Life-Changing Nature Immersion!
The one true component that carries, guides, and influences AATA is NATURE!
At AATA, we see Nature as the most critical element that Human Beings can access for healing, grounding and supporting a fully holistic life.
Last Child in the Woods
By: Richard Louv
Nature-deficit disorder is not a medical condition; it is a description of the human costs of alienation from nature. This alienation damages children and shapes adults, families, and communities. There are solutions, though, and they're right in our own backyards. What's more, nature is a potent therapy for depression, obesity, and ADD. Environment-based education dramatically improves standardized test scores and grade point averages and develops skills in problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. Even creativity is stimulated by childhood experiences in nature.
"Outdoor time elevates moods. Exposure to natural light – even in the shorter days of winter – raises levels of serotonin, the body’s “happy chemical.” Sunlight is also a good way to get a natural dose of vitamin D, which is good for your bones and immune system.
Researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a study that revealed walking in a natural setting versus an urban one improved recall ability by nearly 20 percent.
Activity boosts immunity. According to MedlinePlus, exercise helps decrease your risk for heart disease, maintains bone health and can help flush bacteria out of the lungs and airways."
From Zuna Shoes, a partner of AATA:"Our Feet have over 200,000 nerve endings! The sole of the foot has the highest concentration of nerve endings in the body. Feeling the ground sends continuous feedback from the foot to the brain.
​90% of brain development occurs during childhood years.
It is in these early years that barefoot stimulation from the feet provides the most benefit to the developing brain.
These continuous sensory feedbacks help kids improve focus, help them feel more grounded and aware of their surroundings. The stimulation of the brain helps with problem-solving and social skills."
​
AATA offers Barefoot & Earthing Instruction!
Sunlight
By: Dr. Jack Kruse
"What happens on our surfaces (skin, eyes gut and lungs) is going to determine the biochemistry that occurs below. The biochemistry that is going on in the gut is RADICALLY different depending on the incident light EMF because it has to do with the free radical signal that is made.
Every single day for the rest of your life you need to face east while the sun rises whether it’s cloudy or not, you need to see that sunrise. See it with your eyes, your skin, and your gut. Expose your gut! The stimulus doesn’t have to be very long when you do it correctly. The greatest thing about Einstein's photoelectric fact is that this happens instantaneously."
Reset Your Child's Brain
By: Victoria Dunckley
Dr. Dunckley has found that everyday use of interactive screen devices — such as computers, video games, smartphones, and tablets — can easily overstimulate a child’s nervous system, triggering a variety of stubborn symptoms. In contrast, she’s discovered that a strict electronic fast single-handedly improves mood, focus, sleep, and behavior, regardless of the child’s diagnosis.
Glow Kids: How How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids-and How to Break the Trance
By: Nicholas Kardaras
Brain imaging research is showing that stimulating glowing screens are as dopaminergic (dopamine activating) to the brain’s pleasure center as sex. And a growing mountain of clinical research correlates screen tech with disorders like ADHD, addiction, anxiety, depression, increased aggression, and even psychosis. Most shocking of all, recent brain imaging studies conclusively show that excessive screen exposure can neurologically damage a young person’s developing brain in the same way that cocaine addiction can.
AATA offers an EMF-free, Nature-full environment. We see that being in Nature is not an option for childhood. We offer our educational experiences on a 130 acre property, that borders the Blue Ridge Parkway and Pisgah National Forest of Asheville, NC. Being outdoors can bring about challenges that push us to go further than we would in a comfortable, indoor setting. The Human Being was designed to be resilient to multiple temperatures, weather patterns, and light variables. Indoor learning situations inhibit and dull these attributes, resulting in detrimental long-term consequences.
We are a fully outdoor program not because we do not have access to buildings, but because it is our CHOICE, to be 100% in Nature! The structures we do have, are chosen specifically with our commitment in mind to keep the layer between childhood and nature as small as possible.
​
We are also committed to reversing detrimental effects of the current technologically-focused culture. Offering a time for children to be completely submersed in a screen-free education and unburdened by EMF's.
​
We have incorporated the wise influences of researchers, scientists, and health care professionals such as the following...
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. Henry David Thoreau