April 22, 2021
Earth Day provides the opportunity to stop and ask ourselves how we practice partnership with the Earth and with nature.
In context of the movement from domination to partnership systems, adopting partnership practices that deepen our relationship with nature provides the possibility of identifying ourselves in a larger context, as planetary humans, and offers insight into the perceptive shifts required to cultivate reciprocal and respectful relationships with the natural world.
Through the suggestion of accessible earth-focused partnership practices aligned with primal biodynamic earth patterns, we gain a deeper understanding of how an embodied partnership with nature?s life forces can to help restore wholeness at the personal, collective, and planetary level.
Applied transformational ecology consultant and CPS team member Ann Amberg, M.C.S. authored an article in The Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies (IJPS) titled: “Practicing Partnership with the Earth: Nurturing the Evolution of a Caring Alliance Based on Reciprocity and Respect”.
Ann Amberg provides ten practices for healthy earth partnerships, here are three of them:
The practice of relational eating, or ?Taste Your Place??gathering and eating native foods from one?s own bioregion?helps us appreciate the complexity and diversity of a healthy ecosystem. This practice invites us to come back into natural relationship with limited local resources and the energy cost of living in harmony with the land. Creative collaboration leading to complexity and resilience is an earth dynamic that naturally expresses partnership.
Another practice Amberg provides involves walking on the earth barefoot, as regularly as possible. The intention in this practice is to connect with the grounding energy of the earth as a way of restoring our body?s natural energy balance. In the context of understanding how the earth values and protects its own homeostatic balance, aligning our inner metabolism with that of the land helps to bring an understanding of the complex mechanisms of climate change home to our own felt experience in our bodies.
The third powerful eco-centric practice Amberg provides is that of taking time out and resting (rest = restoration), with the intention of opening a spaciousness within our psyche to allow us to grieve and release what is being lost in this time of intense change and cataclysm in human and earth systems.
Earth Day is also a great day to watch Riane Eisler talk about domination economics, the exploitation of nature, and how we can work together toward a new caring economic paradigm in an interview with Scott Russell Sanders, Reshaping the Future in Partnership, Hosted by REGENERATE Forum’s Andrew Keen.
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See also: From Domination to Partnership: a Planetary Ethic
See also: How Partnership with Nature Can Support Our Healthcare Workers
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