ECOPSYCHOLOGY ON-LINE: John L. Swanson

PRESCRIBING NATURE
Exploring the Subjective Frontiers of Nature
John L. Swanson

John Swanson is a Gestalt psychologist who practices in Oregon. This is an excerpt from a book he is completing dealing with "personal growth through communing with nature."

The unknown within the self is linked to the wild.
Loren Eiseley

A wilderness area may well have more psychological importance than hundreds of beds in a mental hospital.
Roderick Nash

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings; Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine into flowers; the winds will blow their freshness into you and the storms their energy, and cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
John Muir

AS AN ALTERNATIVE to prescribing medications to help us adapt to unhealthy lifestyles in Chris Drury

inhospitable environments, we can prescribe what John Muir called "the tonic of wilderness." While necessary and beneficial in some cases, in others, adding chemicals to medicate away distressing feelings further complicates matters by disrupting and distorting the organismic self-regulation process. In small doses or large, nature activities provide drug-free revitalizers, energizers, and tranquilizers from a five minute meditation in a local park on the way to work to a week long retreat.
While nature is not meant to be a substitute for therapy, it can be a supplemental resource that supports the process. Nature can be a source of solace for those struggling with the pain of loss. The widespread custom of giving flowers to the bereaved is just one example. Nature can be a non-threatening source of nurturance for those whose interpersonal trust issues or isolation make adequate human nurturance problematic. Many have experienced the soothing effects of listening to the rippling water of a stream or watching clouds drift overhead.
Clients of mine report special places in nature that soothed them, giving them respite and sanctuary from the demands of their troubled lives. Judy. who was severely abused by her first husband, told me how she would often go to the seashore. "Without these times walking on the beach, staring out at the ocean waves, watching the sea gulls, I don't think I would have been able to survive. When I started thinking about suicide, I knew it was time to get myself to the coast."

Gretel Ehrlich describes how nature supported her grieving. "I had a sense that the best place for me to grieve for David was with animals and out on the land. There were many things at play. When you're sick, the instinct is to go to bed. When you're grieving, the same instinct makes you want to find a place that is uncomplicated, accepting, and tolerant. I wanted to hook up with whatever it is that makes things live and die, and I wanted to be with people who weren't going to talk it into the ground." (p.3 in Talking on the Water)
The therapeutic value of nature is the focus of a new movement in psychology called ecopsychology. However, the idea that time in nature is especially conducive to the development of mental health can be found throughout recorded history. The pervasiveness of citations by renowned environmentalists, naturalists, philosophers, theologians, essayists, and poets provides strong anecdotal support for the idea that nature is good for what ails you. For example, Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the first landscape architects in the United States and designer of New York City's Central Park, stated it this way back in 1865.

The occasional contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character, particularly if this contemplation occurs in connection with relief from ordinary cares, change of air and change of habits, is favorable to the health and vigor of men ... beyond any other conditions which can be offered them, that it not only gives pleasure for the time being, but increases the subsequent capacity for happiness. . . The want of such occasional recreation where men and women are habitually pressed by their business or household cares often results in a class of disorders the characteristic quality of which is mental disability, sometimes taking the severe forms of . . . insanity, but more frequently of mental and nervous excitability, moroseness, melancholy or irascibility, incapacitating the subject for the proper exercise of the intellectual and moral forces.

Most people find the profusions of nature to be nurturing, aesthetically pleasing, Chris Drury

physically invigorating, stimulating of the imagination, even spiritually profound. There is plenty of evidence that human nature and mother nature resonate to a common order that is physically, psychologically, and spiritually whole-some. Reconnecting with nature reawakens us to pleasure and beauty that feed us in body, mind, and soul.
Many therapy programs which incorporate nature into their approach are available for a wide variety of populations, age groups, and concerns. A very broad spectrum of issues including delinquency, substance abuse, mental illness, sexual abuse, and domestic violence are being treated by a variety of wilderness and Outward Bound programs. Numerous graduate research studies of programs like Outward Bound for both delinquent and normal populations have concluded that they had a positive impact on self-concept, sense of personal control, self assertion, and personality. A review of more than 300 studies of participants in wilderness experience programs found that the most significant pattern emerging from these studies was increased self-esteem and sense of personal control for participants. (Hendee 1993) Nature therapy programs are not just a recent fad. The benefits of "tent treatment" were reported in the American Journal of Insanity in the early 20th century.
However, retreating into nature to escape from civilization's unhealthy stresses and Chris Drury

excesses is not a solution. While it may be an important part of recovering our nature, by itself, it would be just another coping strategy, a band-aid that doesn't get to the root of the problem. In the long term, we must learn to bring nature back into our lives at home and into our communities so that cultural institutions are themselves brought into harmony with nature.
One example of this approach is the "Animals as Intermediaries" program described by Rebecca Reynolds in her book Bring Me the Ocean: Nature as Teacher, Messenger, and Intermediary. This therapeutic program brings nature into contained environments - classrooms, jails, nursing homes, and other specialized living and learning centers - to enrich the lives of learning and emotionally disabled students and people of all ages. Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts includes this program in the therapeutic treatment of their emotionally disturbed children. Program leaders bring a montage of rocks, plants, water, and animals, both wild and domestic, into these settings and introduce activities inviting participants to interact with them. They report that "healing gifts" are evoked by the sights, textures, and smells they offer.

