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THE NATURAL SYSTEMS THINKING PROCESS
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systems. Our natural sense of 
roots
in ecosystems of which they were part. These sensations acted
as nature's guiding voice. They replaced the voice of our "normal"
destructive ways that ordinarily played in their mind even while
in natural areas.
* Now return to top of this page and proceed with the article *
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.'" "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." |
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.
| "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 |
- from Janet Thomas Author, The Battle in Seattle
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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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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, coaching 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.
Act now: courses, 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 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?
Charles Drew, Acton
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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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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 co-create ourselves and the world in a peaceful balance that eliminates these side effects."
- Michael J. Cohen
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 |
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 addressing the nature-disconnected roots of these dysfunctions too often furthers their and our problems as time passes.
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Although each of us is part of nature, our socialization erodes our personal, social, spiritual and environmental relationships because it excessively separates us from the recuperative qualities of nature. This disconnection causes us to lose the benefit of the purifying powers in nature that would ordinarily help us rejuvenate and regenerate our presently deteriorating thinking. Our relationships with ourselves, others and the environment would improve.
We live over 95 percent of our lives indoors, separated from nature; over 99 percent of our thinking is disconnected from how nature works to produce its non-polluting perfection. To our great cost, we omit nature's grace from our personal, social, spiritual and environmental lives.
At www.ninelegs.com a spectacular nature-reconnecting tool gives us the nine leg ability to tap into the unifying recuperative aspects of nature that sustain its balance and beauty.
Nine leg thinking and relating restores our power to co-create and sustain ourselves in balance with all of life.
The nine leg tool helps us reconnect ourselves to the nurturing biological and psychological origins of our mind over the eons. This improves our ability to think sustainably and improve our health and integrity. We raise our consciousness and can produce more rewarding, cooperative life-supportive relationships.
In as little as fourteen days most people can learn how to enjoy the benefits of thinking like nature works. Surely, this is as important and revolutionary as Einstein's e=mc2 or the discovery by Copernicus that Earth and we are neither the center nor most important thing in the Solar System.
"Even though I'm a nincompoop,
I'm not very special at all. Any dumbell can see the reason our
major problems don't subside. It's because our leaders don't
resolve conflicts or issues by using the extraordinary unifying
and strengthening powers of nine-leg thinking and relating. I
don't use them because I'm an idiot. But, what's their excuse,
or, dare I ask, what's yours?"
- Alfred E. Newman.
over
OTHER SIDE
"I find that being stupid
makes me really feel left out and different all the time. I just
can't register all the wonderful things that technology and the
media provide for the normal person. For example, I'm so retarded
that I couldn't even understand that E.T. was an extraterrestrial
like Spielberg and the movie and the stories said. To me, the
powers E.T. had were the same as those of Earth, he was just
like the plant animal and mineral community. Llike them, he was
very vulnerable to technology. But I'm so dumb that I thought
then, and I still think today, that E.T. was a terrestrial; he
was Planet Earth. He was in no way so special as to become a
movie star. After all, doesn't Earth all the time do what he
did if we let it? Nine leg thinking lets us do that, too.
- Alfred E. Newman.
QUESTION: What is so important about nine-leg thinking?
ANSWER: Nine-leg thinking is a supportive, therapeutic key to creating personal happiness through a rewarding and sustainable future for all people and the planet.
To understand the momentous significance of nine-leg thinking, consider this intelligence test question regarding mathematical aptitude:
"If you count a normal dog's tail as one of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?"
"Five," of course, is the correct answer.
Intelligent people answer "five" because it is valid in mathematical and scientific reasoning. Society applauds and economically rewards us for giving correct mathematical or technological answers. But something is radically wrong with this answer; something is missing. Because, somehow, even a dog knows that a dog has four legs.
Our sense of reason recognizes five as correct only until we are greeted by our friendly family dog, or the mean mutt down the street. Five legs only works in theory. When we experience a real dog, or a wolf, or a centipede, or any other natural being, many of our inherent natural senses come into play: our senses of sight, touch, motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, fear, consciousness, community, trust, contrast, love, reason and recognition. Are you aware we have 53 natural senses?
No matter how conceptually clever we are with our five-legged thinking, it is our four-legged sensory awareness that grounds our experience in the true nature of reality. 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.
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. We can kill or hurtfully stress a dog if we make it run too fast or too far because we think that it has five legs. Isn't that what we are doing to ourselves and the environment?
Nine-leg thinking and relating helps us come back into personal and environmental balance by revitalizing our multitude of natural senses through genuine contact with authentic nature.