PARTNERING WITH NATURE by Catriona MacGregor

Author:Catriona MacGregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ATRIA PAPERBACK
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

HEALING OURSELVES THROUGH NATURE

Nature can and does provide a sense of harmony and peace.

DORA VAN GELDER KUNZ, The Personal Aura

Recall the exhilaration you experience when hearing the powerful surf and watching the rhythmic flow of the sea. Recall the joy you feel when the first colorful flowers appear in your garden after a long winter. Simple pleasures? Perhaps. Short-lived? No. Nature is a force for the good in our lives, and these simple pleasures can be expanded to transform your life.

Nature is restorative and offers a healing balm for the soul. Walking in nature, playing in nature, and simply viewing nature are beneficial to human health and well-being. For example, even brief exposure to natural scenes reduces stress, and views of natural scenes, through a window or otherwise, can help people heal more quickly. Consequently, a cure-all for emotional and physical ills may be no farther than our own backyard.

In a study covered in the March 2001 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Mother Nature is depicted as the cure-all for many ills. According to Howard Frumkin, MD, author of the article, and chairman of environmental and occupational health at Emory University:

Although this is not hard-core medical advice, I think we can advise people to enjoy nature. There are a lot of indications that contact with nature, either walking in the wilderness, gardening, or having a pet, makes people feel better and can minimize the effects of disease. It stands to reason that cancer patients may benefit a lot from some of those kinds of contact. 1

Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner and Harvard University professor Dr. Edward O. Wilson, who wrote the commentary for Frumkin’s study, believes that environmentalism is a necessity, not a luxury. Wilson’s belief in the health connection between people and nature echoes the findings of the great Greek physician Hippocrates.

Hippocrates viewed health as a state of equilibrium between the organism and its environment. As outlined in the Hippocratic treatise, On Airs, Waters, and Places, disease results from an imbalance in the natural state of the body within the environmental complex of physical and social factors that affect the life of the person as a whole. According to Hippocrates:

Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly should proceed thus: in the first place so consider the seasons of the year and what the effects each of them produces, for they are not all alike … We must also consider the qualities of the waters. And when one comes into a city as a stranger, he ought to consider its situation, how it lies to the winds and the rising of the sun … These things one ought to consider and [do so] attentively. 2

This is a totally contrary view to a traditional Western medical approach, where disease is traced to a single external agent and can be “cured” with a single, artificially created drug. Yet all living organisms—plants, animals, people, and their habitats—share properties of health. Health crosses the artificial boundaries between the human and nonhuman, the physical and invisible.

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