Welcome to Ecotherapy Trainings
Beyond the office walls exists dynamic landscapes, responsive beings, unpredictable circumstances, and infinite collaborations. Integrating natural environments into counselling can mean more than re-locating your sessions to outdoor spaces. Ecotherapy is an active process of partnering with your surroundings to create therapeutic openings appropriate for your client's needs.
CEI offers the following Ecotherapy training options:
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Individual Ecotherapy Consultations and Mentoring:
Experiencing stagnation or lack of confidence in outdoor sessions? Wondering how to begin transitioning outdoors in your established practice, or want new ideas? These hourly sessions may help restore more flow in your work. Learn how to prescribe and create openings for nature experientials with your specific context and clientele. In person, phone, or zoom. $85. |
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Ecotherapy Trainings 2022: - In-Person & On-line Workshops *Rewilding Your Work: Ecotherapy Applications *Walk-N-Talk 102: It's not just a walk in the park *Nature, Attachment, & the Human Organism More information + Registration Click HERE |
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Bioregional Nature Mentoring for Helping Professionals Improve therapeutic creativity, increase safety, grow your confidence, and explicitly address human supremacy by developing basic naturalist skills and transferring them to client interventions. Sessions take place in and near the outdoor spaces you visit in your work. For Colorado professionals. Contact Kimberly for more info. $65/hr. |
"In this training, there was a wealth of practical ideas for how to work with nature as co-therapist. I valued learning how to conceptualize clients from an eco-therapy perspective. I also appreciate being able to consult on particular cases with Kimberly to work on applying the training to specific clients I am seeing." |
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Approach & Philosophy
"A psychological theory that does not address alienation between people and the natural environment is deeply flawed." -Theodore Roszak
There is no one right way to integrate nature into therapeutic work. The abundant trainings now offered in ecotherapy, nature therapy, wilderness therapy, and rites of passage experiences is reflective of the increasing interest and evidence in the therapeutic benefits of human/nature relationships. Yet none of us hold the Holy Grail formula to nature-based therapy. As a gestalt-focused therapist, I find the richness and vibrancy of the work lies in the infinite creative possibilities present when the therapist, client, and nature's spontaneity come together in a given moment. A beauty lies in holding the mindset of an artist rather than a technician.
** I may use the terms ecotherapy and nature-based therapy interchangeably.**
Embodying an artist's mindset over a technician's means a releasing of control. It is control that is at the heart of domestication, colonialism, and much of society's conditioning that leaves clients, and even ourselves, unsatisfied and feeling bound. Control is also affecting the field of psychotherapy itself.
Nature's diversity, unpredictability, and constantly changing dynamics reflect uncertainty, but they also reflect freedom and authenticity. Under all the challenges, dramas, and traumas that walk through the therapy threshold, lies deep and instinctual desires for these two qualities. Nature helps clients (humans) to feel and embody freedom and authenticity more, which is part of the gift of nature-based work. Unfortunately, not everyone has adequate access to nature or to quality time in nature. This is something we can change.
Nature's diversity, unpredictability, and constantly changing dynamics reflect uncertainty, but they also reflect freedom and authenticity. Under all the challenges, dramas, and traumas that walk through the therapy threshold, lies deep and instinctual desires for these two qualities. Nature helps clients (humans) to feel and embody freedom and authenticity more, which is part of the gift of nature-based work. Unfortunately, not everyone has adequate access to nature or to quality time in nature. This is something we can change.
Colorado Ecotherapy Institute believes that we therapists and other wellness practitioners in love with our beautiful world have both an opportunity and a responsibility to stretch our gifts. Our gifts include shape-shifting roles and skills - sometimes we are therapists and counselors, sometimes advocates, sometimes social workers, and sometimes activists. Let us now stretch into facilitators of inter-species relationships for the benefit of all. I advocate that us changemakers and influencers stop ignoring the plight of our beloved ecosystems in our work, and that we increase access to nature for people by integrating nature into this field.
Core beliefs & philosophies that inform this work:
- Martin Buber's 'I-Thou' relationship perspective, and acknowledging the sovereignty of all life
- Nature-based therapy is a somatic & experiential therapy
- Life is always trying to move towards health and balance
- Nature is not only good for us; we are beneficial to each other, and divorcement from nature is harmful
- Health and wellness practitioners have an opportunity and responsibility, as changemakers, to help increase quality access to nature for people in their community by weaving nature into their operation structure
- Each person has a core Self that is intelligent and untouched by relational or physical injury
- People are mammal animals shaped by the elemental, biological world with physical and relational needs designed to be met by safe, attuned human connections and by contact with the natural world
- It is often life in the status quo that impacts our clients social/emotional/mental functioning. Therapy outside the status quo has potential to realign people with their relational and biological self
More testimonials...
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"Attending Kimberly’s Ecotherapy training reignited inspiration around the dynamic way I want to work as a therapist. Her style was relational and creative! The nature-based interventions helped me place concepts into the context of experiential application in session with my clients. Her transmission of developmental and attachment - based theories through the Gestalt lens solidified material I had learned in graduate school, and allowed me to reach much deeper in my understanding. Kimberly's nature-based approach to understanding the nervous system supported me in finally grasping the content myself, and gave me interactive tools to support and empower my clients to participate and relate to their own systems. The information was gold, and I look forward to more in the future!" -Margaret H, LPC
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"My experience in the Rewilding Your Work Ecotherapy training was enlightening and transformative, personally and professionally. Through concepts and invitations, I now have a better understanding of my own and my students bodies and nervous systems, as well as how that relates/functions within the broader ecological system and life. I have a new appreciation for myself as an animal as well as for the animals I share my life and neighborhood with. I immediately began applying practices and experientials into my work, and am confident this training will continue to be a pillar for how I live and work moving forward." -Natalie P., Yoga Instructor & Wellness Coach
"This past weekend with Kimberly I was reminded of the importance of tapping into my curiosity. Pausing in the middle of a sentence to notice the elk walking behind me, taking moments to listen to where the earth was calling me to tune into, and exploring the life all around me - reminded me of the very reason I do this work. In the ecotherapy workshop I met an incredible group of nature practitioners as we gathered in the trees to share, connect, and learn. Together we learned and explored Rewilding, creative ecotherapy techniques, poly-vagal theory and nature, eco-identity and so much more! It was lovely experiencing, first-hand, how connected we are to each other and the Earth." -Marissa B, LMFT
"Sitting on the ground it occurred to me, through my body first, then my thoughts - that the earth, the land - was key. The earth has held everything that has ever happened to us. In psychology, we see health as indicated by our romantic, familial, or work relationships. But there is never an assessment of our relationship with place and land. It was a huge realization for me to feel, as a justice organizer and a healing practitioner, that I could borrow from the ground because it has always had the most capacity." -Prentis Hemphill
