Connection

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Administrator

I was at the launch of a new ecopsychology anthology last week. Nick Totton, one of the editors, commented that one common theme sang through all the very different chapters; connection.

Book cover of 'Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis'

Vital Signs: Psychological Responses to Ecological Crisis

Many of my blogs have explored the interconnectedness of things, and it’s clear to me that our currently crisis stems from our cultural forgetting of that fundamental truth. The main task for ecopsychology – as illustrated by Nick’s comment – is to reveal connection.

But becoming aware of our relatedness to the world really isn’t hard. Participants on our recent Nature Connection Workshop Walk commented how the sensory exercises revealed just how connected they were to the world around them. The sense of separateness that characterises much of our everyday awareness shifts to a realisation that we are “corporeally embedded” in a “living landscape” (Abram, 1996). Cognitive neuroscience is beginning to understand how  “organism and environment enfold into each other” (Varela et al., 1991) and I’ve discussed the dance between research and experience in The power of place: Protest site pagans (Harris, 2011).

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A new sense of place

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Administrator

I’m just home from facilitating a series of Nature Connection workshops for staff and students from the University of the Arts London. The weather was pretty good –  cold but bright.

Imperial War Museum Park

Imperial War Museum Park - Photo: Antony Johnston

Each workshop was only an hour long, yet by the end participants had come to a quite different sense of the green spaces we were in. I was struck by this; how much people’s sense of place changed in such a short space of time! This change is even more remarkable given that most participants were already familiar with the location we were in: the place was old and yet became new.

The magic comes from simple but powerful sensory awareness exercises that can reveal how Nature’s power thrives in the midst of London’s streets.

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Janus January: Looking back and forward

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Administrator

January is a good time to look to the past and the future, so, like the Roman god Janus, I’m casting a look over some images from 2011 and giving a glimpse of 21012.

Looking through leaves at workshop beyond

A Nature Connection workshop

Our Nature Connection workshops went well in 2012 and we’ll be contining to play on the Hawkwood site in 2013.

We were inspired by the glorious countryside near London to start running seasonal Nature Connection walks. The first one took place on a beautiful Autumn day.

People walking on a path through trees

Our Autumn Nature walk

On 4th February we’ll be off on a Winter Walk. The weather is looking distinctly Spring-like at the moment, so we may not have the frost that made our preparation visit sparkle, but who knows? More walks follow for Spring, Summer and Autumn, each one themed to highlight the special qualities of each season.

Close-up of natural objects

Gifts from the Autumn walk

All photographs on this page by Adeline O’Keeffe.
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Time and place: Seasonal thoughts

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Administrator

Christmas is an odd time of year for me. The reasons are various but it’s largely to do with its proximity to the Winter Solstice. Christmas Day is a few days after what for me is the main event and so inevitably feels like an anticlimax.

I’ve celebrated the Winter Solstice every year for several decades, and it’s a special time for me. The celebration of the Solstice is perhaps as ancient as human consciousness. This is the moment when the year turns. Days had been getting shorter since Mid-Summer, bringing increasing darkness and cold. But from the 22nd the days slowly began to lengthen. This is a profound change because the returning light will feed new life and by early February we can sense the promise of the coming Spring.

The half Moon seen through bare trees.

Perhaps we Pagans like palpable, sensual symbols. The lengthening of the days becomes quickly and undeniably apparent: No act of faith is required to recognise that the Sun has been ‘reborn’. But at a deeper level this return of the light can touch our embodied awareness.

By consciously marking the seasonal cycles I become more sensitive to place and time. This is more than the commonplace recognition of Winter’s cold and dark turning to Summer’s sun; it is an intentional attunement of my awareness to place and time. The long term result can be a richer sense of being at home in the world; an embodied engagement with the natural cycles that ultimately govern our lives.

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Occupy the bodymind place

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Administrator

The Occupy London movement have taken over empty offices owned by the banking group UBS. The space – now called The Bank of Ideas - hosts workshops on everything from mindfulness meditation to alternative economics.

Empty office room

Inside the Bank - © Jon Day

I joined a workshop on embodied stress management here on Saturday and was struck by how a space like this can be quickly transformed. Once there would have been clean white walls, ordered desks and computers. Now walls bright with inspiring graffiti frame fluid movement. A space previously filled with the efficient hum of business now echoes with the sound of drums and laughter.

Such transformations are simple enough. Anyone who has attended a training session arranged in a circle rather than rows of chairs can tell you that how we order space is crucial. Sitting in rows at a training session emphasises the a hierarchy of trainer/trainees and creates a strata with the ‘keen’ people at the front. Because we can all see each other when we sit in a circle, there’s more of a sense of community and less focus on stratified hierarchy. The trainer may still see themselves as leading the group, but the way our bodies are placed in the space works against that.

My experiences of the spaces within The Bank of Ideas exemplify the principle that much of our thinking is not only embodied but also situated. I’m not holding out for banks to start putting desks in circles rather than rows, but trainers at least are increasingly aware of the power of space.

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The power of place: Protest site pagans

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Administrator

Research has established that spending time in the wilderness can have profound effects on people. This “wilderness effect” (Greenway, 1995) usually occurs in truly wild places like the Grand Canyon, but my research shows that it can work it’s magic in more urban environments.

Comfy chair in a field

Home comforts

I describe this process in my article on ‘The power of place: Protest site pagans’, which has just been published in the European Journal of Ecopsychology. The article expands on several themes I’ve explored here, notably Eco-Paganism, the spirit of place and the cognitive iceberg. It’s based on my research with protest camps activists and describes how spending extended periods of time in nature can catalyse profound personal change.

