Nature 3
The Power of Nature: Ecotherapy and Awakening
In recent years, researchers have become aware of a powerful new kind of therapy, which is just as effective against depression as traditional psychotherapy or medication. And the amazing thing is that you don’t have to pay for this therapy. It’s free, and completely accessible to anyone at anytime. It’s not even a new therapy either – in fact, it’s even older than the human race.
This is ecotherapy – contact with nature. A few years ago researchers at the University of Essex in 2007 found that, of a group of people suffering from depression, 90 percent felt a higher level of self-esteem after a walk through a country park, and almost three-quarters felt less depressed. Another survey by the same research team found that 94% of people with mental illnesses believed that contact with nature put them in a more positive mood. Since then, in the UK contact with nature has been increasingly used as a therapy by mental health professionals.
But as well as helping us to heal our minds, contact with nature can transform us. For several years, I have done research into what I call ‘awakening experiences’ – moments when our vision of our surroundings becomes more intense (so that they become more beautiful and meaningful than normal), and we feel a sense of connectedness to them, and towards other people. The world may somehow seem harmonious and meaningful, as a strong feeling of well-being fills us. (These are similar to Abraham Maslow’s ‘peak experiences’ – see my book “Waking From Sleep” for a fuller discussion.) And my research consistently shows that contact with nature is one of the most frequent triggers of these experiences – in fact, around 20 percent of them.
This is certainly true for me. I have what you could call ‘low intensity awakening experiences’ very frequently when I’m amongst nature. If I go walking in the countryside on my own (it doesn’t happen so often with other people) there usually comes a point when a feeling of well-being begins to well up inside me, and when the trees and the fields and the sky around me seem to be more alive and beautiful, and to be shining with a new radiance. The clouds above me seem to be moving with a dramatic beauty, and I have a sense that ‘all is well.’
Of course, countless poets have written of the states of awe and ecstasy they’ve experienced whilst alone with nature too. This is what William Wordsworth’s poetry is most famous for: his sense that nature is pervaded with what he called ‘a motion and a spirit which rolls through all thinking things, and all objects of thought.’ Other poets like Walt Whitman, Emerson, William Blake and W.B. Yeats have also left us many descriptions of the sense of meaning and harmony and inner joy they experienced while contemplating natural scenes.
Why does nature have this effect on us?
It’s not surprising that nature has a therapeutic effect when you consider that the human race – and all our evolutionary forebears – have been closely bonded with it for all our existence. It’s only in recent times that many of us have been confined to man-made environments. For us, contact with green spaces is therefore like going back home, and fills us with the same sense of safety and belonging. We crave nature in the same way that a child needs a mother, and derive the same feeling of comfort from it.
But the main reason why nature can heal and transform us, I believe, is because of its calming and mind-quietening effect. In nature, our minds process a lot less information than normal, and they don’t wear themselves out by concentrating. And most importantly, the beauty and majesty of nature acts a little like a mantra in meditation, slowing down the normal ‘thought-chatter’ which runs chaotically through our minds. As a result, an inner stillness and energy fills us, generating a glow of being and intensifying our perceptions.
So the next time you feel depressed or frustrated, don’t choose retail therapy or mood-altering medication – put on your walking boots and try ecotherapy instead. You may not just get a boost of well-being, but an awakening experience as well.
Author: Steve Taylor Ph.D.
Steve Taylor is a psychology lecturer and the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality, including “The Fall” and “Waking From Sleep”. Eckhart Tolle has described his work as ‘an important contribution to the global shift in consciousness happening at the present time.’ His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com.
I love nature so I sleep with her
For years I’ve wanted to live closer to nature instead of in a house or apartment. Now, even with my town existence, I’m sleeping out a lot, and on the whole it’s very good. People slept out for the most part during our millions of years of evolution, making us stronger in many ways because of it.
Wilderness is relative, and there’s more of the real thing further from towns. Places for sleeping out are ideally the bigger nature preserves, but closer to town and in towns there are spots to sleep in that are pleasant. A balance can be struck: sleep just out of town for a tolerably long commute.
