Uplifting experiences can be as simple as taking the time to watch a skein of geese fly overhead and hear their haunting calls...
...or taking a close-up look at the beauty and sheer variety of mosses and lichens.
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What is Ecotherapy?
Simply put it's about getting out into nature to make yourself feel better, both physically and mentally. Even short spells of exposure to wild places has documented benefits for everyone.
More technically, as an umbrella term for nature-based methods of physical and psychological healing, ecotherapy points to the need to reinvent psychotherapy and psychiatry as if nature and the human/nature relationship matters. It takes into account the latest scientific understandings of our universe and the deepest indigenous wisdom. This perspective reveals the critical fact that, whether they realise it or not, people are intimately connected with, embedded in, and inseparable from the rest of nature. They have the potential to be part of the natural intelligence that connects all living things - but sadly today only a tiny percentage of us have retained or learned that ability. Ecotherapy brings people gently but inexorably into direct contact with the natural world, employing all the senses, breaking down the artificial barriers that so many of us have become trapped behind and revealing the kinship we have with all living things. Grasping this fact deeply shifts our understanding of how to heal our own human psyche and the currently dysfunctional and often even lethal human/nature relationship. It becomes clear that what happens to nature for good or ill impacts us as well, and vice versa, leading to the development of new methods of individual and community psychotherapeutic diagnosis and treatment. |
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