Walk and Talk Therapy and Ecotherapy
Meeting outdoors for your Counselling
You may like to try a session outdoors? Side by side and moving at your pace, you will find the movement facilitates talking. Walk and Talk, or Outdoor Counselling can be particularly helpful if you feel stuck or if the idea of sitting face to face feels too intense or too much.
Once you have decided to give this a try, we will start with a brief consultation to discuss any queries you may have and to make your first appointment. Then we will meet at a prearranged place which I have already visited and fully risk assessed.
I will bring everything we may need for the session including spare waterproofs, warm clothes, a hot drink (during the cold season) and plenty of drinking water.
Ecotherapy
On the steering group of Tariki Trust’s Ecotherapy program, I am experienced in working with the environment to support therapeutic change. Sometimes we use our surroundings to inspire our thoughts and in this way it may play a significant role in the therapy session. At other times we may become absorbed in our own inner process and our surroundings are not much more than a backdrop. Either way, or anything in between, walking outdoors can bring a renewed sense of freedom and can open up new ideas and ways of being.
What is Ecotherapy?
Ecotherapy is a nature based approach to healing that can include a wide range of therapeutic practises such as walk and talk therapy, horticultural therapy, wilderness therapy and outdoor adventure to name a few.
Ecotherapy takes the outdoor environment as a healing space in which the senses are more actively engaged than the traditional therapy room. This shared experience between client and therapist and the natural world may be used to facilitate the therapeutic process.
Ecotherapy also works at a deeper healing level in recognising humanity as an integral part of the ecosystem, wherein our own healing is reflected in the healing of nature and vice versa. This understanding of interconnectivity presents a template for self understanding, and an opportunity to experience our self in context by bringing to awareness the symbiosis of relating and being alive: by observing nature, noticing ourself in nature and developing awareness of how we relate to it. From this we can develop secure attachments with all of life, reconnect with our own beingness and find healing, all of which inter-relate with and contribute to a larger healing process in the world around us.
Climate anxiety is growing amongst many people, and working with interconnectivity provides a space to explore these concerns and issues.
'until you make the unconscious conscious,
it will direct your life and you'll call it fate'