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Project NatureConnect
Institute of Global Education
Online, grant-funded,
alternative courses, career training and holistic jobs; degree
programs for sustainable personal and environmental health
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Director: Michael
J. Cohen, Ed.D. ©2003
Akamai University
West Coast University
Portland State University Adjunct Faculty
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Thinking
and Learning With all Nine Legs
Strengthen
the effectiveness of
-Counseling, 
-Teaching,
-Parenting,
-Therapy,
-Healing,
-Recovery,
-Self-Help,
-Complimentary Medicine
through "nine-leg" environmentally
based self-education.
.
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If we are not using
critical and creative thinking that ofsets our destructive cultural
biases, unknowingly we are part of a major life, midlife
and earth crisis and we feel the erosion of hope.
We cannot solve our most challenging
problems by thinking and relating with the same prejudice and
limiting process that causes them.
The How
and Why of "Nine-Leg" Thinking:
How to identify
and address the underlying conflict in the way we habitually
learn to think, act and relate to the world,
Why we produce
our discontents and life crisis when we don't want to and it
doesn't make sense.
A CORE PROBLEM
As I returned home from my
hike, the school bus stopped at the corner and dropped off two
young girls from first and third grade. We walked down the country
road together and as we talked about school I made the mistake
of asking them if they learned mathematics there and they said
they did. Although I soon wished I hadn't, I asked them if they
could answer a simple math question that I had seen on a critical
thinking math aptitude or intelligence test. It is this logical
reasoning question, one that helps determine our mathematical
ability or our competency to qualify for the rewards of better
job, higher salary or greater prestige and self-worth:
'If you count a dog's tail
as one of its legs, how many legs does a normal dog have?'
With smiles, both girls proudly
responded "five" and looked at me as if I had asked
a dumb question.
'Good,' I replied, "And
have you ever seen a real dog? How many legs does it have?"
'Four'
'Is its tail one of its legs?'
'No, silly,'
'Well then, isn't your mathematics answer incorrect, doesn't
a real dog only have four legs?"
As they thought about my question,
sadness filled the girl's faces. They either thought they got
the question wrong or that I said they were wrong. It looked
like the younger girl was going to cry, and a tension built in
all of us. I was mortified and about to apologize for confusing
them when, as if by magic, a dog with a cropped tail walked down
the road toward us Both girls excitedly smiled and shouted 'Four
and a half is the right answer, its four and a half.' As they
quickly walked away from me to pat the dog, I was so thankful
that it had come to the rescue. It should have received a hero's
medal.
The next day, when the school
bus arrived, I noticed that the girls were met by their mother
who drove them home.
The incident helped me recognize
that the crisis situation that I put the girls in is a crisis
that faces each of us in industrial society from the day we are
born. Most people answer 'five' when I ask the question, for
that is our education, training and conditioning. Our warped
but habitual 'A tail is a leg' thinking underlies most of the
troubles we suffer in Industrial Society"
Consider the
"five legged dog" critical thinking question. It is
a logical reasoning challenge.
"Five," of course, is the correct answer on a math
examination if you want to score high and get ahead. Intelligent
people say "five" because it is valid in mathematical
systems and contemporary thought.
Mathematics
is a logical critical and creative way of thinking, a problem
solving method that is stringently trained and rewarded by our
society. It even effects our self-esteem. For example, how
comfortable would we be if people discovered that we think 1
+ 1 = 5?
We feel, look
and are treated badly if we are not mathematically adept because
we are out of step with our scientific technological world. In
it, 1 + 1 = 2
However, we
don't solely use mathematically logical creative thinking to
live our lives. For problem solving, our natural sense of reason
can consider what we know from our genuine contact with a real,
normal dog, too. That's when our multitude of 53
natural senses
come into play: for example, our inherent senses of sight, touch,
motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, reason, consciousness,
community, trust, contrast and love, to name just a few. Using
them, even a very young child who does not know math can determing
that a tail is not a leg. A child's sense of consciousness and
reason can register that a tail moves, feels, looks, smells,
acts, has a different name than a leg.
Each of these
senses applied to a normal dog provides us with additional
information. Each helps our critical and logical thinking
sense of reason make more sense and more informed, sensible,
problem solving decisions.