One thrifty outdoorsman described sleeping out in a favorite Humboldt County, California forest as “a total freebie” – no rent. For the most economic experience for travel back and forth, use human power as opposed to driving a car – although a bus or commuter train can aid you. In addition to the exercise factor of the cost-free walk or bike ride, fresh air outdoors is wonderful both along the way and at camp.
Action camps, for opposing forest clear-cutting, for example, are sometimes at designated campgrounds, and provide free sleeping space, food, and conviviality – all for a good cause. However, these opportunities are vacations from the city and are rarely feasible for the workaday urban routine or frequently visiting a town’s infoshops, Food Not Bombs meals, and other community amenities.
Tents are optional, and like all gear need to be carried around. Tarps are easier. Another alternative to portable shelter is vegetation, for those with aboriginal skills, if precipitation threatens. Bivvy sacks (that fit around your sleeping bag) are handy. When commuting and sleeping out, the process should be simple and light, partly because locations can change frequently.
Not convinced yet that it’s good to start sleeping out now? How about rehearsing for future social havoc, when, because of the major upheaval when the global economy and petroleum-flows stop, one must depend on new kinds of mobility and survival skills?
It goes without saying that one must leave no trace of having stayed anywhere, unless one is returning. Trash is anathema. However, one can return to a campsite and find it trashed: vandals and police are accused of ripping up sleeping bags, for example.
The box as a home
Why would you want to always live next to other boxed-in households, along filthy asphalt, beset by noisy, deadly pollution machines passing by? With lawn mowers and other power tools spoiling a nice day? The list goes on. Not having one’s own box to live in makes it easier to sleep outside. But, unless one is without a comfortable box, the tendency is to stay indoors constantly, despite the daily dreariness in any pseudo community of consumerland.
As much as people want to do more camping, they will complacently sleep in their box with poor air and unnatural noises only because of the availability of conveniences. I rely on buildings too, as I house-sit and couchsurf in my particular temporary circumstances. However, when one practices sleeping outside, sleeping in a box becomes a mere option instead of one’s sole routine. Burdened with few possessions, or keeping them in storage, one can live in a complete way and satisfy the soul. On the other hand, reality can appear starker when one sleeps out – but so be it.
We are almost all prisoners of boxes we call homes. They are homes, but nowadays are rarely built to be Earth-blending. Unobtrusive and ecologically functional homes in the U.S. are considered weird and substandard, although since the 1960s primitive and simple designs have enjoyed a resurgence. It’s less urgent for the soul to escape such structures.
Inside the typically modern home is an obscene array of pollution devices warming the globe. I refer without exaggeration to the heedless reliance on luxuries thought as necessities by hundreds of millions of us. It is tempting to always use the appliances when they are present, and easy not to share them with neighbors who are hardly known to us.
Benefits, risks, techniques
When people meet in nature, they tend to share and help each other. Especially when walking in wilderness, coming upon people is not as dangerous as when being approached on any street in the U.S. In wilderness you almost never feel any of the even minimal fear that pervades the urban or suburban setting in the U.S. With our self-congratulatory hoopla as the greatest consumers in history and the world’s only superpower, we ignore that we are the most violent, paranoid and trigger-happy society of all.
That can present a problem for one who seeks the freedom of the outdoors. Older consumers are particularly wary of a stranger, especially a “nature person,” looking for a place to lay his or her head. Understandably, a stranger in the neighborhood may be a crazed criminal, although rich-looking people are rarely so suspected. With violent crime so much more common in the last several decades, it’s no wonder one does not normally consider knocking at any old door, and asking for minor assistance – let alone hospitality – of a random U.S. urban or suburban home.
Nature in her beauty and abundance allows relaxation and active meditation, reducing stress and friction between people lucky to be there. You gather around the campfire for companionship and enjoyment, feeling the flow of nature’s peace.
People spend so much time in cars that people almost live in them, as well as in their houses or apartments. Some sleep in cars regularly, a much better use for the things than running them (on petroleum). Sleeping in a car is not quite sleeping out, unless it’s a nondriveable car.
A bicycle is handy for sleeping out, and you can always replace a bicycle dirt-cheaply. Not even having a bike works too, but walking around with all your possessions for sleeping out is a giveaway to the vigilant property-owning/serving classes.
