• Improve your income and satisfaction through independent, interdisciplinary or integrated study and Ecopsychology.
• Help people connect their thoughts and feelings with the self-correcting and renewing ways of the global web of life community.
• Increase personal social and environmental well being by thinking with self-evident facts.
  
• Add the sunlight beauty and spirit of the natural world to your life and relationships.

What's this?

“I love this dragonfly because it is ancient beauty.
I love myself because I am full of ancient beauty.”


“I am attracted to our new kitten, because she is affectionate, unusual and entertaining.
I love myself because I am affectionate, unusual and entertaining.
I recognized myself in the statement and that strengthened me. I received an outstanding compliment from a fellow who is "nature desensitized". He said that I was 'a breath of fresh air.'"


 “I felt a strong attraction to an empty snail shell on the beach and I discovered that I love me because I am imperfect but beautiful. Parts of me have broken away leaving jagged edges and holes. My surface is rough and blotchy. But I have a feeling of mystery and complexity despite my apparent simplicity. I am smooth at my core and I have a secret part that you can't reach unless you are really really small and need a home. But at my center I also have an openness if you look carefully. Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What manner of sorcery is this!!!!!!!!!????????????????? I recognize the value of this activity just as I recognize the connection between me and this shell. I surely have a lot in common with it. I feel like I found a gleaming white salty piece of me."


“I love Honeysuckle because it is like the melody of Franz Liszt's Liebestraub - sweet, light, fresh, enchanting.
I love myself because I try to maintain a pleasant disposition - most of the time I'm easy to be with; I believe in freshness - self-renewal and open-mindedness, and some people even say that they find me enchanting.”



“Here in rural Finland I had a misconception that you all in the USA belong to a highly industrialized world so every thing there is compared with skill, efficiency, proficiency, input and out put. Everything mechanical. But I was absolutely wrong.  The so called perfectionist people of the highly industrialized nation do care for the MOTHER NATURE. They do connect themselves into the attractive natural energies of life.

I am attracted to you all. I feel a strong bondage exists between you and me. It's true we have not met. It's true we are poles apart, live in different parts of the world. We are brought up with a different value system, belief, religion, socio-economic condition, education, geographic area, culture, food habit and many more other dissimilarities. But there exists a natural webstring attraction connection that tells me you are all beautiful human beings. So kind and concerned. So caring and helpful. You all possess a tender heart and I could hear that ethereal song your soul sings. Yes natural webstring attractions connect our heart and soul. So that humanity in us stands us together to brave all odds.

My attractions in nature show me that I like myself because I am the Soul. Pure and true. I am present everywhere. Omnipresent Soul. I connect everywhere with natural attraction and connection. I am as strong as a tree. It is strong as it holds the earth and the earth holds it. I give my love and care to all the earthlings as a tree does.

This program is very important as it asks us to redefine ourselves and to hold ourselves back from the misleading stories of modernization and our socialization. It helps us to gather information, strength and courage to go against the human invasion of nature."

- Journals of Anonymous Webstring Model Participants

“I am a person who feels great when I take the time to shut off the inner chatter and explore nature with many senses When I do so, I feel that I am part of a huge organism called earth, and that I share in the collective wisdom and strength of Earth. These activities that I have been doing are deceptively simple: they are powerful and healing. (I spend time in nature, I immerse myself in it, what difference could a few simple words or particular approach make……………..all the difference in the world………yes, deceptively simple….amazingly effective!)”

Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant



"My experience in nature demonstrated that I am a person who gets good feelings while physically experiencing nature.   I have always enjoyed the physical touch of nature.  The rain, wind, humidity, and temperature arouse all of my senses.  For me, the stimulation of my physical senses by nature arouses the most evident of webstrings.   Then I begin to focus on those that might not be so obvious.  This means I continue to look deeper in the web of life, connecting at many different levels. My personal thoughts on desiring nature in its raw is that "our human instinct is to be in nature."  Feeling the rain on your back and the wind on your face brings back prehistoric sensory messages that light up past experiences of living among nature, experiences that exist deep in our mind, very old, and defined as "instinct".  These sensory messages fire off endorphins creating sensations that aren't necessarily new, but revitalized by a simple touch of nature.”

