Tag: therapy

Nature Therapy Breaks New Ground

A therapy session might not be the place you’d expect to hear talk about Mother Nature. But some therapists believe the natural world and our personal lives are intimately connected, and they’re finding that nature can play a key role in the healing process. Kyle Norris has this story:

Transcript

A therapy session might not be the place you’d expect to hear talk about Mother Nature. But some therapists believe the natural world and our personal lives are intimately connected, and they’re finding that nature can play a key role in the healing process. Kyle Norris has this story:


Clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Franseen talks to people about their personal problems. Over time their discussions broaden-out. They talk about relationships with things like people, money, pets, and the environment around them – the earth. But when she gets to the earth, she doesn’t ask her clients about their relationships with it.


“The only way you can have a relationship with something is if you’re separate from it. But it’s as silly as talking about, ‘yeah I have a relationship with my gallbladder, how about you?’ It’s like ‘no we don’t, my gallbladder’s just a part of me.’ And really that’s what’s going on with the earth; we are as much a part of it as everything else is.”


Franseen believes that many of our physical and mental ailments happen when we forget this connection. Several years ago, she started incorporating the earth into her work. She found that this technique helped people transform an insane world, as opposed to adapt to one.


“We can’t just stop with relationship with self, relationship with family, relationship with community. We need to just keep taking it out as far as we can go. It includes relationship with all.”


The idea that “we are the earth” can sound a little weird to some people. At least one of her clients, 71 year-old Steve Morse, thought so at first. Morse considers regular therapy to be part of his spiritual practice. He works with Franseen in both individual and group sessions. Franseen asked Morse’s group to walk into the woods, sit alone for an hour, and listen for a message. A message from the birds, trees, and sky. When he heard this assignment Morse was skeptical.


“Well as a guy, you know, you don’t do this, it’s ‘whoa!’ it’s too new agey, too off-the-page, too goofy, it’s not masculine. There’s all kinds of reasons that this is not something that you do.”


As Morse sat alone in the woods, something he saw struck him. He noticed a pine seedling that was getting choked-out by the shade of an old tree. He thought to himself that the seedling would probably die, but that it didn’t know that. Morse said that observing the trees gave him consider new ideas about anxiety and unnecessary suffering.


Experts say one of the most powerful things about the natural world is how quickly it takes us to a place deep within ourselves. Jed Swift is the director of the eco-psychology concentration at Naropa University.


“The backdrop of nature, the emersion, what we call the emersion in nature, just stirs up so much emotional and unconscious material for people about safety, about risk, about their health, their survival, about fear, about well being and wholeness and unity, that a lot of therapists are finding that it can speed up the therapeutic process.”


Swift says that far too often, people perceive nature as a backdrop to the human experience. By remembering our connection to the natural world, he says we can enhance our health and our personal sense of identity.


Therapist Lisa Franseen says that for her, nature is a teacher and an inspiration.


“You know the tree grows to be a tree because that’s what it’s here to do, so that gives me hope that like, ‘ok’, then I’m here to do something, and I will just follow through with what I’m here to do.”


One of Franseen’s clients says that her whole life changed when she realized that she was not separate from the earth. The client said that nature also helped her to hear her own answers to life’s questions.


These techniques might not be for everyone, but many people who have used them say that nature helped open their senses to something that they might have missed on their own.


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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Carrying the River Within Us

We don’t have to travel far to experience nature. Many of us have special places that connect us to the natural world. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Bob Hamma reflects on the lasting impact those places can have on us:

Transcript

We don’t have to travel far to experience nature. We all have special places that connect us to the natural world. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Bob Hamma reflects on the lasting impact those places can have on us:


One day in early September, my son and I rented a canoe and took a trip down the St. Joseph River where it crosses from Indiana into Michigan. The cloudless sky was a rich, deep blue and the light breeze created just a soft ripple on the river’s surface. Young turtles sunning themselves on logs plopped in the water as we glided by. We spied an occasional blue heron perched on the bank and a few swans moving gracefully through a pool.


The river was surprisingly empty of human presence. There were a few boys fishing under a highway bridge and a single pontoon boat. But they did not rob us of the sense that the river was ours, that on this river so close to home, there was a quiet, peaceful world without the pressures and demands of our everyday life. I like to remember that day, not only for its quiet beauty, but to create a peaceful space within myself. I want to carry that day, that river, within me.


I close my eyes and I am there. The river becomes part of me and part of the bond between my son Peter and me. It flows through my mind, carving a path through my psyche, laying bare the texture of memory. I travel upstream and remember the joys and sorrows that have formed the course of my life. I am carried downstream as I recall the people, places, and things that I cherish, moving always toward the great sea to which every river flows.


