Healing ourselves with nature
An ecotherapy practice rooted in 45 years of intuitive bodywork and a lifelong interest in our beneficial relationship with nature
Welcome
We invite you to discover and connect with the natural world around us all. Wherever you live, wherever you are.What is ecotherapy?
Ecotherapy refers to a dynamic group of therapies that allow the natural environment into our lives for healing.Its techniques have been practiced for millennia throughout our ancestral cultures and have more recently regained recognition among modern practitioners.Also called nature therapy and deeply related to ecopsychology, ecotherapy helps people reconnect with their evolutionary roots and revive the instinct to engage with and cherish the natural world, a living system that affects us as much as we affect it.In ecotherapy, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the connection.
Is ecotherapy right for you?
Ecotherapy offers many ways to access the healing benefits of nature, so it’s very possible there is an approach or technique that could be a good fit for you.Ecotherapy does not need to be in the wilderness. It does not need to involve hiking or climbing. It can be done in your neighborhood park, your backyard, on your deck or patio, or even indoors.Outdoor activities may not be right for individuals with allergies, photosensitivity, phobias related to the outdoors, or people who have experienced trauma in nature settings.
Benefits of Ecotherapy
Increases positive feelings such as inner calm, well-being, life balance, connection, empathy
Increases serotonin and other feel-good neurochemicals
Reduces aggression, depression, loneliness and isolation
Calms the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight response) which can be over-active in urban environments
Improves concentration and attention span
Reduces high blood pressure and lowers heart rate
Activates the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and recovery) which helps the body to regulate and heal itself
Phytoncides, oils that many trees emit to protect themselves from pathogens and parasites, have been shown to have a direct effect on natural-killer cells in the human body
Focus is on an activity rather than on personal health, making it easier for individuals with social anxiety
Guided Pathways
I’m Kevin, a certified ecotherapy guide.Ecotherapy is a term for a group of nature-based methods of physical and psychological healing. It is a form of therapy that acknowledges the vital role of nature in human health and addresses the deep human-nature relationship.I believe that as modern humans living in 21st-century societies, many of us have lost a sense of our having a role as integrated creatures in the natural world.Here, I offer to guide you along pathways to connect with nature for better physical and psychological health. These are invitations, not requirements, and you can stop at any time. Pathways include a variety of practices and exercises to help us connect in new or renewed ways.
SELF-GUIDED ECOTHERAPY
Detailed instructions for ecotherapy sessions you can do on your own whether you are new and would like to get your figurative feet wet, or more experienced and would like to keep your practice tuned-in. Steadfast and seasonal.
Terms of use: These instructions are for your personal use only. Commercial use by anyone other than Sylvaedic Earth is strictly prohibited.
IN-PERSON EVENTS
No in-person guided events currently scheduled.
Watch this space for updates.
FOR ALL ECOTHERAPY
• Participants hold total and complete responsibility for their own safety, health condition, hydration, clothing and footwear, sun and insect protection, exposure, emotional state, and safe transportation.
• Observe all local laws, ordinances, park rules, and the like.
• DO NOT knowingly or intentionally damage any flora or fauna.
• Pay attention to your surroundings. If at any time you feel uncomfortable, vulnerable or threatened, stop and leave. If any creatures behave in a threatening manner, leave the area immediately.
Foundation Pathway
Intention
To help reduce inner distractions so that your attention is available for the exercises
Preparation
• Choose any place where you feel comfortable
• You can sit or stand
• You can do this exercise at any time of day
• Set electronic devices to silent mode
Invitation
I invite you to:
• With your feet securely under you and eyes closed, focus your attention on the spot in your body two inches below your belly button and midway toward your spine.
• Center: Take three slow deep breaths, breathing deep into your abdomen, not just your chest. Inhale and exhale, relaxing your body and mind more with each breath. Add more breaths, if needed.
• Ground: With your attention focused on your center, imagine dropping a tether from your center down to the ground, then into the ground as deeply as is comfortable. Stay relaxed and keep breathing.
• Stay in this state — centered and grounded — for a few minutes.
• When you are ready, take a deep breath and release your tether with an exhale.
Duration
• Do this for 5 to 8 minutes
Completion
• Take a deep breath. While you maintain the feeling of being centered and grounded, open your eyes. Carry this feeling forward.
