Nature Therapy Walks Blog

Nature Connection and Your Best Self

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 23:21:47 GMT

- with gratitude to Chelsea Hawken

One of the great skills of science appears to be making really interesting subjects sound crushingly dull. It has to do with intellectual rigour, and all that marvellous jargon that drains awe and wonder from the most fascinating investigations.

Take “eudaimonic well-being” for example.

Does that label excite you with its potential for some of life’s great gifts? Does it make you think, “wow, I want that!” Probably not. But you do. No matter how awful the terminology, eudaimonic well-being is something most of us strive for.

It was Aristotle’s idea. He said eudaimonia was the result of a life in full flourish, as if blessed by good spirits and living in sync with its true purpose. In Social Media Speak, the translation might well be: “Living Your Best Life.”

EWB

Eudaimonia is a treasure trove of joy, thanks to overcoming adversity, satisfying personal growth and a general feeling that life is worthwhile. When we experience eudaimonic well-being – or EWB (we’re talking science so it needs a TLA*) – we are fully functional in the world and have a purpose for being on the planet.

And it turns out that being connected to nature can increase our eudaimonic well-being. Scientists are still working out how to study if EWB (eudaimonic well-being) causes NC (nature connectedness) or NC causes EWB – if you get my drift – but whether it’s chicken or egg, there is a proven reciprocal relationship at work.

In 2019, the University of Derby published a meta-analysis studying The Relationship Between Nature Connectedness and Eudaimonic Well-Being.

A meta-analysis is a study analysing existing analysis. The first step is to figure out which bits of other people’s work should be included in the meta-analysis. To do that, the researchers defined EWB using Ryff’s Scale of Psychological Well-being. This gave them six subscales to focus on: Personal Growth, Purpose in Life, Autonomy, Environmental Mastery, Self-Acceptance and Positive Relations.

EWB vs HWB

There are two types of well-being, of course. Science has no fun at all if it can’t compare and contrast. As well as, or instead of EWB, we might experience HWB, or Hedonic Well-Being. This is something we generally like even more, because it’s simpler.

HWB is just feeling good, it’s good times, parties, friends, happy-go-lucky moments. EWB doesn’t necessarily make you feel good all the time because it involves challenges and working through adversity before you get to the personal growth and positivity part of the program.

If you’re after HWB – the quick and dirty happiness fix – here’s the good news. Getting out into nature will most likely give you that. The study showed a simpler correlation between nature connectedness and hedonic well-being, meaning there are plenty of data points to prove what your body, mind and heart feel out in nature.

Just get out there and enjoy the view!

Looking for ‘Personal Growth?’

The Derby study hypothesized “that NC would be more strongly associated with EWB than it is with HWB.” It didn’t quite get there. EWB was boosted by NC, but HWB improved more.

However, here’s an interesting outlier in the EWB/NC equation: of the six measures of eudaimonic well-being, the one most improved by time in nature was “personal growth.” The authors describe personal growth as “being open to new ideas and experiences, and realizing one’s full potential.” There was a stronger correlation between feeling connected to nature and personal growth than there was for the other five subscales.

Conclusion? You could spend more time in nature, and spend less money on “Your Best Self” workshops and personal coaching. Maybe it’s time for a ritual burning of all those goal setting journals and self-help books? You could use them to start your cooking fire on a camping weekend.

Personal growth doesn’t have to cost you anything. It is a natural result of nature connectedness if you’re willing to slow down, open up and let your connections with nature deepen, well, naturally.

Look at all the things around you that are moving, and all the different ways they move.

Stare into the vastness of the sky or the miniature world of activity in a patch of dirt.

Feel with your skin and your fingers.

Listen to the birds.

Play at the shore of a pond, river or ocean.

Soak in some wisdom from a tree.

See what your relationship with the more-than-human-world can do for your relationship with you.

You - and your best self.

*Three Letter Acronym

Stressing the Benefits of Nature Therapy

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 04:14:32 GMT

Stressed Out

Work stress. Emotional stress. Technostress. Environmental stress. Psychosocial stress. Toxic stress. Financial stress. Chronic, damaging stress is ubiquitous for humans living in the 21 ^st century.

It’s less than a hundred years since the word “stress” became tethered to its current meaning: “damaging hyperstimulation.” Living with hyperstimulated bodies and minds causes a raft of symptoms implicated in all the diseases on our top-ten-killer list including heart disease, diabetes, cancer and suicide.

