Too often we remain stuck in old patterns of seeing, learning and acting. If you look honestly at our world, you find that it is someway out of balance in many fields. Not only the societies with their human communities are out of balance, even the seasons in nature are out of balance. Is there a way of restoring this balance? This course suggests that we need to go beneath the surface of what we usually see and know, and learn to see and feel in a different way. By encouraging deeper levels of learning and seeing, we create an awareness of the larger whole, leading to actions that can help to shape our evolution and our future. This course defines the capabilities that underlie our ability to see, sense, and realize new possibilities - in ourselves, in our learning communities, institutions and organizations, and in society itself.
Effective innovation (also in your learning community) requires the capacity to stay connected and grounded in your deepest source of inspiration and to be open to a larger will. If you are open, the larger environment will continually tell you what you need to learn and to do. This is a learning from the present, (and not a learning from the past) (and not a learning from where you want to go and what you want to teach and reach). This larger field, staying connected with this larger field, has been called by Christopher Bache “Sacred Mind”. Some people (like Thich Nhat Hahn, Joanna Macy, Bill Plotkin, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and many others) say the crisis of our times is not only an ecological and political crisis but it is a spiritual one.
The course suggests that the answers we seek cannot come from the limited consciousness which now rules the world but could grow from a deeper understanding born of the union of heart and head, helping us to see that all life is one, that each one of us participates in the life of a cosmic entity of immeasurable dimensions. Maybe this crisis is an attempt to awaken our soul.
The urgent need for this psychic balance, this deeper intelligence and wisdom, this wholeness, could help us to recover a perspective on life that has been increasingly lost until we have come to live without it — and without even noticing it has gone — recognizing the existence of nothing beyond the parameters of the human mind. It is a dangerous time because it involves transforming entrenched belief systems and archaic survival habits of behavior that are rooted in fear, as well as the greed and desire for power that are born of fear. But it is also an immense opportunity for evolutionary advance, if only we can understand what is happening and why.
For a rapidly increasing number of us, there is the possibility of choosing whether to follow in the tracks of the past, continuing to live our lives in servitude to the power principle and the institutions which embody it, however subtly expressed. Or to live and act from a different relationship with life and commit ourselves to the immense effort of consciousness we need to make to understand and serve its mystery.
This course is highly experiential, there are assignments to go (alone and/or with your learning group) and be in nature, to enjoy the peace, the beauty and the wonder you find in nature and deeply relax, even if it is an online course. It enhances your creative thinking, the metaphorical thinking, imagination and mindfulness.
At the end of your course you will have a certification of the acquired competences (transversal competences).
Awareness of self: Allow yourself to be in the “flow” of knowledge as it emerges. Wide your perceptions.
Take your time to learn from nature something about yourself and what you need to redesign your learning communities.
Enjoy the beauty, the peace and the wonder of nature. Enjoy and feel with your heart.
Make use of your creative thinking. Develop metaphorical thinking (create your own metaphors for your life). Use your imagination. Use your right brain.
Connectedness: explore connectedness. Create your community of practice. Use your heart as organ of perception.
Learn mindfulness from nature for yourself. Learn how to offer deep love and appreciation to nature for all you are experiencing.
This is an Erasmus+ course, an European project in adult education.
Project creators: Isoropia (Croatia), Rogers Foundation (Hungary) and Aura Sviluppo Sostenibile (Italy).
