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Thinking With Nature: Today's Rendezvous
with Destiny.
Michael J.
Cohen, Ed.D.
Part Five: Outcomes
Reconnecting with nature activities effectively reverse
our destructive separation from nature by scientifically following
a proven medical procedure. Excellent medical thinking and research
have created surgical techniques that reattach an amputated arm
back to the body. If reconnected properly, the arm will, in time,
function normally. Part of this art is the surgical technology
our thinking has intelligently devised to bring the arm back
into proper contact with the body. The remainder of the procedure
is the intelligence to trust that once this reconnection is made,
only nature itself has the wisdom to heal the rupture and rejoin
the arm and body as an integrated organism. We don't know how
to achieve this final attachment, however nature does. For example,
nature's regenerative ways can, with time, heal a scrape on our
knee or bring a bulldozed natural area back to its original state.
Good medical science respects nature's regenerative powers. It
provides the proper environment and time for nature to heal,
as only nature can. The reconnecting with nature process does
exactly the same thing with respect to our extremely nature-separated
psyche and thinking. Its techniques create potent nature connected
short periods of time and space in natural areas that lets nature
rejuvenate our injured natural senses and teach us its ways.
Because thinking and feeling this way is sensible, fun and feels
good, we bond to it. It fulfills our natural senses of play (#29)
and reason (#42). It becomes part of us.
Have you ever sat near a roaring brook and felt refreshed, been
cheered by the vibrant song of a thrush or renewed by a sea breeze?
Does a wildflower's fragrance bring you joy, a whale or snow-capped
peak charge your senses? Do you like pets, house plants or heart
to heart talks; to be hugged and honored by others; to live in
a supportive community? You did not take a class to learn to
feel these innate joys. We are born with them. As natural beings,
that is how we are designed to know life and our life. Dramatically,
new sensory nature activities culturally support and reinforce
those intelligent, feelingful natural relationships. In natural
areas, backyard to back country, the activities create thoughtful
nature-connected moments. In these enjoyable non-language instants
our natural attraction senses safely awaken, play and intensify.
Additional activities immediately validate and reinforce each
natural sensation as it comes into consciousness. Still other
activities guide us to speak from these feelings and thereby
create nature-connected stories. These stories become part of
our conscious thinking. They are as real and intelligent as 2
+ 2 = 4. This reconnecting with nature process connects, fulfills
and renews our thinking. It fills us with the natural world's
beauty, wisdom and peace. We naturally feel rejuvenated, more
colorful (#3) and thankful (#34) and these feelings give us additional
support. They nurture us, they satisfy our deepest natural wants.
As we satisfy them and speak their truth, we remove the aggravated
stress (#51) and pain (#25) that fuel our disorders. Greed and
disorders dissolve. The process triggers thinking that values
natural sensory relationships with people and places. It empowers
us to create stories that are congruent with nature. It regenerates
natural connections and community within ourselves and with others
and the land. We habitually feel content. We actively, safely
form relationships from this resiliency. We responsibly seek
and sustain our feelings of well being. We learn this by connecting
with nature in natural areas and in each other.
Do you trust that if you pinch yourself too hard, you will feel
pain (#25)? Can anybody convince you that this sensory reality
did not happen? Don't you own it? Anybody who has learned to
trust their sensory experiences can independently learn to use
reconnecting activities within 3 weeks. Most people can master
the total program in 6-12 months. At this moment, internationally,
at least 600 million people could begin to learn and teach these
activities. The benefits would be phenomenal. A new global consciousness
would be born. Wouldn't that be a turn of the century!
People become participatory when participation is fun and safe
and contains value. For example, in the USA, from May through
September, every day more than 300,000 people pay money to attend
baseball games. Others pay to gain satisfactions from many other
amusements and recreations. Imagine the impact of many more people,
free of charge, getting good feelings by actively intervening,
in balanced ways, to stop socially and environmentally irresponsible
acts. Sensory nature reconnecting activities help make that happen.
