Category Archives: Ecopsychology

Minds and mountains

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Early ecopsychology considered the mental health benefits of what we call ‘green space’ – natural areas covered by vegetation, such as parks, forests and gardens. Later, we started to think about ‘blue space’ – oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds and streams. The research shows that both can have a positive effect on our mental health. But what about mountains?

I spent my Summer holiday hiking and climbing in the Dolomites, a beautiful mountain range in Northern Italy. Being in the mountains – typically well over 2000 meters above sea level – felt very different from being in the woods or by a river. First, there’s very little in the way of flora or fauna: There are birds of course, plus patches of lichen and the occasional hardy alpine plant. But we were well above the tree line, and most of the water there remained frozen even in late September.

Instead of gentle green or the soothing gurgle of a stream, there are wide open vistas, stunning views, precipitous drops, and mountains high enough to dwarf a skyscraper. At times I’d be at the highest point for miles, looking out across lower peaks with the cloud layer far below. Spaces like that seem to open your mind: The far horizon proclaims a pure vastness that invites a crisp clarity to thought.

A high mountain Refugio seen from afar with distant mountain tops on the horizon.

At other times mountains towered above, revealing just how tiny I am! Psychologists researching the feeling of awe talk about the ‘small self’, and that certainly fits my experience. Awe puts life into a new perspective: Our everyday concerns feel less significant, and we feel more connected with everything beyond the narrow confines of self.

Looking up at a high mountain towering above.

It’s somewhat dangerous being on the side of a mountain that’s 3000 meters high. Common sense and proper equipment reduce the risk, of course, but the perception of danger sharpens one’s awareness. Daydreaming on a woodland walk or a stroll along the beach is fine, but don’t try it on a narrow ledge with a steep vertical drop! Existing research shows that being in nature can create a more mindful state, but that’s in ‘green’ or ‘blue’ space. The same thing happens in the mountains, but there’s an edge – literally. Mountains don’t simply invite presence; they demand it.

I think ecopsychology needs to consider a third kind of natural space: ‘mountain’ or ‘M space’. I don’t think there’s a colour that fits, and ‘M’ looks a bit like two peaks and a deep valley. ‘M space’ is significantly different from ‘green’ or ‘blue’ space. It’s more likely to provoke feelings of awe, seems to encourage more open, exploratory thinking, and often demands a focused, mindful awareness.

Is all this a clue to why Nietzsche valued the mountains so much?

“We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books – it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

Science, Imagination and Animism

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I recently gave a presentation on ‘Embodied Imagination and New Animism’. I explored my usual themes, but from a different angle and concluded that imagination can open the Western mind to a deeper awareness of the animated world.

As part of my preparation, I read Allan Frater’s Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, which combines theoretical chapters with practical exercises. While the theoretical chapters were helpful for the presentation, it’s the practical exercises that prompted this post.

I’d just finished his chapter about the Waking Dream Walk and remembered that I needed to get some groceries. I decided it was a good moment to take a break from studying and get some shopping in.

It started as I was walking to the supermarket; the clouds loomed, dark and mysterious over the roof of the nearby University building, which had a distinctly mythic look. The trees were unquestionably watching my progress. I smiled. ‘It’s working then!’

Back home, what struck me was how quickly and dramatically my awareness can shift. I didn’t deliberately try the Waking Dream Walk on the way to the supermarket; it just slipped in. Evolutionary psychologist Bruce Charlton suggests that animism is “spontaneous, the ‘natural’ way of thinking for humans”. It takes “sustained, prolonged and pervasive formal education to ‘overwrite’ animistic thinking with the rationalistic objectivity typical of the modern world” (2002).

Bee feeding on yellow flowers

We’ve benefited enormously from such rationalistic objectivity: Thanks to a vaccine, I barely noticed a recent close encounter with Covid. But Max Weber suggests that such progress comes at a cost. Science tends to describe the world through a “process of disenchantment” that banishes “mysterious incalculable forces”. Weber claimed that meaning and value must also be relinquished in such a scientific worldview: “the belief that there is such a thing as the ‘meaning’ of the universe” must inevitably “die out at its very roots” (1962 [1917]).

