Nourished Magazine :: Wisdom to thrive by

“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?”

This is Dr. Michael Cohen’s response to an interviewer’s question as to how connecting with nature can heal and uplift the human psyche.

From his four decades of living and teaching in natural areas throughout the seasons, Cohen has pioneered “applied ecopsychology,” a synthesis of ecology and psychology. Applied ecopsychology was experientially derived from the observed effects of people connecting with sea breezes, roaring brooks, and wildflower fragrances. Cohen noticed that intimate contact with nature puts people in touch with an innate wisdom that affects a deep healing of self and planet.

To make the benefits of applied ecopsychology available, Cohen founded Project NatureConnect, a home study program of the Institute of Global Education in conjunction with several universities, where he is chair of the Department of Integrated Ecology. His students–most connecting with their instructor and each other through e-mail or telephone–make use of his self-guiding training manuals, Reconnecting With Nature and Well Mind, Well Earth. The manuals provide a syllabus of “124 environmentally sensitive activities for stress management, spirit and self-esteem.”

Bound by Attraction

The great systems theorist, Gregory Bateson, once noted: “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way man thinks.” Cohen verifies that the distortions in the way humans think have arisen from our loss of contact with nature. He has discovered a sensory process that helps us regain that loss and thereby more powerfully resolve problems.

The Pulitizer Prize, Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson, observes that “Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world. Preliterate peoples were in intimate contact with a bewildering array of life forms.” By contrast, as citizens of Western civilization we spend, according to Cohen, “an average of over 95 percent of our lives indoors, cloistered from nature. We live over 99 percent of our adult lives knowing nature through detached words, stories and pictures.” This detachment of our psyche from its biological and psychological origins stressfully and hurtfully estranges us from creation, from nature’s supportive, non-verbal wisdom, spirit and love within and about us.” This loss creates the insatiable wants and greed that underlie our disorders. We become psychologically addicted to rewarding technologies and relationships that often have destructive side effects. The consequences of our alienation from nature manifest as the myriad of lasting personal, social and environmental problems which beset the modern world.

To understand Cohen’s scientific analysis of why estrangement from nature disturbs our existence so profoundly, we must start with his outdoor observation that the cosmos/nature is bound by attractions. This principle of applied ecopsychology is in agreement with the experience of mystics. “From atoms and molecules to human beings with developed consciousness, all entities relate through attraction for one another. . . . attraction is the law of nature,” affirms spiritual philosopher, P.R.Sarkar. The cosmos is united as an integral entity by what we functionally describe as connecting attraction forces, but feelingly experience as love.

Cohen avows that attraction, love and consciousness are identical. He says, “The universe and all that it includes are wordlessly conscious and connected through attractions, the same “intelligent binding and pulling together” found in atoms and weather systems. We disconnect from that natural way of knowing by mostly thinking and communicating verbally with words, with abstractions, meaning “to pull apart.” Verbal abstracts are never the real thing for nature is non-verbal. Almost 100 percent of contemporary thinking consists of abstractions.”

Our indoor education formally and informally trains our intelligence to omit more than 45 of our 53 natural attraction senses. We lose conscious contact with our inherent sensory wisdom and its nurturing connection to its origins in nature. Our nature-disconnected thinking omits nature’s intelligence. This results in the deteriorating state of ecosystems and people and our inability to stop being destructive when it is reasonable to do so.

“Disconnecting natural senses from their origins in nature is like pulling out the plugs of light bulbs in our consciousness,” says Cohen. He notes that we are aware if we pinch ourselves too hard because the pain signals this to us. We are also aware that a walk in a natural area refreshingly clears our head and unstresses our body. He argues that our extreme disconnection from Nature erases something vital from our thinking. It removes the fact that both these phenomena are Nature at work. Both are eons of natural attractions balancing themselves to harmoniously create the next life-supporting moment. Cohen suggests, “On a walk, we think we feel better because we leave our problems behind. We have lost sight of the truth that in both examples we connect with the intelligence of paradise at work. That work, since the beginning of time, has created and sustained the natural systems within and around us.” No doubt the loss of this truth places us in the conflicts we face today. We learn to take natural systems for granted. Many of us learn to think we can manage the world better than Nature while knowing full well that with respect to Nature there is no known substitute for the real thing. For this reason, Cohen claims there is no substitute for conscious sensory contact with authentic Nature.

