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THE WEBSTRING NATURAL ATTRACTION MODEL A thoughtful nature-connecting sensitivity process helps us improve how we think, feel and relate. The Organic Psychology of Educating, Counseling and Healing with Nature.
The Webstring Model helps us enlist assistance from appropriate fountainheads of authority. They, in turn, help us recycle and transform our troubles into mutually supportive relationships.
"Webstrings are the threads that build and hold together the web of life. These natural attractions have operated since the beginning of time and are found in every person, place and thing.
Throughout human history, socially and environmentally sound societies have survived successfully by using a form of the Webstring model to help them balance their thinking and socialization with the natural world and its powers.
Today, we suffer our outrageous dilemmas simply because we don't use and teach the Webstring model process.
Be reasonable. Increase person and planet well being. Benefit from learning and teaching the sensory art and science of connecting our thinking and feeling to nature's self-correcting regenerative ways."
INTRODUCTION
If Mother Earth was literate she would, in no uncertain terms, tell us that we suffer our unsolvable troubles because industrial society is prejudiced against nature. The "objective" model that we train/socialize our thinking to use is designed to fight an undelared war against nature and the natural. The deteriorating state of the world shows that in winning that war we are losing in many important areas. Our anti-nature thinking denigrates natural sensory information, process and experience that we desperately need to reduce our dilemmas.
Mother Earth might say, "With respect, nay, disrespect to me, the way you learn to think shoots you in the foot as it conquers me. Your misguided thinking has made us sick, we both suffer from natural system dysfunctions and a fever that you call global warming."
The Webstring Model helps us increase well being because it is an organic working tool that strengthens our mentality and reverses our prejudice against nature. The discoveries from its true-to-life way of thinking enable us to create moments that let Earth and Nature teach. This helps us override the ingrained misleading, words, bonds and stories in our power and profit driven culture. We become conscious of the life wisdom that we naturally inherit from nature and that we are socialized to omit in our thinking. We gain sight of important things that we need to know to help sustain life in a peaceful balance.
Being organic, the Webstring Model empowers us to thoughtfully tap into Earth's whole of life in and around us and become conscious of it. We then use the flow of its self-corrective powers in us to help us/it address our troubles at every level.
OBJECTIVE
To benefit from reasonable solutions for the personal, social and environmental dilemmas that plague us today, we need a practical, easily applicable model to assist us. It's process must help us discover and get on a path to a whole life way of relating personally and globally . The science and spirit of the model must be accurate and trustable. Its art must provide the missing tools we need to improve our relationships in all sectors of life.
The deteriorating state of the world indicates that the models and processes we presently use to guide our lives omit a critical component for health, wellness and peace. We and the environment suffer because our thinking and relationships are taught to dismiss this component. The Websting Model, presented here, not only contains the missing component, it supports our use of it.
Anyone can increase personal and global well being by simply adding the webstring model to the way they presently think, feel and relate.
Until you are positive that you have a better working model that helps you responsibly improve your personal and professional life, it makes sense to gain the knowledge, rewards and hope available at the Webstring Model Homepage.
"Most of our troubles result from webstrings being injured or subdued during our nature-disconnected socialization. This underlies our dysfunctions, excessive stress disorders and sensory deprivation. It coerces our thinking to gratify us in excessive, abusive and exploitive ways that have detrimental effects.
Organic Psychology, a sensory art and science, enables us to help webstrings restore their and our well being.
Are you familiar with the Webstring Model and its tools for gaining constructive rewards through nature's wise perfection?"
-Mardi Jones, Ph.D.
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.
.Increase health and wellness through accredited sensory ecology environmental and social science courses, holistic learning degrees and alternatives. Benefit from sustainable career education training, natural distance learning ecopsychology jobs and rewards.
