San Juan Island, Washington (MMD Newswire) February 4, 2010: To add good energy to the wonderful values of Valentines Day, Project NatureConnect, a holistic degree program at the Institute of Global Education has, as a public service, placed online a free, nature-connecting, Valentine activity for strengthening love relationships all year round. The sense-heightening activity enables counselors, therapists and other individuals or couples to make genuine contact with more than fifty holistic natural attraction energies that we usually learn to ignore.
The director of Project NatureConnect, Dr. Michael Cohen, says, "The natural attractions that hold the world together register in us as natural senses. They are the lasting universal origins of the love we seek and embrace in contemporary society."
"The Valentine activity enjoyably interlaces our attractions for each other and ourselves with the balanced and beautiful unifying processes of nature, in and around us," notes Cohen. "Doing the activity helps us peacefully strengthen our bonds of love for life that, too often, are desensitized or broken by the excessive and exploitive ways of the industrial world. This adds a new strengthening energies to our loves."
An individual doing the Valentine activity recently wrote:
"And, now it has come, small flakes have connected to form large swirling flakes that dance and jump in the breeze like popcorn bursting up from a popper. My soul needs this.
"I love winter because it creates magical, white, crystal, beauty reaching to the sky. I love winter because the sunlight glistens and renews hope and faith...... because, in the midst of the cold, I can feel warmth..... because bird songs remind me that life is worth living. I love winter because the falling snow leaps and dances with joy renewing all it touches."
"I love myself because I adore magical, white, crystal, beauty reaching to the sky. I love myself because my light glistens and renews hope and faith...... because in the midst of the cold, I can feel warmth and bring warmth to others..... because my songs remind me that life is worth living. I love myself because I leap and dance with joy renewing all that I touch."
"Wow! Is that woman I describe really myself? I kinda left her behind in the midst of having to live up to something that wasn't really me. I see her now. I welcome her now. I give her time to rest now. I give her thanks for glistening. I give her permission to dance. So very magical! I am a person who glistens and lifts others that I love with my light."
Through the Valentine activity, conscious sensory contact with nature, backyard or backcountry creates loving moments that fulfill our psyche and let Earth teach us what we need to know to remedy our discontents. This helps us build strong, whole life relationships with each other and the environment."
The pioneering mission of Project NatureConnect (PNC) is to help individuals genuinely connect their thinking and feeling with the regenerative intelligence of nature's self-correcting flow, in and around them. The online program's low-cost, UNESCO approved, training courses and degrees at Akamai University enable students to make conscious sensory contact with the life nurturing way of the eons. They learn how to appreciate it in themselves and in local or remote natural areas.
For additional information and free materials:
www.ecopsych.com
Do the Valentines Day activity
Read additional responses to the Valentine activity
360-378-6313
nature@interisland.net
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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 Ecopsychology 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"and "Reconnecting With Nature."
"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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