Photo by Don Pierce
The Heartwood Path is not primarily a route for healing psychological wounds. Instead, it is designed to cultivate positive emotions like confidence, hope, and trust; nurture virtues such as valor and courage; and strengthen positive institutions including family and democracy.
Life’s quality transcends the simple tally of good moments minus bad ones. Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure alone, falls short of lasting happiness. Genuine, abundant, and enduring happiness arises from psychological strengths and virtues. It is not pleasure but gratification that leads us to true happiness.
To experience this, try the following:
A Juxtaposition: Delight Versus Consideration
HumaNatureConnect Activity
If today is not a day for unstructured time in nature, engage in this activity:
Start-up Protocol
Read The Text — Engage your literary, intellectual, and reasoning senses to journey toward happiness and sustainability. Don’t remain a passive observer; activate your other natural senses as you spend joyful, healthy, and productive time in nature on your way to Gladandgreen Junction.
Attractive Natural Being — With pen and journal in hand, visit a natural area and find a natural being that draws your attention.
Appreciation and Gratefulness — While admiring your chosen being, breathe in appreciation and breathe out gratitude.
Consent — If you find an aspect of nature attractive for at least ten continuous seconds, regard this sustained attraction as consent to enter a connection experience that fosters your optimal functioning.
The Natural Senses — With consent granted, use the list of Natural Senses to engage at least one radiation sense, one feeling sense, one chemical sense, and one mental sense. This variety broadens your perception and enriches your experience.
HumaNatureConnect Activity — After reading, finding, appreciating, and gaining consent from your natural being, use your heightened awareness and nature-induced optimal functioning to perform the following activity and any follow-up components you choose.
Comparing The Benefits Of Pleasure And Kindness
Plan to engage in three acts of pleasure (e.g., eating, conversation, entertainment) and three acts of kindness (e.g., charity work, anonymous gifts, visiting someone isolated). After completing these acts, return to your NatureConnect site, seek your chosen being’s consent again, and journal how each set of acts influenced your sense of authentic, abundant, and abiding happiness. Reflect on how pleasure and kindness differently affect your well-being.
Follow-up Protocol
Natural Systems Reflection Process
For best results, journal your impressions using any of the following prompts and share your insights with others:
General Description — Describe how you performed the activity and what occurred.
Freeform — Write freely about what attracted you to your natural being.
Three Qualities — Note three qualities you found most appealing.
Three Learnings — List three lessons learned from this experience.
Self-esteem & Trust — Reflect on any changes in your self-esteem or trust in Nature.
Changes To Self — Identify any personal changes resulting from the activity.
Honor Yourself — Celebrate your commitment to progressing along the Heartwood Path.
I’m A Person Who... — Write three “G/G Statements” starting with: “This connection experience tells me that I am a person who... ”
Feelings If Activity Taken — Express how you would feel if you lost this connection ability.
Nature Compared To Self — Compose two sentences: “I love this [natural being] because it is [qualities].” Then, “I love myself because I am [same qualities].” This prompt is especially useful for group discussions.
Ride The Green Wave — Assess your agreement with the Ten Green Wave Validation Statements, marking plus (+) or minus (-) in your journal.
Two-Word Summary — Summarize your response to the activity in two words.
Nocturnal Pilgrimage: Tend To Your Dreams Before Moving Forward
Dreams reveal our healing capacity. As Aizenstat writes:
“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).
Tending your dreams is essential between Heartwood Path waypoints.
After tending your dreams, immerse yourself in nature to rest your brain from the overload of urban stimuli. This rest is especially important for those with anxiety, as nature helps counteract fear, guilt, shame, and melancholy by fostering positive emotions like joy, contentment, vitality, love, and interest (Selhub & Logan, 2012).
With these positive emotions, proceed to the next waypoint: “Enduring Trumps Temporary,” where you will explore the lasting power of positive traits over fleeting states.
