Communing with Nature: A Guidebook for Enhancing Your Relationship with the Living Earth

An Outdoor Guidebook like no other.

Most of us do not spend time in nature in ways that nurture us psychologically and spiritually. When we live our lives cut off from nature, we lose a great source of richness and vitality. Learn how our relationship with Mother Nature is greatly enhanced when we shift from viewing her as inert object to experiencing her as living subject.

Developing a harmonious relationship with nature will not only open doors for connecting you with the natural world but also with the depths of your own inner nature. Communing with Nature shows you how to foster this kind of relationship. Over 80 activities in this book will break you out of your limited ways of relating to nature, develop your powers of awareness, and plunge you deeply into the mysteries of existence.

Communing with Nature will help you:

Develop your awareness as a tool for personal growth.

Awaken your senses for connecting with nature.

Use language to enhance rather than block relating to nature.

Cultivate peak experiences in nature as a doorway to spiritual awakening.

Explore relating to a variety of settings: ocean, mountain, desert, cave, and sky.

Create retreats, walkabouts, pilgrimages, and vision quests that connect you to your own inner nature as you commune with the natural world.

Over 100 inspirational quotations will sing to you of the glory of nature's wonders. Numerous stories will make communing with nature come alive for you, awakening your hunger for experiences of your own.

In addition to the personal benefits of communing with nature, a growing number of environmental experts are telling us that the solution to our environmental problems is dependent upon a change in consciousness. Communing with Nature offers a path to awaken this consciousness person by person, a path that leads each of us into deep participation with the wonders of nature's beauty and wisdom.

"John Swanson is that rare guide who not only shows us the terrain, but also sharpens our lenses, deepens our presence. In his company we can learn to merge with the natural world our larger body and experience the delight, reverence, and renewal that is our birthright."

---- Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back to Life: Practices to
Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

"Communing with Nature is an intelligent and deeply inspiring journey into the heart of the human-nature relationship. In a time when so much is at stake in our world, this ecopsychological guide for reconnecting with nature is a valuable resource for educators, therapists, wilderness guides and anyone who loves the earth. This wonderful book is filled with insightful theory, practical exercises, suggestions for using the exercises and examples of how the author has successfully applied them in his own teaching. I highly recommend this book.

---- Jed Swift, Director of the Center for Ecopsychology
Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado