Explore Psychotherapy
Outdoor & Online psychotherapy with Kirsty Turner based in Belper, Derbyshire
Psychotherapy in a Natural Space Outdoors
Moving psychotherapy outdoors gives us a space to be our natural selves as we are in the living world. We can work on whatever issues bring us to psychotherapy and explore in them in a natural space. Outdoor, eco, or nature-based psychotherapy is a growing field with benefits that are continuing to be discovered.
How outdoor psychotherapy helps
Being in natural space supports us to slow down our pace so we become more in tune with our senses, feelings, and insights.
As we attend more deeply to ourselves and our surroundings, we experience being held in the web-of-life around us. This supports our nervous systems to resonate with the living world and can have a calming, restorative effect on us.
The natural stimulation of our senses can awaken our creativity, intuition, and imagination, supporting us to safely process our experiences and move through blockages we are experiencing. The freedom of space and movement can help us feel less restrained, shift our energy, and open us up to new possibilities.
This can rekindle our connection with our deeper nature or essential self that may have become hidden by our difficulties, defenses, or habits. We experience being more real and less cluttered when we are our embodied selves outdoors.
We can see ourselves in a wider context, experiencing more fully in our bodies how we are interconnected with all other creatures and beings. We more deeply experience the wholeness of ourselves and allow all parts of us space to be. This offers a different dimension to the process of exploring and integrating our experiences through therapy indoors.
Outdoor psychotherapy draws on the growing exploration of ecopsychology, which sees our reconnection with the living world as essential to our well-being and the life of our planet. It can support us as we process our distress at the harm to our environment and help us find our place in working towards the healing of our planet.
“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Practicalities
We will meet at a regular meeting place, starting and ending at the same spot, and move around the landscape as is needed for our work. This will involve sitting or walking together in whichever parts of the land you feel drawn to. We will follow the themes and directions you want to explore, using our environment creatively.
We can work outdoors in most weathers, apart from storms or high winds. Experiencing the space in a wide range of weathers can be a useful part of your therapy. We will work to together to keep our work private when we come across other people (and dogs!) by moving to more secluded areas when needed.
If you are interested in discussing outdoor therapy, you can contact me to arrange time to talk on the phone – I offer a free 15-minute telephone conversation where we can look at what you are needing and think about whether outdoor psychotherapy with me could help.
If it seems like this way of working would be helpful for you, we will then arrange a time for an initial session outdoors. This will be an opportunity for us to meet each other in the space, explore what brings you to therapy, and give you a sense of what psychotherapy outdoors may be like. We can both then decide whether to begin working together.
My charge for the initial assessment and therapy sessions is currently £60 for 50 minutes.
“I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds.”
— Mary Oliver
Get in touch
Contact me to arrange a free 15 minute telephone consultation. You can email, or use the contact form below.