Outdoor Therapy

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Therapy isn’t easy, and it’s important that our sessions work in such a way that you feel comfortable enough to engage. For some, that means a welcoming, private, sound-dampened and comfortably furnished therapy room, it might be in your own home in front of a computer screen, or it may be walking side-by-side through constantly changing scenery. Working outside makes therapy accessible for many people for different reasons. If, like me, you were a person who couldn’t sit still in school, outdoor therapy could be for you. 

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The aim of psychotherapy is awareness – awareness of self in the current situation, enabling you to live more fully in the present moment. We’re often working with things that are initially out of awareness, and we need what Fritz Perls would call ‘contact’ to bring things into awareness. Contact in gestalt terms is when you become aware of what is apparent here-and-now; an actual meeting. A meeting with another person, or the environment around you, or your own emotions that may have remained un-felt or denied. Your perspective on that meeting is unique, and this is where awareness resides. When you look at the patterns in the bark of a tree, or the ripples on a pond, what do you see? The answer will depend on your outlook on the world, what you are expecting to see based on a whole series of elements in your life and your life history. This is your situation, your reality, your pattern in the bark and it’ll be different from mine.

 

The therapy session becomes an interwoven three-way interaction between the therapist, the client and the 'other than human' or 'more than human'. Some would say the environment is communicating to us, or reflecting back our projections so we can see and appreciate the message they have for us. Others might choose a more ‘western’ explanation that the changing stimulus is reminding us of things we need to address. Either way, I’ve found working outside can unlock things in a different way to working indoors. 

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I initially chose ‘Therapynature’ as my domain name for convenience, but I now think it’s a far better reflection of my position than ‘Therapy in Nature’. We talk of going into nature, like it’s some separate place of mountains and rivers, when actually we were here all along. 

 

Human beings grew from the same world as everything else, and yet our language suggests we are somehow separate from the world. Gestalt is a ‘non-dualistic’ therapy, we hold the working assumption that there are no hard lines between these things, and everything can be considered as a source of valuable information.

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We are part of nature, whether we’re in a therapy room, online in a separate county, or walking through a woodland by a river.  

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