Ways Of Knowing

Attend To Your Natural Senses

Don Pierce

Jun 08, 2025

∙ Paid

Photo by Erik Karits, Pixels.com.

Heartwood Path Axioms:

Balance literacy with sensation.

AttractiveNaturalBeingImpressions stem disorders.

To bring forth the most happiness while improving the world, be sure to do what I call “Riding the Green Wave” each time you do any of the following activities. We will be using a surfing analogy to summarize how this worthwhile endeavor is done.

It is surprising to most people that our senses are not limited to the five common ones learned in grade school. We actually share with nature over fifty natural senses. By using these ways to register experience you not only learn more about the environment you also become more available to receive nature’s guidance (which comes from your AttractiveNaturalBeingImpression, discussed in the previous waypoint/activity).

We shall divide the natural senses into the ones that provide information by sensation and those that provide information by stories. We shall call the natural sensation mechanisms the “Blue Wave” Natural Sensation Senses” And we shall call the mechanisms used to tell stories the “Yellow Wave” Natural Story Senses.

From the standpoint of maintaining human happiness and a sustainable environment, our culture took a disastrous wrong turn when it focused so much on the “Yellow Wave” story senses, which include consciousness, reasoning, and literacy, and also down-played all the remaining fifty-one “Blue Wave” natural sensation senses (listed in the upcoming blue box).

To help bring us (you, me, fellow eartHearts, and Society, in general) back on track towards a magnificent future, it is important to Ride the Green Wave by using not only “Yellow Wave”stories (using the senses listed) but also “Blue Wave” sensations (listed subsequently).

As in surfing, you fall off the wave when you are not totally aware and when all of your faculties are not in balance. If you do not use your sensation senses you fall into the ocean but do not learn as much as possible in the process because you are not utilizing your full repertoire of ways of knowing. When you live to tell about your stories (of surfing or otherwise) you will see that they are based too much on fantasy or conjecture. If you are exposed to natural objects but do not use your story senses you have sensations but not some of the best ways to make them meaningful. And you cannot most easily and effectively tell others about your ride. The best Heartwood Path “surfing” happens when you combine (blue) sensations with (yellow) true stories and ride the green wave towards happiness and sustainability.

The “Green Wave,” as described by Dr Michael Cohen (Project NatureConnect Website: http://www.ecopsych.com/journalaliveness.html and personal email June 8, 2016) and used along the Heartwood Path, leads to happiness because when a sense is satisfied with the consent of other senses the body produces hormones and enzymes that treat you to feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and joy. Ride the “Green Wave” when engaged at each waypoint.

The “Green Wave” leads to environmental sustainability because it develops and strengthens all the natural senses that enables you to love nature and use that love as motivation for actions that protect the natural environment. (Cohen, Personal Email June 8, 2016). By riding the “Green Wave” in each waypoint and always in your life, you are, purposefully or inadvertently, tipping a part of the world back into a state of sustainability.

Together, happiness and sustainability are hallmarks of the destination of the Heartwood Path––Gladandgreen Junction. “Ride the Green Wave” to get there by combining “Yellow Wave” Natural Story Senses with “Blue Wave” Natural Sensation Senses.

“Yellow Wave” Natural Story Senses

Sense of mind and consciousness.
Sense of reason, including memory and the capacity for logic and science.
Language and articulation sense, used to express feelings and convey information in every medium from the bees' dance to human literature.

