Robert Greenway

Ecopsychology pioneer Robert Greenway did some of the original ecotherapeutic work in the wilderness while teaching at Sonoma State University, as well as formulating important early theories on the human-nature connection. He wrote a chapter for the original Ecopsychology anthology and continues to be active as a writer, theorist, educator, and organic farmer. Greenway asks us to question what we mean by “wilderness” and to explore how and why mindful contact with wildness in all forms can be restorative.

The Desert Fathers retreated to the arid wilderness for contact with the divine. Ancient Chinese sages wrote of leaving the hustle and noise of the town for healing of the soul in deep country. Even native cultures living close to the natural world retreated from villages, from all human contact, for visions, rites of passage, and spirit guidance.

Now, in a time when all ecosystems are damaged, and population and poverty are burgeoning, the remaining islands of more or less pristine natural areas we’ve named “wilderness” still can provide healing for those with the time and means for visitation and psychological immersion. What was once normal and familiar territory to our ancestors has recently, evolutionarily speaking, become rare and is now at great risk. Yet it still retains an awesome power.

Today “the experience of wilderness” has become a tidy package, in some cases taking the form of a class in a few adventurous universities, and in others, a business for thousands of “wilderness therapists,” so called to emphasize their professionalism, skill at guiding and caring for urban-immersed clients who can afford it, and a noble intention to facilitate change in those clients in ways that imply healing.

Modern people debate about precisely what wilderness is, its status as a cultural artifact (what University of North Texas professor of environmental philosophy Max Oelschlaeger called “the idea of wilderness”)¹, how indigenous people have affected it, and whether it really exists at all. The focus in this essay will be with human experience in preserves they do not dominate: islands of relatively intact wildness where the full original natural processes remain in play. Focusing on the immediate experience itself, I will explore specifically four therapeutic questions: If healing takes place in the wilderness, what is the disease? Does this healing really take place in the wilderness more efficiently than elsewhere? If so, why? And lastly, how?

The Wilderness Effect

After running a wilderness therapy training program through a university for over twenty-two years, I am convinced that the wilderness experience can bring about a dramatic change in psychological processes. This change is most evident when certain procedures are followed and when the experience lasts at least ten days, so that real psychological immersion can take place. I collected data from students who took trips into the backcountry and lived without outside contact for as long as twenty-eight days (a full moon cycle). Two-week trips were the most common, and even the changes I witnessed from those shorter trips were dramatic.

How can we characterize “healing” in the wilderness? Before I address this important issue, I must disclose a few of my sources and biases about healing in the wilderness. In the 1960s I was a student of psychologist Abraham Maslow (considered the father of humanistic psychology and noted for his conceptualization of the “hierarchy of human needs”) and psychologist Richard Jones at Brandeis University. I have immersed myself in humanistic psychology as well as Jungian, archetypal (Hillmanian), and transactional psychologies. I have studied anthropology, various cultural rituals, and the rapidly evolving area of transpersonal psychology. I am a student of past and present research on consciousness, both the “hard” and “soft” problem of its sources. I am a musician and a practicing Buddhist, an organic farmer and a poet. All of these perspectives inform and shape my views, though I am not committed exclusively to a single “school” or particular strand of psychology.

I believe there are multiple modes of knowing, each useful for different stages of growth, science being only one mode (albeit very useful and currently dominant). Dialogue, narrative, even music and contemplation are examples of other modes, all of them crucial to understanding the dynamics of the human–nature relationship, or what we now call ecopsychology— a new-old field at the heart of the wilderness experience. When one is alert to the bridge between nature and culture within every word, metaphor, and symbol, language not only stores experience and becomes abstract but floats in the field between cognitive activity and the context through which one moves. Although my approach to a typical wilderness trip requires considerable periods of silence and listening, pondering and contemplation, we do not see words as an enemy, as some nature leaders do.

Before a trip, we chanted, sang, and often used “words spoken with heart,” deepening the connection between ourselves as urban, acculturated humans and the backcountry. We also used techniques to slow and open the mind and to relax sense perception.

