Community Ecology Institute: Nature-Based Learning, People-Planet Connections 

By Chiara D’Amore

Founded in 2016, CEI is a Maryland non-profit organization whose mission is to cultivate communities where people and nature thrive together. We focus on tangible, community-level change at the intersection of environment, education, equity, and health. We showcase and teach evidence-based best practices in these areas that are specifically responsive to our area’s natural and social ecosystems….

Somatic Intelligence: Learning How the Body Stores Trauma and Emotion

By Nyle MacFarlane

…The body’s subtle cues are often overshadowed by salient pain symptoms. It requires a multi-step process to peel back the pain symptoms in order to get to the more subtle cues. I outline this multi-step process in the Four Quadrants of Embodiment, which I teach to clients and therapists who are ready to learn this work.  

The process of speaking the body’s language is often referred to as Somatics, or Somatic Intelligence. The term Somatics was first defined by Thomas Hanna in the mid-1970’s. At this time, his work was focused on how the soma, or body, perceived sensory experiences, and how the body expresses those experiences, particularly in movement or lack thereof….

Sleep Disordered Breathing: A Children’s Health Concern

By Sheri Salartash, DDS

…Children are especially vulnerable when their sleep routines are disrupted.The quality of a child’s sleep has a direct impact on how they mature and grow. And children and parents deal with a variety of symptoms every day as a result of poor sleep. Of the many possible contributing factors, a currently often-overlooked diagnosis is childhood sleep disordered breathing (SDB). In this instance, the amount of oxygen a child has access to at night, which is associated with the upper and lower jaws developing to their maximum potential, has an impact on the quality of the child’s sleep….

Inflammation and Its Manifestations

By Helena Amos, M.Ac., L.Ac., Euro. Physician

…Inflammation is the term used to describe the body’s response to injury or infection. It includes the release of chemicals that cause redness and swelling as well as pain. The process also helps the body to fight the foreign invader and start the healing process, making it both unwelcome but sometimes necessary….

Sweat Lodge as Community Ceremony

By Kurt Griffith/Talking Stone

Sweat Lodge ceremony is older than recorded history and is practiced in some form by almost every culture in the world. We heat ancient rocks dull red in a fire and bring these glowing hot stones into the center of The Lodge, a tightly enclosed, usually dark space. When the lodge door is closed, removing all outside light and sound, we pour water on the rocks to envelop and bathe our bodies with this hot, vaporized water. Our minds are quieted into the eternal now….

L.E.T.S. Support World Music

By Matthew Montfort

Music is an important part of people’s lives and has the power to influence social change. For over 40 years as a musician, I’ve devoted my career to making music the world needs to help humanity survive the coming ecological and geopolitical challenges. Since its inception in late 1978, my band, Ancient Future, has been dedicated to the mission of world fusion music, and to promoting the concept with live concerts and recordings. We want world fusion music, a process by which new music is created based on the world’s great musical traditions, to become a movement. We want world fusion music to be supported by the industry so artists can be fairly compensated, and listeners have access to discover and enjoy this global-inspired music….

Worse Things Happen At Sea

By Mary Finelli; Edited by Cam MacQueen

…The carbon cost of consuming cows (in particular) is often compared to the huge carbon cost of air travel and other fossil fuel-powered transportation. Eating aquatic animals is commonly suggested as a less carbon-intensive alternative to consuming cows, but it can be even more problematic…. 

Ask A Stoner: Can I Smoke Weed And Work Out?

By Meghan Thompson

Getting high doesn’t always mean sitting on the couch with a bag of Doritos.

Stoners get a reputation for being lazy and inactive, but Mike Tyson credits cannabis for his return to the ring at 55 years old. The boxing legend, who claims he smokes $40,000 worth of weed per month, is just one of many star athletes who toke up on a regular basis.

So how does weed affect athletic performance? That depends on who you ask, and for many the answer is “it depends.”…

Spring 2023: Prepare for the Paradigm Shifts

By Misty Kuceris

Some astrological quarters are quiet, basically new and full Moons occurring and a single special event and usually Mercury turning retrograde. Others are so packed you feel as if you’re caught up in the wake of water splashing all over you. During Spring 2023 there are several important astrological events stressing that change in the world is only now beginning. So get ready. Be aware…it’s time to prepare for the paradigm shifts….

Three Reasons to Integrate Ayurvedic Wisdom Into Your Yoga Practice

By Anjali Sunita

If you have found your Yoga practice has plateaued or become rote, disconnected from the rest of your world, lacks context, feels rigid, and is relegated to the Yoga mat at best, or if you feel lost in a home practice without your teacher giving instructions, there are many reasons why the basic study of Ayurveda might re-inspire you and support your continual growth. Here are just three….

