Over 50 trips into the Himalayas with nearly 1500 people. Thousands of retreats for corporations in nature and I think I might be qualified to say that people are different in nature. People are more healthy, more happy, clearly more inspired, more loving, more friendly and the list goes on. Goodness, if you could distil all of the books on good human behaviour you would end up saying they all say the same thing, go into the bush.
The purpose of this video is to remind you that there is a commercial benefit to aligning your business and the people within it to nature. It’s kind of like positive reinforcement of something you already know.
I didn’t want to make it too technical. I don’t think you need pages of research to validate the fact that people perform better in all walks of their life when they are connected to nature. I also don’t think you need pages of research to prove that we are being urbanised and that the definition of urbanisation is ultimately, separation from nature. Hence the world is becoming a very different place than most of us once knew it.
Further, you may be witnessing a complete transformation in the behaviour of people who are going to be the leaders of our world. Those eight-year-old children and their 11-year-old siblings are spending an enormous amount of energy and time relating to people through the Internet. We need to recognise that this change is permanent. And ultimately that personal change has a lot to do with withdrawal from real nature. It’s a whole New World with a whole new set of problems.
As a person who studies Innerwealth, you will also remember that nothing is ever missing it just changes in form. Hence these younger people are not suffering more than we did. The form is very different and we think we can revert somehow to the old form of challenge. Your stories and mine might be completely different about our childhood but I remember one day, at my school, the school bully who was a very tough young kid who had pubic hair before we even had balls, attacked and was being cruel to one of the students in my class who had all of the consequences of having had polio as a child. He was significantly disabled.
The bullying was harsh and somewhat physical. I remember stepping in and blocking this behaviour and ending up being challenged to a fight in the shelter sheds after school. After school in the shelter sheds they were around 100 students crammed up the walls and this bully and I entered into a serious fight. I was stronger than him. And I finally got him lying on the floor in the headlock. At which point in time one of his bully mates kick me in the mouth and put my teeth through my gums. Nobody got punished for this fight. And now our parents that we see worried about their kids getting bullied by people on the Internet think something new has happened all of a sudden that never happened before. Give me a break!
When I went home from that fight, and many others that I had, protecting people in the school who were unable to defend themselves from bullies, I usually went home with serious injuries including knife cuts. My dad’s response was to laugh at me and say I needed to spend more time practising my left hook. I’m not validating my dad’s behaviour as being the best, but just like parents today my dad did what was necessary to put protection between me and bullies. But the one great thing that never did was try to pretend that this was not reality and that I needed to be protected by some visit to the school to complain that they were tough people in the world.
Reality is always confronting. And parents sometimes try to change the universe instead of putting leather sandals on their kids. Teaching children how to be good while they are being bullied is a mess.
But this conversation has become intellectual. But if you, like me, grew up in the bush where reality was life and death of animals and survival in very harsh conditions, bullying on the Internet would just become part of reality. Nature teaches us a lot about the way things really are versus the theorists who think their political views will end up being the majority. What we know from human consciousness is that the lowest consciousness usually has the loudest voice. The person who is screaming the loudest about bullying is usually the biggest bully.
All that being said here is a video you might enjoy about the gift of nature in our lives and might remind us all that the solution for people who are stressed is the get back to nature. The solution for children who are struggling at school is go out and carry a bucket of water. The solution for people who are not grateful for what they’ve got is to go and live somewhere where they haven’t got. Nature is a brilliant teacher, and not just pretty trees pruned in a local park and the vegetable garden that we manicure. I’m talking about virgin nature. But maybe I’m talking to myself about this. Please enjoy the video and the small workbook that I have attached which is the long hand of what’s in the video for those who do like reading multiple pages of research.
INSPIRED THINKING 