Nature Therapy & Earth Based Listening

Heal in Nature

As a guide to the inner wilderness I also take people out into the wild, both one-on-one and in small groups, knowing first hand that nature is a powerful muse, mirror and healer. In her vital folds, we are offered the chance to find our sense of belonging again in the web of life, to wonder into the mystery of our place, purpose and gifts, to heal our wounded inner parts and to remember our enchantment with the animate earth.

I weave together many different kinds of therapeutic work in nature to help individuals and groups feel more connected to themselves and to the more than human world.

My Story

Growing up in London, my father used to take me on long, meandering walks in the forests on the outskirts of the city. This was time for dreaming, sharing stories, and silent companionship. For shelter building, whittling, tree climbing and wandering beneath the vast open sky. This time in nature become the backdrop to a deep bond with my father, but also wove a profound love of the more than human world into my heart.

Decades later, when I began to do the inner work on my early traumas, I ventured out onto the land once again in a chapter of intensive nature-based healing and wholing work. I soon realised that time in nature both catalysed and deepened the psychotherapy and somatic work I was doing, and that there was enormous potential to weave together an approach to healing that embraced mind, body and earth.

This realisation was the basis for the 5 month Somatic Ecopsychotherapy program I am now teaching at Metavision Institute. On this journey, students learn the foundations of Somatic Inquiry as a way to better hold, hear, heal and tend the many inner wounded parts that arise in the context of nature therapeutic work. It is a program that fosters the capacity to self-heal in the midst of a busy life; to turn towards and alleviate our own suffering.

Beyond healing in nature, one of the most precious things we can remember as a species is how to connect in an embodied way to the natural world. Not purely through an intellectual ‘knowing’ that we are not separate from nature, but to ‘glock’ it in the marrow of our bones and in every fibre of the body. This is possible through a process that I have co-created called Earth-Based Listening, which applies the practise of somatic inquiry in nature. This offers a profoundly beautiful way of tuning into the consciousness of the body as a means to connect to the deeper consciousness of the earth; to the deep, pre-verbal, embodied sentience of rock, river, tree, cloud and star. It is a way of coming into relationship with the earth and of being in felt-conversation with the more than human world through the body. This is a way of being that First Nations have never forgotten and that our nature connected ancestors would also once have lived and breathed. The bounty of this practise is that it is in our cellular memory and we just have to be reminded how to do it. To be guided back into a way of communing with the earth, to listen in to her own dreaming, and to remembering our deep sense of belonging in the web of life.

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“…let the soft animal of your body love what it loves...”

— Mary Oliver

Work with me in nature

Slowness & the Art of Presence

We live in the age of speed. Squeezing more stuff into narrower windows of time, fuelled by convergent technology and the relentless drum beat of predatory capitalism. Seemingly without space or pause to take a breath. To take stock. To turn inwards or to cast our gaze outwards, beyond the caustic glare of screens, to the wide open horizons of the earth.
Bayo Akomolafe writes that these are urgent times, let us slow down. And time in nature is an invitation to slowness. Time enough to pause, feel our feet connected to the ground again. To come out of the stratosphere of the mind and all its rushing urgency, into the seat of the body, held by the body of the earth.
Cultivating slowness and presence in nature is a deep foundation for all other healing work. Without it, we so often remain stuck in cycles of nervous system dysregulation, desensitised to the complex interplay of wounded parts and inner resources that lie on the path to greater freedom.
Internal Family & Inner Relationship Healing

Through skilful nature-based practise and self-designed ceremony we can re-attune ourselves to the many parts and places within us. Wounded, orphaned, disavowed and lost, they roam the night time recesses of the body and unconscious mind waiting for us to call them home again into a deep sense of wellbeing and wholeness.
In this work, nature serves as medicine, mirror and beloved, reflecting back to us the fullness of our wounded experience together with the bounty of all that is wild, unbroken and radiant in us.
Inner relationship work on the land also affords us access to the deep archetypes within us that represent the unbroken facets of our wholeness. Connecting to and cultivating these, we find ourselves powerfully resourced to hold and to heal our wounded parts.
Belonging, Deep Ecology & Earth-Based Listening

Our sense of being disconnected and separate from the earth and the more than human world is arguably one of the great traumas of our time. Cocooned in the glittery trappings of urban life, many of us feel empty and dispossessed, seemingly without place or purpose. We have forgotten how to cultivate our relationship with the animate earth; how to be in embodied connection and conversation with the more than human world.
As a teacher of somatic ecotherapy, I am co-developing ways to cultivate a palpable sense of communion with the natural world. To remember in our bones that we belong to the earth. To palpably sense into the places we inhabit and wander, that we do not treat nature as an inanimate ‘other’, but as a living, breathing, sentient organism of which we are an inseparable part. Earth-based listening is one such practise that harnesses body consciousness to come into felt connection with the sentience of the natural world.
This work represents a form of environmental activism, equipping us to navigate prevailing eco-anxiety, to listen in to the stories and dreaming of the earth, whilst also liberating an innate love and responsibility for the natural world in peril.
Transpersonal Journey: Soul & Spirit

As human beings, we are not only a mind and body, but transpersonal beings cut from a far vaster cloth. One wrought of soul, spirit and earth. Each of these dimensions represents sacred ground, and each, in my experience, can be connected to through the portal of the body and the inner well of the deep imagination.
SOUL: drawing on contemporary soulcraft practises and the deep life-myth work of Arnie Mindell, it is possible to tune into the deep code from which we are patterned. What poet David Whyte describes as the truth at the centre of the image we were born with. This describes our deepest place and purpose in the web of life, and also shows up as the pilot wave shaping much of our conscious reality, from our sacred wounds to our deepest gifts.
SPIRIT: Leveraging deep somatic inquiry practises we discover that the doorways into sacred dimensions of being can be found deep in the body, right there beneath our everyday, ordinary experiences. Nothing outside ourselves is needed; we need only ever turn inwards, quietly tending our direct experience with kindness, curiosity, and an attuned awareness to liberate the living, ontological fabric of our deepest Nature. This yields a spirituality that is eminently practical, palpably real and deliciously embodied.