Groundcover Revolution

By Kathy Jentz

…Consider all the maintenance costs of a turfgrass lawn. Frequent mowing, fertilizing, weeding, watering, re-seeding, edging, and aerating not only eat up your personal resources of time and money, but it can be harsh on the environment. Even using all electric equipment and organic methods requires a far greater use of resources to maintain a “healthy” green lawn in comparison to non-turf groundcover alternatives….

This article was excerpted from Kathy Jentz’s new book, Groundcover Revolution. Special Offer for Pathways Readers! Get a 30% discount when you order Groundcover Revolution from Quarto.com and enter the code GARDENING30 at check out!

Higher Still, an Environmental Awakening at the Grassroots Level

By Bruce Johnson, PhD

Accomplishing meaningful change and sustainable development requires a multi-faceted, continuing educational approach, both formal and informal, addressing various aspects of our approach to environmental issues — aspects such as technology, policy, and personal vs collective behavior. 

To effectively resolve the critical environmental crises we face, an ever-deepening, comprehensive educational response is needed….

Wheel of the Year, Spring Quarter: How Will Your Garden Grow?

By Lisa Adams

Ever turning, the Wheel of the Year moves time and agricultural practices forward. We emerge from our rest and hibernation in winter, beginning to plan our year and take action. As Spring approaches, new ideas, new intentions, and new growth take hold in our minds as well as in nature. How can we partner with this energy to live in greater harmony with Earth’s cycles and capitalize on our own personal evolutionary goals? Let’s look back on our agricultural ancestry for clues….

Pre-Bloom: A Spring Reawakening

By Lindsey Haldeman and Lindsey Van Wagner

Just as animals begin to poke out from their dwellings and the flowers gently unfold their soft petals, we humans experience a wakeup from our own hibernation — a physical reemergence, a mental resurgence, and a spiritual revival. Spring represents abundance in nature. Food becomes more available as the crops sprout from the earth. The days become longer, igniting and expanding our energy reserves….

Rediscovering Pleasure

By Elena Khazanova

As we grow up, pleasure becomes less straightforward. Food, rest, play, sensuality all have their “shadow” side. We are programmed to focus on health, safety, productivity and/or service over pleasure. With my psychotherapy clients, I am astonished how often pleasure is “paired” with guilt, embarrassment, or fear. 

Is it true that too much pleasure takes away from one’s health, safety, productivity, or social standing? It doesn’t have to, when coupled with basic self-care. Research shows that people who enjoy life have better health outcomes, their productivity is more sustained; they are also, on average, more altruistic and generous. 

How, then, do we give ourselves permission to drop the unhelpful anti-pleasure conditioning and enjoy life more fully?…

Imagine With Me

By Trish Hall

It dawned on me recently that what I have been experiencing in the aftermath of the pandemic was described in a story by Washington Irving. A few years ago, my life seemed to have some order to it. The pandemic hit. I felt like the letter-cubes being shaken in a Boggle cup. I accepted the role of the letters and made sense of my life within the confines of pandemic rules. Then the rules changed again. Like Rip Van Winkle, an amiable farmer who wandered into the Catskill Mountains where he came upon a group of dwarfs playing ninepins, I found myself in a different world among many unrecognizable people behaving in ways that were foreign to me….

Kintsugi: A Way of Healing the Earth and Ourselves

By Carol Burbank

Sometimes it’s easier to believe we are broken beyond repair than to move towards healing and change. The wound feels too deep. The work feels too hard. We don’t know where to begin.

The Japanese art of kintsugi gives power to hope by helping us reclaim the beauty of healing without pretending we are (or ever were) perfect. This ancient practice repairs cracked or shattered pottery with gold lacquer, creating a masterpiece of alchemical wholeness. Something new is born from something broken….

Gaia & Psyche: The Spirit of Place

By Denise Horton, Ed.M., PhD

The Spirit of Place, the genus loci, is an ancient term which refers to the sacred power and deep spiritual connection we feel in Nature’s holy places. “Awe-inspiring”, “breathtaking”, “spectacular” — these describe scenery, but not Spirit. And sacred places are all about Spirit. Although many are visually dramatic, the power of a sacred space derives from its essential connection to the ineffable, the unknowable, the Great Mystery. As the late mythologist Joseph Campbell reminds us, “The idea of a sacred place…is apparently as old as life itself.”…

Review By Alyce Ortuzar

Getting To Green: Saving Nature: A Bipartisan Solution, By Frederic C. Rich

As an author and as a concerned citizen, Frederic Rich laments that twenty-six years after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) first alerted us to the reality of and threats posed by climate change, “only four out of ten of us are convinced it is a problem that we have caused and can and should correct.” His engaging and thoroughly researched book provides a path for working together to reverse and diminish the harms….

ON THE COVER

Lucy in the Sky, by Jesi V. Lundy