As did the bird, they restore our natural senses. Our natural
senses feelingly raise our conscious reverence for life. They
motivate us to act on life's behalf.
Not suprisingly, research shows that reconnecting with nature
methods and materials are personally beneficial. In youngsters
or adults, participation in them significantly reverses many
troubles. It increases creativity, critical thinking and wellness.
Environmental literacy, citizenship, and learning ability rise.
Participation reduces apathy, abuse of people, substance abuse,
depression, sleeplessness and loneliness. We enjoy educational,
environmental, aesthetic and economic benefits. Our spirit and
self-esteem soars. We actively protect natural areas and help
them recover, for they gain added value. When they are abused,
we feel the pain and react constructively.
The raw data that supports these results speaks for itself. For
example, a study group of apathetic, run down, low self-esteem,
depressed, chemically dependent, at-risk students living 180%
below the poverty level, were in a 10 week recovery program that
incorporated reconnecting with nature techniques. They are part
of the population that is easily hurt and very resistant to change.
The results were exciting in comparison to a control group that
did not use the reconnecting with nature program. Average scores
improved dramatically: Beck's Depression inventory reduced from
12.2 to 1.5. Scores on the Stress Test went from 19.8 to 12.
The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory changed from 9.5 to 5.
Average scores of the Barksdale Self-Esteem Inventory improved
from 22 to 36.2. Sleep Inventory scores moved from 9.7 to 7.3.
Every student's attendance and academic progress improved as
did their environmental awareness, enthusiasm and literacy. No
indications of chemical remission were observed 8 months after
the program ended. Within 6 months some of the students offered
to help the counselors teach the reconnecting process to other
students.
Recently, during one of my visits, this group 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 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 then,
the area and 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. Instead the garbage will
be removed and it will 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 wonderful sensory nature reconnecting activities.
The students recently wrote and received a grant to help make
this vision 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 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."
Question: Will the needs of these students and the natural
world actually prevail over the plans for a parking lot? Would
you become involved and actively support their efforts? Why?
How?
Even knowing these results, most institutions and people in authority
question and fear the use of nature reconnecting techniques.
These people are experts on implementing our habitual stories
and ingrained ways of learning and thinking. That is why we put
them in our leadership positions. However, no matter any individual's
or institution's "ism," dogma, or God, if his or her
natural environment and neighbors are not healthy and recovering,
he or she is thinking irresponsibly. Reconnecting With Nature
and Well Mind, Well Earth show how to use 109 nature reconnecting
activities, why they work and their benefits. These books have
yet to be seriously considered by those in power. The activities'
contributions to personal and global sanity fall on the desensitized
areas of our leaders' nature disconnected thinking.
In response to the information and activities in my books, some
have said: "You may have become a genius from your 37 years
living in nature, but you are also crazy." I deny both.
It takes no genius to recognize that we are unbalanced and nature
isn't. Nor am I crazy because I have learned from nature to reconnect
and think with nature. Crazy? Crazy because I offer practical
ways for anyone to independently share and teach a responsible
nature-connected thinking process via books, workshops or the
internet? Crazy because I, like Karen, sense it is insane to
adapt to an insane society? Am I really out of my tree because
I figure it is unwise to knowledgeably abuse and destroy the
life systems within and around us that support us? That's what
defines crazy, isn't it? It is crazy to think that we are going
to solve our problems by using the nature-disconnected thinking
that causes them.
We must let meaningful contact with Earth teach us to honor that
within and about us, nature and earth are beautifully, intelligently
illiterate. We must learn to respect that nature and Earth are
inherently nameless. They don't recognize names, words and labels.
Their intelligence signals and guides us with natural senses
of nature's origin and design, not through the nature-disconnected
stories we have invented.
We can't continue to think and relate in nature-disconnected
ways and expect to be in communication or harmony with nature.