In concert,
our multitude of senses enable our natural creative thinking
to identify and register a different truth than that of 5-leg
thinking. Natural thinking recognizes from experience the fact
that a tail is different than a leg, that a dog has
four legs, not five, no matter what is correct in mathematical
logic, as in our societies"as if," story on an aptitude
test.
Our nature-disconnected
society builds itself on 5-leg thinking and stories and rewards
us to habitually think with them. This suppresses our natural
4-leg ways of thinking and feeling into our subconscious. It
produces the crisis of Natural
System Dysfunction that underlies our stress, disorders and troubles.
Conflicting
Realities and our Discontents
Research in
Neuropsychology has established that our natural, four-leg dog,
sensory way of knowing and problem solving is our old brain
(Cohen 1995). It is how nature and its systems throughout
the eons, and our inherent inner nature today, knows how to sustain
the world in its natural grace balance and beauty.
In nature,
our old brain nurtures us to enjoy natural good feelings
of greater wellness and balance. We enjoy this happening even
on just a short walk in the park.
Out of Balance
The "four-leg
dog" old brain makes up 90% of how our brain and psyche
work. However, our cultural bias prejudicially socializes us
to habitually think with the old brain for less than .01 percent
of our lives.
We are trained,
instead, for problem solving, to use think and feel "adequately"
with the bias of our "A dog has five-legs" way of knowing.
As the two school girls demonstrated, we develop emtional bonds
to it by our seventh birthday. This 5-leg ability is located
in our recently evolved "new brain," and it
only makes up about 10 percent of our mentality.
It is our cultural
"exploit nature" prejudice that extensively trains
our new brain so that it takes over 99.9 percent of how we would
naturally think and be conscious throughout our lives. Our exploitation
of natural systems within and about us often becomes a source
of midlife crisis and most
other problems.
"From
the masses to the masses'
The most Revolutionary consciousness is to be found,
Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes:
Animals, trees, water, air, grasses."
- Gary Snyder
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SUMMARY:
"If you count a normal dog's tail as one
of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?"
The old
brain inherently senses and knows four, as does the
dog and the rest of nature and the eons.
Our society's
cultural bias trains, rewards and conditions our new brain
to mathematically think five. This problem solving prejudice
produces conflict, stress and life crisis in our sensory old
brain and nature's balanced, non-polluting ways. Although often
overwhelmed, they know the answer to be four.
Old Brain =
4-leg dog = nature's sensory ways of knowing and relating
New Brain =
5-leg dog = socialized, biased ways of habitually knowing and
relating.
From womb to
tomb our cultural bias applauds, rewards and conditions us to
habitually know the world through the prejudice of 5-leg logic
rather than 4-leg facts of life.
The truth
of the matter:
a tail is not a leg. However, the bias of our new brain
thinking has also convinced itself that it is intelligence and
superior, and that it's 5-leg way of thinking and problem solving
can best produce survival and manage the world.
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"Many
go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not (5-leg)
fish they are after. As far as the laws of mathematics refer
to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain,
they do not refer to reality."
- Albert
Einstein
.
"Men have become the tools of their tools."
- Henry
David Thoreau
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Four-legged
awareness
No matter how
conceptually clever we are with our biased five-leg dog thinking,
it is our four-leg sensory awareness that grounds our lives in
the reality of natural systems and how they work within and around
us. That reality knows any normal dog has no more than four legs
and no matter how you look at it, a tail is not one of them.
What is true
for accurately determining the realness of a four legged dog,
is also true for the determining the realness of our life
on Earth, of our relationships with plants, minerals and animals,
with other people and  our
natural self.
Our discontents
and midlife crisis arise because when it comes to supportively
relating in balance to nature and its systems around and within
us, we rarely think in 9-leg (4-leg plus 5-leg)
ways of critical, empirical thinking. Nine-leg thinking offsets
our cultural prejudice and bias.
A major problem
is that we live extremely nature-separated lives. On average,
we live over 95% of our lives indoors, disconnected from how
nature works. Less than 12 hours of our entire lifetime is spent
thinking in tune with the grace, balance and restorative powers
of nature. This conditions us to become prejudicially biased
against nature's intelligence and wisdom.