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Model Participant

In a New York City workshop, Cohen had a group of teachers and students from the Walden School visit a natural area (Central Park) and individually, for fifteen minutes, note what natural attractions and senses they could discover while they were there.  The list of sensory webstrings they experienced included sight, belonging, beauty, reason, touch, place, color, language, taste, reasoning, pleasure, hormonal, smell, peace, appreciation, intuition, sound, texture, form, gravity, sex, gravity, motion, fear, temperature, nurturing, trust, belonging, companionship, empathy, respiration, compassion, consciousness, pain and isolation. Some participants said that, like a little red wagon painted blue, the excessively nature separated way that they had been socialized to think, to their loss, had hidden webstrings and their value from their awareness much of the time. They noted that most webstrings felt good and supportive, and those that didn't, such as pain or fear, motivated them to seek those that did.  For example, one person said they could see that they didn't necessarily run away from an oncoming disaster as much as they ran for their life.

During a discussion about how industrial society destructively captured and molded their red ribbon story way of knowing, these activity participants explored how a bird's attraction/love for food (hunger) was a webstring. So was a tree's attraction to grow away from gravity and its root's attraction toward it. A fawn's desire for its mother and vice-versa were webstrings.  Participants acknowledged that since atoms and their nuclei didn't readily pull apart, it was reasonable to assume that atoms must consist of, express and relate through webstring attractions and therefore so do all materials and things that are made up of atoms, in other words the material world and its energies. The participants concluded that nature, including us, consists of rewarding webstring natural attractions that are basic loves. We and the strings were “natural loves” that we hold in common with the environment, the solar system and each other, and we inherit the ability to sense and feel webstrings that are vital for our survival.  To truly experience or be in love, we needed to have all our webstrings find or build fulfillment for themselves while providing fulfillment for things we loved, including people.

Sharon was asked to choose one attractive natural object, of many, that had been placed, out of sight, in a bag.  She selected a piece of wood because its shape and smoothness attracted her when she explored the bag with her hand.  Once she removed and then saw the piece of wood that attracted her, she reacted negatively to it.  She said that she did not know why she no longer liked the wood now that she saw it.  Days later, she shared that this had evidently been a subconscious reaction. She had remembered, originally through a webstring in a dream, that the wood was the same shade of green as were the walls of her room where, as a child, she had been molested.  This webstring had been, and remained, injured and hidden.

Cohen asked a mixed group of scientists and educators what the formula for water was. The group responded “H₂O;” water was a combination of the elements known as Hydrogen and Oxygen. He then asked them “Since we know that the water cycle is a global phenomenon that includes the land sea and air, and we are aware that water flows through us, too, what is it that we all know that brings water into us yet our bodies neither burst from too much water nor dehydrate from not enough water?”  Participants offered answers such as “salinity differentials,” “osmotic pressure variables,” “environmental determinates,” “dehydration factors,” and the like.  Nobody offered that it was the sense or sensation of thirst, in fact some participants were upset when Cohen tendered it as an additional answer.  Cohen suggested that a water-governing factor was the sense or sensation of thirst and that participants were aware of this on some level for they had experienced thirst since the day they were born. He offered that people inherently were aware that, intelligently, thirst turned on and attracted us to drink water and to bring it into us, and that thirst intelligently turned off to attract us to stop drinking water. He said that with respect to humanity, our sense of thirst (a webstring) was scientifically as much a part of the water cycle as any other part of it.  He added that without the existence of water, we probably would not have inherited a sense of thirst, for we would not need it, it would be meaningless, that, in this sense, thirst was evidence for the existence of water. He showed that thirst was a webstring, one of many sensuous ways that nature registered itself in our consciousness so that we could sensibly think and relate to nature through webstrings.
 
