Eco-Pscyhology
If you have lived for very long you will have come to recognize that our lives are like stories and they have very distinctive chapters and parts. When I was a child my father worked for the Forest Service and about every 3 years we were transferred to a new place. During these times it seemed to me a chapter closed and a new one begin. This was both exciting and scary. It was hard to leave behind what was known but strangely freeing. I remember this brief time usually traveling through space from one place to the other, that really felt like we were in the unknown zone. It feels like that time is also our collective NOW. This time is known as liminal time or in between time. It is a special kind of time and needs a special conscious approach when possible.
“On this Path we learn to drink beauty. We are quenched by the sun and the moon.” Do you know how to breathe, eat and drink beauty? Do you know how to savor and let it infuse your insides from head to toe? Do you know how to feel your own inner life force being fed by the radiance of the world?
Winter is the time of resting in being and waiting. All nature knows this blessed state, even human nature, but in our modern culture we are lost in a great imbalance, idealizing and over-emphasizing the active, doing orientation in life. We have lost touch with receptivity and being. The initiating active principle is of course a necessary power and principle, but if it is not balanced by the receptivity of simply being, if our doing doesn’t arise out of our deeper being, then all our doing and giving and pressured activity drains us. The more we struggle against life’s storms and currents, the more we exhaust ourselves. .
Forest Therapy increases our intake of Vitamin N for Modern Nature Deficit Disorder and Stress related illness. Nature or Forest Immersion experiences are a form of recreational therapy that have a vast array of benefits for human health and wellbeing. Also known as Shinrin Yoku, or “taking in the atmosphere of the forest”, this proves to be the perfect antidote for our stressful modern life styles. 30 years of research in Japan has shown the beneficial effects on all our modern stress indicators; high blood pressure, pulse rate, cortisol levels, immune system balance, creativity and mental focus are all benefited. It is becoming a popular organizational luncheon workshop.
I had to laugh. This is what I have been offering here for years calling it Natural Communion. Now I know it is Shinrin Yoku: The Art of Forest Bathing….. Forest Medicine. The Japanese have the medical studies and results to help us understand its full benefits. It is hard for us to take time out when we think it is frivolous but here it is. The best thing to do for yourself and the planet. Discover to the true healing potentials of nature emersion. Read more about it at this great website and then if you are in the Mid-Atlantic come and visit the Earthwalk Retreat! http://www.shinrin-yoku.org/shinrin-yoku.html There are many among us that already deeply value such experiences and seek them out. As you find ways to bring forest bathing into your life, you will discover for yourselves the profound well being effects this simple practice can have.
Flow the River’s Daughter is a faerie storie about a River Faerie named Flow. It is also about the natural history and the natural mystery of water. We are by molecular count 99% water. Our world and everything in it is shaped and moved by water. Only recently we have discovered that water is everywhere in the Universe. Science has also just recently discovered a 4th state or phase of water, a liquid crystal structure that accounts for the amazing properties of water and perhaps the answers to a whole host of world problems.
I am a deep student of the Medicine Wheel of life, and Winter Solstice falls in the North of this powerful mandala. This direction speaks of the deep stillness of earth, and a vast night sky that seems to make an endless night. The winter night sky is so present in the deciduous forests now, where the summer before the cathedral canopy of leaves gave us only peaks of sky in the breeze.. Now the branches of the bare trees seem to etch into the winter night lifting our gaze into the dark immensity. The stars grow brighter, more present.