Leaving Culture Behind

Students were asked to leave everything they considered to be cultural behind. No school paperwork or contact with loved ones, no discussion of movies, television, the Internet, or other pop culture topics were allowed. We taught that the wilderness was a fully functioning community without us, that it didn’t need us, that we were entering into its field, and that we should do so with respect, even reverence.

In theoretical terms, the minds we all brought into “the wilderness mind” had been programmed by a historically dualistic culture. By dualism I mean the program to divide and separate, not just into natural pairs (day and night, hot and cold), but into common yet artificial pairings: racial “us and them” biases, chauvinism of various kinds, artificial hierarchies, and so on. These illusory pairings play havoc with our perception of reality, making it difficult to retain an accurate perspective. This program is so common in Western culture that it may seem puzzling even to speak of it. But consider how the natural survival skill of perceiving, say, figure-ground phenomena (which is the tiger? which is the background?) morphs in all directions in a highly verbal, abstracted, information-compressed culture as the figure-ground relationship bifurcates into me (my self-system, my ego, my needs, my viewpoints) and them (the other, the puzzling, the alien). Felt contact is then lost, as is the felt presence of the numinous, the awe-ful, the holy.

This more radical definition of dualism awakens us to its function as a divider, a splintering that is the source of alienation. Such artificial boundaries require increasing amounts of personal and cultural energy to sustain themselves. Our individualistic and self-isolating culture reinforces the divisions—daily, hourly—yet one’s inner spirit yearns for reconnection. Our lost capacity to feel for the natural world—trees or a special tree, or frogs, or, in many urban contexts, even the weather—is the “disease” we aim to heal; restoring it is the aim of wilderness work.

How “External” Wilderness Heals

The illusory splits of dualism oversimplify our psychic natures and are the source of our current crisis with the natural world. For example, we carry memories of the oceanic—the experience of the womb—in our psychic depths. We carry childhood memories of being in nature. We have flashes of insight (of peak experiences) when making love, reaching the mountaintop, growing the perfect tomato, and so on. And now in our studies of ecopsychology and deep ecology, we are coming to understand that, along with our hunger for spiritual connection, we also carry a mostly repressed “ecological unconscious,”² a legacy from our eons-long evolutionary path that contrasts sharply with our acculturated view that we can indeed separate from nature.

Although less available to everyone as remnant wilderness areas shrink and become degraded, wilderness still remains a wonderful context in which the healing of dualistic thought modes can take place. Immersion in wilderness offers certain experiences that are especially helpful in knitting together the human–nature disjunction.

The awakening. Being out there is physically demanding. Carrying all the things a person thinks he or she needs to survive is very arduous. The body is awakened, and often speaks (complains) loudly at the idea of propelling itself forward. Preparation and adequate training of course are crucial.

The tribe. We travel in a group, as a tribe if you will, because we evolved as tribal creatures. Exercises of mutual caring and of developing trust in the sharing of camp duties, cooking, and eating food together all arouse this tribal consciousness. Sharing dreams in the morning also helps.

Fire. One aspect of our culture is that we have almost totally lost the mystery (call it sacredness) of fire, the source of all life and sustenance. A group sitting silently around a fire, night after night, with no sirens or car horns, no deep low rumble of a distant freeway—just a crackling fire, firelight shining on tired and often sun-browned, weathered faces—always prompts someone to remark, “We’ve been here before.” The archetypal setting links us to earlier cultures, earlier times, and the very essence of life.

Shitting. My wilderness groups moved around a lot and we rarely resorted to latrines. A trowel was brought, paper burned (if used), waste covered. The process provided an intimacy with one’s body not known to those who only wash their wastes away in a flood of clean water that goes off to who knows where. Here are those grains I carried all the way out here and didn’t chew long enough, here’s my health, or my sickness, there’s my digestion. It’s the human-nature relationship writ close and personal.

The rivers. We always headed far back along rivers, where we could perform rituals like chanting all night under a full moon, making simple sweat lodges with our sleeping bags and tarps, diving into icy pools, and baking on hot rocks through an afternoon. There’s an elegant balance to any watershed, and a choir that comes out at night along any noisy river. A mind open to all this absorbs that balance and, when encouraged, can align with it. This is healing in the deepest sense of the word.

