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| The Greening of Psychological Natural System Stress and Pain Relief: Holistic, Nature-Connected, Sustainable, Counseling, Therapist Degree Training, Life Courses and Coaching Online. Alternative Career Education Psychology; Personal and Professional Environmental Health and Wellness Healing; Employment, Scholarships, Grants and Jobs. |
Project NatureConnect
Friday Harbor, San Juan
Island, Washington, USA
Institute of Global Education
Organic
Psychology and Natural Attraction Ecology
Special
NGO Consultant, United Nations Economic and Social Council
Green
distance learning to improve professions, careers and job
opportunities.
| SYNOPSIS: This report describes a funded natural relief sensory science for greening psychological elements of global studies and citizenship. Its global education elements provide a citizen with natural pain relief and stress relief that result from our nature-disconnected disorders. It is a powerful psychology for psychologists that appreciate nature's healing ways. Our organic psychology tool helps improve health wellness and counseling by enabling our thinking and feeling to safely tap into the truth of nature's grace, balance and self-correcting powers. Participants master alternative therapist coaching and holistic spiritual psychology for green relief. PROGRAM
DESCRIPTION:
Educating Counseling and Healing With Nature Supportive Degrees, Career Training Courses and Jobs On Line Project NatureConnect offers you nature-centered distant learning that enables you to daily 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 in spirituality, quality of life or global studies (and many other areas of interest) by providing grants and equivalent education credit for it. You may find and take accredited or professional CEU coursework and/or obtain a Nature-Connected Degree or Certificate in most disciplines or personal interests, especially those that involve nature, global education, justice, safety and peace. A partial subject and search engine list is located at the bottom of this page.
What a relief! An Online Course by and for Psychologists Therapists and Counselors Greens Earth System Studies, Jobs and Careers. My adventures with the Project NatureConnect online Orientation Course, "Psychological Elements of Global Citizenship." by Sarah Edwards October, 2002 In the early 90's, the field of ecopsychology rolled onto the map with alarms blazing. A flurry of books by experts from many fields from Jungian analysts like Marion Woodman, to cultural historian Thomas Berry, social historian Theodore Roszak and social biologist E.O. Wilson proclaimed a vital relationship between Nature and our physical, social and psychology well-being. But, the experts despaired, we've become so disconnected from this link that both we and the environment are suffering - we in terms of proliferating stress-related disorders; the environment in terms of severe degradation of the ecosystem. Since that time, despite such protestations, our disconnection from nature has only grown more profound. We work in a “cubicle culture” tethered 24/7 electronically by email and cell phones to our personal and career demands. As a culture, we suffer from more lifestyle-related stress disorders and manmade environmental problems than ever before. To cope, we pop Paxil, Prozac or Excedrin PM. Americans spend 1.8 billion dollars a year on Paxil alone and anti-depressants are only slightly below blood pressure drugs as the most commonly used medication. Most people either: 1) Remain unaware that their chronic fatigue, dis-stress, deteriorating or non-existent relationships and loss of community are related to a disconnection from Nature and their own innate biological wisdom - or: 2) Are unable to do anything to change the pace, limitations and pressures of their lives to find less demanding and more harmonious ways to live. Recently books like Awakening to Nature: Renewing Your Life by Connecting with Nature by Charles Cook have arrived in bookstores. These books suggest that taking Nature breaks and bringing plants into our cubicles can help relieve our frazzled nerves. Unfortunately, while such suggestions may provide temporary relief from a stressful day, they are purely palliative, casting with Nature cast in the role of a warm bath that will make our hassles more tolerable. We seem helpless to change our fundamentally frazzled lifestyle. Or that's how it seemed to me before enrolling in one of Dr. Michael Cohen's online courses, the Natural Systems Thinking Process. Over a series of nine lessons, I learned that Nature can be far more than a respite from our way of life. It can become our guide to a permanent cure. I began the online nine-week course with a small group of total strangers from across the nation and beyond. Over our weeks together, we participated in a series of Nature Activities pioneered over the last fifty years by Dr. Cohen., a leading authority in applied ecopsychology and author of the book Reconnecting with Nature, and learned that: 1. Nature knows how to operate free of the disorders we suffer from 2. As part of Nature, we too have this capability 3. We can do this by learning to use our innate abilities to think and operate as nature does from natural attractions that link us to all other aspects of life. 4. In this way, nature can become our teacher, showing us in non-verbal but irrefutable terms how to live joyful, fulfilling lives moment by moment. At the beginning of the course, some of us urbanites questioned whether we would be able to find places to do Nature Activities But we learned otherwise. It's possible to do Nature Activities whether one live in a Manhattan high rise, suburban condo or mountain chalet. One participant in our group, for example, lives in an inner-city rental in a major metropolitan area in the Southeast. She wrote, “I am having trouble finding many 'nice' natural places to go to. I have no forests or windswept beaches or whatever near me.” Upon closer investigation however, she noticed there was an almond tree and several citrus trees in her overgrown backyard. A grape vine grew rampant along the fence and beneath it an ancient vegetable garden created by a previous tenant. Orange flowers poked out above the blades and clumps of grass. Before long she also found herself exploring the dog park where she walked her dog and discovered a lovely stand of salmon-pink eucalyptus trees she'd never noticed before, as well as a nearby golf course. “This was all so far outside of what I'd been thinking of as 'nature' that I'd failed to see what was right in front of my nose,” she explained. So, once or twice each week, we shared our experiences in Nature with one another and established a bond none of us would have thought possible among total strangers who still have never met face to face. During the course, we were all confronted with one or more travails of life: the loss of a job, moments of self-doubt, overwhelming time