Nature therapy considers our mind, body and soul as connected to the natural environment we live in.
NTI draws from the evidence based practices of forest bathing, forest therapy, wild therapy and ecopsychology.
If you've ever moved slowly through a forest, listened to the wind in the trees or noticed the sunshine filtering through the leaves, you've already practiced forest bathing in your own way.
If you are looking to deepen this experience, our fully qualified Forest Bathing Guide, Sarah, guides gentle walks using a series of invitations that will awaken your senses to focus on the natural environment around you. We aim to help you develop an enhanced sense of appreciation for nature and to re-balance your body and mind.
Originating in Japan as 'shinrin yoku' in the 80s, Forest Bathing is an accepted part of Japanese preventative health care. Since then it has been practiced worldwide and researchers continue to investigate its outcomes. They conclude that the real and long-term benefits include, among other things, improved sleep, reduced stress, increased immunity, lower blood pressure and accelerated recovery from illness or trauma.
Forest Bathing.
While Forest Bathing is a wellness practice, Forest Therapy uses these tools as a nature based intervention to target specific mental and physical health difficulties.
Forest Therapy is tailored to the persons specific needs as it focuses on alleviating distress and redressing damage to mental and physical health.
Forest Therapy Practitioners work in partnership with nature by awakening & immersing the senses in the forest atmosphere. It aims to enhance nature & social connections while also promoting inclusivity.
Social prescribing, where non-clinical activities and services are recommend by health professionals, is on the rise internationally. Forest therapy is becoming a field of increasing interest in cases of mental and physical health difficulties as it complements clinical treatment and rehabilitation
Forest Therapy.
Wild Therapy looks to connect traditional therapies with ecological thinking where we consider each species, each being, each person as inherently and profoundly linked to each other.
Wild therapy works towards recognising the endless complexity of our existence where we realise that 'wildness', a state where things are allowed to happen of their own accord, is far more intricate than our domesticated society, just how a wild forest is deeply complex when compared to a manicured garden.
Traditional psychotherapy works with people in tolerating the anxieties of not being in control - of our feelings, our thoughts, our body, our future. In relation to nature it seems that our efforts to control it are destroying it: the more we try to control things, the further out of balance we push them.
Wild Therapy brings together a wide range of existing ideas and practices creating encounters with nature. It helps you to explore your connection to nature and in doing so considering how we too can exist in all our wildness without the need for so much control.
Wild Therapy.
Have you ever felt the weight of our current global climate crisis? Ecopsychology works with people in navigating the often overwhelming impact of their role and responsibility in this.
In traditional psychology, the ‘psyche’ is often considered in isolation from it's natural environment. This split between mind and nature is seen by ecopsychologists as being at the heart of our current ecological crisis.
Ecopsychology questions whether it is still enough or appropriate to limit therapy to practices exclusively between (usually two) people, in the confines of a room with four walls and a ceiling.
It calls out the anthropocentric bias (the belief that we as humans are the most important entity in the universe) inherent in traditional Western psychology and appeals to our deepest, creative selves. It requires therapists, quite literally, to think and feel ‘outside of the box’, in order to find therapeutic responses to the many associated conflicts, divisions and oppressions occurring both internally and externally.
