Reawakening Our Spiritual Relationship with Nature and Animals

Listen to the introductory conversation on the spiritual power of nature between Linda Bender and Rupert Sheldrake

Read below to find out more about Reawakening Our Spiritual Relationship with Nature and Animals with Dr. Linda Bender

That which extends throughout the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider my own nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions."
— Ch'eng Hao

The Truth of Who You Really Are

So many of us are caught up in a sense of dread at the state of the modern world. Climate change. Ecological crisis. Civilization at the edge. We often feel overwhelmed by the facts and the sheer size of the task we face as a species. We shut down.

In our personal lives, we may already feel a sense of general anxiety—a distant recognition of loss—from meaningful connections with the natural world, our selves, our soul.

So what can we do?

And how do we cultivate the right practices, insights, and experiences that will actually empower us rather than shut us down?

The truth is, we aren't alone. We never were. Surrounding us, even in our urban and suburban spaces are animal kind, plant kind, insect kind... Indeed, all of kinds of living beings are kin, family. The whole living, breathing biosphere is one.

You are a part of that. You are that. You've just forgotten. The story of separation that our culture has told itself has gone on long enough. Nature now cries out for us to remember the truth.

What is the truth? The truth of who you are, who any of us ever are is this: that there has only ever been one of us here and it is all of life intertwined.

There's nobody else here. Just one. Oneness expressed in the infinite diversity of beings.

Learning to remember this simple, radical, immediate truth invites us to turn back to the more than human world and face the eyes of the Other.

An owl in the branches. A deer in the forest. Our dogs, cats, or other animal companions. The chattering sounds of the forest, the assuring presence of a tree, or even the humming silence of the rocks. Divinity is found in each and all of these things.

Through each of these experiences we learn that nature is the most immediate and best teacher one can have for healing and restoring the soul.

We often feel that we must do something — and yes, of course we should! — but doing follows being. All that we do flows out from the state of consciousness we embody.

If we are going to show up as our best selves in a time of planetary crisis, we must reawaken to being. Then nature can spring forth—as us—and "do" what is needed for the higher good of all.

What this class teaches is that this transformation is not in the mind. It is only when we let go of mind that we can enter into direct experience with the more than human world.

When we do this, we discover ourselves, we heal our souls. We become what the planet needs now to move from devastation to transformation. We move from the disenchanted, de-souled world to the living world, the world as soul. We learn that animal wisdom, plant wisdom, is human wisdom. We recognize that, in the words of renowned "geologian" and spiritual ecologist Thomas Berry, "the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event."

YOUR HOST FOR THIS CLASS

Dr. Bender is an animal advocate, activist, veterinarian and spiritual teacher who has spent nearly twenty years in Asia, Africa and the Middle East working to protect and rehabilitate wildlife (clouded leopards, tigers, and orangutans are just a few of the animals Linda has helped to give a second chance).

She is the co-founder of From the Heart, a non-profit charity, and author of the award winning, Amazon best seller Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals.

Through decades of spiritual practice with meditation and studying the world's great spiritual traditions—especially shamanism and the wisdom of the indigenous peoples—Dr. Bender knows that aligning ourselves proactively with nature is the most empowering action we can take.

Over the course of four weeks in this online, interactive class, Dr. Bender and guests--Rupert Sheldrake, Susan B. Eirich, and Michael J Tamura—will guide students to reawaken their own capacity to be in the presence of nature, and animals. They are our greatest teachers. When we listen to them, we become capable of raising ourselves to a spiritual and ecological consciousness.

“My lifelong relationship with animals has taught me they are intelligent, emotional beings, capable of great compassion and love. Animals exist in a state of consciousness that is one with nature, connected to all life and closer to God. They graciously offer their divinely bestowed wisdom to those with open hearts and minds.”
– Linda Bender

What You'll Learn in this Four Week Intensive

Encountering the created world as a way of living, a fulcrum of your life, to encounter deeper levels of knowing and wisdom
Being in nature as spiritual psychotherapy in an age of chaos
Nature as a Direct Path to Spiritual Awakening
Using the physical senses as a doorway to go beyond: from body identification to spirit identification
How a deeper relationship with the natural world restores our souls, heals our hearts and sets us on the path of personal and collective transformation
The scientific benefits of cultivating spiritual practices with nature
How showing up as your best self is exactly what nature intends for you—and is calling out for you to become
Waking up to the Earth community and becoming what James O'Dea describes as a "conscious activist," one who is mutually beneficial to all sentient beings cohabiting the Earth