Animism and science seem to be in opposition, but if we step back from an ‘either/or’ approach, there’s space for both. The pioneering work of Barbara McClintock is a classic example. McClintock won a Nobel Prize for her pioneering research on the genetics of maize. She came to such profound understanding by becoming “part of the system” and developing an intimate “feel for the organism” (Keller). McClintock didn’t think of herself as an animist, but arguably the same quality of relationship with the more-than-human informs her work.

Imagination is a fundamental part of McClintock’s genius. As the philosopher Peter Strawson notes, this kind of imagination is involved in activities ranging from a “scientist seeing a pattern in phenomena which has never been seen before … to Blake seeing eternity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower” (1974).

What if Weber was wrong? Maybe animism need not be opposed to scientific objectivity: Perhaps imagination, a fundamental way of knowing that informs them both, can open a fruitful dialogue.

Ecotherapy and psychedelic experience

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Many indigenous peoples have an ancient tradition of healing with psychedelics. Best known perhaps are the Mazatec, who conduct ceremonies with psilocybin mushrooms, and the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin, who draw on the healing power of ayahuasca.

In every case, these healers hold the psychedelic experience within two containers or baskets. Ritual is fundamental and forms the inner basket. The healing ritual is itself held within a broader basket of a culture and community that’s seamlessly integrated into the natural world. In the West, we tend to overemphasise the psychoactive substance itself, but these two holding baskets cannot be separated from the healing power of indigenous psychedelic journeys.

The importance of set and setting is fairly familiar in the West: Your state of mind (mindset) and the location you’re in have a huge impact on any psychedelic experience. In most cases, less attention is paid to preparing for and integrating the psychedelic journey. Because indigenous psychedelic work is held within the two baskets, preparation, set, setting and integration are seamless aspects of the whole process.

It’s sadly no surprise that the Western pattern of using psychedelics is usually fractured and piecemeal. We’ve applied our usual pattern of taking those aspects we find most exciting and ignoring the deeper context. I suspect that was part of the reason why the ‘60’s psychedelic revolution went wrong: Leary’s injunction to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ lacked a strong holding container.

We may be at the start of a psychedelic renaissance, and it’s vital that we learn from past mistakes and the wisdom of indigenous healers. In the West, we’re pretty good at ritual, and a decent psychedelic guide will provide a simple ceremony to support a journey. But our connection with nature is often neglected. Kile Ortigo’s recent book on psychedelic integration (2021) barely mentions nature. However, a paper on the same subject by Sam Gandy and colleagues (2020) notes that “Spending time in nature may be one of the most effective practices for maintaining the benefits of psychedelic sessions”.

I don’t think it’s appropriate for our dysfunctional but dominant culture to try to copy – which is nice way to say ‘appropriate’ – indigenous practices. We need to find our own way, and ecotherapy provides an ideal framework to rediscover nature connection. Ecotherapy can play a crucial role in how we manage the power of psychedelic experiences and I’m exploring ways in which it can serve as part of the holding basket for psychedelic healing. This isn’t straightforward, as psychedelics are illegal almost everywhere. But it is vital if the much-hyped ‘psychedelic renaissance is going to be more than another failed experiment.

This post draws on my research for the Synthesis Institute, notably their pioneering Psychedelic Practitioner Training.

Mindfulness in nature meets somatic therapy

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What happens when we combine mindfulness in nature with somatic therapy? That’s the theme of my conversation with Rochelle Calvert for The Embodiment Podcast. It’s very timely too, as one of the topics we discuss is “living an ethical, embodied life” in a time of ecological crisis. Rochelle is passionate about her work and deeply committed to environmental healing. No wonder we got on!

I’ve often talked about why mindfulness works so well in a natural environment, and we explore that together. Rochelle then provides a very clear introduction to Peter Levine’s somatic experiencing and explains how she combines it with mindfulness in nature.

Rochelle recognises the powerful way that nature “calls us into presence”. By helping us to awaken to our senses, nature can enhance our embodied awareness. This allows us to access the wisdom of the body, awakening our inner sense of safety, well-being, and connection. Western approaches tend to exaggerate the importance of the thinking mind and forget the wisdom of the body, but it’s “the innate intuitive healing of this body” that brings healing from trauma.

