Soul Care
From Crossroads to Clarity, Nature’s Way
Kathy Lundborg
Module 1
W O R K B O O K
Why Nature? The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants Kathy Lundborg Copying Prohibited In an effort to preserve the value of my work and the uniqueness of my program, I ask that you do not use, modify, copy, or distribute any portion of my Soul Care workbooks, exercises, worksheets or audio files. If you are interested in using a portion of this program for the purposes of coaching individuals, please write to me for proper permission at info@kathylundborg.com. Thank you for your support and consideration. Soul Care Copyright Š 2017 Kathy Lundborg www.kathylundborg.com info@kathylundborg.com Butte, MT, USA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This program contains intellectual property protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this program (workbooks, exercises, worksheets or audios) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from Kathy Lundborg.
Why Nature?
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
Contents Why Nature? The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants ...............................1 • Plants Can Read Our Minds!..............................................................................1 • Plants Can Learn!................................................................................................3 • Plants Are Social Beings Like Us!.......................................................................4 • Plants Have a Relationship to the Earth Magnetic Field.....................................4 Nature is Good for Our Health!....................................................................................5 Trees in Particular.........................................................................................................6 Exercises......................................................................................................................7
Copyright © 2017 Kathy Lundborg
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Why Nature?
Why Nature? The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants.
H
ere we go! We are starting off in this module learning about the consciousness of plants. Not only is it really cool information, I believe it is the plant kingdom of nature that guided me to birth this program. We’ll see why allying with the plant kingdom, with
trees the focus of the rest of the program, is a powerful practice for caring for your soul. And, it’s fun! There’s a lot of heady information, but it is extremely mysterious and mystical as well. If you aren’t already passionate about learning about plant consciousness, I bet your passion will be ignited through this information. You will want to dive in deeper, and you will in this program. I have also included the references, so you can really dig in if you wish. Ancient wisdom cultures knew all of this, but we have forgotten it. Now is the time to remember! The natural world was considered sacred, and it is sacred. Now science is proving what the ancients always knew. So what is science telling us?
Plants Can Read Our Minds! Coming from my old logical, only believe what you can see, touch, or feel way of being, this blew my mind. Talk about opening the world of mystery and giving so much more meaning to our reality! Plants aren’t something that just sit there and photosynthesize, bear fruit and flower, they have their own conscious lives AND can read our minds!
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Why Nature?
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
It’s true! Cleve Backster, the foremost lie-detector examiner of his day, discovered that plants are sentient. They read our minds and react to what we are thinking. If you have a green thumb, you may already have a sense of this. Backster stumbled upon this knowledge through an impulse he had to attach the electrodes from one of his lie detectors to his office plant, a corn plant. What he found changed his life forever and spawned years of experiments and research. He discovered: • Thinking of burning a leaf on the corn plant brought a strong response from the plant. • Even if a leaf was detached from the plant, trimmed to the size of the electrodes, or even shredded, the response to threats continued to register on his equipment. • Plants appear to have memory. • Plants can develop a special bond with their keeper unaffected by distance. • Plants react to the death of other creatures and cells. (Backster, 1968) (Hecht, 1974) (Green, 1978) “The Western scientific community, and actually all of us, are in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our current mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information.” ~Cleve Backster See! Plants are consciously interacting with their environments and caretakers! Marcel Vogel, a research chemist working for IBM in California, came across a Backster article. He developed his own curiosities and started experimenting. • Vivian Wiley, his spiritually gifted friend, demonstrated the ability to will leaves to live after being removed from the plant. (We will talk about this more in depth later and conduct the experiment ourselves!) • Plants and their individual leaves have their own unique personality and individuality.
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Why Nature?
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
“It is a fact: man can and does communicate with plant life. Plants are living objects, sensitive, rooted in space. They may be blind, deaf, and dumb in the human sense, but there is no doubt in my mind that they are extremely sensitive instruments for measuring man’s emotions. They radiate energy forces that are beneficial to man. One can feel these forces! They feed into one’s own force field, which in turn feeds back energy to the plant.” ~Marcel Vogel
What a great quote. It says so much, and gives you a taste of what we will experience together in this program. We are going on such a special ride together!
Plants Can Learn! Here’s more evidence that plants are sentient! They take in information from their environment, and alter their behavior based on the information. They can learn to communicate in a way we can understand. In at least one case, the plants learned to control their environment! Dr. Ken Hashimoto, managing director and Chief of Research for Fuji Electronic Industries, wanted to enter into actual conversations with a plant. He gave voice to a plant through his instruments. Hashimoto hooked up his cactus, and his wife renowned for her “green thumb”, talked to the cactus and got amazing results. They eventually taught their cactus to count and add up to twenty. Russian scientists showed plants regulated their water and nutrient intake, and even the temperature and environment. The plants did this through instrumentation that reads signal from the plants. Other Soviet Researchers found plants can recognize friend versus foe through memory of how each treats the plant.