Cohen asked the conference workshop participants if they could see significance in the fact that, even though Hydrogen and Oxygen were tasteless, odorless invisible gases, participants knew, via words and stories, that water consisted of these elements and that its formula was H₂O, yet these were not things that they could sense or feel.  However, they did know about water and the water cycle through their sense or sensations of thirst and excretion, and that this was also a fact, yet they had learned to overlook it.  He went on to explain the role of webstrings and helped the conference participants recognize that we shared an additional 50 or more webstring senses with each other and nature. He noted that by learning to ignore these webstring senses, as we did thirst, we were unable to fully make sense with respect to living in a mutually supportive balance with nature and each other.  He suggested that our major environmental and social challenge was that as industrial society conquered nature, it conquered our natural power to live sensibly via our consciousness of our webstring sensations and our inherent ability to think with them.  We, instead, became addicted to knowing webstrings in ways and stories that we didn't own through natural experience. This made us become dependent on, and pay, the “licensed” owners in industrial society. Similar to our personal webstring sensation of thirst having become the “water cycle” or a “dehydration” or “osmotic salinity factor,” we excessively learned to know our other webstring attractions as “gluons,” “spirit,” “discontents,” “patriotism,” “shopping,” “money,” “drives,” “health,” “needs,” “quantums” etc.  We lost contact with who we naturally thought, felt and knew that we were. We, instead, became excessively dependent upon the stories provided by the physicist, clergy, therapist, politician, businessman, banker, psychologist, professor,  doctor or institution. Most of them and their stories were nature-disconnected and for profit and power they usually were paid or funded to further steer our lives in a nature-disconnected way. Even our institutions captured and attached webstrings to their dogma and attributes, for example, at a university, webstrings of color, music and form became attachments to the  colors, song and symbol of the school. All of this tended to disconnect us from nature and make us more like cultural objects than natural beings.  Cohen argued that unless we addressed our excessive disconnection from ways of nature's self-correcting webstrings, our wide range of problems would increase because we were losing a major source of their solution.

Audience reaction to the  “inconvenient truth” that Cohen introduced was mixed. The thinking of some participants was already under the yoke of objective science that delegated sensation and feeling as inadmissible, subjective or “social science” while others accepted webstring attraction senses as part of reality. 

“From this webstring activity I learned that the smallest amount of time spent in the right way can lead to feelings of oneness with the earth, and peaceful feelings, and that nature will surprise you if you allow it to show you itself the way it wants you to see it.  I found that peaceful feelings can rub off on the creatures around me, including people, and their peacefulness rubbed off on me, too.”

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant


Through the activities, webstring contacts in natural areas help participants sense and consciously reattach the webstrings within them to the string's nurturing origins and continuum in nature. Journals written by participants reflect that they felt, enjoyed and trusted the thoughtful connections and wisdoms that they discovered through the webstring connection activities. They enthusiastically reported that the experience was illuminating, rewarding and healing.
“What I discovered is that nature is in a constant state of webstring love of life - that it is non-love that halts her growth. I realized that given the space to be totally me, I thrive as a natural individual and social being. That if I give others the same space, I nurture a community of love.”

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

"There have been countless times that a family member, friend or companion and I would be camping, hiking or surfing and one of us would say “Oh my gosh, look!”  We would simply shake our heads in amazement at sight we were witnessing.  These are some of my favorite memories.  I remember feeling so extremely in-tune with the other person, and especially because neither one of us would try and describe what we saw &/or felt, someone may have even said the words 'I cannot describe it', but we knew not to try, that trying to put words to our experience might ruin the moment. Later we could write about it or discuss it." 

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

“More than any other time in my life that I've responded to 'Who am I?' I realize now I cannot live without natural sensory love connections. Red leaved maple waves to me, I wave back and breathe out.  We are friends. We need one another. To separate from the this webstring attachment or, like most in mainstream culture, to never really connect at all, is to have an illness and never receive the medicine required to heal.

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

"I am grateful to share and learn with all of you on this course.  Doing these activities over and over diversely educates me.  Not once have I found an activity that did not expand my relationship with nature in and around me and you, no matter how many times I do it.  Each activity has endless life, when shared with nature."