"There is a sacred collective memory, a deep wisdom that the natural world invites us to experience. When we align ourselves to this consciousness
the secrets of the universe unfold and we are forever transformed.”
— Linda Bender

SESSION ONE (OCT. 24)

Unheard Invitations: Calling for Connection, Calling for Help, with Susan B. Eirich

The wild animals are lonely for us. We are lonely for them, even if we don’t know it. We have become disconnected from each other. We can heal each other and the Earth if we reconnect.
- Susan B. Eirich, PhD

In this first session we are joined by Susan Eirich, the founder and executive director of Earthfire Institute, a wildlife sanctuary whose mission is to change the way people see, and therefore treat, wildlife and nature. Having lived with rescued wild animals native to the rocky mountains over the course of their lifetimes, Susan has witnessed paradigm-shifting events that shed new light on what connects us to the natural world and how vital and enriching it is for each of us to do so.

For instance:

Teton Totem is a thousand pound grizzly bear who became crippled. Western medicine couldn't help. An intuitive worked with him telepathically over a long distance. His healing began the next day and, five years later, he is still healed. A "regular" grizzly bear, he changed after his healing. When humans meet him, they sometimes cry in the company of his sweet and gentle presence.
Thunder, an old wolf lay dying out of sight from his pack. When he took his last breath, the entire pack began a low, mournful howl.
An art student naive to the possibility of telepathic communication spent time with Huckleberry, a black bear. She began to cry for no apparent reason. The thought came to her, "I miss my brother," but she didn't have a brother. She didn't know that Huckleberry had lost his.
An "ordinary" aggressive cougar for most of his life, Windwalker changed as he aged. In his final years, he took on a profound presence with people who experienced his capacity to connect and transmit healing energy.

In this session, Susan will relay to participants that all life is waiting to be heard, and resonated with in very direct ways. Our human-centered frame of reference is too small, and it is critical now, more than ever before, that we reawaken to the sacredness and responsiveness of all life. If we can do this, then we can heal each other — animals, humans, and Earth alike. Life needs, recognizes, and calls to Life. This is our heritage, and it can also be our future.

Susan B. Eirich, Ph.D. is Founder and Executive Director of Earthfire Institute. Ever since she can remember, she had an instinctive understanding of the value of all living beings and how important it is not to treat them mindlessly or disrespectfully, for our sake as well as theirs. She pursued studies in biology and psychology, to build a bridge between our scientific and spiritual understanding of animals.

After traveling world-wide and working with several indigenous cultures to learn to see through non-western eyes, she founded Earthfire Institute. Her goal was to explore how human/animal interaction could lead to new insights about conservation, and thus to more effective action. She believes that intellectual understanding, while essential, needs to be balanced by a heart-based, visceral, intuitive and spiritual understanding that can best be accessed in the actual physical presence of animals and nature.

Only with an interdisciplinary approach, input from our full brain and body intelligence, and a deep connection with nature, can we come to solutions leading to lasting ecological renewal. The emerging field of spiritual ecology is a good place to start.

SESSION TWO (Oct. 28th)

Science and Spiritual Practices with Rupert Sheldrake

In this session, Linda is joined by Rupert Sheldrake to continue the conversation that inspired the creation of this class. Dr. Sheldrake is renowned for his paradigm-shifting insights in A New Science of Life where he argued that the laws of nature are not immutable or unchangeable, but more like habits. Nature, Sheldrake suggests, is more like a vast, cosmic mind.

Dr. Sheldrake's latest research in his new book, Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative Experiences and Their Effects on Our Bodies, Brains, and Health demonstrates how the latest scientific research into religious experiences confirms the world's spiritual practices—such as meditation, gratitude, connecting with nature, relating to plants, rituals, singing, chanting, pilgrimages and holy places—like never before.

In this fascinating discussion with Linda, Sheldrake shares what the latest research tells us about the powerful, life-altering benefits of developing spiritual practices with the natural world.