"Upon
arrival the play of fresh wind waves and color on the rocky shoreline
filled our senses. A loving feeling of awe and belonging suddenly
unified us when only minutes before we were angrily competing
for status and to be 'winners' "
- Project
NatureConnect
participant
Prejudicially
limited critical or creative thinking is detrimental. For example,
it might be logical to kill or hurtfully stress a dog if we make
it run too fast or far because we think that it has five legs.
But, isn't that what our bias is doing to ourselves and to the
environment? The destructive results of our problem
solving prejudice speak for themselves with respect to our 5-leg
relationships to emotional, psychological and biological natural
systems, to life and midlife crisis within and around us.
"We have
repressed far more than our sexuality: our very organic nature
is now unconscious to most of us, most of the time, and we have
become shrunken into two dimensional social or cultural beings,
aware of only five of the hundreds of senses that link us to
the rich biological nature that underlies and nourishes these
more symbolic and recent aspects of ourselves.".
...- Norman
0. Brown
...Author of Love's
Body
The differing
values and attributes of natural-sensory thinking, abstract thinking
and whole thinking
It is a grave
mistake for us not to take seriously the difference between natural
sensory (4-leg) and abstract story (5-leg) ways of critical and creative thinking,
along with our learned prejudice for the latter. When these ways
do not overcome our bias, the schism between their different
means of registering the world often produces our discontents
and life crisis, the destructive relationships, stress and conflict
within and around us.
Natural
sensory (Four-leg
) knowing
is a magnificent psychological and physiological phenomenon with
deep natural system sensitivity roots into the eons, the heart
of Earth. It registers in the older lymbic brain that
makes up 90 percent of our psyche. It brings our widely diverse
multiplicity of ancient natural senses and sensory ways of registering
the world into our immediate awareness so that we can think with
them. We are biologically, psychologically and spiritually built
to know and relate to the world through them, as does the rest
of nature's sensitivities.
Abstract
story thinking (Five-leg) knowing produces important awareness
through our cultural bias to think with abstract theories, imagination,
labels and stories. However, like a movie playing in our mind,
they are each a shortcut to reality, not reality itself. They
abstract reality into three of our 53 natural senses: language,
reason and consciousness. These three senses connect with each
other to produce the movie in the newer frontal neocortex of
our brain that makes up only 10 percent of our psyche.
In our abstract
story thinking, a sentence that makes us conscious of something
that is reasonable is considered a story that is "true"
or "a fact." However, when we do not also seek information
and think with our 4-leg natural sensory ability, our abstract,
5-leg, "truth" results not only in personal desensitization
but in the biased separation of our thinking from the balancing
reality of Earth's natural systems and their powers within and
around us. This profound loss in our thinking produces the destructive
side effects and life crisis of our artificial world, troubles
that we can not readily solve with nature-disconnected thinking
alone.
"An actually
existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel."
.....- Ralph Waldo Emerson
.
"We
can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them."
.....- Albert Einstein
Whole
thinking (Nine-leg)
knowing
combines 4-leg and 5-leg thinking. It produces a whole-life,
integrated, intelligent and balanced re-connection between interconnected
natural senses and systems and our abstract thinking abilities.
It also brings to our consciousness our inherent attraction to
the grace, beauty and restorative ways of natural systems. This
love, to our benefit, offsets our cultural bias and its detrimental
effects. It helps nature help us relate and co-create more harmoniously
and sustainably with natural systems in ourselves, each other
and the environment
"Our task
must be to free ourselves from (our) prison by widening our circles
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty."
.....- Albert Einstein
The heart of
our many problems and discontents is that we know and treat natural
systems within and around us inappropriately because their prejudice
incorrectly registers in our thinking as a "5-legged dog."
This finally catches up with us as midlife crisis.
"As a
mother and counselor I have been feeling stressed and pressed
for time. I have been juggling time ever since my kids were born.
So much of my daily interactions are around taking care of others,
especially their pain. Or as
a parent dealing with mundane tasks or having to be a disciplinarian.
I 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, and suddenly I wanted to make something beautiful. I
arranged a broken piece of birch tree limb, some bark with little
lichens, a few acorns and a pine cone, and created a "thank-you
to nature" gift on a rock beside the pond.
The important
message for me that I took from this experience was how much
I need to thank and revive the playful, joyful, creative parts
of myself. I began making different choices about how to prioritize
my time and where to put my energy. In doing this, some things
have fallen by the wayside at times; a balanced checkbook, an
over clean house, more garden weeds. But 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."