The article also explains the model of embodied situated cognition that I’ve described as ‘the cognitive iceberg’ in several posts. In the last section I use the cognitive iceberg model to provide a partial explanation for how the wilderness effect works. I think it works really well as a companion piece to my chapter in The Wanton Green, which is now available.

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Eugene Gendlin

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Administrator

Writing a PhD thesis on embodied knowing was a tricky task and at times I doubted that I could research something so nebulous. My big breakthrough came when I read the work of contemporary philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin.

Eugene Gendlin - head shot

Eugene Gendlin

Gendlin describes a “bodily sensed knowledge” which he calls a “felt sense” (Gendlin, 1981). I’d bet you’ve often had a felt sense: They’re those fuzzy feelings that we don’t usually pay much attention to – a vague ‘gut feeling’ about something or that odd sense of unease we’re feeling when we say ‘I just got out of the wrong side of bed this morning’.

You need an intuitive understanding of the felt sense to really understand Gendlin’s work, so I’ll give a few more examples. Imagine you are at a party and you spot someone that you have ‘a bit of a history’ with. How might that feel? Maybe some butterflies; maybe some vague memories – A mixture of things. That whole mixture is a felt sense. On a lighter note, imagine you’re taking a walk on a beautiful fresh morning, just after a rain storm. You crest the brow of a hill to see a perfect rainbow on the horizon. As you stand gazing at it, you might feel your chest fill with an expansive, flowing, warm feeling. That feeling is a felt sense. So it’s familiar and simple enough: A felt sense is a physical feeling that carries some meaning for you.

It’s not always easy to say what that meaning might be, but it’s worth trying to find out because the felt sense often carries deep embodied wisdom. As Gendlin says, “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981). Anyone can learn to access and verbalise the embodied knowing of the felt sense using a simple technique called Focusing (Gendlin, 1981).

In common with many others I’ve mentioned on this blog, Gendlin thinks that the body extends beyond the skin into “a vastly larger system” (Gendlin, 1997). In fact the body “is an ongoing interaction with its environment” which means that the felt sense can access “a vast amount of environmental information” (Gendlin, 1992). Gendlin’s ideas are fundamental to my cognitive iceberg model and help make sense of the work of philosophers like Andy Clark and David Abram. Given all that, perhaps it’s no surprise that I consider Gendlin to be the most significant thinker I’ve ever read.

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Counselling and psychotherapy

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Administrator

One thread runs though the considerable diversity of my life; a fascination with the human condition. That fascination has never been purely theoretical and I’ve always been concerned with how our lives might be nurtured to fuller flowering. As this thread led me through philosophy, art, activism and academia, I often wondered what larger pattern might emerge. Was there some practice which could weave the threads together?

A path into the woods

Following the path

Several years ago I realized that a pattern was emerging. I was involved with two groups which were practically engaged in helping people towards deeper understanding: One is a training organization which specializes in an embodied approach (Integration Training) and the other is an informal ecopsychology group.

About a year ago the path took another turn. I’d began to realize how powerful my Nature Connection work could be and decided that to take it to the next level required counselling training. As a result, I’ve recently started an Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton. You can be sure that this new strand will add to the richness of this blog and the tapestry we weave together here.

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Thinking with place

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Administrator

I spend last week-end at an ecopsychology retreat in Lancashire. We were staying in a stone barn in the woods, very close to a peat stained river that surged over ancient rocks.

river flowing over rocks

On Saturday I paired up with a colleague for a ‘medicine walk’. This was a wander, wherever instinct led, but with senses awake to the potential for meaning in our surroundings. It was surprisingly powerful and it’s worth pondering why.

Natural places are rich in metaphor and humans are habitual makers of meaning, so perhaps it’s to be expected that a damp, dark grove might trigger a sense of fecund mystery.

While such an interpretation isn’t wrong, it misses the sophistication of the process of thinking with place. The ambiguity of that phrase is productive: While thinking with place can refer to how we use a place as a tool to think with, it also implies an animistic thinking together with place.

Previous posts argued that the subject/object distinction is largely artificial - the “organism and environment enfold into each other” (Varela et al. 1991). I have also described how the mind can reach beyond what Clark calls the “skin-bag body” (1997). It is, therefore, by no means clear where my mind ends and the spirit of place begins. To suggest that there’s a richly metaphorical natural world ‘out there’ and a human meaning maker ‘in here’ is far too simplistic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“As I contemplate the blue of the sky … I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me,’ I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue …”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

In conclusion, person and place are part of a single process; bodymind place.

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Nature Connection Workshops: Reflections

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Administrator

Back in the Spring I wrote about the new series of Nature Connection Workshops Karen and I had planned. Now I find myself in early Autumn preparing for the last workshop of the year.

Nature Connection workshop at Hawkwood

Nature Connection workshop at Hawkwood

The more I do of this work the more amazed I am at the power of it. Several of my posts have commented on research into nature connection: We’re happier in natural environments than in cities and people heal faster when they can see trees. There’s more and more of this research available now and I’ve been collecting links to some of it on my website.

Some of what the research is saying is apparent in the feedback we get about the workshops: “I returned home, feeling alive and inspired, exhilarated by the beauty around me“, “I left with a renewed sense of the slow ebb and flow of my own life“, “we came away relaxed but revitalised (participant’s feedback from my website).

As I noted back in the Spring, it’s the place that does the real work; we provide ways to connect and then the natural magic takes over. The final workshop for this year takes place on Sunday 18th at the Hawkwood food growing site in North London.

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