How to Enjoy Radical Holism Benefits: Nature Healing Intelligence Sanity Book

For example: A rubber balloon filled with a mixture of gases including nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide has its own attractive wholeness.

When you push in its rubber skin you stressfully separate the skin molecules by stretching them out. At the same time you attract together the air molecules within the balloon to accommodate the push and its value...and their crowded attachments stress them.

Both the separation and attraction are "dance properties" of the balloon that your push energizes into dancing. Both make possible an attractive pulse that supports the balloon's whole-life survival in coping with change from a push. Neither are negatives.

If, over time, your story that pushes the balloon is not attracted to more attractive things in response to the stressed resistance dance signals it gets from the balloon, your story is then a negative because it injuriously stresses the balloon. It is not part of how the balloon normally operates to sustain its well being by its energies bringing themselves into balance.

When the balloon is the web of life of Planet Earth, the consequence of our addictive and increasingly pushy, planet-insensitive stories is Earth Misery.

Presently, over ninety-nine percent of the stories that we use to normally think, feel and relate are disconnected from the way the life of Earth works.

The Project NatureConnect NSTP model and its stories are excellent for learning how Earth works because strands of the web represent attracted, connected, sensitive Web of Life GreenWave connections that include 54 natural sense signals from the life pulse of Earth.

EXPLORE NOW: VALIDATE. CONNECT THE CONCEPT, ABOVE, WITH A CONSENTING NATURAL AREA
SEVMRATCI the most interesting felt-sense attractions from doing this section. List the senses that were involved. Add this process to an experience you have had in your special area of interest: Art, Creative Writing, Music, Yoga, Parenting, Recovery, Addiction, Renewal etc.
Supportive Reading and Activities: in a natural area read one or two more chapters and appendices in Reconnecting With Nature including doing their activities and journaling them.
Journal Respond Form: For personal growth and reference use this form to describe the value of this section. www.ecopsych.com/54form.docx

The Webstring Natural Attraction Model (NSTP)

For almost sixty years, Michael J. Cohen, the creator of NSTP, has been an environmental educator and psychologist who, from many decades of university training and living and learning in natural areas, became aware that our socialization in industrial society prejudiced our mind. It conditioned us to know nature and ourselves through abstract stories that separated our thinking from the beauty and balanced ways of nature and this created our disorders. The separation biased the way we think to believe that it alone was intelligent and that our thinking made more sense than the natural attraction way that nature worked to produce its eons of self-correcting perfection.

Upon completion of his undergraduate and graduate studies in natural science and counseling in 1957, for 49 years Cohen increasingly lived, learned and researched ecologically sound relationships as he guided expedition education camping and study groups into natural areas for periods of thirty days to a year at a time. From this remarkable outdoor experience he recognized that he and Planet Earth were equally alive and shared all aspects of life except one, humanity could build relationships using stories, the life of Earth could not. Over time, he developed a sensory nature-connecting model that empowered its participants to genuinely connect their thinking and relationships to the balance and renewing powers of nature, the real thing, backyard or backcountry.

Cohen's unique Webstring Natural Attraction Model (NSTP) enabled the thinking of its participants to sensibly become familiar with, respect and enhance nature's nurturing life-flow in and around them. It benefited them by giving them the means to eliminate the separation of the life of their psyche from nature's restorative intelligence and balance. He observed that it was this separation that made industrial society reduce personal, social and environmental well being.

Today, the NSTP model's process helps us transform our hurtful ignorance and deterioration of the web of life into mutually supportive relationships with its natural systems in the environment, other people and ourselves. In addition, the Model gives us the means to teach others how to easily accomplish this.

Because the Webstring Model has successfully involved people in the process of reducing their destructive relationships with nature, the Model is significant because it is far more experiential and practical than theoretical. It provides us with the means to achieve our most valued goals. This is important because we best increase well-being by owning and using tools that help us build mutually supportive relationships with nature that reduce our dysfunctions.

By 1948, history and current events demonstrated that our thinking in industrial society was programmed to conquer, exploit and control nature for profit, not to embrace nature. Embracing nature was considered, flakey, subjective, unscientific, touchy-feely tree-hugging. We not only learned to think that loving nature impeded “progress” and “economic growth,” we were paid and in other ways rewarded to think this way. This was no small matter nor was it a secret. It was a matter of massive and long-term public consciousness that industrial society had bonded to support our harmful ways, even when we abhorred their personal and global negative effects. By also learning to ignore appropriate tools to deal with this phenomenon, most people were rendered helpless and apathetic in this regard. They knew that the nature-destructive thinking and excessive ways of industrial society deteriorated natural systems within and around them. They had yet to know the source of this dilemma and how to remedy it via NSTP.