Stress either chomps at the edges of our lives, or chews straight through the middle of them. It assaults our hearts, lungs, muscles, mental health – from the microcosm of individual cells to our overall wellbeing.

Being a brainy species, of course, we’ve developed a smorgasbord of methods for dealing with stress in our lives. We have technological solutions from wearable stress-relief devices to float tanks; the old-style, tried-but-true methods like yoga, meditation, chanting or prayer; and escape routes from cocktails and cruises to streaming services.

But there is one very simple way, validated by science, to release stress and enjoy a boost to your physical, mental and emotional health: go spend some time in nature.

Nature slipped off the agenda

For as long as we have been living and working mostly indoors, there have been advocates for the great outdoors. Beethoven walked in the woods every day. “For the woods, the trees and the rocks give man the resonance he needs,” he said – and Beethoven knew a thing or two about resonance.

The romantic poets were early pinups of nature loving. Wordsworth’s daffodils and Keats’ nightingale, Emerson’s cowslips and anemones kept the love of nature in our cultural life.

Einstein was a bit of a nature mystic at heart: “He who finds a thought that lets us a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great peace.”

And yet somehow, because we have been so busy working with our machines and computers and being entertained by screens of every size, the “eternal mystery” of nature slipped off the daily agenda. (Other than watching gorgeous, or increasingly scary, nature docos on Netflix.)

Forest ‘bathing’

In the 1980s, in the midst of Japan’s economic boom, work stress was damaging lives, families and communities. Scientists noticed people who spent time outdoors in nature had better resistance to stress and healthier lives. If research could prove a causal relationship, Japan would have a simple way to reduce the damage – and boost productivity. (The suggestion of positive, economic outcomes being the best hope for research funding everywhere.)

Scientists discovered direct links between time spent in nature and lower blood pressure, lower cortisol levels, improved immunity and much more.

Shinrin-Yoku – or “bathing in the atmosphere of the forest” – was launched and remains a popular stress-reducing, health-inducing practice in Japan, prescribed by doctors, therapists, hospitals and supported by employers. There are more than 60 forests dedicated to the practice of Shinrin-Yoku, with more planned.

An Explosion of Research

The damage to our natural environment from using Mother Earth as a resource and a convenience has launched massive environmental research in the last fifty years. And along with the research on what we’ve done to nature, is a corresponding increase in studying what nature can do for us – specifically for the wellbeing of our bodies, minds and spirits.

Below is a small sample of reports on studies that support the hypothesis that being in nature produces positive benefits for humans, reducing stress and its physical and mental damage. It’s a small sample of the work being done, but a window into the proven potential of nature to improve your well-being.

Mental Benefits:

Improves mental health and cognition

Boosts creativity

Reduces anxiety

Better productivity in the workplace

Emotional Benefits:

Overall emotional wellbeing

Stimulates the transcendental experience of awe

Physical Benefits:

Boosts immunity

Lowers blood pressure

Reduces stress

A summary of studies on the human health benefits of contacts with nature from Heath Promotion International journal.

Language of the Land

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:29:45 GMT

Separation from source

In The Spell of the Sensuous , David Abram argues writing itself might be the essence of humanity’s separation from the natural world that sustains us.

Writing is a symbology for the things of the world. The words we use, transcribed into letters arranged in a specific formation, signify things but don't give us any felt connection to the things themselves. And right there is the foundational split between humans and their natural home.

Language became human beings’ superpower. No other animal had it. Dictionary in hand, we could “exchange the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written word.” Once we could spell, we were able “to cast a spell upon our own senses.”

For someone who has made a living through writing, and is a nature therapy guide, this was miserable news.

I think therefore I am

We are addicted to the symbols of phenomena because they engage our brains in thinking about phenomena, and thinking is our constant activity. Thinking mattered to our civilisations long before Rene Descartes declared it the essence of our existence.

We learn from our early toddling, howling, innocent days that we must train the brain, through education, language, argument and knowledge. Bright brains mean good jobs, scientific research, new product development, new businesses, materials, entertainments, even a vast invisible network of code that connects us with everything that all the other brains on the planet have been able to translate into symbols.

We are very good at this.

