| ........................... |
Reconnecting With
Nature
Finding
Wellness Through Restoring
Your Bond With The Earth
Michael
J. Cohen, Ed.D.
Continued
from page 2:
RESULTS:
In 1977 Robert Binnewies, Vice President of the National Audubon
Society called a program using the reconnecting with nature process
Dr. Cohen presents in this book: "The most revolutionary
school in America." As a result of students and teachers
educating themselves in nature reconnected ways:
- Chemical dependencies, including
alcohol and tobacco, disappeared as did destructive social relationships.
- Personality and eating disorders
subsided.
- Violence, crime and prejudice
were unknown in the group.
- Loneliness, hostility and
depression subsided. Group interactions allowed for stress release
and management; each day was fulfilling and relatively peaceful.
- Students using meditation
found they no longer needed to use it to feel fulfilled.
- Participants knew each other
better than they knew their families or best friends.
- Participants risked expressing
and acting from their deeper thoughts and feelings; a profound
sense of social and environmental responsibility and support
guided their decisions.
- When vacation periods arrived,
nobody wanted to go home. Each person enjoyably worked hard to
build this supportive, balanced living and learning utopia. They
were home.
All this occurred simply because
every community member met their commitment to make sense of
their lives by establishing attractive relationships that supported
the natural systems within and around them.
WHAT OTHER EXPERTS SAY:
"The
activities work, they move students. I see a significant
improvement in their self-esteem and value. They discover an
integrity outside themselves that they find to be a truth within
themselves."
Mark Walsh,
Director
of Wilderness Therapy, New Mexico
"This
treatise is critical thinking as if nature mattered.
The author presents a profound sensory tool that implements the
dreams of Theodore Roszak, John Dewey and James Redfield....Wendall
Berry too."
Dr. Daniel
Levine,
Superintendent of Schools, Lopez Island, Washington
Select
Here to order this book with discounts
Reconnecting
With Nature was the
introductory portion of the 1995 edition of Well Mind, Well
Earth. Select here for reactions
to that edition of WMWE. Reconnecting With Nature now serves as a companion volume to the1997 edition
ofWell Mind, Well Earth.
CONCLUSIONS:
Many dedicated activists for
environmental and social causes say their actions are motivated
by a deep love of life, nature and Earth. Each of us, and every
other life form, is born with that love. It drives and sustains
natural systems within and around us.
In contemporary people the
love of nature has been squelched by the "socializing"
process that teaches us to excesssively separate from, exploit
and conquer natural systems including people's inner nature.
Our squelched inner hurt fuels most of our runaway disorders
for pain is never satisfied. We subconsciously select to know
the world as a dangerous place in order to explain away our pain.
Significantly, most adults can not unashamedly say that they
love the Earth. That shame translates into our apathy, our loss
of motivating sensation and empowerment.
Research shows that you can
not simply ask people to love the Earth and, out of that love,
act in behalf of life and balanced relationships. The plea seldom
produces action. Most people are no longer conscious of that
love and its ethic. Without it, apathy prevails.
To meet this challenge, Reconnecting
With Nature enables us to create safe environmental contacts
that allow our love for life to flow, rejuvenate and once again
be felt. That love produces the motivation and participation
needed to balance personal, environmental and social relationships.
If we want ourselves to achieve such relationships, it is wise
to restore our love for them. We only protect what we love.
You may start the process by
involving yourself and others in the book's free Earth
Day Activity .
Select
Here to order this book with discounts
A RESTORATION ECOPSYCHOLOGY
UPDATE FROM LARRY DAVIES, COUNSELOR (from Chapter 15 Reconnecting With Nature)
The Alternative School, December,
1996
During Dr. Cohen's Project
NatureConnect workshop with one of our recovery groups, we visited
a trashed natural area next to the student's proposed new school.
The area was slated to be paved as a parking lot, and we did
the nature reconnecting permission activity there. As a result,
the student's felt that the area, like themselves, wanted to
recover from the abuse it received from society. They sensed
that, like them, it had been, in their words: "hurt, molested,
invaded raped and trespassed," "It wanted to become
healthy or die," "It felt trashed and overwhelmed,"
"It had no power, it needed a fix or help to recover."
Since that visit, the natural
systems in the area and themselves, their inner nature, has given
them permission to enlist the support of social and environmental
agencies to save the area from becoming a parking lot. They will
remove the garbage and help it recover as an indigenous natural
area. It will be nurtured and nurturing, support wildlife, an
educational and therapeutic nature sanctuary for the school and
a host for doing these sensory nature reconnecting activities.
The students recently wrote
and received a grant to help make this desire of theirs a reality.
Here's what they said in the grant's vision statement:
"We are a recovery group
based on reconnecting with nature. In our recovery efforts, nature
plays a major role. We have choosen a small piece of wilderness
that reflects us as a community. This wilderness community is
being choked by alien plants and stressed by pollution, abandonment
and major loss. We too are being choked by drugs and stories
that pollute our natural self. We feel abandoned by our society
and cut off from nature which fills us with grief. As we remove
the runaway garbage, blackberries and ivy we will work on removing
the toxins from our lives. As we plant healthy trees we will
learn new healthy ways to survive. By protecting this ecosystem
we will find the strength to open our minds, hearts, and souls
for the survival of our Mother Earth and ourselves."
