Ecotherapy -- discovering spirit in the land, the
animals, and the people
|
|
|
Links:
Fiction & Poetry
|
Nature, the ultimate Psychic Healer
I grew up on a farm and lived next to a 2000 acre game preserve where I spent a lot of time with my horse and dogs. I taught myself tracking, I grew up around animals and learned a body language way of communicating from that. It's something that can't be taught in a classroom. When I'm in a city it's like a major assault on my senses, the noise, the concrete, the people (and what they say with their bodies, oh my!), I tend to go into a state of semi panic until I can get a grip. I want to recall a quote from a comment by Tatanga Mani, a Stony Indian, in a book of Native American words compiled by T.C. McLuhan in Touch the Earth: A Self Portrait of Indian Existence, 1971: Oh, yes, I went to the white man's schools. I learned to read from the school books, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. Civilized people depend too much on the man-made printed pages. I turn to the Great Spirit's book which is the whole of his creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature. You know, if you take all your books, lay them out under the sun, and let the snow and rain and insects work on them for a while, there will be nothing left. But the Great Spirit has povided you and me with an opportunity for study in nature's university, the forests, the rivers , the mountains and the animals which includes us.I do think it's possible to get some glimmering of an idea of what Tatanga and others meant by maps to the territory they left us with their words. After all, direct nature isn't all that difficult or abstract, it's very real, and biologically we are set up to experience it. It's in our DNA, our genes. Walking up to a herd of elk like I do every few days is very real, and one doesn't need to question whether it is or not, as Western Philosophical traditions are prone to do about their layers of lovely ideas -- which can be a valid thing to question, of course -- "is what I think the world is, actually what the world is?" It's possible a serious questioner can come to the end of thought, it's limits, the limen, the threshold, and then look through to an opening up of possibilities and mystery we seldom take the trouble to see. But often the questioner seems unable to recognize what prompted the question and goes into multiple degrees of abstract refraction, staying well within the well entrenched layers of security that thought creates with itself. It's a false security, but one that seldom gets challenged as long as all the human created systems function sufficiently to keep daily life going within a certain spectrum of normalcy. Then it's almost like they are pleasantly drugged. Now the question that eco-psychology is raising it seems to me is this: can we begin to reawaken within ourselves those awarenesses that have been made dormant with centuries of deeply entrenched enculturation into the "beauties" of our own narcissistic, rationally conceived selves? A beauty we want to "share" so magnanimously with the rest of the world? Yes, the Europeans wanted to help the natives out of their barbaric darkness according to their own records even back in the 16th Century. Cultural dominance has often found benevolent sounding rationales for itself. It's the same as we are doing in "barbaric" Middle East and it looks like we are turning now to Africa with the new Africom that's been brought into being by this administration. I recognize a lot of what I am presenting may seem esoteric. We are somewhat trapped in this language and culture of rationality. I can't take you with me on my daily jaunts into nature and show you what I read there. I happen to have designed my own life so I live in some seclusion with lots of nature around me, so in that sense I have done something in my own life in order for my own mind to be in a position to experience some of what is being explored in this relatively new field of eco-psychology. Note that it's new only as a name for a collection of questioners who are exploring something together, it's not something new to our consciousness. I think even Rousseau, with his "Noble Savage" was onto something, but he was deep in the rational moment of the post enlightenment period of liberal thought that brought us "Manifest Destiny" as well. I was also peripherally involved with some of the early efforts in the outward bound movement for inner city kids back in the seventies, which came out of my own experiences and interests that would easily fit into this field, so areas of study usually aren't "invented" out of the blue but emerge from a confluence of related interests coming together. Rationality itself is an interesting force in that it tends to pick such things apart and separate out the pieces from the force that draws them together. The ideation of individualization is brought out as a thing to favor over group efforts perhaps as a natural effort of that rational force. The efforts being made with these various nature therapy programs seem to be having some sort of effect along the lines hoped for by the therapists, at least with some folks involved, but who really can say what or why? With human behavior, we are far from being able to say much of anything with scientific certainty. We know far too little about ourselves. At best science gives us hypothesis to work with about anything, especially ourselves, and at best it can only disprove hypothesis, not prove. That's the underlying confusion with the intelligent design controversy. Intelligent Design simply doesn't fit the methodology, science isn't designed to prove, therefore there's no way to test a hypothesis about the existence of an Intelligent Designer, so it can't be disproved, either. And, since it doesn't add anything to the understanding, it gets ruled out of the equation by Occam's razor. But