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.Accredited Nature-Connecting Degrees and Courses On Line: Natural Career Education
.Personal and Professional Whole Life System Training Grants and Jobs.
Learn educating, counseling and healing with nature.

THE ORIENTATION COURSE

Begin/Enroll Here

NOTE: The Orientation Course described on this page is the starting point for all certification and degree programs.

Call us to customize this course to meet your interests, 360-378-6313, or email us your phone number to call you.
...
Please send an email to nature@interisland.net to receive an application,
course instructions and books for your participation in the course.

.Be sure to bookmark this page for easy reference.

This accredited course involves you in natural area and online nature-contact
experiences. They help you discover and explore, first hand, the information presented on our homepage and its links.

Something important to think about:
Are the experts, below and elsewhere, incorrect in their observations? Or, instead, do we suffer because Industrial Society has destructively strayed from the means to live in peaceful balance with nature, in and around us?

"I am familiar with Dr. Cohen and his ecopsychology work. He offers an environmentally sound, hands-on educational process that reduces apathy, catalyzes peace and promotes mental health. It fulfills our personal and economic needs, deeper ideals and spirit. His work deserves the attention of every person who seeks to reverse our troubles."

- Dr. Robert Muller
Chancellor of the University for Peace, United Nations, Assistant Secretary General Emeritus of the United Nations. the recipient of the Albert Schweitzer Peace Prize and UNESCO Prize for Peace."

"Dr. Cohen's compelling application of ecopsychology connects us with the often ignored source of spirit and wellness found in nature. His deeply felt chapters produce conscious sensory contacts with the natural world and bind us to energies that heal our deeper being."

Dr. Larry Dossey, M.D.
Researcher and bestselling author of Recovering The Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search.

"The neurotransmitter levels in the brain are affected by medications that often help improve anxiety and mood problems. And just like medications, different kinds of therapies also impact the brain neurotransmitter levels in a positive therapeutic direction. Dr.Cohen's online courses through Project Nature Connect and his work have been shown to be beneficial and therefore would appear to be equivalent in many ways to Psychiatric visits. I highly recommend his courses."

- Phillip Michael Holman M.D.

Diplomate of American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (1998, 2008), Diplomate of American Board of Medical Specialties (2008), Diplomate of American Board of Internal Medicine (1983)

"The timely sound theory and well grounded experience of this course demands its use by enlightened people. I find its personalized, sensory-focused activities gently, safely lead adults and children back outdoors. In our struggle to find connectedness and meaning it allows the natural world to nurture a responsible growing edge of culture."

- Bill Hammond,
Director of Curriculum Services,
Florida Advisory Council on Environmental Education.

"This is not a reading experience, it's a hologram. It is communicating through talking leaves, something of what whales communicate to each other...you are there."

- Robin E. Lagemann,
Indigenous People's activist.

Project NatureConnect Orientation Course
Institute of Global Education
Organic Psychology and Natural Attraction Ecology
Special NGO Consultant, United Nations Economic and Social Council
Practical distance learning to increase person/planet well being.

A Description of Project NatureConnect
Course Participation Process:

Learning Organic Psychology online

"Enthusiastic" is the way Carol feels about the online orientation course she is taking entitled "Psychological Elements of Global Citizenship". She knows what is important in it to her because in its prerequisite material she identified areas of interest and results that previous course members found important for themselves. She also tried some of the activities with friends and knows they work well for her.

Carol receives a course-starting email and she also reads her course instructions online from her Web of Life Imperative book. She learns from them what activity she and her email partners, who live in many different countries, will to do on this scheduled day in their local park, backyard, or even with a terrarium. In general they have been doing one activity a week. Each activity takes about four hours to complete and these hours can be spread out over the week.

As Carol begins this day's activity she senses what is most attractive to her in a local natural area at this moment. Unexpectedly, she becomes aware that the delicate sparkle of a water droplet on a fern attracts her.

She does additional activities that reinforce this nature-connected sensation and she becomes aware of other things that come to mind from the total experience. They include other times she has felt its joy and meaning as well as her past disconnection from it, what caused the disconnection, and the effects of the loss.

She discovers the droplet being attractive to her was not an accident. It was subconsciously attractive to parts of her that sought the fulfillment of the balanced tenacity, brightness and refreshment it provided. Contact with the droplet brought these parts of her into her awareness.

Carol has already read material which helps her understand the activity she has just done and how she might apply it to improve and further enjoy her daily relationships with people and the environment. She closely follows the twelve guidelines that come with the activity instructions.

Carol goes on-line and shares her droplet experience with her 7-person interact group, her thoughts, feelings and reactions from her nature connecting experience. They live in the USA and abroad.
One shared activity she receives from a group member was done with penguins in Antartica, another in a Hong Kong garden.
Carol downloads, reads, and later reacts, to the attractions she finds and things she has learned in all the email she receives from the group. They become the course textbook. They convey her group member's true experiences in nature with the same activity and readings she just did. Later she reads their reactions to the email she just sent to all of them.

Carol finds the course process is enjoyable and educational. She feels relieved that participants hold something important in common and are therefore supportive and not bogged down in "flaming" arguments about differing viewpoints, ideologies, religions, politics etc. She feels alive and spirited, sustained by her email partners commonly held responses and the group's rejuvenating reconnection to nature.

Her day brighter and energized, Carol looks forward to applying the activity by using what she learned to further connect with people and natural places that attract her. They gain additional value to her and she becomes aware of an often unrecognized natural self-worth in herself and others along with new values in natural areas. She has increased her confidence for she has done the activity and known its effects. She knows that she owns it, can teach it, and gain its rewards again at will.

The course work feels simple and enjoyable to Carol, but explaining to others how and why it works challenges her intellect and spirit. The nature-connected learning process and its effects are so steeped in nature's mutually supportive relationships that for most people they are, like nature's perfection, beyond words. To be known and understood by others, she must help them sense the effects first hand, or remember them from their previous good experiences in nature.

"After I completed the course, as part of the program I was given the opportunity to co-faciltate another section of the course so I had experience of teaching courses on my own as part of the program.

Half the reading on the courses was the email from other students, on the courses with me, about what they were discovering while doing the nature-connecting activities. Our information came from direct sensory contact with natural areas, backyard or backcountry, all over the world, not from the bias of our nature-estranged society. We learned from natural systems how to think and speak with and for them. Although profound, this was simple and enjoyable because we were/are natural systems, we were simply making contact with parts of ourselves and the world that were missing in our nature-disconnected socialization. And we were assured that we knew and could communicate this because we did it, even by email!

The essential thing we learned was how to use simple nature-connecting sensory activities to create moments that let Earth teach us what we wanted to know.

Being accepted to the Orientation Course or the Program is easy once you decide that's what you want to do. Simply read the homepage, optionally read or do the ECHN book then call the office, (360-378-6313) and get your questions answered. They'll email you an easy-to-use copy of the application. Complete it, keeping in mind that once you are on the Orientation Course you can go as far as you want in the program and honestly pay what you can afford when you can afford it."

- PNC Participant (edited)

NOTE: You may read full information about the rationale, process and course sequence of the total certificate or degree degree program.

APPLICATION For a course application form email us or call 360-378-6313. Once you have completed the application, you will be given instructions on how to proceed with the course.