Rochelle then shares her version of a classic somatic experiencing practice, pendulation: It’s one of her favourite practices and is both simple and very powerful. There are full details in her book, but you’ll get a good sense of it in the podcast.

Reciprocity is a word Rochelle uses a lot, and the question of how we can give back to nature is key for her. One of the most important topics we discuss is living an embodied ethical life. How can I be an ally to nature? How can we live in integrity with our planet? This is a recurring theme of this blog, and Rochelle’s work beautifully deepens the field of embodied ecology.

Therapy outdoors: Playing with Winnicott

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I’ve been doing much more outdoor therapy over the last few months. I think that’s partly because it’s been easier to meet face to face outdoors during lockdown, but maybe people have come to appreciate it more? I’ve been engaged with ecotherapy for years and it was part of my life before I knew it had a name! It was central to my PhD (2008), which is how I met up with some of the UK pioneers of ecotherapy. The many discussions we had inspired me to run nature connection workshops in London. Later I wrote my 2014 MSc dissertation on outdoor therapy and then I trained in the practicalities with Beth Collier. It’s been a rich journey!

Although the core principles are the same, outdoor therapy is very different from indoor sessions. The first thing that struck me when I was training with Beth was how much more fluid working outdoors is. Whatever action feels right for the client is open to them: They are free to stand, walk, stop, sit down or even lie on the ground. If a space feels too open, we can go somewhere more enclosed. If where we are feels claustrophobic, there’s the option to move. Of course wondering why a space feels uncomfortable gives us something to explore, but we have the option of how and where we work with that. Working outdoors can be much more playful than indoor practice, and I’m reminded of Winnicott’s belief that psychotherapy is ultimately about two people playing together (1971).

Patterns of light through green leaves

Saying that outdoor therapy is more playful and fluid suggests it might be less intense, but in fact the natural environment has a way of highlighting issues and pulling away our familiar masks. It’s a much more embodied way of doing therapy and that in itself tends to reveal ourselves to ourselves. Nature has a knack of holding up a mirror to us. What we think of as internal psychic processes somehow get symbolised in the space around us. Ecotherapist’s often refer to this kind of synchronicity: Somehow inner reality and external life get blurred.

I find myself back with Winnicott again. He thought of the consulting room as a transitional space that emerged between the therapist and the client. Transitional space is “is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute” (Winnicott, 1971). I can’t help fantasizing that Winnicott would have very much enjoyed doing outdoor therapy!

Beyond relationship? The power of therapy outdoors

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The relationship between client and therapist is considered by many to be the single most important factor in successful therapy (Loewenthal, 2014). But what happens to that relationship when the therapy takes place outdoors? If you haven’t experienced therapy outdoors, you might wonder why it would make any difference to the therapeutic relationship. Isn’t it just like conventional therapy, but outdoors?

The short answer is, it depends. A few outdoor therapists strive to control the impact of the immediate environment, but most engage with it, often finding that nature becomes a kind of co-therapist. When nature enters into the therapeutic relationship, things get interesting! The client begins to form a relationship with the natural environment as much as with the therapist. The therapist is no longer “the professional with the answers and advice”, but instead becomes an “expert at facilitating therapeutic conversations” (Jordan & Marshall, 2010).

Ecotherapist Martin Jordan suggested that when we work outdoors “the myth that the self is somehow separate from nature becomes exposed as the fallacy it is” (Jordan, 2009). This complicates our understanding of the relationship between therapist and client even more. Once again – as so often in this blog – the question arises of where ‘self’ ends and the ‘other’ begins. But if the ‘self’ becomes “entirely entangled with the Other”, we might “risk losing the difference and thus any possibility of relationship” (Harris, 2013b).

David Key, an ecotherapist I interviewed for my MSc research, brings these questions to crisis point. David said:

“What actually happens when people go out into wild places, the thing that’s therapeutic, is something … I don’t know, it feels like it almost isn’t about relationships, it’s almost a Becoming […] that actually goes beyond relationship. […] Relationship is the process, not the product”.