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

“I find that reconnecting with nature involves stepping out of the fixed boundaries of the cultural reality we have all grown up with and lived by. Stepping out of one's reality strategy, as Bandler and Grinder referred to it, is one of the most frightening things in the world for a human being. I know the only reason I was able to do it through this program was because for so long - most of my life actually - the reality I was expected to accept didn't fit together for me. It seemed all wrong. So my whole life I've been looking for something, anything, that would help me understand why what seemed real to everyone else didn't seem very real or make much sense to me. Finally through PNC things now make sense, including why so much in our culture doesn't make sense. But nonetheless there was some real pain, grief, and disillusionment in realizing how a skewed our normal view of reality is. There was many a month of feeling sad, not confused for at last I was not confused, but just sad. I still struggle with how one like myself can fit into the manmade reality of our culture without disconnecting from nature to do so.  So, surely I do understand how difficult and foreign it is for others to know what reconnecting with nature means.”

"I did the activity that directs you to visit a natural area and reasonably learn to sense it and the flow of its systems. You then try to determine where nature ends and you begin. I was surprised and grateful because in 20 minutes I discovered a new depth of who I really am and what has happened to me."

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

“The average American is exposed to about 3000 advertising messages a day, and globally corporations spend over $620 billion each year to make their products seem desirable and to get us to buy them.”

Union of Concerned Scientists Website
http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/guide.ch1.html

"I am actually finding that doing these activities indoors is good for me in that I often feel disconnected when I have needed to be indoors.  By working with the fish and plants in my office, this has allowed me to find that connection that can recharge me in smaller places, rather than just assuming that I have to be outside standing next to the trees or forests or mountains.  I get lots of that, and of course it is very easy to connect with the BIG picture, but it has been good to learn to connect with the smaller, less obvious things as well."

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

I am not where you are, I don't know you, I can't see or hear you, yet I am accurate in my belief that you are reading these words right now. Isn't it an undeniable fact that you are reading them?
 
When you visit a natural area and you see that it is green, it is accurate to say that you do, or that you did, perceive or experience it as being green.
 
When we are in a natural area and we naturally sense things like temperature, motion, roughness, sound, moisture, odors, beauty, fear, hunger or joy, the fact is that we are registering these webstrings, otherwise, how could we be experiencing them.  This is true for at least 53 webstring natural senses or sensitivities that pervade the natural world, including us. We genetically inherit the capability to register them for this enables our thinking and consciousness to participate in the web of life. 

By consciously making sensory thought and feeling contact with webstring attractions, we offer our reasoning an increased spectrum of valuable scientific evidence.  Our senses are alive and life is evidence of itself.  For this reason, the Webstring Model empowers us to contact and invite the purifying flow of webstrings into the life of our psyche, to help our psyche interlace with them and improve how we think and feel.  Through our improved and updated thinking we obtain accurate information about nature from webstrings as well as benefit from their recycling powers. This process helps us become naturally attracted to and familiar with the web of life and its supportive ways. This enables us to reduce or eliminate the prejudicial stories we carry that deteriorate nature's perfection within and around us.

Do our stories or relationships in industrial society interrupt the vital flow of natural systems through us so our thinking loses the benefits of nature's grace, balance and self-correcting ways? Does this loss lead us to destructively trespass and unbalance the whole of life, including our life?

One of the fascinating events of the school year was our visit to the controversial Leaky prehistoric archeology site in Calico, California.  Here were the remains of stone axes allegedly chipped out by stone-age people more that 50,000 year ago.  The archiologist showed us how to make stone axes in their ancient way, using rocks as hammers to cut and chip the stone.  The students used rocks as hammers all morning and successfully made several axes.  We then proceeded to Death Valley, arriving in a blinding dust storm. We immediately proceeded to set up our tents on extremely hard clay soil, so hard that we could neither hand-push nor foot-stamp in our tent pegs as we normally did.   I was surprised to find all but two of the students standing in line, coughing, with eyes tearing, all waiting to use the one single geology hammer we had to hammer in their tent stakes.  Only Dan Chuck and I were not on line.  We already hammered in our stakes using rocks on the ground all around us. 

But the inconceivable had happened. Eighteen other teen and adult individuals who had been directed and taught to use rocks for hammers just three hours before, had somehow forgotten that rocks could be used as hammers.  Choking, with windblown sand stinging their face and eyes, they waited on line for their turn to use the one, manufactured, metal, geology hammer that was available.  It was habitual thinking in action.  Several participants complained that the school was irresponsible, that many more “store bought” hammers should have been available for situations like this. 

