Taking a walk each day and realigning with the green and blue spaces of nature is very likely to bring about multiple positive shifts in your body, mind, and spirit. We are gradually becoming aware that we have lost something essential en route to modernity.
We have reshaped the external environment with roads, cities, and buildings in a way that is in disharmony with nature and harming our own health and well-being. It is time for a major rethink.
A study of 300 cities released by North Carolina State University in 2019 revealed that there was fewer crime and aggression in city areas close to parks and green areas.
According to Lincoln Larson, assistant professor at the university, “We learned that more green space was associated with lower risk of crime across neighborhoods in all 300 cities we studied. Burglaries, larceny, auto theft, and other property crimes occur less often in greener neighborhoods in every city in our sample. Violent crimes like murder and armed robbery were also less common in greener neighborhoods in nearly all the cities we studied.”
Being closer to nature reduces stress, bringing neighbors together and creating a sense of community.
The energy of subduing and conquering nature is a hallmark of the ruling patriarch. The male energy is rational, while the female energy is receptive and more intuitive. An imbalance between the male and the female aspect, the Yin and the Yang, has been responsible for an exploitation and declaration of war on Mother Earth.
It reached its pinnacle in the Inquisition of the Middle Ages when hundreds of thousands of women were burned at the stake. Women were much more closely aligned with nature, especially if they were healers and midwives. But their secret knowledge, passed on over generations in the female lineage, obviously was a threat to the male patriarch.
At a time of great poverty, war and diseases like the plague, these women often were at the forefront of healing, comforting and helping the distressed. Fennel seeds were great at releasing cramps, digestive problems, and increasing the milk supply of breastfeeding mothers. Mint leaves were used as antidepressants and for the treatment of asthma and nausea.
By the 15th century, the church started intervening, forcing the midwives to report every birth to the local parish, especially illegitimate and retarded children.
With their knowledge of contraception, and how to terminate pregnancies, the church saw the midwives as a huge threat to their authority, and sexual morale.
The herbal healers or “witches” and midwives lived dangerous lives in the 15th century as the church started dominating every aspect of the human life from childbirth to death. The Christian cross became the symbol for the suppression and oppression of the female aspect. Women were excluded from the priesthood and holding any higher rank in the church until this day in many denominations.
Interestingly, in the Spanish province of Galicia, we find a version of the cross that finds its roots in Celtic, pre-Christian times. On the one side we find the crucified Christ, while on the other side stands the female goddess, the Madonna. We have the male and female aspects equally depicted on both sides of the cross.
The discovery of ancient Christian scripts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospel of St. Thomas, tells us that there was a time when women were at the forefront of spreading the early Christian gospels. Mary Magdalene, one of the apostles closest to Jesus, played a major leadership role in early Christianity.
There is no historical record that Mary Magdalene was ever a former prostitute possessed by demons as claimed in some of the scriptures.
Around the period 500 AD, the male patriarch systems started throwing the Yin and Yang, the natural complementation of energy between the male and the female, seriously out of balance. It has had a profound effect on the world that we have today.
The dominating male aspect has undoubtedly led to huge technological and material advances, unimaginable to the generations before us. But it has come at a huge price where we are exploiting Mother Earth to such an extent that most species, including our own, will not survive without a major shift in human consciousness.
It’s a common belief that during times of crisis, the thin veneer of civilization collapses with most people falling into egotistical and anti-social behavior.
But Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman, author of the bestseller Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There, claims that humans are fundamentally good and want to do good.
“For every panic buyer, there are a thousand nurses working as hard as they can. For every hoarder, there are a thousand civilians setting up WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups and people in the neighborhood trying to help each other. I’ve been really astonished to see this explosion of cooperation and altruism in a very short period of time,” Bregman said in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
A global crisis such as the pandemic also leads to the realization that other global issues, such as the climate crisis that affects us all, can only be solved in cooperation at a global level.
Reino Gevers – Author – Mentor – Speaker
One more thing...This is an extract from my new book “The Turning of the Circle: Embracing Nature’s Wisdom for Purposeful Living”. It can now be preordered as a Kindle edition on Amazon. Paperback and Hardback versions will be available in July 2023.
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