The students in this program
have quit using drugs and their test scores show significant
improvement in the areas of self-esteem, depression, stress and
sleeplesness. Every student's attendance and academic progress
has also improved. Reconnecting With Nature has proven to be
a wonderful tool for prevention and recovery.
Select
Here to order this book with discounts
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Reconnecting
With Nature puts our
society in context. Dr. Cohen is a master at translating the
complicated paradigms of current thinking into understandable,
down to earth terms and experiences . By learning how nature-related
thought evolves, we learn to build a stronger harmony and balance
with the natural world, ourselves and each other. Personally
or professionally, Reconnecting with Nature is the most useful
ecopsychology resource available for people of any age. Its repeatable
30 day program produces a powerful resiliency that grows and
lasts. It presents a long sought Celestine process, a key to
Ishmael's vision.
"If you are missing the
natural joy and wisdom in your life, it is because you have been
taught to ignore it." states Cohen's treatise on the bizarre
personal and global effects of our excessively separated relationship
with nature. Cohen says: "At birth we each biologically
inherit a delightful wise and loving way of thinking and relating
that we share with the natural world. Unknowingly, we are taught
to bury it alive deep within of us."
Do you recognize part of yourself
in any of the statements below? Reconnecting with nature will
strengthen that part of you:
- I care about the world being
a safer and happier place to live.
- I desire to learn and teach
others how to act more lovingly with respect to people and natural
areas.
- I unashamedly love Earth and
the life spirit that flows through people and nature.
Select here to read Dr. Daniel Levine's interview
with Michael J. Cohen about the nature of Applied Ecopsychology
Select here to read the psychology journal Applied
Ecopsychology article Counseling and
Nature, that is part of Chapter 10 of Reconnecting With Nature
Select
Here to order this book with discounts
QUESTIONS
With respect to reversing our runaway problems, isn't the
education and information we usually receive is no more effective
than the warning labels on a pack of cigarettes?
Guaranteed:
The natural genius buried within you modifies behavior because
it knows how to survive in cooperation with the natural environment.
Your inner nature knows the answers to each of the questions
below. The process that Reconnecting With Nature describes
frees that genius to enter your thinking and relationships.
- - Do you deserve to have good
feelings? Why?
- - What is the key factor that
makes people different or separate from nature?
- - What value is there in you
safely feeling closer nature?
- - What is the greatest truth
in your life that you can trust? (Clue: the answer is neither
God, love, honesty nor nature,)
- - What is the difference between
a thought and a feeling?
- - We are part of nature's
life system so we must somehow be in communication with it. How
does nature communicate with us and vice versa?
- - Are feelings facts?
- - Water is part of nature
and you are part of the water cycle, water comes into you, through
you and out of you. What natural genius in you helps makes water
do this?
- - What natural intelligence
in you helps regulate the flow of water through you so that you
neither bloat, explode nor dehydrate?
- -How many natural senses can
you name that you can know and learn from?
- - Why do we continue to assault
nature and people when we don't like doing it or its effects?
- - Is there a relationship
between our runaway social and environmental problems?
- - Does nature within you know
how to relate responsibly to nature in others and the environment?
- - Can you be sane if you live
in an insane society?
- - Is our innate ability to
sense and feel of, by and from nature?
- - Does our formal education
or our leadership competently address the above questions?
- - What is consciousness and
who invented it?
- - Do miracles happen in contradiction
to nature?
- - What is the relationship
between nature and the human spirit?
- - Do your problems result
from the difference between how you think and how nature works?
- - Since nature produces no
garbage, does nature practice unconditional love?
Select
Here to order this book with discounts
Reconnecting
With Nature
Table Of Contents
- Chapter 1. The Thinking Revolution
- Chapter 2. Maverick Genius
- Chapter 3. Thinking As If
Nature Mattered
- Chapter 4. Replenishing Earth
and its People: The RWN Factor
- Chapter 5. How Nature Works:
The Wisdom of Natural Senses
- Chapter 6. The Powers of Natural
Senses
Chapter 7. Reconnecting With Nature
- Chapter 8. People and Nature
as Community
- Chapter 9. Education and Nature:
The Greening of Psychotherapy
- Chapter 10. The GO to GG Formula
- Chapter 12. The Tropicmakers
- Chapter 13. The Psychology
of Nature Negatives
- Chapter 14. The Natural History
of Personality
Chapter 15. Outcomes
Chapter 16. An RWN Expert States His Peace
- Chapter 17. Self, Meet Yourself
-
- Appendix A. Going for the
Green
- Appendix B. A Case History
of RWN
Appendix C. The Ecology of Spirit
Appendix D. References and Bibliography
-
-
- Select
Here to order this book with discounts
INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL
EDUCATION
Special
NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council in cooperation with
forward thinking schools and students.
PROJECT
NATURECONNECT
Readily available,
online, natural science organic psychology
tools for the health of person, planet and spirit
P.O. Box 1605, Friday
Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313 <email>
www.ecopsych.com
ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY
IN ACTION
The
Natural Systems Thinking Process
Dr.
Michael J. Cohen, Director
send
email
|
Select
Here to order this book with discounts
|