The Healing Earth
Philip Sutton Chard
Have you dug in the dirt with your bare hands recently ?
Had a “conversation” with the wind ?
Drenched yourself in a pouring rainstorm ?
Find out how these simple interactions with nature can help you solve the problems troubling you.
This is a self-help book like no other. In it psychotherapist Philip Sutton Chard uses personal stories and case histories to demonstrate how interacting with nature can help us find solutions to our problems - be they emotional or relationship struggles.
In each chapter of The Healing Earth, Chard illustrates how time spent in forest, field, or back yard interacting with the living forces of nature can quiet our minds, open our hearts, and heal our souls. In these moments of interaction with the Earth we can find the answers to life’s quandaries that have so long eluded us.
Be it low self-esteem, fear, failing relationships, life changing decisions, the death of a loved one, even problems with sexual intimacy - being attuned to the beauty and balance of nature provides powerful medicine for the troubled soul. Chard believes the power to heal ourselves is a gift from Mother Earth who loves us and wants to help guide and nurture, as all mothers do everywhere.
Psychotherapist Philip Sutton Chard grew up with the love of nature and a need to feel close to the Earth. Over the years he discovered firsthand how the natural world shaped his own life, helped him confront personal problems, and healed his emotional wounds.
His own experience led him to develop this unique method of therapy for his clients – that of turning to our original mother, Mother Earth, for the wisdom and nurturing so needed by the troubled soul.
The startling success he has experienced in helping his clients change their lives and resolve their difficulties through a closer bond with nature compelled him to write this book so that others, using it as a self-help guide, can also find the peace and healing they seek.
Philip Sutton Chard
Philip Sutton Chard is an award-winning columnist for the Milwaukee Sentinel and a practicing Psychotherapist. He has a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, a Master of Science in counseling psychology and over 20 years experience as a counselor, teacher, and emotional healer. He lives near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Philip Sutton Chard website
Additional books available
Milwaukee Sentinel column : "Out of My Mind"
Book review by John Scull :
" The Healing Earth"
"How the hell is a tree going to teach me anything?" asks one of Philip Chard's clients. This little book (144 pages) provides many very good answers to that question. Refreshingly, there is very little in the way of theory but there are delightful and moving stories from Chard's personal experience as an outdoorsman and counselor. He describes the joys, challenges, and humor of helping his clients use direct contact with nature to deal with their issues of anxiety, loss, depression, relationships, and the search for meaning in modern life. In each of the stories Chard is a participant and facilitator but nature is the therapist.
The book is fun. Chard and his clients can be found on mountaintops, in the woods, in the garden, and out in the snow, feeling foolish and fearful but solving their lives' problems by connecting with the earth. Besides being fun, the book is often poetic and is beautifully designed as a physical object. Praise should go to illustrator Kenneth Hey, cover designer Wayne Parmley, and photographer Pat O'Hara.
Philip Chard, a counselor who writes a column called "Out of My Mind" in the Milwaukee Journal, intended this to be a self-help book and at the end of most of the chapters there are exercises or ceremonies for the reader to do in nature. I don't know how helpful these exercises would be for individuals without a guide such as Chard; they seem a little general. On the other hand, I strongly recommend this book to counselors or psychotherapists who want to incorporate nature-connecting into their clinical work. His believable and vivid case studies can go a long way in helping therapists overcome their understandable doubts about doing anything new or unconventional. Beyond whatever therapeutic value it might have, this book is an inspiring and enjoyable piece of nature writing.
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