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THE WEBSTRING NATURAL ATTRACTION MODEL Connecting With the Grace, Balance and Restorative Powers of the Web of Life The Wisdom We Forget To Remember Michael J. Cohen ©2000 The information in this article is edited from the author's:
SYNOPSIS: Humanity is part of nature, the balanced, ancient, pre-human web of life on Earth that communicates within itself through non-literate attraction sensitivities. Due to our culture's irrational prejudice against nature, our nature separated society socializes/trains/programs us to live, on average, less than .000022% of our lives in conscious sensory contact with the streaming natural attraction filaments (webstrings) that support, nurture and hold the web of life together . It is reasonable to recognize that we seldom improve personal or global peace and well being because our prejudice secretly conditions us to fight an undeclared war against nature and its webstrings within and about us. Webstrings flow through and rewardingly register in our consciousness as 53 natural attraction senses. These include our well known five senses plus 48 additional senses including the senses of thirst, place and color, trust community and reason, pain, motion, consciousness, gravity and temperature. The socialized excessive separation of our psyche from nature tears it from its nurturing origins in the web of life. This injures and wounds our webstring attractions. It stops their sensory flow through our awareness. To dispel the pain, our psyche removes from our awareness our hurt, inherent 53 natural sense webstring way of knowing. We lose contact with global life's balanced guidelines and rewards. Many of our injured natural senses hide in our subconscious where their pain may be hooked into consciousness so we suffer it. To reduce the sensory void, pain and sadness that our webstring injury and disconnection creates, we crave and psychologically bond to destructive replacement gratifications and to tranquilizers for our separation discomforts. We feel loss and abandonment. We want beyond reason. We become greedy, excessive, insensitive and abusive, for when we want there is never enough. We feel excessive stress and a lack of support that we incorrectly identify as symptoms of life's madness. Life is not mad, it's the prejudice of the nature-disconnected way we learn to think that is crazy. Through researched sensory nature activities, the Webstring Model natural attraction tools of Organic Psychology help us thoughtfully, consciously, reconnect our psyche with the web of life and pleasantly register its webstrings. This enables the grace, balance and restorative powers of webstrings to help us transform the destructive socialization of our thoughts that creates our disconnected reasoning. We recycle it into constructive thinking and feeling. Responsible personal, social and environmental relationships result that increase well being.
Article
The unbalanced way we learn to think in our nature- conquering culture produces personal, social and environmental abusiveness that includes the insanity of war. Although we despise these evils, they don't readily change for, subconsciously, by the age of seven, our socialization bonds or addicts us to some ideas and values that produce our evils. Without appropriately transforming these destructive bonds we and Earth remain dangerously troubled and unbalanced. Biologically and psychologically we are part of nature and vice versa. However, due to our seldom recognized prejudice against nature we learn to live in physical and mental separation from nature and its balanced ways. Our prejudice consists of unreasonable attitudes that are unusually resistant to rational influence. Due to it, on average over 98 percent of our time and thinking is disconnected from nature's grace balance and restorative powers. This severe severance from the web of life's beneficial natural fulfillments produces a void in our psyche. It triggers the discomforts of sensory deprivation and excessive cravings that we must gratify artificially, no matter the ruinous side effects. Our artificial fulfillments often color or distort our thinking while they provide emotional and monetary rewards that fuel our economy. Unthoughtful development, consumerism and disorders result. Despite excellent reasoning and evidence to the contrary, very few of us think that we can satisfy our cravings by thoughtfully reconnecting our thinking and feeling to nature. Such denial of a truth or fact is typical of addiction or bigotry. We have become so bewildered (wilderness separated) that we try to resolve our problems using the same nature disconnected stories, thinking and processes that produce them. The good news is that a new social technology, the Webstring Natural Attraction Model, enables us to break this habitual vicious circle. It helps us recognize ourselves as part of the life of Planet Earth. Scientifically, we can see it and us act like a single living organism.