Cohen observes that it is natural and sustaining for humans to seek and experience attractions in the setting of nature. That is why this “love” connection produces good feelings in sentient beings. The feelings are natural rewards of, by and from Nature that urge us to keep making contact with nature. To biologist Wilson, this human tendency seems so fundamental that he coined the term “biophilia” to signify the “connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.” Our expression of biophilia is manifested, according to Cohen, by some 53 “natural senses.” It is through these sensory loves–from the perceptual senses like smell and touch, to primary drives like thirst and hunger, to subtle feelings like trust and nurturing, to mental expressions like reason and discrimination–that we link our being to the natural system that runs through and about us. Cohen’s work validates sensation itself, not just the words describing it.

Through the use of a long established web-of-life string model, Cohen shows that our natural senses are designed, similar to string theory, to act in congress and bring our being into harmony, fulfillment and community with the world. Cohen calls the resultant functioning of the senses “self evidence” and “natural wisdom.” He finds that it arises when we are able to freely follow nature’s callings and learn how to genuinely connect our complex array of felt senses with the authentic natural world. In this state, our being, like all beings, functions in a manner that desires, mirrors, or receives, “earth wisdom.” “Through its natural attraction intelligence,” says Cohen, “Earth’s global life community cooperatively self-organizes to cooperatively produce an optimum of life and diversity without producing our garbage, war, insanity or excessive abusiveness and dependencies. Nature reconnecting activities help us become conscious of and think with that wisdom. The documented health, psychological and environmental benefits speak for themselves.”

Disconnect humans from rich, immediate sensory contact with nature, and we lose our profound natural fulfillments, wisdom and healing. This loss causes us to want, and when we want there is never enough. Our need for fulfillment overcomes our sense of reason. We can’t stop obtaining satisfactions from materials and relationships even when we know they are environmentally and personally destructive. Too often their side effects produce toxic garbage, cravings, mass conflict, stress, depression and dependency that deteriorates people and natural systems. Cohen says, “Knowledgeably seeking destructive rewards symptomizes addiction and madness. It is insane for us to knowingly destroy our life support system. We are in denial that we are psychologically bonded to doing this and our denial prevents us from effectively addressing this psychological problem with psychological solutions. Instead we rely on using the same nature disconnected thinking that causes the problem”

Nature as Therapy

Applied Ecopsychology teaches us how to use nature as a therapy for our troubles. Cohen’s home study internet course at www.ecopsych.com gets people to reconnect with nature, whether in their backyards or in remote wilderness, for the purpose of nurturing “their ability to make sense of their lives as global citizens.” The techniques presented in the course enable participants “to use a variety of nature-connecting activities to discover, strengthen and fulfill their 53 natural sensations and feelings. This energizes these sensitivities into our consciousness so that we may include their intelligence in our thinking.”

In an article in the American Psychological Association Division Journal, “The Humanistic Psychologist,” on the effects of Project NatureConnect, Cohen reports subsidence in personality disorders, increase in cognitive skills, dissipation of violence and prejudice, and a reduction of dependencies and stress. Cohen himself has effortlessly broken a 58 year habit of biting his fingernails–a habit which resisted repeated attempts to overcome–through contact with nature.

If, as Gregory Bateson asserts, the problems of society and environment ultimately stem from our ignorance of how nature works, and if applied ecopsychology effectively puts people in touch with “earth wisdom,” then its healing potential could be more than personal in scope. Cohen would like to see “people who are trained to connect with this wisdom inject nature-connected learning into every facet of society.” To this end he offers accredited, online courses and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. They are readily available because they incorporate a person’s prior experiences and operate through cooperative distant learning and scholarships. Through them, educators, counselors, families and students responsibly reduce their estrangement from nature, fulfill their deeper ideals, and increase their marketability, credibility and effectiveness.