The Process of the Webstring Natural Attraction Model

In his classic 1953 book, The Web of Life, a first book of Ecology, John Storer, incorporating Eugene Odum's scientific methodology in Fundamentals of Ecology, brought to public attention the fundamental truth that all aspects of life are related to each other and that this gives life the ability to create its own supportive environment and healthy balance. Storer noted that, through Ecology, he described the web of life with respect to what could be identified as an orderly progression of significant food chains and energy threads that were only a small part of the massive facts and forces that go into making the physical global life community. Ecology provided scientific evidence for the concept of a universal form of oneness, that all things are connected. This had long been part of human thinking in many cultures.

In 1972, two years after the first Earth Day, Cohen watched an environmental education specialist in Smokey Mountain National Park ecologically demonstrate how all threads, not just food and energy threads, of the natural community fit into a single pattern to connect, grow and sustain the massive web of life that Storer and Odum identified. The specialist went beyond learning from book knowledge and theory alone. She involved her audience in an environmental studies model, in an activity that helped them bring to mind, include and validate their personal and professional life experiences. In a natural area, she engaged them in a web of life ecology activity that enabled people of all ages to understand, model and feel the natural environment so they could more appreciate, support and protect it.

The specialist's activity consisted of placing a group of forty park visitors, including children, in a circle and giving each person a card to wear. On each card some part of nature was inscribed: bird, soil, water, tree, air, wolf etc. A large ball of string (the GreenWave) was then used to demonstrate the interconnecting relationships between things in nature. For example the bird ate insects so the string was unrolled and passed from the "bird person" through the hands of the "insect person." The string represented their connection. The insect lived in a flower, so the string was further unrolled across the circle through the hands of the "flower person." The flower was supported by the soil so the string continued across the circle and through the hands of the “soil person.” In time, the ball of string became a web of strings (webstrings) that passed through the hands of the participants and interconnected all parts of nature with each other. It was a science-based, ecologically correct and environmentally sound educational portrayal of the total global life community, including minerals.

The activity continued by requesting that the group of web of life participants gently lean away from the web they built while holding it. They sensed and enjoyed how this thin GreenWave string now peacefully united, supported and interconnected them and all of life. The specialist had them note that the greater the number of nature-representatives that were in the circle, the stronger the web would become. Some people shared how the web was beautiful or how past contact with nature had been a powerful experience that opened new vistas, renewed or even healed them. Most acknowledged that being in nature reduced their stress, even on just a short walk in the park. Some said that nature was their higher power.

A few participants observed that there was no garbage or pollution in this web of life community, nothing was left out, everything belonged and cooperated, even though many things, like a mouse and a tree, were extremely different from each other. The activity and its discussion evoked feelings of trust, integrity and unity amongst the participants along with a greater respect for nature's peaceful diversity.

Having involved people in a webstring model that captured and conveyed nature's perfection, the specialist then cut one strand of the web signifying the pollution or loss of a species, habitat or relationship. The weakening effect on all was noted, not only physically through the string, but also by a sadness that many participants felt. As people shared other environmental and social destruction or pollution that they had witnessed, or knew about, another and another string was cut. String by string, the web's integrity, support and power disintegrated along with its spirit. Because this reflected the reality of their lives, participants, some in tears, said that it they felt hurt, despair and futility while others became angry about the loss.

Webstrings, Real or Imagined?

Sixteen years later, in 1988, at an environmental education conference where the same web of life activity was informally demonstrated, Cohen asked the activity participants if they had ever visited a natural area and had actually seen strings interconnecting things there. They said, no, that would be crazy. He responded, "If there are no strings there, what then are the actual strands that interconnect and hold the natural community together in balance?" It became very, very quiet. Too quiet. That silence flagged a momentous missing fact in contemporary thinking, consciousness and relationships, a fact that is still missing today. Participants concluded that the question went outside the scope of environmental education, environmental studies or science. However, Cohen argued that webstrings were a vital part of the web of life and survival. He said they were just as real and important as the plants, animals, minerals and energies that they interconnected, including humanity. If things were really connected, as in the model, then the strings were as true, or more true, than 2 + 2 = 4. They were facts as genuine as trees, thirst or motion, water, sight or sunlight. Without knowing, sensing or respecting the webstrings that make up nature and our inner nature, we broke, injured and ignored them, and part of ourselves as interconnected citizens of this global community. As members of the web of life, we were born with the ability to sense, think with and benefit from the webstrings that connected us to nature and our living planet, Mother Earth.