pressures, the death of loved ones, and career crises. But within a short period of time, we discovered how our growing connection with nature could ease us through unavoidable traumas and help us avoid others all together. One busy career mother, for example, came into the course feeling stressed and pressed for time. “I have been juggling time ever since my kids were born,” she explained. She'd even put off taking the course because she worried how she could add one more thing to her day. But once both her children were both in school, she seized the opportunity, “So much of my daily interactions are around taking care of others,” she wrote later, “especially their pain. Or as a parent dealing with mundane tasks or having to be a disciplinarian. It's hard to stay in touch with play and humor. “ But this began to change mid-way through the Course during a Nature Activity she did while visiting a friend who owns several acres of wooded property. There she walked to sit by a small pond and was especially attracted to the wind, watching it dance across the shimmering water. It was “playful, joyful,” she wrote and suddenly she wanted to make something beautiful. Arranging a broken piece of birch tree limb, some bark with little lichens, a few acorns and a pinecone, she created a thank-you gift on a rock beside the pond for her hostess. “The important message for me from this experience,” she wrote, “is how much I need to revive the playful, joyful, creative parts of myself.” Since then, she's begun making different choices about how to prioritize her time and where to put her energy. In doing this some things may fall by the wayside at times, she finds. The house isn't always as orderly as she'd like. Their meals are more basic. Her garden gets neglected at times and the checkbook isn't balanced every month. But she says, “I am starting to feel better. I have a lot more energy. I'm more interested in my work and I have a deeper connection with my husband and kids.” Another participant was able to put the shock of an unexpected job loss in perspective. The experience had left him extremely drained of energy but while doing a Nature Activity in a nearby park, he experienced both the physical and the mental healing effect of nature. As he drew near a strand of shade trees, “It quite literally reminded me of being held in my mother's arms as a very young child,” he wrote. “It was as if the area was saying to me; come to me, let me hold you so that you can rest.” He lay down and fell asleep under those trees. When he awoke he “sensed how each thing around me was connected to the others for its survival. We're all part of Nature, relying on one another. I knew I would be OK even though my job had ended. Change is constant and I'm not going through it alone. The Natural world has been surviving much longer than I have, so why not learn from it?” Another participant suffered the death of a dear friend, and her cat. On top of that she was accosted on the street. She wrote “I have had a week where my self-esteem hit a low and I was faltering about the reason for being in the world, the grief and loss had overwhelmed me and I was at my most vulnerable.” But, she found, the Nature-Connecting Activity that week “gave me a sense of self-love and pride in my ability to defend myself. (It) was like having a friend, a very dear friend, hug me warmly taking away a lot of sadness and pain and shock, reminded(ing) me to trust myself and to keep taking risks in life, no matter how hard it can get because I have the strength and courage to make it through.” While each week's activities had specific healing effects on our lives, the cumulative effect was even more far-reaching. Some of us began to re-evaluate our careers, where we lived, our relationships with our loved ones, etc. One participant decided to move to another part of the state where she lived, concluding “I have decided to move interstate to an area that is more aligned with my values and needs. I have a feeling I am not in a healthy place. So I will be preparing to move over the next few weeks.” She moved before the course was completed. Another participant explained, “This course helped me grow emotionally over the past couple of months. I gained great joy from the experiences that I have had and shared with my wife. I am less wanting and quite happy most of the time. I have a feeling of calmness which if it leaves I now know how to regain efficiently and effectively through simple reconnection activities. It gives me hope for the future.” This last comment sums up what I found to be most important thing for me both personally and professionally. On a daily basis we tend to get bogged down in myriads of worries, concerns, fears, habits, and issues that are unappealing, unpleasant and even painful to us. Nonetheless we cling to these stresses, unable to escape them. In psychotherapy and other healing programs, we assume, as helping professionals that we must help people understand and figure out these problems, never considering that we by following our innate natural attractions, as nature does, we can make different choices so we won't have these stresses in our lives. Since completing the course, I've faced several upsetting events in my life, but I find I'm handling them quite differently now. Knowing how good I can feel when connected to nature and knowing that I have the choice to feel that way at any time, I'm no longer willing to give that feeling up, even for frightening or unpleasant events. I've learned that at any moment we can say “No, that's not what I want,” and by going outside or otherwise connecting with Nature, once again we have a choice no matter, how difficult the situation, to move responsibly toward what attracts us in the moment, trusting ourselves to choose wisely both for myself, the others in our lives life, our community and the natural world around us. The Natural Systems Thinking Process is a remarkable personal and professional tool that can be used to heal us of a vast variety of lifestyle dis-tresses and the resulting depression, anxiety, and addictions that plague us, and in the process teach us to respect and value, and thereby preserve the life-giving natural environment around us. References Berry, Thomas (1988) The Dream of Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Cohen, Michael (1997) Reconnecting with Nature. Corvallis, Oregon: Eco Press. Cook, Charles (2002)† Awakening to Nature, Renewing Your Life by Connecting with Nature. New York: Contemporary Books. Roszak, Theodore, ed. (1995) Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Wilson, E.O. (1984.). Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woodman, Marion “Abandoned Souls, Abandoned Planets.” Ryley, Nancy (1998) The Forsaken Garden: Four Conversations on the Deep Meaning of Environmental Illness. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books 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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