Why Cultivate a Cognitive Agility with Land and Plant Kin?
We Work to Re-Learn to Speak a Nature Oriented Tongue !
This is a note for those who may be questioning real world applications of cultivating relationships with plants, trees and surrounding-land-systems. In its most basic simplicity, we are moving towards collective dialogues that shift from the entangled hierarchy, power-over, consumeristic trance we are in, to a more shared, awake and unified living life. Please know that what we are doing isn’t as difficult a concept as it may seem. What we are doing here is moving into awake inter-relating action. Away from the spellbound slumber we’ve been in, to a harmonious, inter-connected, and conscious way of living and listening.
First, thank you for taking the time to read about this three-day training. Besides it being designed to amplify ones existing field of understanding, we’re basically waking-up a sleepy unused pathway that our ancestors have relied on for their everyday knowing. This training quickly fast forwards our human centered thinking, [anthropocene centered] and helps us usher in a partnering with all living systems with symbiocene thinking. [Symbiocene thinking - the symbiocene is a term coined in 2011 by Glen Albrecht. He uses this term to argue that human history should enter a new era that is characterized by harmonious interactions between humans and all other living beings]. We are in a transitory time. Between now 2020 and 2030, traditional cultures to scientists the world over speak of our ability … right now … to do the best we can, for Earth.
The training is committed to distilling out our innate skills that lay dormant and share in the tools we each bring to the group. Together re-discover relating to the natural world through the practice of sensing of the collective field, that is, resonating with the invisible that impact our lives every day. Our job as facilitators help unlock talents, skills and abilities. However since this is a shared process, we each play a role of waking up to our innate participatory grid and liberate those less used sensory pathways. And we practice willfully calling upon and applying these internal and external senses for everyday living exchanges, rather than just leaving things up to chance or missing the call.
Participatory exchanges like, Second Sight, extra-sensory perception (ESP), Psychometry, Remote Viewing, feeling-into also known as systems sensing and thinking, to developing ones coherence or Sixth Sense. Another way to think of this is having good intuition or a gut sense and apply the above to the tangible construct of the day in adaptive, restorative and co-creative ways.
Progressive scientific thought has labeled this type of sensing, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). It is well known that TEK societies around the world still live and use this type of relating everyday of their life. Where our bodies are instruments of perception and there is so much more available to our human-Nature relationship than meets the eye. Where the intersections of science and spirituality says that this type of thinking is beyond cause and effect.
Its holistic, co-creative, and interrelative with the context of a larger system. This approach to living is cultivated throughout the 3 days and 3 evenings of this retreat. Develop out our New Earth Living Skills, as it is now that we are entering into a participatory evolutionary event the world over. Its momentum is exponential as we move away from the dominant, institutionalized framework, looping-savior-victim-persecutor model to an inter-connective, wholeness thinking paradigm. Yes, our intuition can be subject to emotional flaws and programmed biases, we play with these ideas through remedial empathy exercises, grouping discussions and post break-out groups to help simplify and ease out the conditioning so we may more fully ‘hear’ the sacred invisible…the collective field…what patterns that mountain may be host to.
Starting here in this circle, intuition and imagination is significant and as necessary as is the tangible and concrete living. We say, maybe even more important now than ever; more necessary and meaningful than we’ve ever known before. We believe if we continue to leave TEK out of the context of our every daily lives, this will only continue our disconnect from having full and responsible relationships with the-Nature-that-surrounds-us and continue the harmful way we are currently living with Nature.
HOW ARE PAST RECIPIENTS APPLYING THIS IN THEIR LIFE:
CAVEAT ONE: liberating our intuitive process helps us make better decisions when it comes to doing the right thing for the environment to everyday living, such as righting around the socio-economic-racial-gender and political, education, agriculture, recognizing propaganda, reducing carbon emissions on a personal level and scaling consumption choices for instance. And here are how past recipients of this training are applying to their life:
- one woman transformed their garden consulting business guidelines to apply listening to the
landscape before making any landscape changes. Clients are informed, educated and if not
on board in the process, no landscaping takes place. Please note - this is that persons primary
livelilhood.
- another adapted their spiritual coach work to include Nature thinking and
Earth centered feminine spirituality..
- another is a farmer, scientist and activist who shifted their mechanistic training to holism, with
Nature on equal ground and now speaks with a Nature oriented tongue in all their activism work.
And this very same person once thought she was not able to hear the voice of Nature…
- others make relationship decisions through consulting a tree or Nature space for right steps.
- as for us, we ask permission with plants, trees or Nature scape’s before making decisions if we are
to prepare herbal medicine, cut a branch, dig a hole, clear a space, or other; we work to
rethink (everything), reduce (consumption), repurpose (co-creatively), reuse (everything),
repair (before replacing), refurbish (the old but goodie), refuse (SINGLE USE), … recycle (as
a last option).
- be leaders in speaking for the rights of plants, trees and landscape in every crevice of our life.
CAVEAT TWO: Yet, too, liberating our intuitive processes seems so darn simple that most people believe its irrational, get bored or disinterested. It’s so simple that it’s often deemed not real, unnecessary and can’t stand up to our tangible capitalistic driven wants. That is true. And, it shouldn’t be either.
By the way the senses we liberate? They may not have been used for a while, or enough, or at all for most our life so this does often feel difficult to summon into use, or be a trustworthy method of living. Some of us say things like, “lady, we are just too busy anyway with our everyday lives” – I say, this IS about our everyday lives. Others add, “besides, what’s in it for me anyway?” – I say, everything. We all need to know this. We all need to remember this.
Believe us, we are all cohorts with our vast living landscape. We all have an impact on Mother Earth right now, whether we consider to take this training or not. So we ask, reach into your sensory gates and find out how enter-related we are with our living back yard. We are that landscape. That landscape is us. Listening to the voice of Nature, cultivating relationships with plants, trees and land is for all our future.
Trainer Facilitators
Marguerite Uhlmann-Bower
Carolyn Pierson