Bound by Attraction
Nature as Therapy

Educating and Counseling with Nature

by Ron Logan with Mike Cohen

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“All children are born geniuses. 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently, degeniused by grown ups.”

-Buckminster Fuller

The social and environmental stability of nature connected people demonstrates that we inherit nature's extraordinary intelligence. Within us is the ability to think and relate in diverse, non-polluting, cooperative ways that support all of life. Whenever contemporary society neglects to nurture our innate ability to think like nature works, we become vulnerable to destructive relationships and their deteriorating effects.

The Natural Systems Thinking Process addresses this issue. It provides an easily learned, home study, nature connected curriculum that increases a student's ability to relate in constructive ways. It consists of using thoughtful, shared, nature connected sensory activities that help us enjoy a vital missing link in the way learn to think.
“At root, ecology is an erotic attitude of closeness, relatedness and care. We have made it into a rational/activist project and lost sight of its heart”

- Thomas Moore

For forty years NSTP has helped students and professionals transform into inspired, compassionate leaders and citizens. It goes beyond textbook learning. Backyard or backcountry, it empowers an individual to cooperatively create profound, direct experience moments that let Earth teach.
"Nothing is more indisputable than our senses."

- Jean Le Rond d'Alembert

NSTP demonstrates that the best way to truly learn about supportive life relationships is to sense them and participate in building them. This produces a stunning academic excellence that addresses problems that arise from our nature disconnected advanced knowledge and pressing issues. It becomes a practical, easily accessible means to personal and global life in balance.

In 1959, Dr. Michael J. Cohen singularly founded Trailside outdoor programs, an experiential learning community based on a process of genuinely reconnecting with nature. In time, the National Audubon Society and many other seekers of responsible education called it the most revolutionary school in America. It became the National Audubon Society Expedition Institute in 1978 and was accredited in thousands of colleges and universities as part of the University of the State of New York. Participants thrived in 83 different natural habitats and by keeping their commitments to open, honest relationships with the natural environment, each other and with indigenous people(s), researchers, ecologists, the Amish, organic farmers, anthropologists, folk musicians, naturalists, shamans, administrators, historians and many others. The experience deeply connected their inner nature to the whole of nature and culture. Change occurred because each participant's thinking became part of life's wisdom, a growing that does not need to devour.

As a result of the participant's romance with educating themselves this way, in the school community:

  • Chemical dependencies, including alcohol and tobacco, disappeared as did destructive social relationships.

  • Personality and eating disorders subsided.

  • Violence, crime and prejudice were unknown in the group.

  • Academics improved because they were applicable, hands-on and fun.

  • Loneliness, hostility and depression subsided. Group interactions allowed for stress release and management; each day was fulfilling and relatively peaceful.

  • Students using meditation found they no longer needed to use it to feel wholeness.

  • Participants knew each other better than they knew their families or best friends. They felt safe to risk expressing and acting from their deeper thoughts and feelings; a profound sense of social and environmental responsibility guided their decisions.

  • When vacation periods arrived, nobody wanted to go home. Each person enjoyably worked to build this supportive, balanced living and learning utopia. They were home.

All this occurred simply because every community member learned how to meet their commitment to make sense of their lives by establishing relationships that supported the natural world within and around them. Students and faculty hunted, gathered and practiced such relationships; they organized and preserved a consensual group living process that awakened their natural wisdoms. They discovered how to regenerate responsible relationships when they decayed.

The secret to the program's success was to learn how to learn directly from the natural world, the living Earth within and around us. A model teacher, our planet's ecosystems neither display nor cause the problems that plague contemporary society.
"The laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive."

- Henry David Thoreau

The school community sought, intensified and treasured natural attraction sensations and feelings that registered in consciousness through their restored sensory roots in natural areas. The global life community taught them how to trust it, to validate, think and co-create with it.

From 30 years of all-season travel and study in over 260 national parks, forests and subcultures, Dr. Cohen developed a repeatable learning process, a nature connected educating and counseling method that unleashes our inherent ability to grow and survive in unity. By documenting that it works repeatedly and can be taught and applied, he earned his doctoral degree. Since 1985, he has translated the school's process into readably available ecopsychology activities and relationships that can be easily applied at home.

Dr. Cohen's prototype model has become a unique and lasting educational experience that blends contemporary, progressive educational philosophy with the age-old ways of our living planet. To make the benefits of applied ecopsychology available, Cohen founded Project NatureConnect, a distant learning program at the Institute of Global Education and Greenwich University, where he is chair of the Department of Integrated Ecology. His students--most connecting with their instructor through email 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 educational activities for stress management, spirit and self-esteem.
"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."

- John Burroughs

“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. Cohen's response to an interviewer's question as to how connecting with nature can educate, heal and uplift the human psyche. His applied ecopsychology is a synthesis of ecology and psychology. He experientially derived it 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 and improvement of self and planet.

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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.