Staying warm and dry is harder some times of year, depending on the climate of the bioregion. The West Coast of the north American continent is generally more inviting than the rest of the U.S. But no matter where you do it, the rewards of feeling like a free animal and in touch with nature are incomparable. Earth lovers should head for the outside and leave the polluting and the pollution behind and in the past. Do it for the Earth and the future, as a revolutionary act, or because it feels good.
Unfortunately, even patches of nature are disappearing everywhere in the development-mad regions of civilization. In the U.S., cities have become privatized fortresses – anti-poor and anti-homeless. It’s not original to point out that Jesus’s parents would probably not be well received today in their time of need, by most households and institutions in this country.
When one is houseless in and around U.S. cities, he or she is like a hunted animal. But we’re all hunted animals. It’s just the illusion of security that a box brings that allows people to feel non-hunted. Instead, they are trapped, and they can be found there. Yet, to them this is vastly preferable to “having nothing.” Some people think they are what they own.
Where people are consuming the least in terms of energy, paper, plastic, etc., they are far kinder to the Earth than upstanding citizens supporting the local and global economy. In towns that have embraced the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions, homeless people – particularly the car-less – should be treated as honored citizens encouraged to keep up their less consumptive and less self-consuming life styles.
To be barely surviving, in terms of material tonnage, is at least to not live in a fantasy world (like the middle-class or very rich person might). In the U.S., the facade of a kind, open society fades quickly when homeless or nomadic people make the dutiful drones of the materialist herd uncomfortable. Society’s growing tendency is to forcibly move people away who are unqualified to shop.
Campgrounds needed for homeless
The benefits of sleeping out, such as enhanced awareness of our life-support system known as nature, are hardly ever appreciated or acknowledged by those not doing it. Also, sleeping out implies homelessness and begging. In the town of Arcata, California, there is no legal campground, and the police go to lengths to uphold the no camping ordinance. The community redwood forest, 500 acres, is off limits! So is the marsh wildlife sanctuary where sewage is biologically treated – 100 more lovely acres off limits. Anyone caught sleeping in those giant parks or anywhere around the city in his or her own vehicle is rousted.
This is tantamount to an anti-homelessness law. It is just what was ordered by some downtown merchants and other proper folk of what has been hyped as the most progressive town in America. “Sleeping is not a crime,” goes a protest slogan in Arcata. City Councilman Dave Meserve is trying to assist the homeless, which has been a rare act for politicians of the past. He is already rather busy trying to pass a City Resolution calling for our Congressman to initiate impeachment of George W. Bush.
The local chapter of Veterans for Peace is working on establishing a nomadic camp. Some vets like sleeping out as therapy for what they endured in Viet Nam. One Vet for Peace told Culture Change that in the 1930s, during the rough economy, homeless camps were established around the nation that were self-governed.
Arcata’s approach – if the city council does not keep ducking the issue by continuing to criminalize homelessness – will be to help establish nomadic campgrounds up and down the coast. The reason for careful planning and coordination with distant cities is to avoid making Arcata a sole destination for homeless people, if it has the only nomadic camp for hundreds of miles. A well-designed, well-run camp for the homeless would feature showers, the ability to use an address and a phone for job qualification, and other amenities. Arcata’s activists also plan to draw upon proven efforts elsewhere. In Portland, Oregon, for example, homeless people erected Camp Dignity almost three years ago, and have successfully dug in for the duration despite little public tolerance initially.
Locales and practices
In Amsterdam in 1974 I made it a point to pitch my tent in a nice, central park, where I heard it was acceptable to do so. No one bothered me. I was having an out-of-USA experience! I don’t know if Amsterdam is still allows camping in that park, but the whole nation still has a reputation for tolerance and putting public funds toward social needs of the whole population – an alien concept in the Empire on the other side of the Atlantic.
Many environments for sleeping out abound. Who cares about sand? Or redwood leaves? It’s all good. You take what you can get. Make a pillow and mattress out of nature’s materials. To be truly off the grid, do without the techno-gadgets that turn camping into an artificial incursion into nature.
Camping out as recreation is healthy under almost any circumstances as quasi-direct experiences of nature. Sleepin’ out is different: getting funky, being feral.
