Discover your Heart through Permaculture
/Dr. Margret Rueffler, Senior adviser, school of Socio-Economics and Ecology
The ethics of earth care, people care and sharing surplus are one of Permacullture’s unique contribution in our today world. They actually point the way to a new paradigm, from survival and lack of, to abundance and sharing.
Permaculture design provides a system which allows us to move deeply into our abused eco-systems and release their inherent potential.
Permaculture caught my attention a number of years ago, when searching for a system to develop the Jiwa Damai gardens in Bali. For the past 10 years, I immersed myself into its design concept, translating it by learning through doing to our beautiful Jiwa Damai gardens. Over time, inviting known teachers, participating in various trainings, and delving deeper in its principles and methods, I introduced permaculture training into Jiwa Damai/Lagu Damai foundation educational offerings as well.
The book of Bill Mollison that introduced the practice touched me deeply. I came to respect permaculture’s inherently intelligent and wise approach to regeneration as a way to return to a healthy balance with the earth as a living being.
With time it became more apparent to find a way to deepen and expand on permaculture ethics. As a trans-personal psychologist who has worked over the past thirty five years through empowerment and raising self-esteem in individuals and groups in various international contexts, I now faced the question of how to deepen the attitude towards its ethics by integrating a transpersonal psychological HeartSelf-Intelligence approach, with hands-on and design methods.
Thus, Discover your Heart through Permaculture began to unfold.
One way was to have class participants work in the garden and use the time they spent preparing compost as a context for meditation. However, in several classes I witnessed participants refraining from getting their hands into the earth, touching the soil and connecting with its living multitude of beings.
After much reflection, I developed a training system I call Discover your heart through Permaculture, a way of integrating Self-awareness and personal growth with the rich permaculture learning content. Its purpose is to enable the ethics to become alive, first, by unfolding one’s one heart energy. The vibrancy of learning to love myself and then extending it to other beings, human and energetic, soil, garden plants, animals and earth as a living being. Thus the wise and intelligent permaculture approach becomes more vibrant by touching and when working hands-on with the soil as well as designing.
Learning how to love oneself and allow this love to flow into the earth while practicing permaculture techniques has now been integrated into Jiwa Damai’s permaculture curriculum. The goal is to honor and respect oneself and, as a consequence, to honor and love flora and fauna and the life-giving earth one works with.
The permaculture curriculum has been well researched and documented. It includes information on how plants react to sound, emotions, rejection, anger, and love by retracting their energy field or extending it. Plants do, indeed, interact and one must become aware of their intricate interaction with the environment and of the powerful influence one’s own state of mind and emotions exerts on everything around one. Our own vibrations can contribute loving energy that amplifies the effects on plants, animals and soil. The frequency of one’s own personal vibrations influences all interaction, enhances plant growth, and contributes to the permaculture compost-making, as well.
Thus working with nature in alignment with the heart, honoring both, the physical dimensions as well as its energetic sources.
All approaches and methods in the permaculture design, mental concepts, and inherent values are deepened and intensified through the experience of connecting with the heart. That is, the expansion from the Self to the other and the earth as a complex being is now applied in the interfacing of the many different aspects of the permaculture systems thinking. From small to large, including time and space as major factors as well.
