THERAPEUTIC MODALITY
Ecotherapy
Remembering ourselves as nature.
Reconnecting with the living world
Outdoors, the nervous system often finds what it has been quietly seeking. The rustle of wind through leaves, the weight of earth underfoot, the slow patience of a tree that has stood through seasons of change — these things speak to something older in us than language. They offer a kind of company that does not ask us to perform or explain, only to arrive as we are.
Our work together may unfold on a walking path, in stillness beneath open sky, or in quiet conversation with a particular tree, stone, or body of water that calls to you. We might track how a shift in weather mirrors a shift in mood, notice what a season of dormancy has to teach about rest, or let a natural landscape reflect back the landscape of your inner life.
Nature becomes both mirror and teacher, offering images, metaphors, and felt experiences that talk therapy alone can sometimes struggle to reach.
So much of our suffering takes root in disconnection — from our bodies, from one another, from the rhythms of the earth that once held and oriented us. Ecotherapy invites us back into relationship with the natural world as an active participant in healing, rather than a backdrop to it.
How nature can support healing
This way of working draws on a growing body of research showing that time in nature can lower stress, ease anxiety and depression, and restore a sense of perspective and belonging. But beyond what can be measured, ecotherapy rests on something older and more intuitive: the recognition that we are woven into the living world — and that remembering this can be its own form of medicine.
Across cultures and generations, humans have turned to the land, the seasons, and the more-than-human world for guidance, grounding, and meaning. Ecotherapy honors that lineage. It asks us to slow down enough to listen — to the wisdom of our own bodies as they respond to wind, water, root, and stone — and to let that listening become a doorway into deeper self-understanding, resilience, and belonging.
living relationships
My approach to ecotherapy is grounded in my doctoral studies in Integrative Healing Practices at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where my research centers on plant relations — the reciprocal, often overlooked relationships between humans and the plant world. This ongoing inquiry continues to shape how I understand healing as something cultivated in relationship with the living world.
Long before I encountered ecopsychology as a field, plants and land were present within my family. My Ecuadorian abuela was a curandera who worked with plants, and my father worked the land in Nicaragua. Their relationships with the earth are part of the ancestral ground from which I approach this work.
My formal studies in ecopsychology and herbalism have given me other languages and practices for tending this relationship. My Shipibo-Konibo teachers have further deepened my understanding of plants as living beings with whom I can cultivate relationship. Through teachings and experiences of dieta, I have come to understand knowing a plant as something that asks for time, attention, reciprocity, and a different quality of listening. For instance, through dieta, we become more vegetal—loosening the boundaries of the individual human self enough to become receptive to other rhythms, intelligences, and ways of being.
Plants invite us into another temporality: rooted and responsive, shaped by relationship, continually exchanging with the world around them.