Green is the shelter
Of all that I need
I feed on the berries
and bathe in the streamI’ve always lived here
In circles life goes
I’m the same as the creatures
that live in the groves– the Depavers, from Green is the Shelter, 1997
Walking and even biking around in the dark without a light, both on roads and in nature, is sometimes necessary. Some day soon there will not be abundant energy for many of us to have artificial light. Fortunately there is always some light at night in addition to both street lighting and our friend the Moon Goddess: starlight. With that, I bid you a good night outdoors where you may enjoy yourself. Watch the sky, the ground, and the horizon – things you don’t do when you’re stuck inside the box. Feel more human!
Author: Jan Lundberg, culturechange.org
Jan Lundberg formerly ran Lundberg Survey Incorporated which once published “the bible of the oil industry.” He has run the Sustainable Energy Institute since 1988.
Ecological Ideas: The Animate Sensible Nature
The nature represents an absolute form of existence of universal life. It is a reasonable infinity. It approves the law of evolution, the revival. The nature is alive; it is not composed by dead forms. There are powers in nature that support life. These powers work hidden in the silence of eternity. The beauty and the perfected purpose fullness, the order and eternity add to the Animate Sensible Nature a divine power and never-ending internal energy. The nature has neither past, nor future – its moment is always now. It is always young and revived. The nature – this is the world of things, forms and relations, the world of human thoughts and emotions, a unique system of realities, in its hidden essence filled by the reasonable reality. It is the love of God towards everything that is alive. The existence hides behind the time and space an absolute Wisdom.
Further the master Petar Danov underlines the following:
The animate nature is a collectivity of wise beings which represent the “atoms” of the great, enormous world. The whole space where we live and move is filled by creatures of different categories and cultures. This is the reason why through the eyes of those who have a cosmic consciousness, the whole Space with its nature represents an entire living creature within which everything unites.
There are principles, powers, energies and laws acting in the animate nature. There are two basic reasonable principles: the one of power (activity) and the one of mildness. The first one separates, individualizes and divides the Whole. It logically leads to struggle, destruction and death. The other principle, on the contrary, unites the individualities and brings peace; it originates from the spiritual world. This is a proof that the world has been built on the basis of two manifestations coming out of one Beginning. That is why the basic law in accordance with which the world is developing, is the evolution (the perfection of the material substance and its rising to spiritual one, to full mutual penetration and merging into the Spirit) and its opposite process – the involution that stands before it (descending of the Spirit to the matter and building the world of forms). The involution direction is from the Center to the periphery while the evolution is going up the way back following the first process. These two principles or directions of global development of Space in their operation liberate energy necessary for creating of eternally changing conditions of life. As being such principles they represent methods of performing the great plan for the universe outlined by God.
Discussing the relation God – Animate Nature, the master underlines
……..We call reasonable animate nature the thing that is manifested and the one that is not manifested yet, we call ideological soul of the existence. The ideological, eternal, sacred and the not manifested yet – this is God, it is the great BEGINNIG OF LIFE. It is connected to the manifested. That is why some call nature the body of God. However the nature only represents an image. Some people deep in their ideas to such an extent discussing this image, that they support the opinion of Nature and God being one and the same thing. But if Nature and God were one thing then God would be a restricted being. We know one thing for sure: the Nature is the manifested and God is the not manifested, the infinite that eternally manifests and yet remains not manifested.
According to the master the nature is the very manifested external reality, the manifested superior sensibility, superior love. However Nature has hidden its spiritual and divine side from the lower consciousness. People only see the shadow of things, the changing visibility but not the real content, the real Life, not the spiritual and reasonable powers that manifest and act behind that visibility. The Science has only examined the external form so far– following the way of the empiric and rational knowledge and only now it starts to show interest in the real creating powers of Space. That is why at the end of XX century the mankind has already stepped on the Moon, is taking out of the earth atmosphere navigated shuttles, is preparing an expedition of astronauts to Mars and is managing to master the thermonuclear energy and plasma but yet does not know well enough its own “Ego” and is only using 1 % (!) of its brain potential – the material bearer of our consciousness.
All things in nature as a manifestation of the superior reasonability have a deep internal purpose. The real science of today has to go further than studying the content and the internal creating powers hand in hand with the metaphysic knowledge: it has to direct its efforts towards the deep hidden purpose of the objective realities of the Existence.
Source: bratstvoto.net
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