“Blue Wave” Natural Sensation Senses

Sense of light and sight, including polarized light.
Sense of seeing without eyes such as heliotropism or the sun sense of plants.
Sense of color.
Sense of moods and identities attached to colors.
Sense of awareness of one's own visibility or invisibility and consequent camouflaging.
Sensitivity to radiation other than visible light including radio waves, X rays, etc.
Sense of temperature and temperature change.
Sense of season including ability to insulate, hibernate and winter sleep.
Electromagnetic sense and polarity which includes the ability to generate current (as in the nervous system and brain waves) or other energies.
Hearing including resonance, vibrations, sonar and ultrasonic frequencies.
Awareness of pressure, particularly underground, underwater, and to wind and air.
Sensitivity to gravity.
The sense of excretion for waste elimination and protection from enemies.
Feel, particularly touch on the skin.
Sense of weight, gravity and balance.
Space or proximity sense.
Coriolis sense or awareness of effects of the rotation of the Earth.
Sense of motion, body movement sensations and sense of mobility.
Smell with and beyond the nose.
Taste with and beyond the tongue.
Appetite or hunger for food, water and air.
Hunting, killing or food obtaining urges.
Humidity sense including thirst, evaporation control and the acumen to find water or evade a flood.
Hormonal sense, as to pheromones and other chemical stimuli
Pain, external and internal.
Mental or spiritual distress.
Sense of fear, dread of injury, death or attack.
Procreative urges including sex awareness, courting, love, mating, paternity and raising young.
Sense of play, sport, humor, pleasure and laughter.
Sense of physical place, navigation senses including detailed awareness of land and seascapes, of the positions of the sun, moon and stars.
Sense of time.
Sense of electromagnetic fields
Sense of weather changes
Sense of emotional place, of community, belonging, support, trust and thankfulness.
Sense of self, including friendship, companionship, and power.
Domineering and territorial sense.
Colon icing sense, including compassion and receptive awareness of one’s fellow creatures. sometimes to the degree of being absorbed into a superorgansim.
Horticultural sense and the ability to cultivate crops, as is done by ants that grow fungus, by fungus who farm algae, or birds that leave food to attract prey.
Sense of humility, appreciation, ethics.
Sense of form and design.
Intuition or subconscious deduction.
Aesthetic sense, including creativity and appreciation of beauty, music, literature, form, design, and drama.
Psychic capacity such as foreknowledge, clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychokinesis, astral projection, and possibility certain animal instincts and plant sensitivities.
Sense of biological and astral time, awareness of past, present, and future events.
The capacity to hypnotize other creatures.
Relaxation and sleep, including dreaming, meditation, brain wave awareness.
Sense of pupation, including cuccoon building and metamorphosis.
Sense of survival by joining more established organism.
Spiritual sense, including conscience, capacity for sublime love, ecstasy, a sense of sin, profound sorrow, and sacrifice.
Sense of homeostatic beauty, of natural attraction aliveness as the singular essence-diversity attraction dance of all our other senses (NNIAL).

You will need to use more of your capabilities to make the best personal and environmental advances. Your ability to activate these oft-overlooked capacities needs to be carefully logged (as regular entries into your journal) so that you know you are using all of your innate tools for coming to know, so that you know that you are grasping the nature of the world, and so that you know you are living more fully. This logging in your journal will occur according to the eighth bullet of the Follow-up Protocol.

To fill-in the “I’m A Person Who...” line in the Follow-up Protocol after each Heartwood Path Activity you need to first make sure that you are registering impressions during each activity using any or all of the fifty-four natural senses. That way, after the activity, you can determine the validity of whether in each activity you are truly Riding the Green Wave by marking whether you understand and agree with each of the Validation Statements shown in the next activity.

When examining your acceptance of The Ten Green Wave Validation Statements, in your journal give yourself a plus sign (“+”) whenever you understand and agree with all of the statements. If you do not understand or agree with all statements give yourself a minus sign (“-”) in your journal. Anything less than 100% understanding and agreement (any minus sign (“-”) means that you are not Riding the Green Wave and may wish to redo the activity and seek additional information and one-on-one guidance at www.heartwoodpath.com. It will be interesting to work through these statements before you start any of the activities and then once again at the end of all of the activities, as a way to measure changes in your self concept.

To validate whether you are successfully Riding the Green Wave, take the following three steps at each of the following Heartwood Path waypoints:

recall and prepare to use all of the natural senses as you engage in each activity (mixing Yellow Wave Natural Story Senses with Blue Wave Natural Sensations Senses);
as suggested in Follow-up Protocol, determine the validity of whether in each activity you are Riding the Green Wave by determining your understanding and agreement with particular Green Wave Validation Statements (enumerated in the next paragraph); and
check your emerging self-concept by doing the “Nature Compared To Self” Activity described in the Introductory Experience.

