Through reasonable conscious contacts with natural areas, backyard or backcountry, NAE empowers our thinking to increase health and wellness. It erases our denial that, destructively, we condition our psyche to disconnect from nature's restorative flow, in and around us.
Friday Harbor, WA (MMD Newswire) November 10, 2009 -- : Project NatureConnectat the Institute of Global Education's Department of Integrated Ecology, has announced its educating, counseling and healing with nature accredited courses and degree training have become an inexpensive Applied Ecopsychology program at Akamai University in Hawaii. There, PNC furthers its environmental studies agenda at tuition fees that are eighty percent less than most other degree granting schools.
The Institute's UNESCO approved form of Integral Ecology addresses the destructive environmental and social impact of Industrial Society's hidden bias against nature, including our inner nature. It offers a new sensory science, Natural Attraction Ecology (NAE) that empowers our thinking to increase health and wellness in most arenas. NAE reduces our unreasonable denial of the fact that Society conditions us to exploit nature's restorative flow, in and around us. We improve any endeavor or relationship by adding NAE to it,
An overview of how Natural Attraction Ecology helps us reduce environmental and personal disorders has been published at About.com, the "Guidance. Not Guesswork" part of the The New York Times Company whose stated core purpose is to "Distribute high-quality, socially and environmentally responsible news and information." Two About.com articles, "The Science of Natural Attraction Ecology" and "The Hidden Voice in Natural Systems," were guest written for the N.Y. Times Company by Dr. Michael J. Cohen, the Director of Project NatureConnect.
Natural Attraction Ecology (NAE) helps our thinking recognize that, from within the nucleus of an atom to our solar system and beyond, all of nature, including our body and psyche, consist of, and are bound together by natural attraction.
Cohen demonstrates that natural attraction is nature's unifying and healing essence, an organic energy flow that only exists in each immediate moment and has the ability to produce change and sensibly balanced life relationships, locally or globally.
Cohen says, "For our survival, we inherit the ability to register a critical portion of nature's attraction relationships in our consciousness. We experience them as 53 natural senses. Each sense is a fundamental form of love that permeates our psyche. Each is an attraction for our thinking and feeling to interlace with the restorative dance of the natural world as its wisdom streams through and about us."
"The great problem we face," says Cohen, "Is that we deny that we are biased in Industrial Society. That bias fools us to believe that the way we learn to think and feel through our nature-conquering stories, is superior to the attraction-sensitive way nature works to produce its regenerative flow.
Cohen notes that our nature-demeaning bias motivates us to live excessively separated from nature. "On average, we spend over 95 percent of our time indoors. Over 99 percent of how we think and feel is disconnected from the nurturing and balancing attributes of nature's dance. This great loss results in troubles that we seldom solve without reconnecting with nature.
Cohen claims that the frustration and hurt from our nature-disconnected thinking motivates us to irrationally seek satisfactions from people, places and things that have destructive side effects.
"NAE helps us make a quantum leap to support and enhance nature's healing ways rather than excessively separate from them," says Cohen. "It gives our natural senses the power to recycle the pollutants in our mind that prevent positive change. Added to any profession or relationship, NAE increases our ability to solve problems without creating new ones."
Natural Attraction Ecology works best for individuals who have had at least one good experience in nature that they trust, including just a quiet walk in the park. Such experiences demonstrate that genuine sensory contact with natural areas helps nature's attraction to our lifes convert disorders in our psyche into the rewards of more balanced thinking, wellness and peace.
About Project NatureConnect
The pioneering mission of Project NatureConnect is to increase personal, social and environmental well-being by helping individuals genuinely connect their thinking and feeling with the sensory intelligence of nature's self-correcting ways, in and around them. The online program's low-cost, UNESCO approved, training courses and degrees enable its participants to make conscious sensory contact with the life-wisdom of the eons that awaits discovery within them and in natural areas, backyard or back country.
Program Founder and Director:
Recipient of the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award, Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D., is a Program Director of the Institute of Global Education, where he coordinates its Integrated Ecology Department and Project NatureConnect. He also serves on the faculty of Portland State University and Akamai University. Dr. Cohen has founded sensory environmental education outdoor programs independently and for the National Audubon Society and Lesley University (AEI). He conceived the 1985 National Audubon Conference "Is the Earth a Living Organism," and is an award winning author of "Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature,"""The Web Of Life Imperative" "Reconnecting With Nature." A video about his lifework may be viewed at http://www.imdb.comtitle/tt1357054/
"We cannot win the battle to increase the well-being of the web of life, that includes our life, without strengthening our natural senses, our emotional bonds with nature - for we will not fight to save what we do not love."
- Michael J. Cohen
http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
Email: nature@interisland.net
360-378-6313, Pacific Time Zone
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