The Wilderness and Wellness Podcast

Kimberly Beck: Ecotherapy and Rewilding – Healing the Harms of Divorcement from Nature

Ron Waline / Kimberly Beck Season 1 Episode 30

Join me for a discussion with ecotherapist, rewildling coach, and outdoor skills practictioner Kimberly Beck as we explore ways to reverse the ill effects of our divorcement from the natural world due to human domestication. Kimberly shares her nature connected background as well as healing experiences and epiphanies she had which led her down the path of learning the principles of therapy and how to facilitate a relational reconnection between people and the natural world. Kimberly expounds specifically on rewilding and how it fits into the ecotherapy conversation of reunifying people with nature. We talk about ways that people project onto the the natural world, and others, and what one can learn by properly observing and asking questions about one’s projections. Kimberly offers stories of experiences with clients, exemplifying ways that nature connecting events can become an anchor for those struggling with mental illness. We also discuss the natural ability of the awareness skills, such as tracking, bird language, and naturalist knowledge, to facilitate ecotherapeutic self-exploration. We explore the importance of play and its role in helping people become fully realized human beings, as well as other nature reconnective activities that can be incorporated into one’s life.

Connect With Kimberly:

Relational Rewilding Nature Coaching Website

E-mail: wild@relationalrewilding.com

Kimberly’s Instagram Page

Book Recommendations:

How to Raise a Wild Child, by: Scott D. Sampson

Deep Nature Play: A Guide to Wholeness, Aliveness, Creativity, and Inspired Learning, by: Joseph Cornell

Nature and Therapy: Understanding Counselling and Psychotherapy in Outdoor Spaces, by: Martin Jordan

A New Path: To Transcend the Great Forgetting Through Incorporating Ancestral Practices into Contemporary Living, by: Arthur Haines

The Power of Now, by: Eckhart Tolle

Other Links:

John Stokes and “The Tracking Project”

Jon Young, “8 Shields Institute”

Wilderness Awareness School

Shelley Torgove, “Artemisia and Rue: Earth Centered Healing Traditions”