HumaNatureConnect Activity

Green Wave Validation Statements

(Start Doing Them Now)

Review these specific statements each time you do any of the activities for the remainder of this series of courses. Doing so will let you know whether you are on track or if you need to go back over previous activities. One hundred percent acceptance of the following Green Wave Validation Statements is necessary if you want the best chance of finding happiness in a sustainable environment:

It is true what I experienced in the Heartwood Path HumaNatureConnect Activity.
Both myself and the natural attraction I experienced have at least some form of sensation and are, therefore alive.
Natural attraction is the essence of spirit, love, unity, and life.
There are ways of knowing that rely on scientifically valid sensations, there are ways of knowing that rely on stories, and happiness and sustainability are reduced when our subjective stories do not accurately reflect our AttractiveNaturalBeingImpressions;.
Humanity inherits fifty-four natural senses that enable us to register and relate reasonably to Nature's attractive aliveness and intelligence, in and around us today; and I used, or considered the use of, all of these senses while doing this Heartwood Path HumaNatureConnect Activity.
It is reasonable and intelligent to recognize that science is needed to clean up the mess made by believing that nature is an object to be exploited.
We suffer a wide range of disorders because, unreasonably, we live out of tune and balance with the purity of our AttractiveNaturalBeingImpressions. Without these impressions we habitually practice an artificial way of life whose nature-disconnected stories violate and injure the inherent natural wisdom that we share with the nature.
The whole of life deteriorates and we humans produce and suffer our discontents when our literate-story is inaccurate/imaginary/unreasonable and our consciousness is bonded to it and its nature-disconnected flaws.
HumaNatureConnect Activities improve our relationships by making space for NNIAAL (Now’s Nameless, Intelligent, Alive, Attractive Love) to safely operate as we “Ride the Green Wave.”
In any given moment we can come into balance and increase personal, social and environmental well-being by learning to empower our thinking and relationships through connecting with nature as we “Ride the Green Wave.”

Review these statements each time you “Ride the Green Wave” in the Heartwood Path Activity Follow-up Protocol. When you understand and agree with all of these statements give yourself a big plus sign (“+”) in your journal. Or, when you do not understand and agree with all of these statements give yourself a big minus sign (“-”) in your journal.

To Logging Whether You Are “Riding The Green Wave”…

Photo by Anil Sharma, Pexels.com.

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.

Becoming Proficient With The Natural Senses And Making Sure That You Are Riding The Green Wave

For this activity, review the list of fifty-four Natural Senses and, one by one, attempt to bring them into play as you visit an attractive natural object. Work to become proficient in as many senses as possible. To recall the list of Natural Senses, see the list provided earlier in this waypoint or purchase the list of natural senses to be carried in your wallet.

For the first of many times, determine whether you accept the Ten Green Wave Validation Statements (listed above). Do not be concerned if your acceptance does not come easily at first. You may need to visit several more waypoints before you can accept what it means to “Ride the Green Wave.” Once you are consistently accepting all of the Validation Statements, you can either stop validating or use the validation process to keep yourself on track.

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.

Photo by Antonio Friedeman, Pexels.com

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.
Photo by Ellie Burgin, Pexels.com.
The Heartwood Path Exchange:

Swap Your Ideas, Impressions, Photos, And News With Others

Post your impressions and photos in the Comments at the bottom of the page
Engage with others in your Heartwood Path course or salon
Create your own salon that meets regularly online, by phone, or in person
Discuss your impressions with trusted family members and friends
Post your impressions and photos in our EartHeart Networking Forum
Post your impressions on this specific waypoint on our Facebook Page
Join the broader conversations on our Facebook Page
To see what conversations you can inspire, share your photos and impressions about anything pertaining to your journey down the Heartwood Path on your Facebook page, on Instagram, and on other social media accounts. If you like, include “#heartwoodpath” and “#waypoint(insert waypoint number here)” wherever pertinent