The history of psychotherapy has evolved from individual treatment to include a broader "family systems" approach. Broadening our perspective to include the ecosystems of Chris Drury

the biosphere and environmental landscape is the growing edge that is the critical challenge facing us today. The new field of environmental psychology may help us unravel the mysteries of the healing effects of the environment.
Psychologists and social psychologists have focused their attention primarily upon the interpersonal world, exploring the quality of our relationships with others and the creation and destruction of human community. However, the way we interrelate with our physical environment is a deep mystery that we are just beginning to explore. Environmental Psychology did not exist as an academic discipline until the early 1970s. Environmental Chris Drury

Psychologists are just beginning to spell out the relationship between the physical environment and human experience and behavior. For example, Environmental Psychologists study the structuring of human living space, whether in homes, gardens, or campgrounds as an expression of the meanings, symbols, and values of the people involved.
Modern research evidence is beginning to validate the widespread folk wisdom regarding the healing effects of nature. Environmental Psychologist, Roger Ulrich, found that patients who had gallbladder surgery recovered faster and needed fewer strong painkillers when they had a view of trees through their hospital window than when they looked out on a brick wall. (Science, 1984, 224: 420-21) Similarly, prison inmates suffered fewer stress-related illnesses such as upset stomachs and headaches if they could see trees from their cells. Environmental Psychology is a promising avenue for understanding nature's influence and its therapeutic applications.
Again to quote John Muir, "Thousands of tired, nerve shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of lumber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."

       John Swanson's study includes an account of his relations with an otter who intruded upon his vision quest exercises. It is included here to remind us that therapy has more resources than we often realize.
       Each morning during a vision quest in 1994, I greet the sun while standing out on some floating logs on a lake. Facing the eastern horizon, I spontaneously create a ceremony of meditation, prayer, and chanting that is responsive to both my natural surroundings and my inner experiencing. Some are short and simple. Chris Drury

Others develop into longer, more elaborate "sunrise services."
Wednesday morning: As I hop out to my place on the logs, the sunlight is already showing on the treetops behind me. I begin as I often do with a combination of praying, gently "ohming," and singing "thank you for this day." The energy level is not high, yet very pleasant. For whatever reason I expect a short ceremony. As the sun begins to break the horizon, I settle more deeply into the serenity of gentle ohming. The soothing sounds of my chanting reverberate within and without.
When the sun is half way up, I look to my left and sitting on the same log, about twelve feet to my left, is an otter!

I fall silent, being careful not to make any sudden gestures. I sit very still, containing Chris Drury

my excitement about what will happen next. He -- if he is a "he" -- stays there only briefly before slithering off the log. Breaking my own guidelines which call for silence, I resume my gentle ohming chant. A few moments later, his head pops up in front of me and slightly to the right; close enough so that if I bent over and leaned out I could have touched him. Eyeball to eyeball, we look into each other's eyes for a few long seconds. Then, the otter opens its mouth, and in a raspy low moan out comes the sound, "ohm." As soon as he finishes this startlingly good otter version, he drops out of sight again. In the silence that follows, I feel astonished, exhilarated and blessed.
       I resume ohming, which now resonates with special feeling for my surprise visitor. This time around I sing not only "Thank you for this day" but also "Thank you for this otter." A short while later, I notice a nose sticking out from between two logs just two or three feet to my left and slightly behind me. My otter friend has joined the ceremony. I continue to ohm and once again he responds with his own ohm sound. I am sharing my sunrise ceremony with an otter! After awhile he disappears beneath the water.
       Soon after his departure, I express my gratitude for this wonderful event and start to leave. Two steps into leaving, a loud moan startles me as I step onto a log. Recoiling with dread that I might have squashed him under the log, I bend over, scanning the surface of the water for some sign of him, saying, "I'm sorry. Are you OK?" Immediately, the otter appears and swims around and right up to my right foot which he would be touching if it weren't higher up on the log. Looking right into my eyes, he "ohms again." I "ohm" back. Again, we are eyeball to eyeball. I find myself talking to him, "Isn't this a wonderful home" and "I am writing a book that I hope will help save this place and others like it for us all." After this brief encounter, he once again submerges. I pause a moment to see if he will re-emerge, and when he doesn't, I return to my campsite.
       When I try to tell my friend what happened, I can't get started. I just laugh and laugh Chris Drury

for several minutes before I can contain myself enough to tell him the story. When I settle down, I tell the story with much specific detail, "He was right there, two or three feet away and slightly to the right." When I finish, my friend says, "you're telling me this as if you're trying to convince yourself that it really happened."
Instantly, I recognize he's right.

Back to the Eco-Psy Home page