The peaks. We often climbed at night, sometimes naked, carrying warm clothes in a day pack so we wouldn’t dampen them with sweat. Reaching a peak before dawn, we tuned our minds to the sun’s appearance.

“Of all the ways it makes sense for humans to worship, worshipping the sun makes the most sense,” an uncle from the Arapahoe once told me. We felt the life-giving warmth and the entry of light into endless stands of trees at dawn as they drew in carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen. As we watched the transformation to daylight, we reinforced our own connections to the molten fires of the sun.

Decisions. All decisions, except those involving life and death situations, were made by consensus in the group, though at the outset of a trip the leader’s suggestions carried more weight. Such a process requires an awareness of a “group mind,” and it not only challenges the isolated dualistic self but creates respect for the group—the kind of respect that we hope would extend into the natural forms and processes around us.

What changes in the wilderness? If we assume, as is common in psychology, that ego means “the executive function,” and if we accept the Buddhist idea that much of one’s consciousness serves the purposes of the ego, then it follows that a need-obsessed (or hungry) ego is what drives a culture engulfed in consumerism. In the wilderness, first the shape of the ego changes, generally becoming more open—especially if the days are warm, the nights aren’t too cold, one’s equipment works pretty well, there aren’t too many rattlesnakes or bears (at least at first), and no major storms roll in. If one’s basic needs are fulfilled, the mind opens without hesitation.

But the question is, opens to what exactly? To the eco in our “ecopsychology.” Cultural historian Theodore Roszak, in his book The Voice of the Earth, accentuates the psychological side of ecopsychology, describing our healing as a quest for the “ecological unconscious.”³ True, but if the unconscious at the depth of our species’ memories of living in the wilderness truly connects with natural processes, then the ecological unconscious is as “ecological” as it is psychological—it connects to our surroundings, to the balances, cycles, patterns, and relationships that are described by ecology and that we can experience by staying outside.

If our universe is one of “basic goodness,” as Buddhists like the venerable Chogyam Trungpa would describe it; if Gaia (the planet Earth) functions as a complete system that seeks balance; and if the natural processes in a wilderness (including experiences of death, birth, pain, rest, and perturbation) are even somewhat healthy, then it makes sense that the energy flowing in and out of quiet and respectful participants meets the energy of the wilderness and thus makes deep healing possible. The acculturated ego’s programs fade into the background, and new needs arise that are consistent with the wilderness setting. And if the wilderness journey is well structured, there might be space for rediscoveries of human-nature relationships arising from the unconscious. This kind of healing provides us with a natural model, a guide, a stimulant for collective relationships that seek harmony rather than dominance or individual gain over other members of the community.

In the backcountry, our perception can change at very deep levels. Dreams change, as does the desire to manipulate the world in ways that damage it. Some realize that our great cultural achievements, our vaunted intelligence, and our skills at fulfilling our needs are actually only rudimentary, and sometimes both immature and unwise. It becomes clear why so many of our attempts in recent years to reverse human-caused damage have only caused more damage. We come to feel that we have not focused enough on understanding the complexity and the context of how our psyches work. We have made mistaken assumptions of omnipotence over the natural world.

Healing the World and the Human-Nature Split

If we view the kinds of transformation we can see during a short few weeks in the wilderness through the lenses of history, anthropological knowledge, and depth psychology, we can see that our culturally prized cognitive differentiation has become a disjunction, a rupture that shows up in nearly every culture today. Although this divisiveness may be illusory, it still manages to wreak havoc psychologically, politically, ecologically, and spiritually. We simply cannot continue to live as if we are separate from nature and therefore from each other.

Nor will mystical transformations into “other transcendent realities” work if we destroy the ground from which we wish to leap. Unless the underlying dynamic behind the duality stance is itself healed, we will make little overall progress.

The level and depth of reconnection and healing available in the wilderness give hope for recovery. Even as true wilderness experience becomes less and less available, we can find ways of linking minds to all forms of nature—to our own physiology, our every breath and eyeblink, our compassion for all living things. We may still be able to enter that sacred relationship with our planet, with fire, with nature, the body, and each other.