Anybody that did have another manufactured hammer that day would have been in a powerful position because they would have been needed. For example, they could have charged a profitable fee for the use of their hammer or hired themselves out to hammer in the tent pegs of others. 

That night, when some of the tents were blown down, participants moved into and slept in the supportive warmth, protection and comfort of the school bus.

Having been with this group for seven months I was torn because I felt I could not easily help the situation.  My position as a counselor and educator was to guide participants to learn to think for themselves. Everybody had already fully experienced that when a problem, personal or other, arose participants were encouraged to call a “common sense” meeting so all could help solve the problem by sharing their webstrings, thoughts and feelings.  This process was an essence of the school community.  Was standing on the hammer line my problem, should I have called a meeting? 

While the students stood on line I could have asked if they recognized that they could use local rocks as hammers, or I could have told them to do so. However, since this was not a life threatening situation, I sensed that telling them what to do, right or wrong, would just make them more dependent on me as an authority and/or make them feel stupid or resentful because they knew that they already knew they could use rocks as hammers, in fact, they had just done this hours earlier.  So, I let them live out the experience and hopefully learn from it, experience being the best teacher if it doesn't kill you. 

The following day, at our planning meeting I asked the participants why they thought they did not use rocks as hammers and what they thought would have been the best thing for me or them to do to prevent this incident from happening again.  Many different reasons for not calling a meeting or for not using rocks were offered, like “It was getting late, we needed to get the tents up while it was light.” “The steel hammer worked better,” “Rocks for hammers are fine but I'm more familiar with and adept at using a manufactured hammer, I'm used to it.”  “I saw others waiting for the hammer so that's what I did, too.”  In general, the group agreed that this was all some form of habitual behavior. They could not, under some circumstances, “think outside the box,” even when they were outside the box. Their natural webstring of reason had been dulled to point that they could not make better sense in this natural area because their thinking had been conditioned into a “manufactured hammer habit.”  They were too rushed or not sensitive or concerned enough about their new situation to seek a solution for it, other than the habitual one. Some said that I had been cruel, that I should have told them to use the rocks instead of letting them suffer on the steel hammer line. Some said it was irresponsible for me not to have called a meeting at the time.

A month later we set up camp in a hard ground area in Utah and many students used rocks as hammers this time.  In addition, they reminded others to use rocks as tent peg hammers, too.  As a community we had taken one good step beyond where we formally were.  We had also increased our esteem for ourselves as a webstring community and as individuals with the capacity to be helpful members of the community.

As I stated in my Trailside School catalog, learning how to create a sensible community for ourselves was a major goal of my expedition education program and this process included most disciplines and senses including music, art, writing, science and relationship building.  As exemplified by not using rocks for hammers, almost daily some of us discovered our misled webstring attachments to inappropriate stories and had meetings about improving our thinking.  Our challenge for our travel/study school year was to seek additional webstring attractions.  These would help us, in community, un-bond from the old and connect our misled attachments to our sense of reason so that it could guide our detrimental thinking habits into more constructive and happier relationships. Meetings to this end were an expedition norm and finding reasonable solutions was basic curriculum. Meetings included having our webstring of reason make our red ribbon of literacy accurately convey the information and wishes of 50 other webstrings in the group and the natural area. That helped us live and learn appropriately in a supportive and balanced unity.

Each year, each expedition group designed and built a unique community that made webstring sense to its participants. Each learned to become supportive of nature in and around them. The fact that we succeeded explains why, when vacation time arrived, nobody wanted to go home.

“If you count a normal dog's tail as one of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?” 

- excessive air, water, and land pollution, agricultural clearing, mono cultures, livestock grazing, predator extermination and global warming;
- excessive consumerism, stress, tranquilizer use, abusiveness, mental imbalance, medical disorders, unhealthy dependencies and social injustice;
- excessive poaching, hunting, fishing, and trapping;
- excessive logging, mining and energy exploitation;
- excessive ski areas, resorts, golf courses, off-road vehicle use, urban and suburban sprawl;
- excessive agricultural and forestry biocides, non-native species introduction, road building, fire suppression, dam building, irrigation diversions, groundwater depletion, stream and river channelization,
- excessive human population growth and unreasonable political power.

