Forest Therapy | The Feeling Space

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Forest Therapy

Remembering our place in the wild and living world.

To read more about somatic therapy, click here.

we
belong
to
each
other.

We are all connected.

I often meet folks who are looking for a therapy experience that reflects this.

Who are longing to move beyond solitary cycles of "working on themselves",
and access deeper ways of belonging to their bodies, their places of being, their kin.

If trauma creates disconnection - from self, relationships, land, body, and breath -
then perhaps healing trauma is about restoring connection.

This work invites communion with the more-than-human world to notice the deep webs of connection that we are already a part of.
Remembering this connection awakens personal and collective wellbeing.
And, for many of us, it is also grief work.

Here we acknowledge the impacts of colonization/land theft, ancestral grief, capitalism, speciesism, and severance from land, spirit and culture on our wellbeing.
We seek to repair this severance imperfectly - knowing that what was broken can never be unbroken. But we can choose new futures together.

Forest Therapy blends somatic attachment therapy with ecological, spiritual and ancestral practices, and is rooted in ecological approaches to attachment theory.

Sessions are offered weekday afternoons in East Guelph.

Wild Forest

What to expect:

Forest Therapy happens outdoors in Guelph in all weather, and can include:

walk-and-talk nature therapy
outdoor somatic attachment re-patterning
co-regulation exercises with the living world
feeling and sensing our belonging in nature
ancestral grief work and ecological attachment practices (I have a Western European settler descendant lens, blending the Gaelic practice of Dùthchas with relational and decolonial somatics)
forest therapy groups coming 2025

Resources:

Ecological Attachment Theory: check out the work of Marika Clymer, the Energetic Ecologist here.

For more information on the benefits of forest therapy, check out this article about Shinrin-yoku (the Japanese practice of Forest Bathing).

To learn about the Gaelic concept of Dùthchas, click here.

My Land-Based Lineage & Lens:

I grew up on a farm near the Owashtanong (Grand) River and spent my childhood and adolescence in the forest, often with my dad. I consider myself an eco-spiritualist animist, whose work is rooted in decolonial, anti-fascist, queer, and justice-based approaches to connecting to land, body, and ancestral spirituality. I am a Western European settler descendant, with ancestry from Ireland, Scotland and England.
I have been intentionally practicing land-based spiritual communion since I was a child. Some of my human teachers include Sophie Strand, Dr. Christena Cleveland, Marika Heinrichs, Danielle Dulsky and Sophie Macklin, who each practice at the intersections of embodied spirituality and community/ecological justice. The land itself, and the wild beings within it, have been my first and greatest teachers.

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