NATURE THERAPY

Q. What about challenges like ADHD? What about when children transition from the Living Ethics School to a mainstream school, in which they will have to sit still and attend to academic work several hours a day at school and then more at home?

In present day society the champion young resisters of forced confinement for several hours a day generally earn the label ADHD. In the ground-breaking book Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv connected ADHD to the emotional and physical cost of alienation from nature. He coined the term Nature-deficit-disorder (NDD), which is the only label I know of that actually points society toward a healing solution. Whereas the label ADHD provides a socially acceptable gateway to drugging children, so they will docilely comply with the system, Louv’s NDD points toward a bonafide healing therapy: access to the scents, sounds, colors, textures, and endless opportunities for play in wild nature. According to Louv:

The real disorder is less in the child, than it is in the imposed, artificial environment. Viewed from this angle, the society that has disengaged the child from nature is most certainly disordered, if well-meaning. To take nature and natural play away from children may be tantamount to withholding oxygen.

Just as withholding oxygen can result in brain damage, thousands of studies have proven that daily sensory deprivation of a variety of sounds, textures, and scents, such as those found in nature, contributes to the dulling of the senses and intelligence. Similarly, curriculums that are devoid of life deprive children of the joys of childhood and trigger depression and defiance. And of course, oxygenated blood flowing to the brain necessitates due attention to physiology. Confinement must be replaced with children running, playing, climbing a lot, every day.

But there’s more, much more to the story. The research of Dr. Konstantin G. Korotkov http://www.korotkov.eu/ takes us deeper, all the way into the quantum realities of the child-nature alliance. Dr. Korotkov invented the gas discharge visualization (GDV) camera. which captures energy fields emanating from humans and plants. Even more intriguing his camera captures ongoing interchanges between plants and plants, and plants and people. Science and spirituality are now on the same turf, revealing quantum level communication and communion between the plants and trees, as well as the natural environment and people.

But anyone who intuitively plants children in wild nature already senses this truth. At the Living Ethics School, for thirty years, we have observed children climbing trees, running across the prairie, sneaking through Thorn Forest, sitting in tree house headquarters, and creating households, shops, hotels, banks and post offices in the Children’s Village.

Years ago when the trend became less and less recess, we placed outside play right in the middle of the morning for 40 minutes, mid-day for an hour and at 2:30, after a shorter than usual school day. Most days a bright-eyed group floods into classes recharged and ready to learn. Snow days and early spring days are the exception, at which times we are forced to set aside lesson plans and accede to the irresistible beckoning of the outdoor amphitheater.

“What about when our children move back into the system?” Anxious parents ask.

When John Holt was asked what intelligence is, he replied that, “Intelligence is figuring out what to do, when you don’t know what to do.” When therapeutic attention has been given to the cultivation of both joy and real intelligence for the first decade of childhood, most children quickly become A-B honor students after a brief adjustment period, during which they figure out the teach/test and teach-to-the-test system.

The powerful assets, which those who have communed with wild nature (in both inner and outer terrains) bring to institutions, are their innocence, open-friendliness, sense of self-worth, enthusiasm for learning, and activated whole-brain intelligence. In an unnatural environment, some will even retain these natural attributes.