.
- Project
NatureConnect
participant
"A lake is the landscape's
most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking
into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."
-Henry David Thoreau
"Truth
is what stands the test of experience."
- Albert
Einstein
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Act now:
books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help
Solving
a Core Problem
The five-leg
bias and prejudicial limits of critical and creative contemporary
problem solving and thinking produces our greatest disorders.
One of these limits is that, being logical, our five-leg thinking
can not tolerate its awareness of the unreasonable suffering
that its nature-disconnected ways cause. It escapes this pain
by going into denial of the problem. It
refutes that our and its sensory disconnection from natural systems
within and around us is prejudiced, biased, addictive or limiting
and that it produces disorders. It's bias defensively claims
instead, that our mentality and intelligence is far superior
to that that of other species and the global ecosystem. That
is a definition of midlife crisis.
Dealing with
this problem consists of using a distinct nature-reconnecting,
9-leg art and science. The process enables us to first
let nature revive our numbed natural senses. This heightens our
multisensory awareness of natural systems around and within us
and others so that our every relationship may connect with and
benefit from registering their regenerative balance and beauty.
The greater
sensibility of the 9-leg thinking process enables us to let
nature's powers help us free ourselves from our prejudice and
bias for, and bonds to, our destructive ways. Our reward is that
we enjoy relationships that support all of life and benefit from
them.
"Hey,
I may be dumb but, you know, I'm also rich. That is because I'm
so dumb that I gamble all the time and I only make one bet.
I bet that
a person who is not using nine-leg thinking to solve a problem
is actually helping to cause that problem and they don't even
know it.
The reason
I'm rich is because I win that bet every time."
- Alfred E. Newman <grin>
Some Basics
of Love
(Before reading
further please recognize that it is the bias of our five-leg
thinking that is doing the reading, not our inherent sensory
connections with natural systems. Our bias may feel ill-at-ease
with this page's critique of how our 5-leg thinking is in denial
and how it omits the way nature's global perfection works so
successfully.)
Most scientists
recognize that just as our arm is naturally attracted, or "loves,"
to be attached to our body, all people are biologically, psychologically
and spiritually born of, part of, and naturally attached to nature,
in the form of our planet, Earth. This includes being emotionally
attached or bonded to Mother Nature and Mother Earth through
our natural senses, just
as a child is bonded to its human parents.
We are born
with an innate sensory love of nature's plant, animal and mineral
kingdom "resources," of sunshine, food, water, soil,
air, community, cooperation, spirit and beauty--that we hold
in common with each other and all of nature. This is why most
children love to play in nature. The name we give to this deep
potent and rewarding love is survival.
"A four-leg
experience put the shock of my unexpected job loss in perspective.
The job loss left me extremely drained of energy but in a nearby
park, I experienced both the physical and the mental healing
effect of nature. As I drew near a strand of shade trees, it
quite literally reminded me of being held in my mother's arms
as a very young boy. It was as if the area was saying to me;
come to me, let me hold you so that you can rest. I lay down
and fell asleep under those trees. When I awoke I sensed how
each thing around me was connected to the others for its survival,
how 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."
- Project
NatureConnect
participant
Act now:
books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help
Five-Leg
Effects
Our stringently
learned "five-leg dog" new brain's extreme disconnection
from thinking with our inherent old-brain "4-leg dog"
way of knowing, causes serious limitations in the way we relate
to ourselves, each other and the global ecosystem. Its as foolish
as putting a lobster in charge of O'Hare International Airport.
"Technological
progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
- Albert
Einstein
.
"What
is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to
put it on?"
- Henry
David Thoreau
"The loss
of nature in our mentality makes us continually want so there
is never enough. We presently
'want' the world's resources at a pace that outstrips the planet's
capacity to sustain life as we know it."
- Michael J. Cohen
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Because our
critical and creative indoor thinking and psyche have very little
genuine, sensory 4-leg contact with authentic nature, we desperately
need a tool to  help
us increase our conscious sensory contact with natural systems.
