Wilderness

“Call in the ghosts. Call in the wolves. Call in your own wisdom and light your own candle. Howl, love, and carry yourself home.” Jeanette LeBlanc

Wilderness therapy is an experiential form of therapeutic work that draws on the resources and wisdom of the natural world. Nature can support your healing journey by helping you connect with a safe place of belonging in addition to challenging your usual ways of being in the world.

For me personally, throughout my childhood and adult years, the wilderness played a deeper and deeper part in my healing. Whether that was riding my bike to the park, playing outside for hours, exploring Yosemite as a teen, or picking up shells on the beach, intuitively and unconsciously, I sought and craved the wild to nuture myself.

I find nature to be the source of all truth. I believe to deny our wild is to deny ourselves.

Zion National Park became a sacred space to me early on in my twenties. My dogs and I would explore the red rock and sand of the desert long before I had children. I have since become an avid cyclist, backpacker, camper, and embrace nature every chance I can immerse or explore in it.

Connecting back to my ancestral roots and Mother earth provided healing for me during times of uncertainty and growth. Research has show it provides the same to individuals who allow or foster that therapeutic relationship.

Ayesha Ophelia so beautifully described, “You are comprised of 84 minerals, 23 elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells. You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by a sperm and egg. You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet’s most complex and living thing. You are not living on earth. You are earth.” 

As a society at large, it pains me to see people disconnected from the wilderness around them. The lessons and slow nature of nature provides comfort and teaching few man-made places can offer. It is an abundant and free resource available to all. It is always around us even in the tiniest of flowering weed spurting up from a crack in the pavement.

For those looking for a more immersive experience, Wilderness Intensives can be offered at a day rate or for a weekend backpacking experience.

Follow me on IG for up to date information on Wilderness groups.