To identify and explain the strings in the web of life, from his 38-year livelihood living and learning in natural areas Cohen modified the web of life activity. His goal was to help its participants be fully aware of webstrings, what they were and their significance. In his version of the activity, he did not start the demonstration with the labeled cards. Instead, he began it by asking participants to: 1) visit the natural area around them for five minutes, 2) find two or three things there that for at least five seconds they felt attracted to, 3) identify what they liked about these attractive natural things and then 4) return to the web of life circle. Upon returning, participants, in turn, wrote on a card that they later wore, one of the natural attractions they found, one that, if possible, had not already been chosen by another person to insure an optimum of diversity in the circle.

To help people integrate the attractions they found in nature as part of the web-of life activity, Cohen explained to the participants that, although they could not notice it, the large ball of string faintly pulsated like a heart because it was the source of conscious attraction. The dance of its pulse resulted from, back and forth, being attracted to survive in the moment and then to attractions that drew it into more supportive survival in the next moment. In addition, whenever he passed the string through a person's hand, it was always from left to right.

Significantly, Cohen added two more cards to the activity. Each of them was labeled “person,” and after all the webstring connections were made between all the participants, including the two people labeled “person,” the two “person” people were additionally connected to each other by a special red ribbon. It lay across the top of all the other webstrings in the circle. Cohen explained that the ribbon signified that people inherited a sense of literacy, a unique ability to connect with each other by thinking and communicating through words, numbers and stories. Most participants agreed that the web of life itself communicated or communed through webstrings but things in nature did not directly think with, understand or use spoken or written words, numbers or stories. In this sense, nature and the natural were illiterate and our “red ribbon” stories were foreign to them. Cohen noted that this disconnection was very dangerous because it was self-evident that to be part of a system a thing must be in communication with the system and vice versa. Many participants displayed alarm or sadness to the point of tears during this procedure.

Cohen added another step to the original activity. He had participants slowly, with their fingers and free hand, move the strings through their hand from left to right so that the pulsating string moved/flowed throughout the web. This depicted the long-term dance and flow of natural systems and their attraction energies. It portrayed how the “waste products” of one natural thing were a life-giving contribution to other things, including people. For example, the carbon dioxide we exhaled was food for plants. The model also demonstrated that whenever any member of the web of life community restricted the flow of the string, the string was stretched and stressed until the member cooperated. This tension modified its pulse. However, if the restriction was not corrected, the flow and well being of each member, as well as the whole system, was adversely affected. This included a reduction in the well being of the non-supportive member.

In his enhanced web of life activity, during the part of the activity when the strings were being cut, Cohen suggested that it was inaccurate, incomplete or biased “red ribbon” human thoughts and stories about life and natural relationships that mislead people to excessively cut the webstrings or restrict their flow. Non-supportive stories impacted the strings, and therefore the whole web, as they passed through the hands of people. For example, the story of industrial society socialized people to ignore the attraction string flow in each moment as their source of survival and, instead, for profit, survive by excessively devouring or exploiting other members of the web community. This occurred even to the point that other web members became extinct and disappeared from the global life community. Participants admitted that this occurred in their lives out of habit, addiction or necessity so they could not stop injuring the strings, even when their sense of reason knew it made sense to stop. For example, they could not walk to work if their workplace was not within walking distance.

Since well before the day that the web of life activity was first designed, Earth and its people were increasingly suffering from "cut string" disintegration, yet we continued to cut the webstrings at an alarming rate. Few disputed the accuracy of our situation as depicted by the web of life model yet, sadly, people witnessed and felt, especially since Earth Day, the continued cut-string deterioration of the natural world and their relationship with it, each other, and themselves. To those whose belief system rejected that people were part of the web of life, Cohen asked how they explained that in a study published in the Annual Report for Smithsonian Institution in 1953, scientists found by using radioactive tagged atoms that 98 percent of the atoms of our body and mind are replaced each year by atoms from the environment. Every seven years or so, practically every molecule in our body returns to the environment and is replaced by a new molecule from the environment, just as the string flow of his webstring model portrayed. In addition, our body consists of ten times more non-human cells and organisms than human, cells. Over 115 species, alone, live on and help sustain the health of our skin. (Margulis & Sagan 1986). Cohen would ask, “Doesn't this suggest that we are part of the web of life and it is part of us? Isn't the web like the womb of our post-natal life?” Are not the life of Earth and ourselves identical?

