— RE-Connect with Nature protecting the Environment For Inner Health —

Our Project's Theme

"Re-Connect with Nature" is a set of creative exercises and mindfulness-based games to reconnect with nature and with yourself. In fact, it is a wonderful way to bring people from different backgrounds and ages together and make new friends.

With the increasing influence of technology in our lives, less time is being spent outdoors. The screens keep us hooked by creating easy rewards for the brain and are slowly influencing our behaviour and lifestyle. These brain rewards create unhealthy habits which are extremely hard to break. It is no wonder that obesity, anxiety, loneliness and many other lifestyle issues are on the rise. We desperately need a substitute for all the junk entertainment that is being fed into our brains.

Is there a simple way to unblock our minds and imagination so that we can move away from our old habits and create new ways of being? Perhaps with forest theatre, you can choose a few moments to break free and learn to fly.

Forest theatre is a pathway to explore our inner selves by taking inspiration from nature. It is about learning with nature, in nature. And we all know, the best learning happens when it is fun.

Why nature? 

No one knows for sure, but one hypothesis derived from evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson's "biophilia" theory suggests that there are evolutionary reasons people seek out nature experiences. We may have preferences to be in beautiful, natural spaces because they are resource-rich environments-ones that provide optimal food, shelter, and comfort. These evolutionary needs may explain why children are drawn to natural environments and why we prefer nature to be part of our architecture.

Now, a large body of research is documenting the positive impacts of nature on human flourishing-our social, psychological, and emotional life. Over 100 studies have shown that being in nature, living near nature, or even viewing nature in paintings and videos can have positive impacts on our brains, bodies, feelings, thought processes, and social interactions. In particular, viewing nature seems to be inherently rewarding, producing a cascade of position emotions and calming our nervous systems. These in turn help us to cultivate greater openness, creativity, connection, generosity, and resilience.

In other words, science suggests we may seek out nature not only for our physical survival but because it's good for our social and personal well-being.

Our Objectives

• We want at first, to help the participants to reconnect with nature which means to connect again with their inner self finding calm and clarity and reducing the stress and anxiety that overwhelms us in the modern way of life. Research reveals that environments can increase or reduce our stress, which in turn impacts our bodies. What you are seeing, hearing, experiencing at any moment is changing not only your mood, but how your nervous, endocrine, and immune systems are working.
• Also, to raise Environmental awareness through "green" activities that will help the participants to realize how important it is to protect it and find new ways to live that are harmless as much as possible.
• Develop skills for a better understanding of themselves and others. Furthermore, the more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting to life's changes
• To create cultural awareness among participants. All youth workers from participating organisations want to have this intercultural interaction and through this to examine new ways of learning through Non-Formal education. To provide the relevant knowledge and involve participants in activities that will enable them to criticize and attempt to eliminate any form of discrimination.
• To gain self-confidence and other resilience: During the training, the participants will have the opportunity to get to know themselves better, to express their feelings and emotions in front of others. When you don't hesitate to expose yourself, immediately it means that you have self-confidence.
• Stress management and stress relief techniques and other coping strategies: In this training, we will use a lot of stress relief techniques such as yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and visualization to learn how to ground ourselves and can easily find tranquillity and peace in everyday life situations. This process may result in enhanced physical and emotional well-being.
• Promote mental well-being and a positive attitude in life: To ensure the best possible outcomes of the project, the priority is to gain self-awareness. Self-awareness is the key to mental well-being. When you see us clearly, we are more confident and more creative. We make sounder decisions, build strong relationships, and communicate more effectively.
• By these sessions we want them to be active in Human Rights to know that are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.

What happens when we reconnect with nature?

Research is discovering all the different ways that nature benefits our well-being, health, and relationships.

Humans have long intuited that being in nature is good for the mind and body. From indigenous adolescents completing rites of passage in the wild to modern East Asian cultures taking "forest baths," many have looked to nature as a

How nature helps us feel good and do good?

The naturalist John Muir once wrote about the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California: "We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve q place for healing and personal growth. 

But what does the science say? Several studies have looked at how viewing awe-inspiring nature imagery in photos and videos impacts emotions and behaviour. For example, in one study participants either viewed a few minutes of the inspiring documentary Planet Earth, a neutral video from a news program, or funny footage from Walk on the Wild Side. Watching a few minutes of Planet Earth led people to feel 46 per cent more awe and 31 per cent more gratitude than those in the other groups. This study and others like it tell us that even brief nature videos are a powerful way to feel awe, wonder, gratitude, and reverence-all positive emotions known to lead to increased well-being and physical health.

Positive emotions have beneficial effects upon social processes, too-like increasing trust, cooperation, and closeness with others. Since viewing nature appears to trigger positive emotions, it follows that nature likely has favourable effects on our social well-being.

This has been robustly confirmed in research on the benefits of living near green spaces. Most notably, the work of Frances Kuo and her colleagues finds that in poorer neighbourhoods of Chicago people who live near green spaces-lawns, parks, trees-show reductions in ADHD symptoms and greater calm, as well as a stronger sense of connection to neighbours, more civility, and less violence in their neighbourhoods. A later analysis confirmed that green spaces tend to have less crime.

Viewing nature in images and videos seems to shift our sense of self, diminishing the boundaries between self and others, which has implications for social interactions. In one study, participants who spent a minute looking up into a beautiful stand of eucalyptus trees reported feeling less entitled and self-important. Even simply viewing Planet Earth for five minutes led participants to report a greater sense that their concerns were insignificant and that they themselves were part of something larger compared with groups who had watched neutral or funny clips.