In this session you will learn:

The amazing studies on ESP between humans and animals (first explored in Sheldrake's book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1994)
Discovering the synergy between scientific knowledge and spiritual practices
How spiritual practices with the natural world help us to remember who we are—like all of the world's great mystical traditions
How a spiritual practice with nature can help us connect with that oneness in the most visceral, embodied, and sensorial ways possible
How connecting with the more-than-human-world can help us become more loving, joyful, empathetic, grateful and equanimous

Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author of more than 85 scientific papers and 13 books. Since 1981 he has investigated unexplained aspects of animal behavior, including how pigeons find their way home, the telepathic abilities of dogs, cats and other animals, and the apparent abilities of animals to anticipate earthquakes and tsunamis. He subsequently studied similar phenomena in people, including the sense of being stared at, telepathy between mothers and babies, telepathy in connection with telephone calls, and premonitions. Although some of these areas overlap the field of parapsychology, he approaches them as a biologist, and bases his research on natural history and experiments under natural conditions, as opposed to laboratory studies. His research on these subjects is summarized in his books Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994, second edition 2002), Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999, new edition 2011) and The Sense of Being Stared At (2003, new edition 2012). Sheldrake's latest book, Science and Spiritual Practices, is available now.

SESSION THREE (Nov. 7)

Finding Soul (Anima) through the Animal World with Michael J Tamura

This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence … a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.
– Plato

In this session we are joined by Michael J Tamura, a gifted spiritual teacher and healer, to learn about how we can reawaken the capacity that all human beings have to commune with nature.

The word animal derives from the word anima, a Latin word meaning the vital principle of life, or soul. When we awaken to the spiritual power of nature, we are really coming to consciousness of the fact that all of life is soul. This is what the ancients described as the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world. When we tap into the reality of soul, we cultivate a deeper capacity to communicate with all living beings on a profoundly intuitive, heart centered and empathic level.

In this session, you will discover:

Methods and practices to rekindle your own intuitive abilities
Cultivate and learn to listen to what the soul is communicating, not only between you and other human beings but all living beings
How to discover your "animal sixth sense"

Michael J Tamura is a world-renowned spiritual teacher, healer, and clairvoyant. For over three decades, he has offered clients classes, seminars, and sessions in spiritual guidance and self-healing. He has been featured on radio and television, including CNN, and is the author of You Are the Answer. You can learn more about Michael on his homepage.

SESSION FOUR (Nov 14)

Journey to the Heart of Inner Space and Evolving Consciousness with James O'Dea

In this fourth and final session, our experiential bonus module, we are joined by James O'Dea, author of The Conscious Activist, Cultivating Peace and Soul Awakening Practice. James O'Dea will help us to conclude our journey together with a guided audio journey to the heart of inner space, and evolving consciousness, where we are invited to connect with the ground of being and the mysterious essence of all life.

These audio journeys are psycho-spiritual journeys, and all participants are invited to be in a peaceful and meditative state before entering the live module.

The audio journeys have struck a chord with early listeners who have experienced them as "ancient memory," "holograms or holygrams," "deep space where the mind experiences reality without thoughts," "very deep brain refreshment," "spiritual union with Nature," and "the birth of a highly conscious future."

After each guided journey, students will be invited to participate in a live Q&A with James to integrate their experiences and insights. This is a powerful practice that they can take with them.

In this session you will learn:

Two, 15 minute guided audio journeys with James O'Dea on Zoom.
Students are encouraged to be in a relaxed and meditative state, as these practices are not for casual listening.
Two live, 15 minute Q&A portions with James after each guided journey
Integrative discussion between Linda and James and a conclusion to our reawakening course

James O'Dea is a former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He worked with the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut during a time of war and massacre and lived in Turkey for five years during upheaval and coup d'etat. He has taught peacebuilding to over a thousand students in 30 countries. He has also conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the world. He is a member of The Evolutionary Leaders group and on the Advisory Board of The Peace Alliance and Kosmos Journal. James also mentors emerging leaders. He is an Honrorary Fellow of the Laszlo New Paradigm Institute. James is both an activist and mystic.

What You Receive

Four live, 90 minute interactive classes with Dr Linda Bender and guests on October 24, October 28, November 7, and a final, integrative and experiential module November 14.
An interactive Q&A portion of each session with Linda and guests
Recordings of each session sent to you via directly via email. Yours to keep.
Access to a Class Portal, where all course materials are available.
Find the others. Connect with a vibrant community of fellow spiritual seekers, healers, teachers and advocates for the Earth!

Class Registration: $110

Join us for this 4-part online, interactive intensive, with Dr. Linda Bender, to re-discover the presence of the natural world for personal healing and collective transformation!

JOIN THE CLASS