Benefits
When we center and ground, we place our inner selves in a solid yet open space, available for connection.
Terms of use: These instructions are for your personal use only. Commercial use by anyone other than Sylvaedic Earth is strictly prohibited.
If you appreciate my work and find it useful, please consider supporting it.
Seasonal Pathway: Listening
Intention
To become engaged with nature in this place. This time we will use our sense of hearing.
Preparation
• Choose a natural area where you will feel comfortable. It can be any location: park, backyard, patio or deck.
• Because we will be listening, avoid areas with intrusive human-made sounds.
• You can take a buddy with you. You can both do the self-guided exercise.
• Take a journal with you so you can make notes after the exercise but before you get home.
• Wear appropriate clothing for the weather and surroundings.
• When you arrive, set all electronic devices to silent mode and turn off all speakers.
Invitation
I invite you to:
• Find a comfortable place to sit.
• With eyes closed (if you feel safe), focus your hearing on all the nature sounds that are happening all around you in this place at this time, especially anything new to you. If human-made sounds are also present, do your best to focus on the natural sounds.
• Make mental notes of what you hear while you are listening to your surroundings. Resist any temptation that may arise to write in your journal, make notes on an electronic device, or record what you hear. Give all your attention to your sense of hearing.
Duration
• Do this for 3 to 5 minutes to practice using your sense of hearing.
• Write down your observations in your journal. You can follow up or share with your buddy or with others later.
• You can continue to listen in this location or move to another location.
Caution: Try to resist any temptation to repeat the exercise right away with another sense. It takes at least 2 minutes to shift intention from one sense to another.
Completion
• Wrap-up your ecotherapy exercise with an extension of gratitude to your surroundings.
Benefits
The benefits of nature sounds are available to us even in the presence of human-made sounds, provided we can still hear nature. Studies show that pleasant birdsongs reduce stress and annoyance while water sounds enhance positive emotions such as tranquility, awareness and relaxation and improve health outcomes. Also, nature sounds are excellent at masking the negative effects of human noise. [footnotes 1, 2, 3]While listening to nature we may hear new sounds such as a birdsong we don’t recognize. When we learn about those sounds, we can experience the well-documented benefits of lifelong learning which include improved brain function, emotional resilience, self-esteem, mental health and physical health. Plus taking the time to learn about nature after the ecotherapy exercise extends our engagement with nature. (Save IDs for after the exercise so that your full attention stays on listening in the moment.) [footnotes 4, 5, 6]For more information about how engaging with nature improves physical and psychological health, refer to our Resources section.
Terms of use: These instructions are for your personal use only. Commercial use by anyone other than Sylvaedic Earth is strictly prohibited.
If you appreciate my work and find it useful, please consider supporting it.
Rambles
Things that grab my attention or move my heart: Sips of nourishment, glimmers of hope, and other on-topic tidbits. Periodic and ephemeral.
ON SECOND GLANCE
Little things I found in our garden only as I was looking elsewhere first.
Blue-Winged Scoliid Wasp, Scolia dubia (native)
Tiger Bee Fly, Xenox tigrinus (native)
Young Dung-Loving Bird's Nest Fungi, Cyathus stercoreus (worldwide distribution)
Maize Calligrapher Syrphid Fly, Toxomerus politus (native)
Oak Gall from Rough Oak Bulletgall Wasp, Disholcaspis quercusmamma (native)
Pennsylvania Dragonfly, Libellula pulchella (native)
RESOURCES
Dig deeper into the beneficial connections between people and nature.
Resources
Dig deeper into the beneficial connections between people and nature.
ECOTHERAPY AND NATURE
Links:
- Nurtured by nature: How time in nature can improve our mental health and sharpen our cognition
- Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing
- ‘The Nature Fix’: What Japanese Forest Bathing Reveals About Well-Being
- Real nature beats technological stand-ins, but technological nature is better than nothing
- Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings
- Exploring the Benefits of Eco-Therapy Based Activities at an Urban Community College
- Green healing: Ecotherapy as a transformative model of social and health care
- Nature of Place Symposium 2020: Biophilia, Love of life is human nature
- Nature of Place Symposium 2021: Children
- Nature of Place Symposium 2022: The Voice of Change
Resources
Dig deeper into the beneficial connections between people and nature.