The long term adverse effects of how our nature-disconnected
language influences our thinking is where we must focus. We must
honor that it is wise to let nature itself nurture our natural
senses back to health and reap the benefits. Then they may enter
our consciousness, then we may thoughtfully feel and speak nature
connected words that help us participate in nature's global intelligence.
That is sanity. That is the heart of sustainability. It comes
from tangibly, sentiently, non-verbally experiencing real natural
beings and areas, actual rocks, plants and animals, not substitutes
for them, not simply visions or spirits of them.
Substitutes for seamless nature reconnecting experiences often
subvert us. Substitutes subconsciously support our delusion that
we are intelligent enough to create substitutes, that we don't
need nature itself. That delusion is our problem, not its solution.
That kind of thinking has brought us to our runaway troubles,
not prevented them. To achieve global integrity and balance,
we must reasonably, consciously place our nonverbal sensory inner
nature in direct, safe contact with its nurturing source in nature
and then speak the truth of those experiences. That has shown
to make sense. Sanity is nature's intelligence, the nonverbal,
regenerative and nurturing powers of natural things and places.
When we learn to think, speak and act out that intelligence because
it is reasonable to do so, we are sane. We desperately need that
sanity today. It is available. It is the hope of tomorrow.
To subside, our disorders need more than our media, stories,
videos, industrial spirituality, technologies and other artifacts.
We need the nameless love and wisdom of unmediated nature to
embrace the misguided state of our mentality. That profound,
immediate contact and relationship has balanced and sustained
nature-centered people and the natural world throughout history.
It has shown to work as effectively with our problems now as
it did with other challenging problems in other times, places
and cultures. A working knowledge of and relationship with the
nature-reconnecting process is a vital missing factor in our
utopian prophecies, concepts and visions. Too often, we dependently
embrace these stories rather than get involved with the process,
too.
I have watched many people, young or old, no matter their personal
or professional interests, follow a nature-reconnected path to
living responsibly by learning, and helping others learn, to
reconnect and think with nature. Some have become counselors,
teachers, artists, home care providers or business people. Others
have become osteopaths or executives. Each of them promotes person-planet
sanity and wellness. Be aware, however, that some of them, like
myself, don't maintain lawns.
We may accurately measure the way we think by the long-term effects
of our thinking. Our present nature-desensitized state shows
that our thinking can no more define insanity, intelligence or
excellence in education than a short circuited computer can repair
itself. I teach people the secret of how to reconnect with nature,
rejuvenate the conscious intelligence of their natural senses
and repair their short circuits. I believe that is an intelligent
thing to do. If doing it sometimes fingers me as being crazy,
then am I not like the inmate in an insane asylum who saw a farmer
carrying a large bag of DDT? "What are you going to do with
the DDT?" asked the inmate. "Put it on my strawberries"
replied the farmer. "Hell," said the inmate, "I
put cream on mine and they tell me I'm nuts."
Conclusion
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. In most people it has been squelched by the "civilizing"
process that teaches us to excesssively separate from, exploit
and conquer nature including people's inner nature. Satisfying
our squelched inner hurt fuels most of our runaway disorders
for pain is never satisfied. Significantly, most adults can not
unashamedly say that they love the Earth.
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 you
to create safe environmental contacts that allow our love for
life to rejuvenate and once again be felt. That love produces
the 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.
Thinking With Nature Article Part 1 ..Part 2
..Part
3 ..Part
4 ..Part
5
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Greenwich
University
greenwich@university.edu.nf
1-800-367-4456
APPLIED
ECOPSYCHOLOGY / INTEGRATED ECOLOGY
Department Chair Office Information
Dr.
Michael J. Cohen, Chair
Post Office Box 1605,
Friday Harbor, WA 98250.
(360) 378-6313
nature@pacificrim.net
Dr. Cohen is also the director of
PROJECT NATURECONNECT
at the
Institute of Global Education
A special NGO Consultant to the
United Nations Economic and Social Council
He also serves as Adjunct Faculty
for
Portland State University School of Extended Studies.
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