The Webstring Model Based on Vladimir Vernadsky's 1929 identification of the biosphere, and John H. Stoer's 1953 ecology classic, The Web of Life, experts have accurately portrayed nature and the web of life by gathering a group of people in a circle. Each person is asked to represent some part of nature, a bird, soil, water, a tree, etc. A large ball of string then demonstrates the interconnecting relationships between things in nature. For example the bird eats insects so the string is passed from the "bird person" to the "insect person." That is their connection. The insect lives in a flower, so the string is further unrolled across the circle to the "flower person." Soon a web of string is formed interconnecting all members of the group, including two people who represent humanity. In the string model an additional, singular red ribbon connects the two people in the circle. The ribbon represents that in the web of life people alone can connect with each other using the written or spoken abstractions of literacy, of our words and stories. Every part of the global life community, from sub-atomic particles to weather systems, is part of, and included in, this lifeweb model. Their webstring interconnectedness produces nature's balanced integrity and prevents runaway disorders. In the above-described activity, dramatically, people pull back, sense, and enjoy how the fragile string that they share peacefully unites, supports and interconnects them and all of life. Then one strand of the web is cut signifying the loss of a species, habitat or relationship due to pollution or excessive exploitation. Sadly, the weakening effect on all is noted. Another and another string is cut. Soon the web strings' integrity, support and power disintegrates along with its spirit. Because this reflects the reality of our lives, it triggers feelings of hurt, despair and sadness in many activity participants. We have long observed and objected to Earth and its people increasingly suffering from "cut string" disintegration, yet we continue to cut the strings. Natural beings relate while in contact with the whole of the web of life through its webstrings. As part of nature, we are conceived with and by this ability. Along with many others (13), Pulitzer-Prize winning sociobiologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard, affirms that people have an inherent biological need to be in contact with nature. He shows that Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction. In 1988, I asked some web of
life activity adult participants if they ever went into a natural
area and actually saw strings interconnecting things there. They
said no, that would be a crazy hallucination. I responded, "If
there are no strings there, what then are the actual strands
that hold the natural community together in balance and diversity?"
As part of nature we are born with the natural ability to sense and know webstrings but we seldom learn to habitually acknowledge or exercise this ability. Without seeing, sensing or respecting the the flow of the strings in nature and our inner nature, we break, injure and ignore them (1). Their disappearance produces a void, an uncomfortable emptiness in our psyche and lives that we constantly try to fill. We want, and when we want there is never enough. We become greedy, stressed and reckless while trying to artificially replace our lost webstring fulfillments. We place ourselves, others and Earth at risk for with respect to the supportive, non-polluting genius of the web of life and its reycling ways, no substitute has yet been invented that replaces the real thing (2). The replacements we invent often have detrimental side effects. With the exception of humanity, as its special red ribbon in the model signifies, no other member of the lifeweb relates, interacts or thinks through the webstring sense of verbal or written literacy and prejudices it may convey. Nature's web is a non-verbal, non-literate experience consisting of natural system webstring natural attraction sensitivities, of loves, not of words that abstract (meaning pull apart) relationships and reality (4). A bird's attraction/love for food (hunger) is a webstring. So is the tree's attraction to grow away from gravity and its root's attraction toward it. The fawn's desire for its mother and vice-versa are webstrings. Every atom and its nucleus consists of, expresses and relates through webstring attractions as does every kind of material or thing. All of nature, including us, consists of these attractions (14). They are webstrings, basic natural loves we hold in common with the natural environment and each other. We inherently experience the webstrings we need for our survival, such as thirst, temperature and belonging. They register in us as 53 or more natural senses. As we learn to ignore or subdue them, they end up hurt and frustrated in our subconscious mind. Stored there, we don't feel their pain until something triggers it into our awareness. We often guide and limit our lives around our fear of being "hurtfully triggered" or hooked (11). Similar to a spider web, each webstring is connected to the whole of the web and is sensitive to it. And, as with the spider and its web, when you touch one string, all the strings become aware of your touch and lend support to the touched string, giving it resilience. The spider also registers an awareness that the web has been touched for its sensitivities and consciousness are also webstring connections that support the web and vice versa. Today, newly researched nature-reconnecting activities enable us to safely and beautifully bring webstrings back into our lives and thinking (3). The presence of their self-correcting ways helps reinstate the organics of naturally balanced personal and environmental relationships (10). Genuine webstring contacts in natural areas enable us to sentiently and consciously reattach the webstrings within us to their nurturing origins, their continuum in the web of life (6). We feel, enjoy and trust this thoughtful connection and its wisdom. It is rewarding. Webstring connection activities also help people translate webstring attraction feelings into verbal language and share them (through the red ribbon) (9). In this unifying way, our sensory connections with the web feelingly express and validate themselves in conscious thoughts and words that strengthen our human reasoning and relationships (12). These communications enable us to think in unity, like nature works. We enjoy nature's grace, balance and restorative wisdom as it continually flows into our mind and relationships. It recycles the contamination of our thinking and feeling into supportive attractions and relationships, like nature works. As the power of Webstring support, unity and nurturing replaces destructive exploitation, competition and greed, recovery occurs (7). The natural world, backyard or backcountry, becomes a remarkable classroom, library and therapist that we treasure (8). It helps us peacefully co-create a future in unity with ourselves, each other and the global life community (12).