Intelligent language

Words allow us to feel we’ve got it all nailed down. Not just nomenclature and syntax, but feelings and thoughts and everything else that all the words we know can express. Try to learn another language and you soon appreciate the glory of a native vocabulary. There is a deep chasm of time and effort between, “Where is the bus station please?” and the ability to hold a conversation in a foreign tongue.

Spoken and written language defines our human intelligence. Even in the midst of other humans who speak a language we can’t understand, we have faith in the sophistication of their communication. They are not grunting like pigs. They are communicating with words that can be captured alphabetically, even if the alphabet itself is alien to us. They are part of the superior species with consciousness and smart phones. Pigs just grunt and are, therefore, lesser. Expendable. Edible.

And yet, nature has its own vocabulary – of animal dialects, of colour patterns, sounds, textures, smells – that our own way-back-when ancestors understood. Its language is still comprehensible to many indigenous people whose lineage has been able to hold to threads of meaning through generations and genocides.

David Abram might have alerted my brain to its alphabetical addiction, but he is not a linguist. He is an ecologist and philosopher (plus an accomplished sleight-of-hand magician, but that’s another story.) He explores nature’s countless channels of communication.

“To the sensing body all phenomena are animate,” Abram says. “Each thing, each phenomenon, has the power to reach us and to influence us. Every phenomenon, in other words, is potentially expressive.”*

Communicating with a more-than-human-world

If we are open to a broader field of expression, we find the world of nature teeming with animation. We are able to communicate with what Abram called the more-than-human-world in surprising ways that have nothing to do with human language.

If we shift from racing passed nature at busy-human velocity, and slow ourselves down to something more like nature’s pace, we might feel our way towards the “wild and multiplicitous magic” of animals, rocks, trees, rivers, flowers. We might get a sense of intelligence beyond the limits of our word-obsessed brains.

The body of language

One of Abram’s heroes, the 20 ^th century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued our native, spoken language is learned not through our intellect but our bodies. Babies express through the noises made by their breath, vocal chords, and mouths and learn language by watching, hearing and mimicking the noises the humans around them make. “We thus learn our native language not mentally but bodily,” Abram says.

Merleau-Ponty said the body’s expressiveness, “extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world, and our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all other “objects” the miracle of expression.”

Feeling into that miracle of expression starts with being open to all the subtle ways nature might communicate with you. Each nature therapy walk begins with your body, with opening your senses and slowing your movements. More than mindful walking, a nature therapy walk is “bodyful” walking.

Bodyful walking

I can write words about the mystical script written on a scribbly gum, but when I’m with a scribbly gum, present to how it looks and smells and feels, I don’t need words to feel my way into our mutual stories.

I know the human story of the retired CSIRO associates who, with a keen student from ANU, set out to solve the mystery of the scribbly gum’s dialect. They discovered 11 new species of moth and DNA links, via ancient Gondwanaland, to the moths’ prehistoric relatives in South America. That story may have a certain scientific romance, but it is – to me – not as powerful as the mystery in the language of all the life cycles written in scrawls over the scribbly gum’s bark.

I thought verbal and written language was my only primary mode of expression, other than the obvious facial and physical gestures. Nature therapy walking has introduced me to the deep pleasures of a physical conversation between my own body and the beings of the world around me. It's the contentment, and the surprise, of open presence in a more-than-human world.

* All quotes from The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram (1997, Vintage Books, New York) Chapter Three, The Flesh of Language.

The A.R.T. of Creativity and the Great Outdoors

Mon, 08 May 2023 04:42:36 GMT

Getting creative with our time on the planet

Research shows being in nature makes us happier, but for those of us interested in getting more creative with our time on the planet, it has another major benefit: nature time boosts our creativity.

One organisation with expertise on creativity – the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers – tells its members : “for creators in particular, nothing beats a little face time with Mother Nature when it comes to re-establishing balance and even jumpstarting a few extra synapses between your ears.”

The newest research into nature’s impact on creativity is based on a theory developed in the 1980s by University of Michigan psychology professors, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. The Kaplans proposed Attention Restoration Theory – with the delicious acronym ART – in their book The Experience of Nature , based on their 20 years of research into natural environments and mental focus.

Attention Restoration Theory

In the 1960s and 70s – when it became obvious that all of us, and particularly children, were spending more and more time indoors and less and less outside – the Kaplans began to study how being in nature affects our health, our relationships and ultimately the way we direct our attention.

