InHabit: Eco-Somatic Cosmology in Ecotherapy

Recently, in an ecotherapy session, I invited a nervous client to go within and sense what animal or ecological energy might support her during an upcoming and difficult family conversation. She closed her eyes, took a few slow breaths, and waited for something instinctive to rise.
After a moment, her body began moving in a wave-like motion. Her posture grew taller. Her spine softened and became more fluid. With eyes still closed, she continued this subtle undulation and then said: “I’m not sure why, but my spine is growing a tail, and I’m becoming a dragon.”

She felt confused by the imagery. Yet this made perfect sense to me.

🐉 Awakening Our Dragon Layer
Dragons are powerful symbolic beings connected to the hara or womb energy center. They govern this core hara layer of our energetic self and unfortunately are rarely activated in our human development process. Dragons are associated with creativity, initiation, transformation, and embodied truth — qualities my client had been longing to step into, especially in relation to her family.

Before I shared anything about dragon symbolism or evolutionary memory, I invited my client to breathe into this lower energy center in a way that felt coherent with dragon energy. She instinctively knew what this meant. Through her breath and imagery, she activated this dragon quality within her. Afterward, she practiced what she wanted to say to her family and how she wanted to express it. Her voice, confidence, and overall presence were noticeably different.

In those few minutes of inhabiting dragon, something awakened in her. Since then, we’ve continued to deepen this energy and integrate it with the intelligence of her heart. Dragon without heart can become forceful. Heart without dragon can become overly accommodating. Together, they create balanced, embodied power.

Eco-Somatic experiences like this are becoming increasingly common as I integrate eco-somatic experiments into my ecotherapy sessions. Clients have inhabited eco-ancestors such as:

• Wolf
• Jaguar
• Panther
• Heron
• Mother Tree

Through these ecological memory encounters, they awaken dormant natural energies and discover new and ancient ways to meet life’s challenges - guided by animals and other eco-ancestors.

What is InHabit?

InHabit is my new offering, rooted in a creative, evolutionary eco-somatic cosmology. Inhabit means ‘to live in or occupy’. Sometimes this refers to a place or habitat. Yet this verb is also a birthright of body and consciousness. All animals fully inhabit their being in coherence with their environment and all other life forms. We (western culture) humans are the only beings to vacate and mistrust our animal body and our evolutionary wisdom. We also exist completely out of coherence with our environments and universal laws that govern life, such as carrying capacity. Yet beneath our socialization, something is waiting for us to remember and return. 
InHabit was added to my ecotherapy practice over the last 2 years and now is being offered as part of my ecotherapy trainings and consultations.  This addition supports clients in accessing more primal layers of their nervous system and invites practitioners to go beyond well-known therapeutic modalities. Inhabit explores:

• Ecological Family Constellations instead of Family Constellations
  
• Evolutionary Family Systems instead of Internal Family Systems
  
• An Eco-somatic Nervous System Theory instead of (and in addition to) Polyvagal Theory​

This may sound audacious because these modalities have become almost biblical in therapeutic spaces. My intention is not to replace conventional therapy methods, but to expand them. Most widely established approaches rarely consider our evolutionary journey, ecology, or the innate nature that we are designed to inhabit. 

What Eco-Somatics Offers

Eco-Somatics is an emerging field that expands on traditional somatics by blending: 

• The new and the ancient
• ​The human and the more-than-human 
• Playfulness and depth 

At its core, it is an embodied remembering of our identity AS nature. This cosmology goes beyond simply connecting TO nature—which subtly implies separateness. While 'nature connection' has been central to my work in nature guiding and ecotherapy, remembering—through our creaturely bodies—that we ARE nature is equally important to the healing of both people and the planet. 

Join the Introduction to InHabit

If you are curious how InHabit: Eco-somatics in Ecotherapy can bring more aliveness to your sessions, more strength to your clients, and deeper maturity to our communities, join me for an on-line introduction on Sunday January 18th, 2026.  

Dragon Blessings,
​Kimberly 

Register Here