The world and
its people are seriously at-risk. It makes the greatest sense
for our super-trained "5-leg" thinking and problem
solving to learn to see the value and logic of connecting with
"4-leg" sensory old brain ways of knowing in order
to make better sense of our lives and reduce our troubles. Project
NatureConnect is a tool that teaches us how
to recognize 4-leg and 5-leg thinking, and how to bring them
together and benefit ourselves and the planet with a balance
9-leg process and appreciation of it. Knowing the world in 9-leg
ways never removes from our consciousness that a dog's tail is
not a leg.
"People
who have had a beneficial experience in nature but whose bias
does not let them practice the nine-leg art and science of strengthening
that experience, and think with it, have been socialized into denying their
own truth. They and the world suffer accordingly."
Organic Psychology instructor
Act now: books, courses, degrees, grants,
recovery, self-help
Four-leg connections
combined with our five-leg thinking enable us to have restorative
9-leg experiences and relationships that help us co-create more
harmoniously with nature's
healing and renewing powers within and around us.
An online 9-leg
learning
tool helps
us make better sense of our life, and life on Earth, and reduce
our most challenging troubles --personal and global. This is essential
for prejudicial short circuited thinking usually short-circuits
its ability to figure out what short-circuited it.
"I am
going through a breakup with my partner and am thinking about
things that are most important to me. I am finding a great difference
between my intuitions and my instincts. My instincts, which include
my senses tell me to stay with my partner. I am still so attracted
to Renny in many ways. But the rationale of my inner intuition
tells me that I need to move on. In the natural area I visited,
I was attracted to a group
of trees, and I remembered roaming in the woods before I was
with Renny, and that lost sense of freedom and autonomy.
Focusing on
my senses in the wild allowed me to temporarily be away from
my attraction to Renny. Being connected to the Earth brought
many senses to mind that helped me evaluate my connection to
my partner and how it was serving me.
I think I am
getting too "attached" to Renny. Meaning- my time of
learning and growing with my partner is over, but I cling to
the relationship out of a need for connection. Out of a lack
of deep connection with the Earth and people, I find someone
that I can cling to and hold on to. What I discovered I really
need to do is let go and work on building deeper relationships
with people who I am not in love with and be with the Earth.
I find that
being connected with all possible aspects of nature dissolves
my addictions and allows me to be free and think clearly. It
teaches the part of me that attaches to things that have become
less sensible to let go and be free, and to let myself change
and grow."
Project
NatureConnect
Ecology Student
.
"We
need the tonic of wildness."
"In wildness is the preservation of  the
world."
- Henry
David Thoreau
"A
human being is a part of a whole, called by us -universe-, a
part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts
and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of
optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind
of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and
to affection for a few persons nearest to us. "
- Albert
Einstein
"Within and around us,
our use of a tool that helps us genuinely
reconnect our mind to nature's balance, beauty and healing powers
enables our thinking to reduce our troubles and increases our
love of nature. We protect and save what we love."
- Michael J. Cohen
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REFERENCES
Cohen, M.J. 1995, Counseling
and Nature: A Greening of Psychotherapy THE INTERPSYCH
NEWSLETTER volume 2, issue 4 March, 1995. Contains additional
reviewed journal references. [Also re-published in
U.S. Department of Education ERIC, Green Education, Reconnecting
With Nature (Ecopress), and Web of Life Imperative
(Trafford).]
Cohen, M. J. (1993) Integrated
Ecology: The Process of Counseling With Nature. The Humanistic
Psychologist, Vol. 21 No. 3 Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Cohen, M. J. (2003) The
Web of Life Imperative: Regenerative ecopsychology techniques that help
people think in balance with natural systems. Victoria, British Columbia, Trafford
ADDITIONAL NINE-LEG INFORMATION: courses, degrees, grants,
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and Personal Training Books,
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Attractions Trail
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Outcomes; empirically knowing ourselves and the world
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.
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The Nature Of Nine Leg Knowing. How Do
We Belong and Heal?
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"Ishi, (the last hunter-gather
Native American) was sure he knew the cause of our discontent.
It stemmed from an excessive amount of indoor time. 'It is not
a man's nature to be too much indoors.'"
- Theodora Kroeber
"It is quite clear to
me after several years in the environmental movement that all
physical problems of man's impact on the environment - pollution
of the air and waters, the desecration of the land, the contamination
of the food chain - all start within the environment of man's
mind."
