How to Heal Our Disconnection From Nature

Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

In her elegiac essay "Into the Woods " poet and scholar Ruth Padel writes:

"What would Robin Hood have made of Country Life's recent excavation into the fantasies of British 7-to-14-year-olds concerning the wild life and wild places of their native land? Two thirds had no idea where acorns come from, most had never heard of gamekeepers (do they mug people or protect the Pokemons?), and most believed there were elephants and lions running round the English countryside. A third did not know why you had to keep gates shut -- was it to keep the elephants in (or was some joker taking the piss just then?), or stop cows 'sitting on cars,' upsetting the countryside's most vital beast -- the traffic?

The Connection Between Shamanic Healing and Creative Unfoldment (essay)

Epona, by Susan Seddon-Boulet

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The Wound is the Place Where the Light Enters You

Rumi

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In this essay I will present my ideas of the connection between shamanic healing and creative unfoldment. It is something I make aware of in my philosophical counseling practice, which I combine with forest therapy.

On a Storyteller´s Night

The Star Fishers, by Jeanie Tomanek

"A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation. Even in silence we are living our stories."

Ben Okri (in Birds of Heaven)

You are lying in bed. You are ill with the modern illness, stress. The doctor has prescribed some pills. It is a summer night. The window is open. Outside is the garden. The curtains are moving.

Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth (a Shamanic Ritual)

According to Aristotle (De Philosoph, fr. 8), wisdom (Sophia) covers any ingenious invention and conception (all of which ultimately are gifts, sent down by the gods); therefore to do any thing well, skillfully, according to the divine paradigms and models, is to follow the way of “wisdom” which finally leads to the highest metaphysical goals, to the noetic realms where Wisdom itself, the graceful goddess, dwells. No wonder that every nation loves wisdom and has certain “lovers of wisdom”, be they goldsmiths, artists, healers, singers, priests, or magicians.

Algis Uzdavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth – From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism

Philosophy, Storytelling and Shamanic Healing

The Arabian Nights illustrated by Charles Folkard

The Thousand and One Night is not something which had died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory – and also, now, a part of tonight.

Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights.

Philosophical counseling is about healing the Soul of Man. Therefore you can also call it spiritual healing. The essence of spiritual healing, in my context, is to discover, and especially, accept, your true creative calling in life. If you do this you will experience the enchantment of being helped by the spirits. The first step in this direction is help to become a life artist. All in all, I call my help guided primordial meditation, a return to the Source of consciousness, which again is a return to the Source of nature.

The sickness philosophers are healing are human problems - problems common to all mankind

In a certain sense the philosopher is a healer.

Many philosophers make as a doctor a diagnosis and suggest a treatment. So did Buddha, and so did Kierkegaard.

But what they were treating were the human problems, therefore problems common to all mankind.

The sickness unto death, which for instance Kierkegaard´s script The Sickness Unto Death has as subject, is the despair.

The despair is here presented as a sickness in the self, and the condition for healing is to become yourself.

In the same way in Buddhist philosophy, where the sickness is the suffering common to all mankind, and the treatment is meditation, and the recovery is enlightenment.