When I was thinking of a disturbing aspect of my life, I definitely felt bummed.  While walking around at a near by park area, I found myself attracted to a tree (not sure what kind) but it was warm and inviting.  While I thought of being 'webstring connected' my disturbed situation dissolved and I felt support within the area.  I have always turned to nature in moments of uncertainty, confusion, or frustration, so my writing may not sound very enthusiastic, in fact I feel strange saying it out loud.   Whenever I have been bummed-out throughout my life, I immediately go on a hike, camp, surf or at least a long walk.  I know this is the way to sustain a healthy mind, body and soul; it works always. 

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

Bill thought it was ridiculous for his Organic Psychology course to suggest that he obtain webstring consent from a tree to visit it, before he actually visited it. He believed that visiting a natural area was our God-given right. However, because he wanted to overcome his problem with depression, he did a sensory nature-connecting webstring activity that helped people gain permission from a natural thing to connect with it. (http://www.ecopsych.com/amental.html).  Doing the activity provided Bill with an unexpected peak experience sensation that filled his psyche. As part of the activity, by thinking and expressing to the tree that he would honor and be kind to it and that he would not harm it, his attraction to the tree continued. He became aware that he was obtaining the tree's consent to visit it, otherwise it would not have remained attractive to him and something else might instead have become more attractive.

Bill's natural webstring attractions to the tree's color, shape and grandeur intensified and lasted for an extended period. He delighted in the strength of this feeling and began to sense that in many ways the tree first felt like, and then actually became, a close friend, like a supportive family member.  His fearful “nature is dangerous and dirty” belief along with his feeling that “I'll look foolish if I do this” transformed, for the moment, into the exhilaration that was triggered by a safe and mutually supportive natural webstring way of knowing the tree.  In this moment he felt happy, not depressed. 

Bill recognized that through this activity alone he could seek permission to build supportive relationships with nature in himself, in others or in natural areas at any time.  Using Organic Psychology gave him the ability to activate natural webstring attraction sensitivity powers that helped all natural things, including him, build community.  He saw how seeking consensual contact with nature was reasonable and enjoyable, that his attraction to a tree had “composted” part of his old “nature is bad” story into a mutually supportive way of enjoying the natural world as his extended family.  This felt exciting and worthwhile. It increased his self-esteem because he became conscious that he knew how to connect with nature and that its renewing webstring energies helped him recycle “feeling down” into “feeling more alive, less depressed.”  Bill told his online support group, “This experience was a delight of surprises.  I felt that I touched the tip of an iceberg of new intelligence.  What I love about me is that when I gain a new awareness like this, I can no longer act as if I'm ignorant, that I do not know.  My curiosity and desire for a fuller experience of the web of life fuels me forward.  These activities have done more for me in the last four months than the past 14 years of my personal searching and I thank each of you so much for being part of my world in this program!”

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant




2. “It is now snowing and very cold.  To do this activity I asked permission to enter the sacred natural space of my backyard.  It was much quieter today, no birds chirping.  I was immediately attracted to the gently falling snow and how peaceful it is.  My hurt webstrings took joy in this because for so long in my life I could not find peace.  I thought of myself as unworthy of being loved, a very imperfect being.  That often played out in my relationships with others, especially men, because I never felt good enough for my father.  As I have learned to love myself and accept my natural self, I could see myself as one made perfect in nature, and love that person.  I can truly see myself! 

Through the consent activity, I entered my backyard with its permission.  I was immediately attracted to a leaf on the tree.  It seemed to be in the shape of a heart.  I looked closer, well maybe not, but backing away it was a heart to me.  Labeled? I can label that leaf because I've learned what the shape of a heart looks like, yet in actuality a heart isn't even shaped like that.  This activity was powerful for me because as I read the rationale for doing the activity I wasn't even feeling any connection, and so I hoped by going outside something might happen.  I saw the heart-shaped leaf, but still felt no connection.  It was interesting that as the connection developed everything, above, slowly unraveled for me, and I know now why I was attracted to that leaf. That is the reward provided by webstring connections that is the overlooked secret of nature. 