The Kaplans described two forms of attention. “Direct attention” mechanisms are necessary to deal with life in busy urban environments where our brains are assaulted by millions of bits of information every second. Because we can only respond to a fraction of available information at any one time, we burn brain energy not only trying to focus on what’s important, but constantly weeding out what’s irrelevant. Our “prefrontal cortex-mediated executive attentional system” becomes exhausted. You know how that feels.

In nature, however, we can shift into “spontaneous attention” which the Kaplans call “soft fascination.” Soft fascination allows the mind to drift, settling anywhere it chooses without a goal. Natural environments provide shapes, colours, movements, spatial relationships, sounds, smells – plus feelings that range from curiosity to awe – that stimulate soft fascination. And soft fascination restores our tired, overstimulated brains so they can focus again.

Much of the 20 ^th Century research into ART was based on relieving mental fatigue, stress recovery and nature-time’s implications for sufferers of ADHD. More recently, researchers have discovered soft fascination also boosts our creativity.

Why (almost) any natural environment will help

A strenuous uphill scramble with the constant possibility of snakes, stinging nettles, or breaking your neck in a fall, is not what the Kaplans had in mind when they wrote about the restorative effects of nature. They described four elements necessary to ensure your time in the outdoors will reliably restore your capacity to focus:

Being away – Disconnecting from everyday life, from places that trigger habitual thoughts and concerns, is the starting point. Even taking your eyes from the computer screen to the trees outside the window can be restorative.

Soft fascination – Hard fascination can be fun. Directing your full attention to an activity, a show, an argument – even an uphill scramble with snakes – can absorb your mind in a satisfying way. But soft fascination is genuine time-out for the brain, letting the mind wander wherever it’s drawn without direction.

Extent – The environment needs to allow you to feel comfortable, to be somewhat familiar and not too challenging. (Another strike for the snakes.)

Compatibility – This relates to being in nature because you choose to be, not because you were forced there by some external imperative.

21 ^st Century Research into Nature and Creativity

Fast forward to the 21 ^st Century, and research into Attention Restoration Theory began to focus on whether the restorative effects of nature on focus and attention could lead to increased creativity.

Mental fatigue, after hours of staring at a screen, responding to constant demands, sitting in meetings, serving or counselling or fixing things, squeezes out the possibility of spending our leisure time creatively, or of creating innovative solutions in our work. At the end of ‘one-of-those-days,’ we have just enough energy to pick up the remote control.

Time outdoors, however, restores our natural capacity for curiosity, personal reflection and creative thinking.

Professor David Strayer of the University of Utah released his research in 2012 in an article headed Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings . Strayer studied 56 people in various groups, hiking and camping in Alaska, Colorado, Maine or Washington – with no technology allowed. The use of technology, according to Florence Williams in The Nature Fix, is one of Strayer’s pet hates.

Using the Remote Associates Test (RAT)*, a common measure of creative thinking and problem solving, the results showed, “A 50% increase in performance after four days of exposure to nature.” Strayer’s paper says: “The current research indicates that there is a real, measurable cognitive advantage to be realised if we spend time truly immersed in a natural setting.”

‘Green’ shifts the brain into meditation mode

Another study from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, reported in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, used mobile electroencephalography to collect brain activity data on participants moving through urban and green environments.

The subjects took a walk through an urban shopping street, a green zone and a busy commercial district. In the green zone their brains showed lower frustration, engagement and arousal, and higher activity in the ‘meditation’ sector of the brain. The researchers suggest their work can be used by promoters of urban green space. I think it’s just one more good reason for a nature therapy walk.

Another study in Taiwan, reported in Frontiers in Psychiatry, demonstrates the degree of perceived “naturalness” in the environment correlates to higher degrees of creativity. “The perceived naturalness of environments has a positive impact on creativity,” it says.

The study’s authors – all from the school of Landscape Architecture at National Taiwan University – used as their laboratory a college campus, testing participants in areas ranging from the college ecological pool and farmland (high naturalness) through to streets of high-rise dorms (lower naturalness). The strong impact of natural surroundings led the researchers to recommend urban planners incorporate as many flower beds, trees and rocks into their designs as possible, “as natural elements stimulate curiosity and a flexible imagination.”

