Photo by Don Pierce
The Heartwood Path is not the best route to take if one solely wants to heal psychological damage. Rather, it is better used to promote positive emotions (confidence, hope, trust), positive traits (valor, courage, etc), and positive institutions (the family, democracy, etc.).
The quality of one’s life is more than just the quantity of good moments minus the quantity of bad moments. Hedonism is a flawed attempt to find lasting happiness. It is the psychological strengths and virtues that entitle us to find authentic, abundant, and abiding happiness. True happiness is not achieved through the pursuit of pleasure but rather through the pursuit of gratification.
True happiness is not achieved through the pursuit of pleasure but rather through the pursuit of gratification. To illustrate how this works, do the following:
To A Juxtaposition Of Being Delighted And Being Considerate…
HumaNatureConnect Activity
If this is not a day when you prefer to spend time in nature without an agenda, do the following activity:
Start-up Protocol
Read The Text — Use your literary sense, your mind sense, and your reason sense to read your way towards happiness and sustainability but do not just be an arm-chair traveler. Use your other natural senses as you also spend healthful, fun, and productive time in nature on your way to Gladandgreen Junction.
Attractive Natural Being — With pen and journal in hand, go to a natural area and look around to find a natural being that is attractive to you.
Appreciation and Gratefulness — While admiring your chosen being, appreciate it with your inhalations and give it gratitude with your exhalations.
Consent — Once you find an aspect of nature that is attractive to you continuously for at least ten seconds, think of your continued attraction as your consent to have a connection experience that will lead to your optimal functioning.
The Natural Senses — After gaining consent to enter into a connection experience with the natural being, have available the list of Natural Senses. Mix it up by using at least one radiation sense, one feeling sense, one chemical sense, and one mental sense, to widen your perception, and add variety to your experience.
HumaNatureConnect Activity — After reading the text, finding a natural being, appreciating it, gaining its consent, and scanning the list of natural senses, use your heightened awareness and nature-induced optimal functioning to do the following activity and engage in as many follow-up components as you see fit.
Comparing The Benefits Of Pleasure To The Benefits Of Kindness
For this activity, determine how you will engage in three acts of pleasure and three acts of kindness. Return home from your chosen NatureConnect site and conduct your acts of pleasure (eating, conversation, sex, entertainment) and kindness (doing charity work, giving anonymous gifts, visiting a shut-in person). Then, return to your chosen NatureConnect Site again, obtain your chosen being’s consent again, and in your natural location write down how well, if at all, your acts of pleasure and kindness added to your abiding, abundant, and authentic sense of happiness. Compare how you felt when seeking pleasure as opposed to how you felt after acts of kindness.
Follow-up Protocol
Natural Systems Reflection Process
For best results, write down your impressions of this activity in your journal using as many of the following components as you see fit, afterwards, share your interpretations with others.
Journal Components
General Description — writing a general description of how you did the activity and what happened.
Freeform — writing, in freeform, what you found attractive about your natural being.
Three Qualities — writing down three qualities you found most attractive about your natural being.
Three Learnings — writing down three things you learned from this activity.
Self-esteem & Trust — writing down how, if at all, this activity changed your self-esteem or trustfulness of Nature.
Changes To Self — writing down what aspects of your self, if any, were changed by this activity.
Honor Yourself — praising yourself and your commitment to making another stop along the Heartwood Path good for yourself and the world.
I’m A Person Who . . . — writing down three different so-called “G/G Statements” using the following format: “This connection experience tells me that I am a person who_________. ”
Feelings If Activity Taken — writing down a sentence about how you would feel if you lost your ability to experience this connection.
Nature Compared To Self — creating a sentence that reads: “I love this (insert words that identify the attractive natural being) because it is (insert words that refer to the qualities you like about the natural being).” Then, creating a parallel sentence that reads: “I love (insert the word “myself”) because I am (insert the same qualities as before).” If only one follow-up component can be done at any one waypoint, do this one. It reveals a lot about the participant quickly. In group settings it is a very good way to get pertinent conversation underway.
Ride The Green Wave — determining whether you understand and agree with all of the Ten Green Wave Validation Statements. In your journal, give yourself a plus sign (+) if you do agree and a minus sign (-) if you do not agree. Do not worry if you do not give yourself a plus sign (+). These notations are merely for your own information. Regardless of your own plus or minus assessments, you are always free to move on; or, if you are attracted to do so, you can always revisit the waypoint, ask for Guidance, and/or redo the activity.
Two-Word Summary — writing down two words that summarize your response to this activity.
Nocturnal Pilgrimage: Tend To Your Dreams Before Heading To The Next Waypoint
Dreams tell us of our capacity to heal. Write Aizenstat:
“The same bodily intelligence that knows how to fight off an infection or generate new cells can also use dream imagery to give us clues about how to cure whatever ails us. In fact, dreams will often prescribe a means of complementary treatment even before we go to a conventional physician” (2009, p. 190).
For dreams to work in this way, they need tending, as you are by now doing between each Heartwood Path waypoint.
After you tend to your dreams, allow your brain to be aroused and allow your brain to take a much needed rest from its extra exertion as a result of processing information in nonnatural settings by immersing yourself in nature. This requirement for a rest from urban mental processing is more needed in those who have anxiety (Selhub & Logan, 2012, p. 29). When one’s amygdala is amped up from processing urban stimuli fear too often sets in. Nature helps one overcome this short-circuiting. Fear often leads to guilt, shame, and melancholy. Nature counters these unpleasant responses in the way it helps one develop positive emotions such as joy, contentment, vitality, love, and interest (Selhub & Logan, 2012, p. 30).
Bring positive emotions into play by moving to the next waypoint: “Enduring Trumps Temporary.” There, you will discover the relative benefits of positive traits over positive states.
