Psychotherapy Oakville: 4 Insights into Natural Life
To practice depth case studies in Oakville is to be aware of many key symbols in peoples’ lives, including “naturalness” or “the natural life”.
This symbol has become of more and more importance to dwellers in affluent suburban communities like Oakville, especially in the last 15-20 years. It seems clear that it resonates with the increasing divorce from nature that we have experienced in an advanced technological mass society.
What makes this symbol so potent for us?
Nature as Symbol
If you study the history of suburban life, you discover that, at its roots. it’s really about return to, and increased contact with, nature.
The idea of suburbia springs from the awareness in late 18th and 19th century cities that life was increasingly divorced from meaningful connection with the natural environment.
So, as long as there have been communities like Oakville, Burlington and Mississauga, their inhabitants have yearned for connection with the natural world.
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Outer Nature
Connection with outer nature concerns 21st century North Americans more and more. You can see it reflected in a a vast variety of ways in popular culture, and in economic life.
Many of us feel acutely that our lives are more and more confined to artificially constructed environments. Often that awareness brings a sense of claustrophobia.
We want natural everything: exposure to the outdoors; natural fabrics in our clothes; natural cleaning materials; and perhaps especially, natural foods and medications, due to our fear that ingesting man-made chemicals or GMOs may lead to grave illness.
In many areas, people flock to cottages at this time of year, often to experience less complicated living that seems closer to the natural environment.
Our yearning for closeness to nature — at least nature in its outward manifestations — seems boundless.
Inner Nature
What we may be less aware of is our need for a return to inner naturalness. There is real danger that we can become over-civilized, over-technologized, and over-rationalized, thereby losing contact with who we most fundamentally are.
In particular, we can lose contact with those aspects of our own nature that don’t fit the mode and expectations of our society, or our idealized self-image, or fit the way we present ourselves — what Jungians call the persona or social mask.
Rediscovery of our connection with our most fundamental nature, with who and what we really are, may be experienced as a genuine liberation, accompanied by a deep sense of being wholly, and integrally, ourselves.
This is the deepest, and most profound, sense of contact with nature.
Psychotherapy Oakville: the Journey to My Own Nature
One of the most painful things can be to discover that I am at odds with my deepest nature, with my most fundamental self. This awareness can manifest in a profound yearning for authenticity and wholeness. In this fundamental sense, the journey of individual therapy can be a journey toward natural life — life in connection with the whole of the instinctual and spontaneous Self.
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