our rational mode of thought has an implicit ontology to come to answers. Rationality by its linear, logical nature demands answers, demands a cause. Looks for sequences of blame. But what linear rational human created program can you imagine that could possibly be instituted, and by whom, to reawaken what Tatanga is referring to? So the argument for a therapy that hypothetically reconnects our very biologically based beingness to nature is one that must leave the scientific questioning for that spectrum of potential for knowing the method and its questions are designed to explore. And it must also leave the realm of our search for a rational certainty. We can only hope to learn by doing and observing the results -- in ourselves and others. Our understanding that results will be that of a systemic sensitivity, a whole of awareness, which is something we have ingeniously fragmented ourselves from. We can see from our science that human beings are now doing tremendous damage to the earth's biological systems. The full extent to which that may come, we cannot yet know for certain. Perhaps when a degree of certainty that will be convincing enough is arrived at, the possibility of turning our efforts at control back to natural processes that are imminently capable of finding their own natural balance, will not be possible in order for that balance to be one that supports human life and all lives of all organisms that encompass ours. As Gregory Bateson once said, To want control is the pathology! Not that the person can get control, because of course you never do... Man is only a part of larger systems, and the part can never control the whole... So if it's pathological to want to control nature, to look upon the earth as a resource for humans to use at their discretion, how would we come to grips with that pathology? Arguing from the perception that human behavior is closely correlated with what I would call the rule of form and context, my thoughts go towards the dynamics of a natural therapy described in the growing literature on ecopsychology. From the rule of form and context, what I'm seeing is that it is from the fundamentals of form we are immersed in that we draw our maps of the world in our minds. For most, form consists primarily of human transformations of the environment created by using our technology-producing capabilities and our abstract design capabilities. Most of what we glorify to ourselves as the real world is derived from that. All of our complex idea systems and the cultures they describe and reify are derived from those forms. The illusion created with our abstract conceptualizations is that nature is the raw material and humans can make it into something far better for themselves, and thus we get to the foundations of a "pathology" of control. However, if we back off and look objectively at what's been going on for millions of years, we can see that for most of the existence of our species on this planet, we have adapted to a world that provided for us all we needed to become the whole beings we are. We can see that humans have had to do very little altering of their environment to adapt to almost every type of climate that can be found. It was as an interaction with the forms of nature that our very DNA evolved. So it's a return to that form that is the basis for the theories that have produced this new field called "ecopsychology." And as it turns out, the "experiential" programs over some twenty years now have shown tremendous promise in support of that hypothesis. I would suggest that the most exemplary to discuss would be those wilderness therapy programs for adolescents at risk, or "troubled teens" as some call them, which are usually inner city children with the range of problems that arise, gang membership, drug problems. These kinds of programs have proven to have remarkable transformative results for many types of distressed teens. And the promoters of these programs commonly list the following attributes of these experiential therapies (the following is from a program listed in the Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court Programs and Services): In order to offer increased accountability and promote personal growth and internal discipline, the Court Service unit offers six multi-day wilderness education trips per year. Trips provide challenging experiences by testing physical, mental and emotional limits while offering ongoing counseling support. This program promotes self-reliance, teamwork, environmental stewardship, self-confidence, responsibility and compassion. Each participant has an invaluable role in every trip and has a stake in the success of the group. Backpacking trips along the Appalachian Trail and visits to Camp New Hope in Natural Bridge, VA, provide participants with challenging life experiences that are then brought back into the CSU setting and used to promote positive behavior change. So by putting a young person in an environment -- in essence, an entirely new form -- and creating a new context, a situational process occurs and from that emerges a new awareness. All of these situations rely on the natural environment itself, personal skill building so that each can learn the basics of self reliance in that environment, group interaction so that those skills can be used in teamwork with others to accomplish the goals of survival in a wilderness setting, and from that emerges new awareness, self-confidence, responsibility, and compassion. These are programs that should not be confused with another type of setting now called teen "boot camps" which are run on a military paradigm that involves authoritarian methodology. Those also have some positive effects, but at the same time their philosophy does not offer a startlingly different atmosphere of nonviolence and compassion. So philosophically they do not meet the basic vision of the ecopsychology movement.
|
