Issue 13 September/October 2011
Quantum
6) The overly masculine approach to life and being must be tempered with the “insights of ecofeminism with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes.”
7) “Whatever contributes to small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego.”
8) Focusing on synergy, the “needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.”
Ecopsychology EarthWays, of Sebastopol, California, is representative of a relatively new form of psychology called ecopsychology. Their tagline, “Restoring Relationship with the Natural World,” sets the theme of this approach to well-being. In the words of Theodore Roszak, as outlined in his book The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology, there are eight main principles to this therapeutic approach:
1) “The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious.”
2) “The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, to some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution. . . . Ecopsychology draws upon these fi ndings. . .striving to make them real to experience.”
3) “Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the recently created urban psyche and the age-old natural environment.”
4) “Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child’s innately animistic quality of experience in functionally ‘sane’ adults.”
5) “The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vivid as our ethical responsibility to other people.”
www.quantumhealthmagazine.com
EarthWays, cofounded by Sara Harris and Susan Kistin, is a collective of seven psychotherapists and healers who, in addition to psychotherapy, lead wilderness excursions and nature-based ceremonies. On their website, www.earthways. info, they write that “ecological, social, spiritual and emotional crises mirror one another. What is harmful to the earth is also harmful to humans, and what benefi ts and respects the earth brings wholeness and well-being into human life as well.” Since our interior life can be mirrored through the exterior life of nature, ecopsychology therapy can help us to become sensitive to what nature may be mirroring for us, so that we can better understand ourselves and our own internal processes. Personal stories are also respected, for, as EarthWays also says on its website, “one’s pain, suffering, beauty and gifts are related to the world, and can only be deeply expressed and transformed through that relationship.”
Earthing
It doesn’t get any earthier than getting your bare skin on the earth, and that is the premise behind “earthing,” a practice whose health benefi ts were “rediscovered” by Clint Ober and written about in the book Earthing (Basic Health Publications) by Martin Zucker, a former news reporter with the Associated Press, and Dr. Stephen Sinatra, an integrative cardiologist.* Earthing—literally the connection “skin to skin” between a person and the earth—is said to promote better health, from reduced infl ammation to relief from pain. One study also showed that six weeks of “grounding,” as the practice is also called, normalised cortisol levels, vastly improving sleep. Another study by
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