Nature for an optimal creative kick-off

A Danish study published in 2015 also concludes, “Nature does indeed have the capacity to enhance creativity,” and suggests the earlier you get into nature, at the beginning of a project, the better.

This qualitative study followed 17 creative professionals and was designed to explore, “how nature has the ability to evoke the creative way of thinking by making us more curious, able to get new ideas as well as flexible in our way of thinking.”

The study demonstrates nature has its most profound effect in the early stages of the creative process: “Nature especially plays a role in the two first phases of a creative process, the Preparation phase and the Incubation phase,” it says.

So if you’re considering any creative project – from a presentation or dissertation, to patchwork or watercolour, to writing a book or a concerto – a little quality time with Mother can provide the right conditions for your mind to do its unique creative thing for an optimal kick off.

A wander in your local park, around the block under some trees, even your backyard – so long as you have no agenda other than to be outdoors for a bit – should do the trick.

Nature Therapy Walks as container

A nature therapy walk is designed as a container with all four elements of ART’s prerequisites.

· It takes you out of your daily patterns;

· encourages soft fascination through invitations to engage with nature in tactile, imaginative or sensory ways;

· is comfortably paced and without physical strain; and

· no one is forcing you to do it . . .

unless your friend drags you along when you’d rather be at the pub.

If they do, why not give it a try? For creativity’s sake. Just this once? (You can go to the pub afterwards.)

*Many studies of creativity use the Remote Associates Test as a measurement tool. If you’d like to know how it works (and have fun with some examples) try this.

From Labels “to the things themselves”

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 02:03:12 GMT

A rose is a rose

We are, as a species, addicted to naming things. Blame it on Genesis. Once the

story go t around that God created t he animals and plants, but gave the job of naming

them to his best and brightest, Adam, we humans have been slapping labels on

everything we see.

One of the UK’s most admired nature writers, Robert Macfarlane, says it this way,

“We do not care for what we do not know, and on the whole we do not know what we

cannot name. It’s the problem that’s kept science and religion in opposing camps for

centuries – only the nameable, measurable and quantifiable can be “known.”

And it’s why, in 2015, Macfarlane added his name to a list of authors that included

Margaret Atwood and former children’s laureate Michael Morpurgo who complained

to the Oxford University Press that 50 words from nature had been excised from the

dictionary.

Dictionary ditches nature

The letter pointed out that research showed strong bonds between time in nature

and benefits for children’s intellectual, social and emotional wellbeing.

“The National Trust list of 50 things to do before you are 11 includes many for which

OJD once had words, but no longer, like playing conkers, picking blackberries, or

catching minnows in a net,” the letter said.

It quoted research showing 40% of children regularly played outdoors a generation

ago, while 40% never play outdoors today.

“Obesity, anti-social behaviour, friendlessness and fear are the known

consequences,” it said. We believe the OJD should address these issues and that it

should seek to help shape children’s understanding of the world, not just to mirror its

trends.

By 2015, the Oxford Junior Dictionary had deleted dozens of words representing

things from the natural world in favour of words from technology.

The OJD is one of many Oxford Dictionaries and is written for kids up to seven years

old. It has less than 5,000 words, compared with 172,000 in the complete diction, so

sacrifices had to be made.

But why did nature have to make the sacrifice? It seems the editorial policy of the

dictionary follows the ethos of the capitalist/industrial/technological drives of the last

few hundred years: screw nature.

Words like acorn, bluebell and chestnut were replaced by analogue, broadband and

chatroom. The word blackberry, instead of denoting a bush with thorns that you

would willingly risk your forearms and shins on to get a gob-full of purple-juiced

deliciousness, became Blackberry, capitalised. A personal digital assistant or PDA.

Because all important things have an acronym.

Who’s job is it?

The trouble with indignation over the choices made by Oxford’s editorial team is that

it is not the dictionary’s job to set the agenda for society. The job is, in essence, to

“mirror its trends,” for which the authors criticised it. With complex lexicographical

algorithms it totes up words that are being used, and those that aren’t, and captures

terms to reflect the society of the day.

Dictionaries have never stopped changing. And isn’t that how we want it? Who’d put

pedants in charge of the language bank? (Thereby leaving it to languish as hostage

to meticulous mandates decreed by the aristocracy of argot?)