In one of his later workshops, Cohen helped participants answer, “What are the strings?” the question that he originally asked at the conference. He suggested that to answer it, they explore and express what they had been sensing or feeling as part of the web of life because the life of their psyche and mind was also part of the web. To this end, he had participants do an activity to help them discover what webstrings might be: “Find any attractive object or thing in the natural area here, and with your total energy pull or push it, but don't dislodge it from its attachment or move it from its place.” Through this activity participants were able to physically sense and feel some of the attraction energies that connected things to each other and the whole of the web of life, including attractions in air and water. They also became aware that their felt-sense attractions to things in nature were also webstrings and that webstrings pulsated. As they changed from moment to moment, they re-registered in the things they connected. For example, if a person saw a bird and the bird saw the person, the bird might move, the person might move in return and this pulse would continue until other attractions called. Both the bird and person registered and reacted to the in-balance webstring senses of motion sight and distance, and perhaps many others, as well.

In time, participants recognized that webstrings were a dance of connective attractions by all of life to obtain things like food, water, habitat, energy, minerals, warmth, community and support. Soon they realized that, in their psyche, these attractions were also specific senses or desires that they experienced such as hunger, thirst, trust, belonging, respiration and place. They saw how, in the web of life demonstration, every part of the global life community, from the spaces between sub-atomic particles, to weather systems, to the solar system, to the life of their mind was included and was part of the web and that everything consisted of, and was held together by webstring attractions and their aware/conscious contact with of each other. This explained why, like the whole web of strings they had constructed, nothing ordinarily fell apart or became garbage without cause. Webstrings naturally bonded things together in mutually supportive ways. Natural things acted as if they consented with each other to support their individual lives and all of life.

Webstrings injured in childhood are recognized as vulnerable to other individuals who, due to similar childhood injuries, are less sensitive to their vulnerability, and vice versa. This situation triggers distress. Webstring attractions in natural areas replace these vulnerabilities, reduce distress and promote unity.

Because the Webstring Model has successfully involved people in the process of reducing their destructive relationships with nature, the Model is significant because it is far more experiential and practical than theoretical. It provides us with the means to achieve our most valued goals. This is important because we best increase well-being by owning and using tools that help us build mutually supportive relationships with nature that reduce our dysfunctions.

EXPLORE NOW: VALIDATE. CONNECT THE CONCEPT, ABOVE, WITH A CONSENTING NATURAL AREA
SEVMRATCI the most interesting felt-sense attractions from doing this section. List the senses that were involved. Add this process to an experience you have had in your special area of interest: Art, Creative Writing, Music, Yoga, Parenting, Recovery, Addiction, Renewal etc.
Supportive Reading and Activities: in a natural area read one or two more chapters and appendices in Reconnecting With Nature including doing their activities and journaling them.
Journal Respond Form: For personal growth and reference use this form to describe the value of this section. www.ecopsych.com/54form.docx

#24

Expedition Challenge Activity

This activity helps you experience a crucial point in my life and yours. It allows the dead to rise from the grave. Once I was able to see life everywhere, I could critically validate the universality of my natural senses and of Us.

1. Go to an attractive natural area and thankfully gain permission to spend an hour inventorying what is taking place there. Identify how and where for each thing you find, this same thing is taking place in yourself and affecting you, and vice-versa.

2. Do this same activity with a partner and each of the 54 senses that you can find in that person.

Participants’ Reactions have been:

Plants breathe, I breathe.
I move, rocks move.
Water cycles through me and everything else.
Rocks interact, I interact.
Crystals grow, I grow.
Soil nourishes, I nourish.
Atoms attract and are attracted, me too.
I reproduce, minerals reproduce.
Birds fly, I jump.
I desire to be, so does everything else.
I love to relate, oxygen loves to relate.
Water changes, I change.
Roots need diversity, so do I.
My life results from and celebrates the lives of other beings.
The desire to be of trees, rocks, and dinosaurs is alive and well within me.
I’m alive. Earth is alive.
I’m not old enough to reproduce, but that doesn’t mean I’m not alive.

EXPLORE NOW: VALIDATE. CONNECT THE CONCEPT, ABOVE, WITH A CONSENTING NATURAL AREA
SEVMRATCI the most interesting felt-sense attractions from doing this section. List the senses that were involved. Add this process to an experience you have had in your special area of interest: Art, Creative Writing, Music, Yoga, Parenting, Recovery, Addiction, Renewal etc.
Supportive Reading and Activities: in a natural area read one or two more chapters and appendices in Reconnecting With Nature including doing their activities and journaling them.
Journal Respond Form: For personal growth and reference use this form to describe the value of this section. www.ecopsych.com/54form.docx

#25

Expedition Challenge Activity

A human infant, our inner child, is the Planet personified; it embodies the Planet’s attractions, life processes and materials. Its natural tension-relaxation attractions exist to acquaint and connect the infant with the natural world’s life-supporting elements and pulse.

