Nature is the original therapist & guide.

Nature as therapy

This morning I woke up early as I always do, with the light. Outside my window was a sunrise that looked like a watercolour painting and instead of looking at my phone I witnessed that until it faded. I got up, stretched, made coffee in a flask and then walked down to the beach to swim with friends and then spend sometime around a fire together.

Now, not every single one of my mornings can be this immersed in nature and I am also childfree BUT even when I am my busiest I try to place my body in nature every single morning. Whether that’s swimming, driving to the forest nearby or just simply resting my feet on the earth and my back against a tree.

This has always been my therapy. When I was child and home life was chaos I would runaway to the woods and talk to the trees. I was obsessed with the pond in our garden and I would dive into the more than human world with my whole body. Often returning home after hours covered in mud. The bigger body held me while the bodies of my parents couldn’t.

This has never left me. Or actually I have never left this.

This which is the wider ecology that our bodies are a part of.

This as aliveness and mystery that is not here to be tamed or fully known.

And this is important because I don’t view nature as something that is here to be in service to me, I don’t believe in human superiority. This is our home, this is an extension of us, reverence & reciprocity is the foundations of this connection. The trees, the rocks, the soil, the rivers and the oceans are all our ancestors.

And so when I speak of nature as therapy, naming the above is important because for me therapy is one way of remembering our wholeness and our place in the world. Yes its about healing and finding more ease but if we miss out the above then we are really just faking it and will be continuing to exile parts of ourselves.

Me as a therapist or guide can help you begin to find your way back to yourself, nature is what will welcome you fully back home. This is somatic therapy. We can’t call it somatics if we don’t realise that we are all connected to each other and everything on this earth. We don’t end at the edges of our skin, no matter how hard we try to separate ourselves.

The acts of breathing & eating, something we all need to do to stay alive directly connects us to everything.

Haven’t you noticed how your veins and arteries mirror the rivers, tree roots and mycelium? How your lungs look like upside down trees? How the minerals of your bones can be found in the soil and that you are more other life forms than human cells?

So this morning when I swam in the sea and rested my body on the earth my nervous system opened up, my breath deepened and slowed, my connective tissue softened and my body was flooded with all the good shit that supports the healing it knows how to do because we belong here.

When we really immerse ourselves in nature, when we build a relationship with our home and it’s many seasons we remember how to slow down. We remember how to listen deeply, we remember how to witness and be witnessed, we remember how to grieve & rage and we remember how to be held.

Is nature a quick fix? Absolutely not. Will it be your teacher, guide & witness? Yes.
But it’s also deeply important that we remember that nature is not here to be in service to us, we are nature and it asks us to return to our wholeness with this world. This is both hard and also supportive. Resting our body on the earth will resource our nervous system and also demand we look at the harm humanity is causing to the earth in our forgetting.

Therapy, embodiment, somatics whatever you want to call it, is not about feeling good. It’s about learning HOW to feel, it’s becoming responsible and accountable, it’s making the changes we need to make, it’s about knowing ourselves, even the hard parts and expanding our capacity for all of life. This is what it means to reclaim our wholeness and heal.

Some ways you can engage with nature…

  • Get to know a tree, plant or place. Observe their seasons, meet them fully and listen deeply. This is not a once and we’re done thing, commit to seeing them as much as you can over the course of a year. Make notes, draw or paint them, record their sounds, ask questions, see where you mirror one another and see if you can let yourself meet their life force as kin not as an other.

  • Take your movement practice or meditation practice outside.

  • Everyday let your barefeet meet the earth.

  • Pick up litter once a week.

  • Buy a disposable film camera and commit to taking 9 photos a season over the course of a year that documents what you find beautiful in a place as it moves through the seasons. Get them printed because these will be precious.

  • Find a volunteer gardening programme.

  • Learn how to forage and use the rules of the honourable harvest (Braiding Sweetgrass)

  • Learn the names of the plants and the trees, name and thank them when you see them.

  • Rest your spine everyday against the trunk of a tree. Listen.

  • Start wild swimming (safely)

  • Feed the birds, make sure you use the right type of food.

These are just a few things that help get you started in cultivating a deeper relationship with nature but you can also be playful and create your own. Below are some recommendations to dive deeper…

The Emerald Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OwFblqZ7FIkLSW4rvbJEF?si=b56bcf078e8a405b
Lifeworlds podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0gv7CYo3JviKSlFI3l6WbQ?si=0ae1368a87fc4a05

The Serviceberry & Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand.
Returning Home to Our Bodies by Abigail Rose Clark.

Please buy your books from an independent bookstore.
The photos were taken by me on some of my many adventures into the wild.

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ami robertson