The dictionary reflects what our culture has chosen: technology over nature, every

time. But change is everywhere, always, and our language will reflect shifts back to

nature as clearly as it has away from nature. We have, for example, the word

greenwashing – it’s in the Oxford – that demonstrates nature conservation is

mainstream enough for us to call out the shysters who piggyback on its cachet. We

have named their game.

Humans always start by naming things. In the beginning was the word, after all.

Names are part of our first language, the one spoken to us as babies. But our bodies

know an older language, the language of our evolutionary home which is the natural

world.

Nature Deficit Disorder

In Last Child in the Woods , journalist Richard Louv popularised the term “nature

deficit disorder.” As children spend more and more time indoors and on screens, the

incidence of stress and anxiety, ADHD and other diagnosed mental-illnesses plus

obesity and the physical health impacts of poor physical fitness impacts their lives,

their families and their futures.

In The Nature Principle : Human Restoration and the end of Nature Deficit Disorder,

Louv broadened his research to study the myriad ways governments, communities

and individuals are working to restore the human relationship with nature.

In his introduction, Louv says The Nature Principle is about the power of living in

nature—not with it, but in it. We are entering the most creative period in history. The

twenty-first century will be the century of human restoration in the natural world.

It’s the optimists view of where we’re headed – in word and in deed. And I’m an

optimist.

Nature Therapy Walks

In a nature therapy walk we don’t fuss over labels – like the botanical names of

plants or the genus of animals – that sort of knowledge is for walks with a naturalist

or biologist or zoologist. They may be wonderful events, but they are a different

species of walk.

A nature therapy walk tries not to engage your thinking mind in labelling things. We

want the mind to get a little loose. In the liminal space of a gentle walk in nature, we

get a chance to let the body feel what it feels, and the mind to take a time-out.

The mind, of course, will go on naming things – even if it’s a quiet murmuring in the

background. But in a nature therapy walk, we might start to feel that the label is not

the whole story. Maybe there are different dimensions to explore, perspectives that

are larger than words. Words, after all, are just symbols that stand in for an entity.

They give us a hook on which to hang our mutual understanding: rock, tree, flower,

ant, bird, fish.

In a nature therapy walk we take a shot at getting closer to the entity itself. As the

German Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl said when he sent his students into the

field: “to the things themselves!” In a nature therapy walk, we head out to engage

with the things themselves.

Phenomenologists like Husserl were not interested in how we humans interpret and

study and dissect the things, but in the raw physical and conscious experience of

them. Phenomenology might be seen as the philosophical ground for what we

loosely call embodiment.

Whatever big words we use, however, it’s all about experiencing rather than

intellectualising. It’s all about getting out into nature.

Mapping Happiness

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 01:55:16 GMT

Concrete-and-neon

“Don’t try to take me bushwalking,” my friend said, “I’m a concrete-and-neon kinda girl.”

She knows what she likes. I don’t try to take her bushwalking.

And yet . . . her concrete-and-neon image doesn’t fit so well with her choices. Her first post-

divorce holiday was a safari in Africa – open plains and oversized predators. When we catch

up, she prefers to walk the parks in her neighbourhood rather than linger in a coffee shop. But

I don’t challenge her city-girl image. Perhaps her behavioural preference for the outdoors is

so familiar, so mundane, she doesn’t even notice it?

When a massive study on what makes people happy demonstrated that being in nature is, for

the most of us, our happy place, the media commentary had the tone of “well, duh!” Don’t

we already know that?

We do, but like many of the things we feel in our bones, culture has trained us to look

towards science to tote up the relevant numbers before we can be confident. Science has now

done it’s statistical thing with happiness and nature, and done it by applying a strictly non-

natural but ubiquitous technology: a smart phone app.

Mappiness: data confirming intuition

George MacKerron got his PhD from the London School of Economics. He studies “the

economics of subject wellbeing,” subjective wellbeing what non-economists might call

happiness. With fellow economist Susana Mourato, MacKerron developed mappiness, an app

that provides truckloads of data on where, when and doing what makes people feel happy.

Mappiness pings participants at random times during the day to ask simple questions, often

requiring no more than finger tap on a slider. It collects information on where they are, what

they’re doing, and how happy they are. The initial research study, published in 2013,

included one million responses from 20,000 participants. By 2017, mappiness was up to

66,000 participants and 4 million responses – and still showing that nature makes us happy.

