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Beginning in Belonging
I want to say something about eco-psychotherapy. I want to begin with an image: two children on a bush block near Kinglake, Victoria. My sister and me, in flamboyant jackets and knitted beanies, but bare-bottomed in the dirt. I have evidence. There are photos—mud smeared cheeks, sticks in our hands, fully absorbed in whatever earthy business had called us down. That effortless absorption, that instinctive belonging. Where does it go?
And why should a therapist care?
I didn't know then that I was learning something. That later, when the world became more head than hands, more words than weather, something would ache in me. Through my late teens and early twenties, I was intense, introspective, philosophical. Nietzsche's line stuck with me—how every philosophy is in part a confession. I think that's right. My honours thesis was ostensibly an argument for the “ontological primacy of subjective experience”. But really, it was a personal revolt. I was trying to rearrange the furniture of my own being, shifting emphasis from thought to something more immediate, something felt—a quiet rebellion against the internal tyranny of the rational, the linguistic, the cognitive.
It helped to discover a whole tradition—phenomenology, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty—where this wasn't a private heresy, but a shared inquiry: What is the ground upon which all of this thinking stands?
ALONE IN NATURE
Between semesters, I was out walking. Tasmania's Overland Track, and Western Australia’s Bibbulmun Track. Thirty days hiking the length of Pyrenees on the Grande Route 10. Always solo. At other times I'd pull up at deserted campsites in an old Land Rover. I didn't have a clear idea what I was searching for. I just knew I had to be out there. There was a quiet freedom in it—a relief. A way the land answered questions that reading never quite could.
Eventually I trained as a therapist. I loved the work. The tenderness of it, the precision, the craft. But I noticed something unsettling. I'd sit with clients in these little offices, four walls, and listen as they described their stuckness, their internal loops, the recursive ruminations. And I'd feel this echo—not just in them, but in the room itself. As if the architecture of therapy was mirroring the very constriction we were trying to loosen. Indoors, individual, interior. Their efforts to free themselves from knots, to get beyond, were not helped by the frame in which we worked.
I'd known in myself what it meant to be freed from that: not by talking, but by sitting beside a creek, or walking alone in mist, or watching light move through trees. Not to escape my mind, but to remember I was more than just a mind.
And so the question arose: What if therapy itself could step outside?
In 2014, I found a way to follow that question through a Master's degree—mostly qualitative research that gave me a container in which to explore. I moved to the country. I lived on land. I ran a kind of sandbox inquiry: What happens if we sit still in the one place for hours? If we try to "listen" to a tree? If we craft with natural materials, not for aesthetics, but as a way to collaborate with the landscape?
That time was rich. Not always easy, but formative. I wasn't trying to prove anything—just to stay with the question. I read Jon Young, Bill Plotkin, Joanna Macy, David Abram. All people standing, in their own ways, at the threshold of therapy, philosophy, and the more-than-human world. People who sensed that health doesn't end at the boundary of our skin.
What I came to see was this: we suffer from a kind of cultural amnesia. This forgetting—this dislocation from land and sky and moss, and the old intimacies of place—is not random. It's systemic. Through childhood, and schooling, we are subtly but powerfully weaned away from our natural inheritance. We become proficient in abstraction while losing fluency in belonging.
A CULTURAL INHERITANCE
The Western world's "objectivity binge," for all its gifts, has cost us something. The world made object, the self isolated. And so we come to therapy not just with personal wounds, but with this deeper disorientation: a forgetting of our earthliness, our embeddedness, our non-negotiable relationship with the more-than-human.
Sometimes I think of us as a people who've lost their first language. Nature stands at the door, waving, summoning, and we somehow do not hear. Or we hear just enough to ache, but not enough to respond. It's a quiet tragedy. No one's fault, exactly. But real.
And here is where eco-psychotherapy begins—not as a grand solution, but as a kind of remedial practice to treat a cultural wounding. Like physiotherapy after a car accident. A slow re-training of our capacity to feel the ground again. To trust it. To belong. It's not about creating something new, but about a process of re-membering—of becoming aware of something we already know but have lost touch with.
As an eco-psychotherapist, I do not think of myself as a guide with answers. More like a permission-giver. A structure-holder. Someone who can say: Yes, it's okay to long for the trees. Yes, you're allowed to go barefoot on the hill. Here are some ways we might listen together. I offer language, validation, and structured invitations that can re-anchor people in their natural inheritance.
A NATURAL INHERITANCE
And when that happens, when the remembering begins—then the usual therapeutic content (anxiety, grief, relationship struggles) doesn't disappear, but it softens. It is held within something larger. Clients describe a sense of space. A quieting. Parts that once fought or hid, now feel seen and safe. Relationships breathe. The unquestioned belonging of the earth becomes the ground upon which all our other work can stand.
I've watched it happen, again and again. It's not magic. But it is profound.
So when people say, "That training changed my life," I know it sounds like hyperbole. But it's not. What they're describing is orientation restored. And that's no small thing.
Even now, ten years into this work, the question remains alive. I don't think it will ever settle. And maybe that's the point. To keep theory porous. To treat every encounter as field research. To let the land be a co-facilitator. In training groups, I often say: this work is not a ten-step model. It's not a package I've perfected. It's an open inquiry. I come as a fellow asker. Let's look together.
I imagine now that child again, in the dirt, in the bush, mud on the cheeks, body entirely at home. That child grew up, became a therapist of sorts, and now stands at a clinic door that opens onto wild landscapes - within and without. This is a different kind of consulting room. A different kind of 'treatment”.
I wonder what wild landscapes—within and without—are calling to you?
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Are you interested in nature-based therapy? You can check out group supervision and training options here: https://www.wild-mind.com/ecopsychotherapy-hub