- Maurice Strong,
Founder or the United Nations Environment Program,
Co--chair of the Commission on Global Governance,
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Because we live in a nature-separated
society, we seldom learn that it is the personal and collective
relationship of our mind with nature that determines our sanity,
our future and the future of the earth. Much has been written
about how we need to help the planet regenerate itself. Too often
we overlook that restoring it is the lasting means to improve
the environment of our mind, our wellness and our destiny.
How conscious are we about
the interactions of our mentality with the natural world? How
do we passionately incorporate nature's intrinsic health and
recuperative powers into our sense of self, other and livelihood?
Do we acknowledge this deep and penetrating partnership in a
renewable path to sustainability that serves people, the environment
and peace?
These are compelling questions
for us as our society is in denial of our mentality's relationship
with nature and we face a most precarious future.
We Lose What We Most Love
As nature's resources are diminished so is the quality of our
lives as part of nature. As the quality of our lives diminish,
we become desensitized and fearful. We further lose touch with
our natural ability to connect to the web of life within which
we are so intricately bound. It becomes a cycle of loss. The
nurturing link between our human lives and our earthly home gets
broken. We are driven to seek more and more satisfaction in the
material world, which means we consume more and more of the resources
we need to sustain natural world and our inborn love of it. We
get further and further away from our innate sense of meaning
and being. We lose what we most love-about ourselves, the world
to which we belong and our sense of the sacred in everyday life.
Nature's Saving Grace
In these difficult times, we are virtually on the edge of losing
our ability to save both ourselves-and our earthly home. Yet
the saving grace is simple: We will save what we love. And when
we learn how to stop long enough to genuinely reconnect to the
nurturing sustenance of nature, we emotionally reconnect to what
is most deeply satisfying in our human experience-belonging.
We re-learn to love the very essence of who we are as living
breathing perfect beings on a living breathing perfect planet.
It is a generative partnership that happens when we reawaken
and enliven all our senses with the awareness of nature's grace,
intelligence and sustenance. We find and feel that we, too, are
part of the very grace and intelligence we celebrate in nature.
We belong. Because this reconnecting process is often foreign
to contemporary life, an enabling tool has been devised to help
us engage in the process.
Restoring Our Sensory Connections
To Nature's Renewing Powers.
Project NatureConnect, a pioneering process in environmental
psychology and education, has developed an ecopsychology program
that is first of all committed to helping us-as individuals-restore
our connection to our place in nature's transcending grace. Then,
through its sensory nature-connecting, ecotherapy activities,
we learn how to genuinely unite our thinking to the web of life
that is always around us, always nurturing us, always waiting
to help us wake up. We help ourselves bond to living in awareness
and equilibrium with nature, in hope and in love. Living in that
organic awareness we create a lasting future for our loved ones
and for our extended human and ecological family.
The Organic Science of Nature's
Regenerative Ways.
Backyard or back country, the idea and goal of Project NatureConnect
is special because it is doable by choice. It offers a web of
possibilities-for everything from personal growth, stress management
and depression recovery to professional gain. It is based on
the NatureConnect work developed by Michael J. Cohen over a span
of 50 years of studying, teaching, writing about and experiencing
the regenerative power of our natural experience in the natural
world. His work is a science and an art, the result of decades
of practice working with communities of people in natural areas,
all culminating in a process that helps us recover what it is
we have forgotten, what it is we love, what it is we can save.
(www.ecopsych.com)
Healing Our Relationships
It is time for us to come out from behind the addictive socializing
and economic forces that keep the environment of our mind disconnected
from the Earth and each other. It is time to re-learn how to
let the wisdom and renewing energies of nature transform our
destructive patterns into balanced and loving relationships that
can help restore both personal worth and global harmony.
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"The indescribable
innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain,
of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever!"
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden |
- by Janet
Thomas Author, The Battle in Seattle
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coaching
The Essence of the Nine-Leg
Equation
This tool offers a powerful
process that deals with the problems of inspiration hope and
integrity through books degrees and courses online
It is a health improvement
formula that strengthens your vote, conflict resolution and nature
healing as well as restores balanced relationships free of stress
and dysfunction to earth, peace and environment workers.
This power equation contains
the genius and support of Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau
for use in self-help and supporting hope, cooperation, research
psychologists, naturalists and good government,
It acts as a health and life
experience intelligence that increases resilience, friendships,
love wellness ethics education awareness counseling citizenship
transformation and constructive bonding.