This extract illustrates what I most like about this interview: you can hear David working with complex ideas and trying to force language to express something that refuses to be named. His ideas seemed to evolve as we spoke. David rhetorically asked “How do we as human beings even conceptualise the therapeutic relationship that the land or the sea offer us?” We can’t, but the attempt to do so is hugely illuminating.

The full interview was published in Self & Society: An International Journal for Humanistic Psychology (2015). The article is entitled “What impact does working outdoors have on the therapeutic relationship? An interview with ecotherapist David Key“

Nature and the therapeutic relationship

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I completed my Masters dissertation back in 2014, so it was interesting to re-work it into a journal article several years later. My question was whether working in a natural environment had an impact on the therapeutic relationship. It does, of course, but how?

The existing literature noted seven key themes:

  • 3-way relationship;
  • Nature and the therapeutic process;
  • Symbolism, metaphor and synchronicity;
  • Power;
  • Self/other, inside/outside;
  • Nature and the therapeutic process;
  • Boundaries and containers.

I found all of those in my research, as well as two completely new themes; the turning point and transference. The term ‘transference’ comes from Freud and it describes the phenomena of ‘transferring’ our feelings about someone in our past to a different person in the present. The person in the past is someone of deep importance to us, typically our father or mother. I’d guess we’ve all experienced that, even if we didn’t realize what was going on at the time! My research found something rather odd and potentially very significant: It’s possible to transfer strong feelings about some significant person in our past to a natural object or phenomena. A tree, for example, can come to represent someone’s father or stormy wild weather can powerfully evoke emotional echoes of a mother/son relationship. I wonder if this plays into the idea of ‘Mother Nature’?


There’s a key moment in therapy in nature, a turning point where the client and therapist pass a threshold and enter into a liminal space. I draw parallels with anthropological theory about rites of passage, which highlights the importance of that in-between space where the initiate is neither who they were nor who they are to become (Van Gennep). In a rite of passage there’s a midpoint of transition where, for example, the person is no longer a girl, but not yet a women. The anthropologist Victor Turner emphasized the importance of this central liminal phase where the ritual participants are “betwixt and between” (1967).
What has all that to do with therapy? Turner’s notion of liminal space seems to be closely related to what psychotherapist Donald Winnicott calls “transitional space”. Transitional space is “is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute” (Winnicott, 1971). Is where therapeutic healing happens?

I’m ending this post with some big questions left open. No apologizes for that: I did the same in my dissertation! Sometimes the value of research comes from the questions it asks rather than the answers it claims to offer. I’ll end here with the same quote from Merleau-Ponty that concluded my dissertation:

“[t]he accomplished work is … not the work which exists in itself, like a thing, but the work which reaches the viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it” (1993).

The Wilderness Effect

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Ecopsychologist Rob Greenway used to guide people on wilderness treks and after years of research concluded that “civilization is only four days deep” (Greenway, 1995). When people go on long treks in the wilderness they start out enthusiastic: They’re feeling excited and looking forward to the coming adventure. But after a couple of days of hard walking, most begin to get uncomfortable. It’s not just aching muscles that are the problem; people start to miss the familiar civilized world that they’re habituated to. “There’s no fricking phone signal out here!” “When do we get to have shower?” “Damn, it’s quiet …”

But something profound happens after about 72 hours of being in the wilderness. Rob found that almost everyone experienced “an increased sense of aliveness” and “feelings of expansion or reconnection”. Rob calls this phenomena “the wilderness effect” and it’s one of the best established theories in ecopsychology.

I was hugely excited when I first read about the wilderness effect. It seemed to offer a powerful way to reconnect people with nature, and maybe transform our relationship to the world. My excitement was short lived however. The effect Rob had observed happened on extended trips into the American wilderness, so there’s no way to bring it to the millions who yearn for it.

But years later I had an experience that opened my eyes to another possibility. I was living on a road protest site and while it was far from being pristine wilderness, life there slowly deepened my connection to nature. Could it be that something like the wilderness effect happens when we spend a lot of quality time in urban nature?