The Pulitzer 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 consciousness from its biological and psychological origins stresses and hurtfully estranges us from creation, from nature's non-verbal intelligence, spirit and love within and about us. This profound loss creates the insatiable wants and greed that underlie our disorders. The consequences of our alienation from nature manifest as the myriad of personal, social and environmental problems that beset the modern world. They are not typical of nature-connected people(s)."
"There must be the generating force of Love behind every effort that is to be successful"

- Henry David Thoreau

To understand Cohen's scientific analysis of why estrangement from nature disturbs our existence so profoundly, we must start with his observation that the natural world is bound by attractions. This principle of applied ecopsychology is in agreement with the experience of mystics and physicists. "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 experience as love.
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name"

- Confucius

Cohen avows that attraction, love and consciousness are identical. He says, "The natural world is wordlessly, intelligently, conscious and connected through attraction, meaning 'to pull together.' We disconnect from that natural way of knowing by mostly thinking and communicating with abstractions, meaning 'to pull apart.' Our verbal abstracts are never the real thing; nature is, and nature is non-verbal. Our overwhelming indoor education formally and informally trains our thinking to omit more than 45 of our inherent natural attraction senses. We lose conscious contact with our non-verbal sensory wisdom and its connection to its origins in nature. Our nature-disconnected thinking results in the deteriorating state of ecosystems and people. Sadly, we lose the knowledge of how to stop being destructive."

Cohen observes that it is natural and nurturing for humans to seek and experience attractions in the setting of nature. "That is why reconnection produces good feelings. The feelings are natural, built in, rewards." 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 senses-- chemical senses like smell and touch, feelings like thirst and hunger, community senses like trust and nurturing, discriminatory senses like reason and consciousness--that we register and link our being to the flow of nature that runs through and about us. We often ignore that each of these sensations is a distinct intelligence of its own.
"The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge."

- Marie Montessori

Our natural senses are designed to act in congress to bring our being into harmony, fulfillment and community with the world. Cohen says the resultant functioning, a natural wisdom, arises when we are able to freely follow nature's callings and connect our complex array of felt senses with the natural world. In this state, our beings operate in a manner that desires, mirrors, or receives, natural intelligence. "Through this multisensory intelligence" says Cohen, "Earth thrives by producing an optimum of life and diversity without producing garbage, war or insanity. Nothing is left out. This defines unconditional love. The Natural System Thinking Process offers us the means to register that intelligence so that we may think with it. The documented benefits speak for themselves."
"It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair

Reward humans for disconnecting from rich, immediate, sensory contact with nature, and we lose natural fulfillments and intelligence. This causes us to want, and when we want there is never enough. Our need for fulfillment overcomes our sense of reason. We experience greed. We often can't stop obtaining satisfactions from materials and relationships that we know are personally and environmentally destructive. Our excessive disconnection produces toxic garbage, cravings, mass conflict, stress, depression and dependency. This is addictive madness for it is insane to knowingly destroy our life support system and community .

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Nature as Therapy

Cohen's applied ecopsychology makes sense by rejuvenating our senses. Just as disconnection from nature psychologically causes many social and environmental troubles, reconnecting with nature helps us resolve them. The process teaches us how to use nature as a creative educator and therapy for our dilemmas and betterment. Cohen's home study internet courses at <WWW.ECOPSYCH.COM> gets people to reconnect with the environment, locally or globally, for the purpose of nurturing "their ability to make sense of their lives." The techniques presented in the courses enable participants "to use a variety of nature-connecting activities to discover, strengthen and fulfill their natural sensations and feelings."
"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 alien stories that pollute our natural self. We feel abandoned by our society, treated like garbage, and cut off from nature which fills us with grief. By protecting and nurturing this ecosystem we find the strength to open our minds, hearts, and souls for the survival of our Mother Earth and ourselves."

- NSTP recovery program student report.

In an article in the American Psychological Association Division Journal, "The Humanistic Psychologist," Cohen reports subsidence in personality and other disorders, increase in cognitive skills, dissipation of violence and prejudice, elimination of dependencies, and reduction of 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.
We are nature, long have we been absent, now we return."

- Walt Whitman

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 in using his Process inject nature-connected learning into every facet of society." To this end he offers accredited, online books, courses and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. They are inexpensive because they incorporate a person's prior experiences and operate through distant learning cooperatives. Through them, educators, counselors, families and students increase their marketability, credibility and effectiveness. Recently a psychologist who learned this program said: "This is the course that every civilized person will be required to take if we are to reverse our runaway disorders."
"One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin."

- William Shakespeare

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; sensory contact with the natural environment nurtures and energizes our inner wisdom into our consciousness and thinking while giving the environment an added value.) 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 non-governmental 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.
"Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table."

- D. H. Lawrence

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--Ron Logan with Mike Cohen

Mike Cohen <NATURE@PACIFICRIM.NET> of Project 'NatureConnect"

References for this article may be found at http://www.webstrings.org/references.html

NEW BOOK <HTTP://WWW.ECOPSYCH.COM/ECOEINSTEIN3.HTML>

NATURE CONNECTED PSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION: Walk nature's path to a fulfilling livelihood, self-improvement and responsible relationships. Activities,courses, Ph.D., M.S., and B.A. degree programs and internships: <HTTP:/WWW.ECOPSYCH.COM>

A Natural Systems Thinking Process produces ecopsychology courses and degrees that enable students to increase academic skills, resiliency and responsible relationships.

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© Copyright 2000. Ron Logan - All Rights Reserved.

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© Copyright 2000. CCL-LLC - All Rights Reserved.