It rejuvenates anxiety burnout
suffering disorder abnormalities that deteriorate mental health
social justice peace community trust economics and cooperation.
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self-help
How does the Nine-Leg Balance
of Life Equation help you improve the quality of your life and
all life?
-Enjoy 53 sensory parts of
nature, like thirst, each a distinct way of knowing and relating
that, when intact, helps us sustain the wellness, balance and
resilience of natural systems in us and the environment.
-Transform the abnormal, desensitized corporation economics and
other omissions in the way our nature-disconnected society teaches
us to think.
-Rejuvenate natural life sensitivities and Earth-integrated,
whole ways of knowing
-Master how to reconnect your mentality to its nurturing origins,
to the regenerative vigor, sustainability and integrity of nature.
-Help yourself, and those close to you, benefit from the renewal
that lies in the magnificence of a beautiful day, the wisdom
of an ancient tree and the fortitude of a weed.
-Through life experience discover how to let the "higher
power" in nature's healing energies help your thinking transform
your stress, disorders, suffering and harmful bonds into constructive
personal, social and environmental rewards.
Strengthen your inborn natural genius.
-Use powerful tool and process books, degrees and courses to
tap into potent self-help healing and conflict resolution powers
of nature.
-Research and restore forty-eight inherent sensory intelligences
into your awareness that we normally learn to deny and subdue
so they deteriorate.
-Enjoy community ways of knowing and relating that, when intact,
sustain the wellness, peace, balance. health and resilience of
natural systems within and around us.
-Quadruple the power of your vote.
-Realize more completely your hopes and values.
Increase your resilience, support, social justice and friendships.
-Reduce stress, anxiety, burnout, dysfunction and loneliness.
-Improve your ability to think clearly and implement the power
of love.
-Strengthen personal, environmental and government wellness.
-Produce cooperation and responsible professional opportunities
and ethics.
-Discover environmentally sound directions goals and satisfactions
-Enjoy nature-connected education, psychology and healing courses
and degree programs
-Increase personal and global peace and inspiration while reducing
dysfunction.
Add important new self-improvement dimensions to counseling,
healing and citizenship relationships.
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degrees, grants, recovery, coaching
Open Articles and Letters
Nature's Grace: A Nine-Leg
Equation Provides an Answer to Hopes, Prayers and Dreams.
Dear Editor
The lack of finding inner peace,
sustainable economics, trust, social justice and personal and
environmental wellness had alarmed me. I sought and finally found
a tool that transformed my depressing stress and anxiety into
responsible stability. I thought I was stressed because the more
I became aware of the destructive things happening to Earth and
to people and places I loved, including myself, the greater became
my lack of hope and feeling either mad, sad or depression. This
divorced me from both my spirit and partner. I felt anger with
God and beauty, a fear and disrespect of God for letting so much
war, suffering and environmental deterioration occur that I was
powerless to change. In time, I became aware that I was in denial.
I denied that I, like many others, had an addiction to immediate
rewards from my dysfunctions. They robbed me of the resilience
to tolerate what I could not change. In fear, I came upon the
description, on this page, of an amazing empirical equation that
combines the genius of Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau.
Lost in depression, I only paid attention to it because it received
super positive reviews from many conferences, spiritualities
and publications that I respected, especially Psychology Today,
Humanistic Psychology and the Journal of Environmental Education.
In retrospect, it was a love answer from nature's grace and beauty
to my hopes, prayers and dreams.
Mr. Editor, Does writing about
this make sense to you? Isn't it something your readers can benefit
from?
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self-help
The Equation for Personal Growth and
Self-Improvement
A Sensory Education and Counseling
Tool Strengthens Holistic Health, Inner Peace and Sustainability
Although we are part of nature,
we are normally educated to spend, on average, over 95 percent
of our time and 99 percent of our lives thinking and feeling
while separated from nature's grace, beauty, and restorative
powers. Our mentality's profound loss of nature divorces us into
apathy through denial. We deny that we are rewarded for fearing
and exploiting, rather than embracing, the supportive ways of
our planetary mother and her kingdoms. We deny that we are psychologically
addicted to nature-disconnected thinking that creates our personal,
social and environmental dysfunctions.
