The Biophilia Effect by Clemens G. Arvay

Author:Clemens G. Arvay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True, Inc.

Experiencing the Healing Wilderness with Others

My time in the mountains served mainly as self-reflection, and since I was alone, I was very much concentrating on myself. However, the wilderness is also a wonderful place to spend time with other people. Group experiences in nature have a very different potential. As social beings, humans need company. In everyday life, which is dominated by stress and hustle and bustle, the importance of social interaction sometimes gets a little lost. After all, we meet people all the time, in the subway and on the bus, while shopping or in the theater. We talk with colleagues at work or at school. We may have the feeling of always making new acquaintances. But often our talks revolve around the things we are bound to in everyday life, namely, work, school, shopping, the latest film we saw, and perhaps politics and society. This is all very important. But the face-to-face encounter between people, open and if possible without any facades, is more of an exception than the rule in everyday life. And it is certainly true that our communication is increasingly shifting into the digital world. Via email and social media, we may have the feeling of cultivating social contacts, but we lack the decisive factor of social coexistence, the presence of our counterparts.

Nature and wilderness offer a valuable setting where people can meet each other and take a time-out together in which the focus is on one another, from one person to another. In this section, I would like to give you suggestions for the practical organization of a wilderness experience in a group, a so-called wilderness retreat.

A retreat is a planned spiritual resting period or a targeted withdrawal from our everyday environment. It is the ideal form of the important therapeutic biophilia effect of nature that environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan have described as “being away.” Of course, a retreat does not have to take place in nature, but the wilderness provides the perfect space because we come into contact with our human roots there. Symbolically, but also in reality, we can be “completely human” in the wilderness and live a bit like our ancestors. We can rediscover our wild side a little further, which, as Indian scientist and human rights activist Vandana Shiva said, is not the opposite of “cultivated.” A retreat in the wilderness is, therefore, a liberation from conventions and social constraints. And this valuable experience is not as easy in a meditation room or hotel seminar space.

A retreat in the wilderness should take several days and include overnight stays on-site. For this purpose, a hut in nature is suitable, as are tents in a forest or meadow. A wilderness retreat promotes the experience of being away from everyday life through several factors. The first is the unfamiliar environment away from civilization, which offers us a completely new setting and places us in a world where different rules prevail. However, the fact that we are cut off from the

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