How Ecopsychology Can Help Your Love Life

Creation and creativity make love happen

A simple picnic that you set up with materials you have at hand can help you create memories and love.

Making a picnic table from repurposed materials, for example, shows not just creativity, but consideration, kindness, and compassion for the world.

After all, the pallets in this picnic table were once trees. Those trees, like all beings, provide habitat, homes, and food for bugs, birds, and more.

It’s not hard to realize that all of creation is about food, sex, nurturing, (nutrients in non-human systems such as fertilizer), and all systems that exchange/share to have these things.

Like them, you are in a relationship of exchanging resources and giving of yourself. If you are not giving enough of yourself, you are unhappy, unfulfilled, and overly stressed with the increasing complexities of life that is disconnected from nature, and thus, your own belonging.

Creating a picnic, together, or as a surprise for a loved one, is just one example of connecting to the real world and opening your senses to sharing.

Mindfully acknowledging the stuff of life will also help you mindfully create lasting moments with your beloved. Share what you sense.

Nature’s rules teach us reciprocity. Giving and taking, nurturing and abundance are the natural way we evolved to love and share.

Learning limits of giving and taking

Yet, the world also has limits and boundaries. We cannot consume all the land, food, wildlife, or water without paying a price. Our Earth limits — our ecopsychological mental and physical relationship to all systems — show us what we need to find each other and stay within healthy boundaries.

In nature, all being is relationships. You love someone because they help you through life, and you feel a sense of helping them which provides meaning and fulfillment. You have a relationship with all the food and air that passes through you, even if you are disconnected (sadly) from its source.

When one person feels the relationship is one-sided, it must be confronted.

We automatically feel frustration, even anger, when something feels unfair.

It is hard, but necessary, to learn patience and extra compassion when we feel cheated by a partner’s inconsideration. We also must examine our own harsh inner voice, and self-conflict with just as much patience and compassion.

We have a lifetime relationship with all other beings, and with our own self. Accept that, and the work is more rewarding.

Making sense

We evolved with senses wide open in the real world. Today, abstract concepts about love, positivity, on-line everything, and millions of self-help books aim to sell you on the idea that you are flawed and just need this tiny bit of help to “Change your life” or “Find your soul mate.”

Except for our mental sense and yearning for bright and shiny new concepts to “fix” us, we have largely lost touch with the reality of our senses in the real world. Finding them helps you act out the verb that is love.

Doing, not expecting. There are simple ways to make sense of it all. Use your inner knowledge of sensory gifts.

Savoring food, beside a rippling stream, in a cooling breeze, seeing green leaves, smelling several scents, feeling gravity, satisfying thirst, and being in the present moment helps us to slow down. When we slow down we are much more grateful for time with our loved one, and the myriad relationships to all these senses and more.

There are millions of things you can do with your partner to slow down and spend time with one another in the real world. Walk, sing, dance, play, garden, watch birds, exchange massage, read and share, notice wildlife, share bodies, listen to natural sounds (away from all engines/devices) explore night skies, set up a water source for wildlife, appreciate landscape views, hike, swim, lay in the grass…

The saying “touch grass” is overused and little understood. When you do make time to unplug and rejoin the real world, take someone you love with you.

…

Clap, follow, highlight, and/or comment to receive rivers of appreciation from Christyl Rivers

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.

***