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Why Nature?
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
Plants Are Social Beings Like Us! We are learning more and more about the mysteries of trees. Recently, Peter Wohlleben published his book, Hidden Life of Trees, where he describes how trees have their own social security system. They are only as strong as the rest of their community, so if some have more access to nutrients, they send the sugar to their community through the root systems, balancing out the community (Wohlleben, 2015, pp. 16-18). What can we learn from this?! I also wonder how many other plants operate this way and we are completely unaware?
Plants Have a Relationship to the Earth Magnetic Field Astrology is the study of the movements and relative positions of stars and planets as a means for predicting information about human affairs and terrestrial events. Our individual astrological stories are based in our position on Earth and the position of the planets and stars at the time of our birth. Plants actually have a corresponding quality! Every living plant has a critical rotational position (CRP), which is apparently established by the earth’s magnetic field as the seed sprouts out of the ground. This orientation is where the plant emits maximum energy (Radionics, n.d.). Just as auras of humans can be measured, auras of trees can be measured with dowsing techniques. Various dowsers have measured a tree’s auras and have found nodal points of energy as well.
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Why Nature?
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
Nature is Good for Our Health! “It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.” ~Robert Louis Stephenson
You might already know intrinsically that time in nature is good for your health. Perhaps you feel more calm, more at peace, more connected after taking a nature walk. Now, more and more research is measuring amazing health benefits of nature therapy or forest therapy. • The Japanese have found that “Forest environments promote lower concentrations of cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity, and lower sympathetic nerve activity than do city environments.” (Park, Tsunetsugu, Kasetani, Kagawa, & Miyazaki, 2010) • Nearly 10% of people with high blood pressure could get their hypertension under control if they spent just 30 minutes or more in a park each week! “A dose-response analysis for depression and high blood pressure suggest that visits to outdoor green spaces of 30 minutes or more during the course of a week could reduce the population prevalence of these illnesses by up to 7% and 9% respectively.” (Shanahan, et al., 2016) • Walks in forests increase people’s natural killer (NK) cells – a type of white blood cell that supports the immune system and is associated with a lower risk of cancer. Research done with people taking long walks in forests for two consecutive days found that “NK (natural killer cells) activity, as an indicator of immune function, increased by 56% on the second day and returned to normal levels. A significant increase of 23% was maintained for 1 month even after these subjects returned to
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Why Nature?
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
urban life, clearly illustrating the preventive medical effects of nature therapy.” (Miyazaki, Park, Tsunetsugu, & Matsunaga, 2011) • Improve your mental health through walking in nature. “Participants who went on a 90-min walk through a natural environment reported lower levels of rumination and showed reduced neural activity in an area of the brain linked to risk for mental illness compared with those who walked through an urban environment. These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world.” (Bratman, Hamilton, Hahn, & Daily, 2015) • Need to improve your short-term memory? Take a nature walk! It’s that simple! A study found short-term memory was improved by 20% by taking a nature walk, but there were no changes after taking a walk on city streets. (Berman, Jonides, & Kaplan, 2008)
Trees in Particular We have been spending a lot of time on plants in general and nature. We will be emphasizing trees in particular through this program. Why is that? Well, trees are the largest plants on earth. The Tree is a common archetypal symbol found in the ancient world. “Trees are symbols of physical and spiritual nourishment, transformation and liberation, sustenance, spiritual growth, union and fertility” (Whitaker , Obtained 2016). They are used for ceremony, ritual, celebration, and places of birth and death. Sacred trees are found in many traditions including the Shamanic, Hindu, Egyptian, Sumerian, Toltec, Mayan, Norse, Celtic and Christian. Science and trivia about trees will be found throughout the program, as it applies to each particular module. We’ve learned a lot together about plants, and now we are going to start diving into the applications of the connections to plants and us.
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Why Nature?
The Science Behind the Consciousness of Plants
Exercises In the two exercises included with this module, we get to practice mind over matter and interacting with a plant. Have fun with these exercises! Be amazed at the power of your mind, and don’t be discouraged if it takes a little practice. If your mind has been based in logic, and you don’t yet have spiritual practices, it may take some practice. That’s okay. These exercises are building blocks to get you to the more advanced practices in later modules. Believe me, it took me time and practice to open to the wonders and mysteries of our reality! Open the exercise documents for all of the instructions.
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