Nature-based psychotherapy is a transpersonal therapy that incorporates the mind-body relationship, spirituality, and the study of consciousness for human transformation. Time in nature can help you take space from your inner self-critic, challenge what you thought you knew about yourself, enter intimately into your aliveness and develop a relationship with something vastly larger than yourself. April can help you develop your own spiritual foundations, learn to heed the call of your soul and uncover your own basic goodness. In this way, you can gain access to your innate strengths and underlying wholeness.
Nature-based psychotherapy
Drawing on ecology, traditional indigenous knowledge, rites of passage practices, the body-mind connection, art and creativity to help cultivate a sense of belonging and connection with nature. Outside or indoors, April can help you find your current circumstances reflected in the natural world and understand your life as part of the natural cycles of change. No matter what you are going through, something in nature has already experienced it and can offer guidance. As a result, you will come to know your deep interconnectedness with all life and find that you are never truly alone.
Therapy
Experimenting with new ways of being in the present moment is the most effective way to develop new neural pathways and make lasting changes. Through mindfulness you will come to know yourself on a deep level through the living experience of your five senses as well as your own inner landscape of sensation and emotion. This type of experience helps you see both your brilliance and your blind spots and allows different parts of yourself to enter into the conversation of your life. Experiential therapy draws on hakomi principles to access your own awareness and direct experience rather than ideas about who you might be.
Handout: What is Hakomi Therapy
Experiential psychotherapy
Individual Therapy
Hakomi
Wilderness Therapy
Clearing ~ ~Morgan Farley
I am clearing a space
here, where the trees stand back.
I am making a circle so open
the moon will fall in love
and stroke these grasses with her silver.
I am setting stones in the four directions,
stones that have called my name
from mountaintops and riverbeds, canyons and mesas.
Here I will stand with my hands empty,
mind gaping under the moon...
If something seized my life tonight,
if a sudden wind swept through me,
changing everything, I would not resist.
I am ready for whatever comes.
But I think it will be
something small, an animal
padding out from the shadows,
or a word spoken so softly
I hear it inside.
It is dark out here, and cold.
The moon is stone.
I am alone with my longing.
Nothing is happening
but the next breath.
Letters to a Young Poet ~ Ranier Maria Rilke
... have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms or books written
in a very foreign language.
Don't search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Trauma-informed psychotherapy
At some point almost everybody has experienced some form of trauma, big or small. These experiences can remain in the nervous system and contribute to unhelpful habitual or compulsive ways of being. April can help you release the patterns and symptoms of trauma with the help of the following methods.
Eye Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR)is a way of releasing experiences that cause distress, by activating the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
Handout: What is EMDR
Natural Processing (NP)is a type of body-centered EMDR that targets the ways we disconnect from ourselves and supports nervous system healing.
Trauma Containment and Resolution (CAR) helps to resolve trauma symptoms by tracking body sensations to release incomplete actions from the nervous system.
Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) creates an altered state of consciousness that facilitates the processing of trauma and depressive patterns.