I find that at my very core, I want to live in the heart of nature.  For so long I've lived not where I truly felt I belong, but instead where I thought it best to meet people.  I guess I was afraid to be alone, but now I am afraid to live so disconnected to nature, to live so far from my destiny.

My natural self, the girl I love is the girl who takes joy in every aspect of the natural world, the one who lets her spirit be free and interconnected with the universe.

What has stuck with me the most so far throughout this course is to ask permission and gain consent, then give thanks.  Doing these things make you feel like you are equal to everything that lives with you here on earth.  When I call each sense a “connection” or “natural attraction” this makes me feel like we (the leaf and I, the mountain and I, ect... are equal). With gratitude and consent, we need each other to survive.

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant



Additional examples are available of seeking consent to visit natural areas and more are found in the In Balance With Nature Activity results.

The mental image that came to me when I read about the activity was that, with respect to natural systems, all humans are walking around like mummies wrapped in towels.  I became exhausted and sad about the image and thought to myself, why would I want to do this activity when it will take me back to disconnection with Nature?  Well after all that excess mind chatter, I finally plunged in and did it! This time, I gained permission from an indoor money plant that was given as a gift 4 years ago.  I wrapped my right hand in a towel and sat by the plant with my eyes closed.  Immediately I began to feel loving sensations move up my left hand and arms and before I knew it, my entire left side was fully alive.  However, the right hand had no feelings and my right shoulder was in pain.  It felt as though my right side was blocked.  I opened my eyes and hugged the plant with my bare left hand.  I thought to myself why don't I connect more often?
After a few moments of connection, I unwrapped my right hand and embraced the plant and went back to re-connecting and being happy. I am finding so many ways to re-connect and be inspired by my inner beauty!

It is so easy to step out of societal craziness, just enter Nature. Nature connection is enhancing my meditation practice. I learned that that I can fill my being with love at any given moment of connection.  In that moment I need nothing and I have everything.

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant  

“We all take care of one another. But what about the insanity, the destruction, the massive extinction rates going on right now? I am but a child of nature's way and not ready to address the sickest of the sick, the most nature-disconnected in our human family.  Nature will let me know when it is my turn to speak and I will be ready and humbly serve as an effective, persuasive and love-filled diplomat for Nature.  Nature will have a seat at the bargaining table. Nature's way will return to fill and heal humanity to sanity and balance. Reconnection is the way to lessen human suffering and human destruction of nature.  Waiting so patiently, the river roars.”

- Journal of an Anonymous Webstring Participant

 “The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, .... freedom of the spirit and thought..... from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as well as from unphilosophical routinizing and habit in general. This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy object for the individual.

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people.”

-Attributed to Albert Einstein



“Most people seem to have some kind of rainbow that continually escapes them.  If they search for it for a thousand years, they may find its peace.  With the science of webstrings, I walk out my back door and become it …. the trees, the grass, the gentle song of the wind, the clouds, the yellow daffodils….I become their peaceful rainbow of well being”

- Anonymous Webstring Model Participant



"Human behavior is rooted most deeply in nature's intentions and desire. The rhythms of nature underlie all of human interaction: religious traditions, economic systems, cultural and political organization. When these human forms betray the natural psychic pulse, people and societies get sick, nature is exploited and entire species are threatened."

- Attributed to Stephen Aizenstat



"Touching, seeing and sensing the wooded area webstrings where I sat showed me that I am a person who feels a profound sense of wonder and peace as the love of these trees and plants wrapped its arms around me and filled my heart with the essence of life.  This love feels like a warmth extended to me from each living attraction within each cell of each natural being.  It washes over me and around me, as if to welcome me home from a long journey.  It feels wonderfully good to be home."