WORKING WITH NATURE
Links:
- Let Your Garden Grow Wild by Rebecca McMackin, ecological horticulturalist Rebecca McMackin
- On Native Plants: Do they matter? by Benjamin Vogt
- Native Knowledge: What Ecologists Are Learning from Indigenous People
- Is Your Yard Undergrown? by Nancy Lawson
- More plants is always better: Immersive landscapes with Claudia West, interview by Margaret Roach
- Nature’s Genius: How the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems
- Allegheny Land Trust: Helping Local People Save Local Land
- Biophilic Cities, Connecting Cities and Nature
- The HINTS Lab: Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems
- Homegrown National Park, co-founded by Doug Tallamy
- Mt.Cuba Center: Renowned botanic garden committed to the conservation of native plants and their habitats
- Pennsylvania Wilds: Nature is not just a place to visit. It is home.
- Pittsburgh Canopy Alliance — Increasing local urban tree canopy
- Plant, Baby, Plant: Healing land and restoring our relationship with the Earth
Resources
Dig deeper into the beneficial connections between people and nature.
NATURE IN ART
Links:
- Beatrix Potter: A life drawing nature, including pages from her childhood sketchbooks
- Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet by David Abram
- Fall by Mary Oliver, poem at The Poetry Foundation
- Lyanda Fern Lynn Haupt, author and naturalist
- Nature Is Always Listening: The Wondrous Science of How Mushrooms Respond to Music, by Maria Popova
- Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth, with excerpt from book by Carl Sagan
- Randy Woodley, author and co-founder of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm and Seeds
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, author, professor of Environmental Biology, founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment
- The Story Behind “Silent Spring”: How Rachel Carson’s Countercultural Courage Catalyzed the Environmental Movement, by Maria Popova
Resources
Dig deeper into the beneficial connections between people and nature.
Footnotes
SEASONAL PATHWAY: LISTENING
Links:
- [1] A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks
- [2] Listening to Nature Gives You a Real Rocky Mountain High
- [3] 10 Years of Research Reveals That Listening To Nature Can Improve Your Overall Health
- [4] Benefits of Lifelong Learning
- [5] Lifelong learning in active ageing discourse: its conserving effect on wellbeing, health and vulnerability
- [6] Building Emotional Resilience Through Lifelong Learning
About Us
I’m Kevin, a certified ecotherapy guide working in the Western Allegheny Plateau along with the Erie Drift Plain. After 45 years as a certified bodywork and licensed massage therapist, I transformed my practice to connect more deeply in my lifelong love of nature.We welcome all people who wish to accept the gifts of nature.Hate has no place in healing spaces and will not be tolerated.We believe that all people deserve to be safe, supported, and respected.
What we do
My ecotherapy is an engagement with local surroundings, a series of invitations for exploration, guided encounters that can assist deepening our relationships with nature to facilitate healing, followed by the option to share about your experience during the session.Focus is on an activity rather than on personal challenges or problems. Settings can be outdoors or indoors, online or in person, in a variety of formats.
Supporting techniques available
Marma Therapy — Ayurvedic acupressure
Intuitive Energywork — Bringing over 45 years of experience to assist with deepened healing
Reflexology
Disclaimer
I am not a medical practitioner and do not diagnose or treat ailments.Benefits of ecotherapy have been demonstrated in clinical studies. They may not occur with everyone or occur every time.
Contact Us
Land Recognition
Sylvaedic Earth recognizes the spirit and stories of the original stewards of the land where we offer this work, the occupied ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples that include the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Kaskaskia, Lenape, Osage, Mississauga, Monongahela, Seneca and Shawnee.We pay our respects to their Elders and their people, community, and culture, past, present, and future.We are committed to learning and supporting indigenous communities today, and welcome comment from these people.Learn about indigenous lands here:
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TERMS AND CONDITIONSYou may not use these instructions to guide participants, teach students, lead courses, treat or interact with clients or patients in any form.You may not reproduce or sell these instructions in any form.You may not claim these instructions as your own work or concepts in any way or form.
Thank you for respecting our intellectual property.