“Our key finding,” MacKerron said, “is happiness is greater in natural environments.”

While the three top activities for making us happy are sex, exercise and gardening – and the

most miserable is being sick in bed – whatever we’re doing, we’re happier in nature. And

MacKerron has the charts and graphs to make our preferences real.

Not all green space is created equal

While all natural environments proved positive for happiness, MacKerron demonstrated a

hierarchy of happy places. The common favourite, by a decent margin, is coastal and marine

environments. They’re followed by mountains, moors and heaths (it was a British study); and

then woodlands, grasslands, farms etc. “Developed suburban environments” came last with

“inland bare ground.”

To enrich the individually reported data and ensure statistical rigour, mappiness collected

GPS data on where the participant was located. Researchers controlled for externals like

weather, daylight, type of activity, companions, date and time and individual response trends.

It produced a huge data set to keep MacKerron’s computers slicing and dicing for years. He

got himself a PhD – and a TedX Talk – out of it!

“Green space is lovely, we all know that,” he told TedX Brighton. But, “there are all kinds of

things that are lovely, and that we want more of.

“We want education and health care – and I want gadgets – but at some point we don’t have

unlimited money and we have to make trade-offs.” It’s important to know exactly is giving us

the wellbeing effect, and the size of the impact, so we can be more confident about what

trade-offs to make if our planning decisions are to make communities happier.

New tech, old truth

Mappiness may be the coolest way to prove the biophilia hypothesis which states we are

evolutionarily attracted to other living beings.

Humans evolved over six or seven million years. We spent 99.99% of our evolutionary

development living intimately with nature. We’ve spent just 0.01% under stone, thatch, slate

or tiles, even less with 50 stories of other human dwellings stacked in boxes above us. We’ve

had mere evolutionary minutes with incandescents or fluros that mess up our biorhythms,

eating foodstuffs developed in laboratories, staring at tiny screens that suction our attention

towards pixels.

We are in the short tail-end of our evolution so far. We may prove capable of The Great

Work, as Thomas Berry describes it, and learn to live in tune with the natural world. Our

evolution may grow a very long tail. We could become a super species. Or we could continue

cannibalizing our own survival until the planet is returned to Mother. She will have another

go at making life that sustains itself.

Whatever the long-term outcome, our short experiment with urbanization hasn’t destroyed

what all those millennia of evolution gave us: positive benefits from being in nature.

Mappiness gave us the data, but it’s an experiment everyone can do. Open the door, walk

outside, find a park, a patch of grass, a tree in the carpark – any chunk of nature will do – and

hang out for a while. Try it again tomorrow. Buy a pot plant for your room, or a bunch of flowers.

Pick dandelions or clover blossoms. Give yourself a little quiet time with something

completely natural.

Thanks to mappiness I can give you some scientifically verifiable advice – even if it’s

unsolicited: if you want to cheer up, go sit under a tree.

Losing My Virginity (Or My First Nature Therapy Walk)

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 01:43:30 GMT

It was my first time, and my feelings had uncanny similarities with that other, more

famous shift from virginity to knowing and being known.

There was the thrill of finding out what this being – this thing I was suddenly so very

passionate about – could mean for me. I was ready to open up, curious to explore

how it would feel in my own body. Plus this: I had to trust the ‘other’ in this

relationship. Trust it might be able to care for me as I cared for it. To hold, even

without much confidence, the bright hope of reciprocity.

The Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides ( ANFT )

During my hour and a half drive north to our meeting place, the skeptic chattered

soberly below the excited anticipation of the newbie. “It might not turn out to be all it’s

cracked up to be.”

It wasn’t a fumbling, accidental sort of loss of virginity – I had signed up for it in

advance, with a trained Nature and Forest Therapy Guide – but I still had no idea

what was coming.

I knew only this: I’d heard an interview, on the Embodiment podcast, with Amos

Clifford founder of the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides. I knew

being in the bush had inscrutable effects on my body, mind and spirit – irrational joy,

odd feelings of connection, profound quietude – and I knew whatever this forest

therapy thing was, I wanted to try it. And maybe I wanted to stick with it build a

relationship with it.

Pulling into the carpark I was almost giddy. How would it feel? How would it change

me? Don’t we all want to be changed by consummation with an idealized ‘other?’ In

my case it wasn’t a person, mission or faith but the enormous entity my culture

taught me was very much ‘other’ than we humans: nature.

