in contact with my attractions nurturing natural origins. That made sense to me and has guided me through many life choices great and small. It led me to university coursework in Natural Sciences and Counseling along with unifying Interdisciplinary Studies and environmental life experiences. They have privileged me, for the past 47 years, to live, learn and work while connected to the vibrant perfection of natural areas, year round. While isolated from continual contact with the philosophies, stories and dogma of indoor academia and industrial America, my thoughtful, long-term sensory outdoor contact and research with person/planet relationships has led me to found and direct many successful environmental education programs. All are, and were, based on the methods and materials of the core courses that are presently offered cooperatively with my Project NatureConnect degree training program. I have written eight books that describe the program and the courses. My science-based, add-them-to-any-discipline, natural attraction thinking activities, books and essays help students learn how to create moments that let Earth teach. Students and staff benefit from the same nature-connected experiences and observations I have enjoyed during my life. My hands-on natural attraction discoveries add a potent whole life and peace factor to the false, but righteous, nature-disconnected stories that socialize us wrong. My discoveries include People feel and relate better when in natural areas (1952) Planet Earth acts like or is a living organism (1965), Expedition Education (1968), Natural Attraction Theory (1977), The Screen of Consciousness (1981), Prejudice Against Nature (1982), The Whole Life Factor (1983), A symposium asking “Is the Earth a Living Organism? (1984), The Webstring Natural Attraction Model (1988), Registering 53 Natural Senses (1989), Natural Senses are Natural System Facts (1990) Literate vs Non-Literate Duality (1990), Validations: The Survey of Participants (1995) NIAL: Nameless Intelligent Attraction Love (1996), The Natural Systems Thinking Process (1996) Organic Psychology (2001) Natural System Dysfunction (2004) Natural Attraction Ecology (2006) Please visit my web page for additional publications and achievements that eminate from my natural attractions path. The essence of my nature-connecting work has been to validate the art of thoughtfully seeking and respecting our natural attractions while we are in direct sensory contact with natural areas. This process brings into our awareness authentic information education and relationship phenomena that we can cite and scientifically explain by validating our natural senses and feelings as facts. Our connection activities and experiences, not nature-disconnected stories, become our fountainhead of authority. By adding them to any endeavor, our empirical knowledge helps us and others increase personal and global well being by increasing wholeness. To accurately evaluate my work, it is reasonable for evaluators to have had at least one good/attractive experience in nature that they are willing to share and validate. This levels the playing field. It helps us together address any righteous prejudices against nature and the natural that we might hold. It assures us that during the evaluation process we have a nature-connected essence in common to enhance peak communication and understanding. Without using written or spoken words, that is how nature works, too. INVITATIONS: If you have had a good experience with natural attractions in nature, please help it share its value by describing it on our blog list at http://natureconnect.blogs.com Through keywords and topics, you may find and read good experiences by others there, too. You may also find good nature experience writeups through the search engine at http://www.ecopsych.com You can explore a guided natural attraction experience at http://www.ecopsych.com/trailattract.html http://www.ecopsych.com/amental.html http://www.ecopsych.com/giftearthday1.html Act
now.
Master
Organic Psychology by doing it. http://www.ecopsych.comAchieve a Degree or Certificate to strengthen your professional interests, or your hobbies or pastimes, by connecting them with nature. Implement your strongest hopes as you increase personal and global well being. Topics, subjects or leisure pursuits can include those listed below or other areas of interest: |
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