CONCLUSION Our thinking is our destiny. We unnecessarily suffer many problems because our nature-prejudiced and nature-separated socialization prevents our thinking from acknowledging the following:
The most effecient way to learn
to use and teach the webstring process is by taking a short,
online Orientation
Course: The Psychological Elements of Global Citizenship. Additional references are available at our homepage
References: 1. Cohen, 2000, Nature Connected Psychology: creating moments that let Earth teach http://www.ecopsych.com/natpsych.html 2. Cohen, 1997, Reconnecting With Nature: Finding Wellness through restoring your bond with the Earth, Ecopress, Corvallis, Oregon. http://www.ecopsych.com/newbook2007.html 3. Cohen, 2007, The Webstring Natural Attraction Model 4. Cohen 1995, Counseling and Educating With Nature http://www.ecopsych.com/counseling.html 5. Cohen 1993, Well Mind,
Well Earth, Roche Harbor, WA, World Peace University Press
6. Kofalk, 1994 The Distinguished
World Citizen Award 7. Cohen, 1996, Study and
Survey of Participants and Outcomes 8. Logan, 1995 Nature Psychology Courses and Degrees http://www.ecopsych.com/theory.html 9. Cohen, 1996 Psychological
Elements of Global Citizenship 10. Storer, J, 1953 The Web of Life, New York, New American Library 11. Beyond Addicted Thinking: do this activity. http://www.ecopsych.com/trailattract.html 12. Cohen, 1995, The Global
Wellness and Unity Activity 13. The Eco-Sensory Intelligence Test 14. Cohen, 1998 The Hidden,
Unified-Field Voice in Natural Systems
15. Natural System Dysfunction
(NSD): the disorder, its origins and remedy
About the Author: Applied Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. founded and coordinates Project NatureConnect and the Natural Systems Thinking Process. They are continuing education workshops, distance learning courses and degree programs of Akamai and West Coast Universities, Portland State University and the Institute of Global Education. Dr. Cohen chairs the Department of Applied Ecopsychology/Integrated Ecology on San Juan Island, Washington and initiated the 1985 National Audubon conference "Is the Earth A Living Organism?" For 33 years, he has founded and directed degree granting environmental outdoor education programs for the Trailside Country School, Lesley College, and the National Audubon Society. His many books and articles include the award winning "Connecting With Nature: Creating Moments that let Earth Teach" which is included in his 1997 self-guiding book "Reconnecting With Nature" (Ecopress) and "Well Mind, Well Earth: 97 Environmentally Sensitive Activities for Stress Management, Spirit and Self-esteem." Dr. Cohen is the recipient of the Distinguished World Citizen Award.
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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 subjects or personal interests. A partial subject list is located below.
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Achieve a Degree or Certificate for connecting your professional interests, or your hobbies or pastimes, with nature. Increase the value of your deepest passions or leisure pursuits while increasing personal and global well being. Adding webstring education to topics or subjects can include those listed below or other areas of interest:
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INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council
PROJECT NATURECONNECT
Readily available, online, natural science tools
for the health of person, planet and spiritP.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com
ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION
The Natural Systems Thinking Process
Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director
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