Recently a psychologist who took this program said: “This is the course that every civilized person will be required to take if we are to reverse our runaway disorders.”

Dramatic claims are made for applied ecopsychology. Can reconnecting with nature really provide a panacea to human problems? Such an assertion seems overreaching. Wisdom is not accessible only through sensory engagement with creation. Many have achieved great depth of wisdom by going within themselves, rather than into wilderness. (Cohen insists the two sources of wisdom are identical; they are both the same natural system in action. That’s why sensory contact with the natural environment nurtures our inherent inner wisdom into our consciousness and thinking. He says the advantage to reconnecting is that it helps us purify our inner nature; the latter is too often contaminated by long term contact with our society’s disorders.) But it is certainly true, as Edward O. Wilson reminds us, that “Wilderness settles peace on the soul.” And peace of soul is certainly prerequisite to peace in the world.

Cohen has certainly done a service by drawing attention to the detrimental effects of our alienation from nature, and by creating tools for healing this alienation. In recognition of his 35 years developing and promoting nature-connected learning, the World Peace University, a United Nations consultation organization, honored Cohen as recipient of its 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award. If Cohen’s ecopsychology process gets enough people reestablished in natural wisdom, the earth may honor him with a proliferation of butterflies, purification of streams, and peace among nations.

Here’s a Taste…

The activity below helps us register Earth through psycho-logic, the 4-leg logic of our sensations, feelings and emotional abilities that we biologically inherit from Nature. The activity below is from the book Reconnecting With Nature by Michael J. Cohen and is used by permission.

STEP 1.
Consider the following: Human beings depend on reasoning and language to survive. We are the only species on Earth with the ability to communicate and think with words. Unlike us, the global life community sustains its beauty and balance via non-verbal attraction communications and acts, not words.

We cannot teach Earth to speak English or any other verbal language. We can, however, learn to participate in Earth’s non-verbal, webstring, ways since, like all species, as part of Nature we are born knowing them and able to register them. This is part of our natural inheritance.
When you sense that you will enjoy learning how to safely communicate with Earth, proceed to the next step.

STEP 2.
Go to the most unspoiled attractive natural environment available to you, be it a potted plant, weed, pet, backyard, park or sanctuary. Go to a real natural area or plant, animal or mineral, not to a picture, video, visualization, memory or spirit of it.

Let your webstring of reason work for you here as you visit.. It is reasonable to be safe and seek good feelings. If you sense anxiety producing or discomforting webstring signals from some things here, seek other attractions instead. They will prove to be more safer and more rewarding.

STEP 3.
Thoughtfully try to know the attractive natural place or thing that you choose in a non-verbal way, similar to how Earth and nature knows it. You may accomplish this by focusing your words and thinking to the word “attraction.” A variety of natural attraction webstrings are what hold the Earth community ecosystem together in balance.

Say “attraction” over and over again while touching, smelling, hearing, and viewing whatever attractive natural colors, sounds, shapes, motions, smells and sensations are present in this natural area. Do this with your eyes closed as well as open. You may also do this by using the words sensation, feeling or connection to bring to mind how natural attractions register in people.

Chose one special thing that feels most attractive in this moment, otherwise choose any natural attraction that is present: a vibrant leaf, breeze or view; a delightful smell, flower or shape, a captivating bird, sound, motion or texture.

STEP 4.
Notice that this attraction feels good. Thank it for giving you that comfortable feeling. Enjoy that good feeling for a moment. (If it does not feel good, find another natural attraction here or elsewhere that does. Don’t forget that the sky is part of this area.)

STEP 5.
Now translate the truth of your experience in this enjoyable natural moment into words. Write the sensory attraction experience you just had and leave it as a comment on this article.

About the Author...

Applied Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. has been living, learning and teaching in the outdoors for over 45 years. He refines wholistic methods to help people consciously reconnect with and benefit from the grace, balance and restorative powers of natural systems. Contact ecopsych.com