Slowing down

Fiona McCowan is a horticulturist, a permaculturist and an energy healer but what

she mostly brought to our walk was warmth and confidence. This was not a walk to

identify species or deliver healing, the only expertise she had on show that day was

an intuitive inclusiveness that put her three participants at ease.

While we moved to the trail head, Fiona explained the walk was about 800 metres

down to Little Beach where we would sit and have tea before returning on the same

track to the cars. She would offer invitations that we could interpret any way we liked

and then, at the end of each 15 or 20 minute period, she’d call us together with the

sound of a crow. There was a composting toilet at the camp site by the beach. That

was the housekeeping done.

We stopped in a clearing just inside the gate that allows the ranger’s vehicles in to

the national park. Fiona invited us to look around, then to close our eyes and hear

and taste and smell. She asked us to take note of our breathing. My mind went into

critic mode. “Hmmm, I’m not sure I would do it that way.” “I’d have a proper breathing

exercise . . .” Without understanding or allowing her to guide me, my mind leapt right

into judging and chattering and turning my nervous uncertainty into controlling

blather.

“Hold your hands out. Can you feel them holding the air?” she said. “What would it

feel like if the air was holding your hands?” That’s weird. That’s cool. Yes, this air

around me has a sort of subtle substance . . . and once I switched into feeling mode,

my judging mind took a break. I had arrived.

With eyes closed, we turned around slowly, feeling into our hearts and stopping

when we felt guided to. When Fiona gave the invitation to open our eyes I saw a

dancing leaf – a eucalypt leaf dangling from an unseen spiderweb, spinning in

space. A joyful omen. We shared what we were noticing. I mentioned the leaf.

We set off on the track, slowly, silently, just noticing what was in motion around us.

Fiona asked us to stay behind her and she walked at a snail’s pace. After about 15

minutes she called us together again, to say a few words or not, there was no

pressure and, I felt, no judgment. Even from me.

Invitations to engage with nature

Fiona invited us to befriend a tree. I wandered up a hill and found two huge straight

gums, twin sentinels I imagined as a threshold for me to walk through and begin my

forest guiding journey in earnest. I chanted a little, gave thanks, and after my

impromptu, private initiation, I saw at my feet a scroll of scribbly bark. I couldn’t see a

scribbly gum – my favourite tree - anywhere nearby. I felt it had been tossed there as

a gift. The promise of a graduation scroll. I still have it.

We moved through imaginary invitations, engaging with the water in the stream by

the track, and the rocks at the beach. Our last exercise was to make an offering from

treasures collected while beach combing. I found a fishing lure with crystalline eyes

and opalescent paint – a shrewd decoy and perfect replica of a tiny fish. I found

equally tiny shells and made a mandala of miniscule treasures – gratitude for all the

fish I have eaten in the past, and praise for the preciousness of the subtle, the small

and the quiet.

Someone had built a rough, driftwood shelter on the beach. Inside it, Fiona laid out a

sarong with a tea set, some fruit, nuts and chocolate. She made tea from clover

collected on the walk and we sat under the shelter as it leaked water on us while a

squall of rain passed over. The drips on my forehead felt like a blessing.

Grief, gratitude and a goal

In our final sharing circle, Bonnie talked about the grief she’d felt on our walk – the

sound of a cockatoo had reminded her of her father, and the bird returned to her

awareness many times as we walked. The offering she made on the beach was for

her father. I had barely noticed the cockatoo. But it wasn’t there for me.

Kathy had found an answer to a question she’d been pondering for months – what to

call her new business. Talking with a tree, the perfect name came to mind. On this

seemingly simple decision hung her logo, website, marketing plan . . . all the

necessary accoutrement of a new venture and she was thrilled to have found it.

I found what I wanted to be when I grow up: a forest therapy guide. Grief, gratitude

and a goal. We all found something uniquely valuable wandering around in what I’ve

come to know as the tirelessly surprising, awesomely engaging more-than-human

world.

Maybe losing my virginity is not, in the end, the right metaphor. Perhaps it was more

like baptism, a rite of passage. But like that first loss of virginity, it was the very

beginning of a fundamental change in my life. It led to a birth and a new relationship

that reverberates through every one of my days.