With consent, find examples of the 54 natural attraction senses in a natural area and see if you can determine how they supported you life as an infant and now.

For example:

The infant senses the tension of suffocation to attract the Planet’s air. Breathing relaxes this tension and satisfies the Planet’s tension for carbon dioxide.
The infant senses the attraction called thirst because Earth has rain, lakes and rivers to give it water.
Thirst attracts the Planet’s water and, in turn, the infant’s urine relaxes the living planet’s tensions for liquid, nitrogen and support.
The infant senses hunger because the global life community wants it to eat and live. The infant senses the attractive tension to excrete because Mother Earth needs its by-products as food for other organisms.
The infant desires mobility to move toward attractive environments that support it and need it.
The infant feels loneliness because it craves the life-supportive niche and relationships that Earth and relationships.
The infant senses temperature because it seeks environments that best support its life and vice-versa.
The infant experiences tensions of sexual desire and nurturing as part of nature’s love for it and its kind.
The infant senses music, form and color so that it may react to those aspects of Earth. The infant satisfies the living planet’s desire to have life supportive relationships.
The infant feels tensions and senses because, in concert, senses catalyze global and personal balance.
The infant trusts the now moment because only in it does the whole of life resonate.
The infant loves life because love is the nature of NNIAAL.

Considerations:
Our infant self remains alive in us throughout our lives as our inner nature's biology. It is entirely sentient. Our mind is mainly designed to pay attention to attractions in the natural world for they are its origin and sustenance. The infant within us craves them, for it is them and of them.

Food for thought: .
To be fully rational, our rationality must honor our natural senses and act accordingly. When it doesn’t, our inner nature emotionally us senses abandonment for it is being disconnected from NNIAAL, the sources of its life. Our comfort-discomfort feelings at any given moment entirely depend upon wisdom about what combinations of logic, symbol-images, attractions and tensions touch our inner nature.

EXPLORE NOW: VALIDATE. CONNECT THE CONCEPT, ABOVE, WITH A CONSENTING NATURAL AREA
SEVMRATCI the most interesting felt-sense attractions from doing this section. List the senses that were involved. Add this process to an experience you have had in your special area of interest: Art, Creative Writing, Music, Yoga, Parenting, Recovery, Addiction, Renewal etc.
Supportive Reading and Activities: in a natural area read one or two more chapters and appendices in Reconnecting With Nature including doing their activities and journaling them.
Journal Respond Form: For personal growth and reference use this form to describe the value of this section. www.ecopsych.com/54form.docx

#26

Expedition Challenge Activity

Let SUNEH-NNIAAL help you answer a question or strengthen yourself.

1) Identify a question you want assistance with.

2) Find a natural attraction in a natural area, an attraction that you can touch (tree, brook, flower, place, air etc.) and gain its consent to do this activity with it.

3) Get to know this tree as yourself by identifying as many of the 54 senses that you share with it as you can in this moment of the time space unified field.

-Validate that now is when the life of its and your essence are identical.

-Validate, too, that during the growth of Earth's life through the eons this natural attraction preceded humanity and part of it loved itself into being to your human life so in real time,

-Validate that what is attractive to you about this attraction is actually it in you doing the attracting.

4) Now, while unified with the attraction, continue to put into language what attractions you are experiencing that could be helpful to your question.

5) In your imagination become the attraction talking to you and telling you the helpful experiences you found in 4).

6) Identify the insights or values you obtained from 1-5 and apply them when appropriate.

EXPLORE NOW: VALIDATE. CONNECT THE CONCEPT, ABOVE, WITH A CONSENTING NATURAL AREA
SEVMRATCI the most interesting felt-sense attractions from doing this section. List the senses that were involved. Add this process to an experience you have had in your special area of interest: Art, Creative Writing, Music, Yoga, Parenting, Recovery, Addiction, Renewal etc.
Supportive Reading and Activities: in a natural area read one or two more chapters and appendices in Reconnecting With Nature including doing their activities and journaling them.
Journal Respond Form: For personal growth and reference use this form to describe the value of this section. www.ecopsych.com/54form.docx

WARRANTIED FACT CHECK: Visit the warrantied fact list www.ecopsych.com/warrantfact.docx and insert dates on new facts that you learned or know to this point in the book. Place a check mark on facts you previously dated that you feel have been reinforced or extended.

Continue on to Part 4

Introduction/ Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4