Connections, compassion, and co-healing: The ecology of relationships

Abstract

In developed countries many people spend little time in direct contact with the more-than-human world and react with pervasive fear and mistrust of ʼnature’. This chapter explores repairing our relationships with the more-than-human world and enabling us to positively engage with the more-than-human world as we face complex and challenging decisions in the Anthropocene. Our relationships are entangled with all beings and natural systems, and the cosmos as an ecology of relationships. Ecofeminism provides a framework for changing the patterns of violence, which means changing our relationships, in order to heal. Women’s outdoor programming by women has retained a way of being and an attitude towards the outdoors guided by an ethic of care and an understanding of entanglement. Drawing from this history and experience, outdoor leaders, skilled in healthy relationship building, can support participants exploring and repairing their relationships with the more-than-human world including stopping criticism, defensiveness, and contempt. Thoughtfully designed outdoor education programs can provide transformative, paradigm shifting experiences that help participants connect to the more-than-human world from a place of compassion and awe counteracting negative images and fear of ʼnature’ that result from western narratives. Instead of seeing the more-than-human world as something to be controlled, they see it as part of themselves and understand our need for healthy affiliation with the more-than-human world on the visceral level. Appreciative inquiry helps grow a relationship system of fondness and admiration grounded in gratitude and respect, which when done at the individual, family, community, and universal (including the more-than-human) arenas adds to sustainability.