- Anonymous Webstring Model Participant



"I had sauntered onto a nearby unpaved path and slowly climbed among the rocks, thinking intensely about what I might do with my life. As I climbed to the top of an overlook the sky was vast and luminous, the crisp moonlight illuminated the valley, and off in the distance was the island's inconsequential-looking-chapel. With the warm summer breeze on my skin, I suddenly felt a cascade of tingling sensory impressions, causing me to feel extended into earth and sky and also into that little chapel, a symbol of human culture, striving and reflection. I felt utterly empowered, literally wired into the cosmos; at one with myself. I have not been as focused in my whole life as I was at that moment.

I was 17 years old. That night, during that strengthening, directive experience, I made decisions that set me on my adult path: to enter a liberal ministry. I heard no voices; doves didn't suddenly descend from the heavens with a message from afar; I just had a great silent inner dialog that no words can describe. I didn't feel my individuality to be swallowed up in some vague oceanic experience; if anything, it was underscored and enhanced. For a moment or two I actually felt invincible!"

- Attributed to Dr. Khoren Arisian, Leader, Society for Ethical Culture



Due to brain injury from a cycling accident, Bart, a writer, could no longer write due to head pain. For years he suffered constant pain that that did not respond to repeated surgical, chemical, psychological and meditation treatment. He sought alternatives from the Internet, discovered the Webstring Model's Organic Psychology and took an eight week online class in it. He did the course's webstring nature connecting activities with an attractive group of trees in the center of his town. His heightened sensory relationship with them and with his online classmates enabled him to remedy his pain so that he could write again. He said the pain had transformed into pleasure. When the trees were later to be removed for development, Bart passionately rallied the town to protest their demise. The town saved the trees and became more involved with Webstrings.

- Edited from Reconnecting With Nature



"I was really trying to be honest with myself when I did the questions in the webstring educating and counseling with nature course. Somewhere during the course I wondered if I am doing this right - if it will really make a difference in the way I think and act regarding nature. What a surprise I got! I could not believe that the scores were so different from doing them the first time. Now I realize that there was a big shift in my mind. I always loved nature, but my mind needed a kick-start to learn how to connect with webstrings and let my sensory connections register in my consciousness.  As my scores clearly demonstrate, I am restoring my equilibrium every time I connect with nature."

- Anonymous Webstring Model Participant


"I do not wish to hear about the moon from someone who has not been there,"

- Attributed to  Mark Twain


In a study, participants were randomly assigned to one of three "treatments": A walk in a natural environment, a walk in an urban environment or relaxing in a comfortable chair. At the end of each excercise, intruments indicated that people who had taken the nature walk had significantly higher scores on overall happiness and positive affect and significantly lower scores on anger/agression. Nature walkers also performed significantly better on a cognitive performance measure.

- Hartig, T., Mang M. & Evans, G.W. (1991) Restorative effects of natural environment experiences. Environment and Behavior, 23, 3-26 (Reported in Nature's Path)


"This activity helped me realize that even if I'm in a natural area but I'm thinking or talking about the problems that face me in the classroom or with my boss or about my favorite rock star, I'm not fully connecting with nature."

- Project NatureConnect Participant



An astronaut's report noted that, from the moon, Earth seemed like it was alive, to which an indigenous person responded: Our people have always known it is alive because we respect it, we can see and feel its life in us and in its beauty. Your society is so out of contact with nature that you have to spend billions of dollars to go to the moon and discover what simply thinking with the land and your heart could tell you. 

- National Audubon Society Conference “Is the Earth a Living Organism?”
   


"Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling! This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table."

-  Attributed to D.H. Lawrence


 “When I mentioned that my shoes smelled like mint from crossing the brook, Phyllis said that nature was so giving, 'Your foot crushed the mint plant yet it still gave you its wonderful aroma.'  Later, I thought, “Its aroma reminded me of its spirit, I must be more careful where I walk.”

- Project NatureConnect Participant


"We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.".

- Attributed to Stephen Jay Gould

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ORGANIC, ACCREDITED, APPLIED ECOPSYCHOLOGY AND ECOTHERAPY 

The Natural Systems Thinking Process

Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director


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All programs start with the Orientation Course contained in the books
The Web of Life Imperative and Reconnecting With Nature
and the
Naturally Attracted DVD video
.