Contemporary society has taught
us to be experts in conquering nature, including the balanced
ways of our natural self and its love of nature. The result:
because we don't protect what we don't love, nature, our collective
sustainability and our personal wellness suffer. To stop this
insanity the Einstein-Thoreau Equation makes readily available
the means to genuinely connect our thinking and feeling to Mother
Nature's recuperative powers, perfection and love of us as her
children. Using the Internet as a learning tool, we tap our psyche
into nature's beautiful sane and balanced web of life that produces
an optimum of diversity and benefits without producing garbage,
a web some people call God (www.ecopsych.com).
Through easily learned, nature-connected
Organic Psychology methods and materials, the Internet makes
it possible for any individual, or 600 million people, to think
in ways that invigorate resiliency and spirit and that reduce
our addictive trespasses, denial and apathy. By genuinely reconnecting
our thinking to natural systems we restore and trust more than
forty-five natural senses that have been numbed out of our consciousness
by our extreme disconnection from nature. The self-improvement
renewal of these senses increases our sensitivity, sensibility
and love energies. This ecopsychology helps unbalanced parts
of our minds and hearts benefit from nature's ability to rejuvenate
and balance itself, including us, for we are part of nature.
We reduce our stress, depression and abusiveness. We transform
our apathy into constructive participation. Backyard to back
country,-we strengthen our life, our organizations and global
society.
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coaching
An Equation Helps Us Meet Our Great Challenge
"Our body, mind, spirit
and ability to love come into the world through nature. They
are part of nature's beautiful perfection, wisdom and restorative
powers. However, the extreme disconnection of our thinking from
nature injures these attributes. Like tearing a leg from a live
rabbit, we wound and damage our ability to think clearly. Its
dysfunction deteriorates our wellness, our inner peace and the
environment.
Our bonding and denial present
us with great challenges. To replace our lost gratifications
from nature, our socialization rewards our disturbed psyche to
attach or addict to contemporary ways along with their destructive
side effects. Our greatest challenge is that we learn to deny
that the self-improvement means is available to reconnect our
thinking with nature's regenerative powers and thereby empirically
co-create ourselves and the world in a peaceful balance that
eliminates these side effects."
- Michael J. Cohen
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self-help
Mood Disorders: Are You Suffering from
Denial of Your Separation from Nature?
| |
Excessive separation
from nature produces the discomforts of fatigue, apathy, stress,
anxiety, depression, hopelessness, anger, mood swings, mistrust,
loneliness, broken relationships, destructive dependencies and
sleep, eating, learning and attention disorders |
1. Contemporary society
and its citizens are in denial. We are aware that we are part
of nature and that although we are disconnected from nature,
we deny that this separation bears ill effects upon our physical
or mental health and inner peace. We are also in denial if we
know our separation from nature is producing destructive personal,
social and environmental disorders but we don't use readily available
nature-reconnecting tools to help us treat these disorders.
2. Because we are members of
a nature-disconnected society in denial, we are psychologically
bonded to our society's ways and we each suffer from and perpetuate
the dysfunctions, insanity and discontents of our society.
3. Many people display mood
disorder symptoms or other discontents that are not normally
found in nature-connected people. These individuals are usually
in denial that they suffer because they are, or have been, excessively
separated from nature and its regenerative healing and restorative
powers. The symptoms these individuals endure include the discomforts
of fatigue, apathy, stress, anxiety, depression, hopelessness,
anger, mood swings, mistrust, loneliness, broken relationships,
destructive dependencies and sleep, eating, learning and attention
disorders.
4. Contemporary society consciously
and subconsciously socializes us to believe that nature is an
enemy to overcome, conquer or develop.
| |
- We are in denial
that we mistakenly consider it progress and economically sound
to subdue natural systems within and around us and thereby lose
the resilience and immunity provided by the recuperative powers
of these systems.
- We deny that if disconnection from nature produces discontents,
that authentic reconnecting with nature enables nature's renewing
powers to help us transform our discontents into happier, more
reasonable, ways of being and relating.
- We deny that nature-reconnecting tools are readily available
to us and that we that can use them to help ourselves reverse
our disorders. |
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5. An individual that only addresses their personal dysfunctions
without empirically addressing the nature-disconnected roots
of these dysfunctions too often furthers their and our problems
as time passes.
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coaching
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