Nature Therapy: The Deeper Invitation

I’ve been sitting with something for quite a while now.

As Nature Therapy and Forest Bathing continue to grow in popularity, I find myself feeling both hopeful and cautious.

I’m grateful that more people are discovering the research. The evidence is compelling. Time spent in nature can help regulate our nervous systems, reduce stress and rumination, restore attention, and support our wellbeing. These benefits are real and they matter!

But I hope nature therapy never becomes another wellness trend. Not because wellness doesn’t matter. It does. But because trends ask, “What can this do for me?”

Nature therapy invites a different question: “What will it feel like to come home?”

For years, I’ve watched people arrive in the forest carrying the weight of modern life—stress, grief, burnout, anxiety, distraction. They come hoping to feel better, and that’s what happens. But over time, I’ve realized something. The deepest transformation I witness goes far beyond wellness. It has everything to do with remembering.

It’s not uncommon for someone to become emotional during a guided session. We may have just spent twenty minutes sitting with a tree. Each person has a unique experience, and when we gather again, one or two people often return with tears in their eyes. Here’s the interesting thing, they usually can’t fully explain why. I think about this often. After years of guiding, and through my own lifelong healing journey with nature, I’ve come to realize that something deep is happening. We are remembering. Perhaps even our bodies before our minds. 

I don’t think people come to nature therapy simply because they want to reconnect with trees. I think, beneath that, they’re longing to reconnect with something within themselves, and in doing so, they often rediscover their place within the greater web of life.

That thought brings me back to a passage from Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit “We know there is more than green gardens and nature calendars, and recycling, and a summer hike in the mountains, and an occasional camping trip. More, even, than an hourlong ‘forest bath,’ however lovely that sounds. We know there is a wilder earth, and upon it—within it—a wilder, more authentic human self. We know the need of each for the other is absolute.”

Yes. That’s exactly it!

Forest Bathing is lovely. The science behind nature therapy is compelling. But if that’s all it becomes, something important is lost!  We begin to relate to nature as something we use, rather than something we are in relationship with. For most of human history, we lived in close relationship with the natural world. Our nervous systems still remember this. We are not separate from it—we are part of it.

In 2017, researchers Siegmar Otto and Pamela Pensini asked an important question: What actually drives pro-environmental behaviour? Their findings were striking: 69% of pro-environmental behaviour was linked to nature connectedness, compared with just 2% linked to environmental knowledge.

Knowledge matters. Climate science matters. But information alone rarely changes how we live. Relationship does.

When we experience ourselves as part of the living world, not separate from it, we begin to care for it differently. Not because someone tells us we should, but because it feels like caring for our home.

This reminds me of the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing—when we hold multiple ways of knowing together, valuing both Indigenous knowledge systems and Western science to deepen our understanding of the world and our relationship with it.

And perhaps that is what this work is really about. Not escape. Not optimization. But remembrance. 

A slow returning. 

A reweaving of relationship. 

A sense of belonging to something older, wider, and alive!

Because in the end, nature therapy isn’t simply about helping us feel better. It’s about helping us remember what it feels like to belong.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to take a few moments outside today to simply sit and be present. To notice the world around you through your senses and feel yourself arrive. To place your feet gently on the Earth and belong.

With gratitude,

Claire Beach,

Certified Nature Therapy Guide & Mentor,

Founder of The Wild Edge Nature Immersion