As the river becomes a part of me, I sense my life as a whole rather than as scattered fragments. There is a peaceful center, which I need only take the time to connect with. I know that just like this river I come from somewhere and am going somewhere; that I am a part of something greater; that I belong to people and to places.


When you are bruised or troubled, go to that place where you connect deeply with nature. Go to that river, that woodland, that mountain. Let the river carry you, the forest shelter you, the mountain bear you up. Close your eyes and go to that place which is for you a source of life.


Host Tag: Bob Hamma is a writer who lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Cooling the City With Green Rooftops

  • The City Hall in Chicago is topped with plants and trees to try to cool things down. The city is working to reduce the heat island effect caused by so many blacktop roofs and parking lots. Photo by Lester Graham

On the nightly TV news in large cities, the meteorologist sometimes talks about the heat island effect. That’s where all the blacktop roofs and asphalt parking lots soak up the heat and increase the temperature on a hot summer day. One major U.S. city is trying to do something to reduce that effect. To set an example, the mayor decided to start with City Hall. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

On the nightly TV news in large cities, the meteorologist sometimes
talks about the heat island effect. That’s where all the blacktop roofs
and asphalt parking lots soak up the heat and increase the temperature
on a hot summer day. One major U.S. city is trying to do something to
reduce that effect. To set an example, the mayor decided to start with
City Hall. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


Standing on the roof, eleven stories up, isn’t really far enough to escape
the noise of the city below. But this rooftop is an escape. It’s a garden, a
big one. There are even trees. Not in pots, but actually planted on… or…
in the roof.


Marcia Jiminez is the Commissioner of the City of Chicago’s Department of Environment. She says Chicago wants building owners to
do what they can to cool the city down… and planting gardens on the
roof is one way to do it. So that’s what the city did on top of City Hall.


“Well, the garden on the rooftop is addressing what we call an urban heat
island problem. By putting the garden with light colored pavers and the
green plants on top of the roof, we’re actually helping to use less energy
inside the building and it actually helps to keep the building cooler.”


Cooling down the building is just the beginning of this garden. Despite
being eleven stories up in the middle of downtown, the roof is alive with
bugs and butterflies.


“Actually birds and all of the insects, many of them, have found their
way up here. We’ve actually put up birdhouses to study what kind of
birds are coming to the rooftop garden. This is a place of
respite as well as a place to feed.”


The whole rooftop has become something of a lab. Scientists research
what animals have made a home here… and they’re monitoring how the
plants are spreading.


Kimberly Worthington worked on the City Hall project to see it go from
the drawing board to rooftop. She says they chose plants for color, form
and for survivability.


“The design that we went with was low maintenance, was what we were
looking for in our plant selection. And the landscape architects that were part of the design team focused on plants that would require less water. And they also wanted to keep as many native plants as possible. So, there are a lot of prairie plants up here.”


The Chicago City Hall rooftop project also reduces rain water runoff. 75-percent of a one-inch rain will be soaked up right here in the garden. That’s good because too much rain overflows sewers into Lake Michigan. If enough buildings in the city had rooftop gardens, stormwater runoff problems would be curtailed a bit.


While the city is touting the environmental benefits of its rooftop garden, in another part of the city a planned rooftop garden is all about people.


Brenda Koverman is with the Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital in Chicago. We’re up on the roof where she’s showing me landscape renderings of how the surrounding area will look once the planting begins. Stone paths, fountains, flower gardens and shrubs.
It’ll look beautiful. And it’ll probably cool things down up here. But Koverman
says this is for the patients who are learning to be mobile after disabling injuries. The hospital hopes that patients in rehabilitation will find the rooftop garden more pleasant and helpful than institutional tile floors and plastic obstacles as they learn to
manuever…


“You know, so, are patients more able to maneuver their wheelchairs in the community? Are patients able to use their hands better so they can cook better at home? Are patients able to stay out of the nursing home and go to their home? So, if we can get any kind of
those outcomes, then it’s a huge success.”


It might be more interested in the patients, but the hospital will still be helping Chicago reduce its heat island effect.


There aren’t very many of these projects in the city, so it’s hard to say whether the rooftop gardens could cool things down all that much. But Environment Commissioner Marcia Jiminez says all you have to do is go up on the roof on a hot day. City Hall sits right next to the County Building. In fact they look like the same building. But not from the roof. Only one side is garden.


“In last summer in 2001 on the hottest day, while it was about a hundred degrees on the city hall side, it was 165 on the opposite end of the building where’s there’s a blacktop roof.”


Even if you’re not interested in planting a garden on your roof, the city still requires some effort to cool things down. City ordinance calls for light colored material when a roof is replaced. And parking lots have to plant some trees before they can get a permit to resurface. Rooftop gardens aren’t mandated… but city officials say they’re learning first
hand that it’s a much better use of space in the city.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.