A camp fire in the woods
Life in the woods

The short answer is yes; ecopsychologists generally agree that “simply spending meaningful time communing with nature” is beneficial (Shaw, 2006) and the full-on wilderness effect is a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind. I’ve written about this in detail elsewhere and I’ll be developing these thoughts in later posts, but for now I’ll close with a quote from Jim Hindle. Jim lived amongst the trees at the Newbury protest site and beautifully describes how his awareness was transformed by that experience:

“I became accustomed to the sound of the wind in the trees at all times. It wasn’t a thing I necessarily listened to, but the silence that fell whenever I stepped inside a building was eerie and disquietening. … It was like being connected to a great river, the source of all life … and years of separation between us and the Land were falling away like an old skin”
(Hindle, 2006).

The psychotherapy of place

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How we are in the world emerges from the matrix of mindbody and place. Although it seems very obvious that where I live or grew up will influence how I feel or even who I am, that reality is largely neglected by psychotherapy. The traditional Freudian model focuses on individuals caught in Oedipal family relationships and place is all but ignored. Psychotherapy in general seems to have forgotten embodiment, although there are notable exceptions like Focusing, body therapy and some Existential approaches. But even in the more embodied psychotherapies, place is rarely discussed. The term embodiment implies place – we are all embodied somewhere – but it often seems that those working with embodiment treat place as a mere background, an adjunct to the important business of having a body.

Merleau-Ponty suggests that we have “a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place” (2002 [1962]). It’s not that I am sitting in my room – I am in a co-existence with that space. Gendlin is even more radical: the body “is an ongoing interaction with its environment” (Gendlin, 1992). To be clear, there isn’t a typo there: Gendlin isn’t saying that the body is in an interaction, but that the body actually is that interaction.

Ecopsychology engages with the wider world, and ecotherapists might well ask about a client’s relationship to nature. But how often do therapists consider the places that we live in more generally? We typically ask about siblings, parents, intimate partners and the like, but when do we wonder about the everyday landscape of our client’s lives? “How do you feel about your home? What’s your local area like? Do you drive to work, walk or take the bus? Where did you play as a child?” If ecotherapy is about the environment rather than just the ‘natural’ world, (whatever that means), these questions are vital.

Clients sometimes talk about the fields they played in as children, how they feel when they wake up in the familiar space of home or what the corridor outside their flat means for them. I’m increasingly curious about these things, perhaps because I’m aware of the importance of this dimension of our existence. Where do we go with this? Ecopsychology has opened new pathways and my Focusing practice is sensing into this edge. There are also clues in the work of Gaston Bachelard, who proposes a new strand of psychoanalysis he calls topoanalysis. Topoanalysis “would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (Bachelard, 1969 (1958]). I haven’t had time to study Bachelard yet, but watch this space.

Focusing in Nature

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Put simply, Focusing is a means of opening our awareness to the “bodily sensed knowledge” which Eugene Gendlin calls the “felt sense” (Gendlin, 1981). The term ‘felt sense’ describes those fuzzy feelings that we don’t usually pay much attention to – those vague ‘gut feelings’. As you become more aware of a felt sense it will often open like a bud, revealing an otherwise hidden embodied knowing. I discovered Focusing when I was doing my PhD research and it’s become central to my spiritual practice and personal wellbeing. It subsequently become the foundation for my psychotherapy when I trained as a Focusing Oriented Therapist.

Focusing is usually done indoors, but it occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what happened if I tried it in nature. It’s an obvious step and  it came as no surprise that other people were already doing it. What did surprise me was how powerful it could be. My first experiments were a revelation:  Focusing in nature quickly softened the perceived barrier between ‘me’ and ‘the world’, enabling a much more intimate relationship to place.

A boat sits on a still Loch at dawn

This was amazing! In minutes I could get a deep sense of connection to the natural world. Was it just me? I read about other peoples experiences and did some interviews. Although different people had different experiences, that sense of profound connection came up again and again.

As Deep Ecology has noted, that connection is fundamental to changing our environmental behavior. Herbert Schroeder, an environmental psychologist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service found that Focusing in nature “was a first step toward articulating the ineffable, experiential value that natural environments have for me” (Schroeder, 2012: 141).

There’s much more to be said and done. If you’d like to know more, see my article, Gendlin and ecopsychology: focusing in nature in the Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies journal.