Ecopsychology studies the human psyche as part of the living Earth, and ecotherapy puts it into practice, with therapy done in, with and through the natural world. They offer shamanic work an independent naming, from within psychology, of the wound Therapeutic Shamanism calls power-lossPower-loss. Disconnection from nature, the web of life and our place in it: like being unplugged from the national grid. One of the two root causes of shamanic illness, healed by reconnection (not by soul retrieval), beginning with the Power Animal bond. Read the full answer, a growing body of research showing that time in nature helps mental health, and practical experience of working therapeutically outdoors.
What are ecopsychology and ecotherapy? #
Ecopsychology is the study of the relationship between the human mind and the natural world. The historian Theodore Roszak coined the word in The Voice of the Earth (1992), arguing that beneath the personal unconscious lies an ‘ecological unconscious’, linking each person’s psyche with the living planet.1 The pastoral counsellor Howard Clinebell wrote one of the first books on ecotherapy a few years later.2 The editors of an influential 2009 anthology, Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist, describe ecotherapy as applied ecopsychology, and insist that nature is not simply a tool for human healing: animals and the Earth are participants in the work.3
In practice, ecotherapy covers many things: therapy sessions held outdoors, wilderness and adventure therapy, horticultural therapy and therapeutic gardening, forest bathing, animal-assisted therapy, conservation work and more. Martin Jordan and Joe Hinds, two UK specialists in the field, have mapped it in an academic collection.4
Do they see the same wound as shamanism? #
Very largely, yes. Much psychotherapy reduces everything to the human level, and most of it is done indoors, with no connection with or awareness of nature. A few branches of therapy, such as ecotherapy, do understand the importance of the more-than-human, though for now they are a very small part of psychotherapy as a whole.5 Shamanism sees much of the pain we feel as caused by our disconnection from the more-than-human and from nature, and calls that disconnection power-loss.6
The ecopsychologist and psychotherapist Andy Fisher comes to a similar view from inside psychology. The psyche, he says, cannot be understood apart from the more-than-human world, and healing individual suffering and healing the ecological crisis are the same task.7 Psychotherapy, from the shamanic side, has things it must learn if it is ever to help heal the wound caused by our separation from the more-than-human world.8 See What is power-loss?
What does the research show? #
That time in nature helps, particularly with mood. A 2021 review of fifty studies, sixteen of them randomised trials, found that nature-based activities such as green exercise, gardening and forest bathing reduced depression and anxiety and improved mood. The most effective programmes ran for eight to twelve weeks, with sessions of twenty to ninety minutes, and those delivered in groups had the largest and most consistent effects. The same review found much less evidence that such programmes improve physical health, such as blood pressure.9
The science journalist Florence Williams visited many of the people behind these findings, from Japan’s forest-bathing trails to Finnish studies of how much time in nature makes a difference, and describes ideas such as Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory, which proposes that natural surroundings let a tired, effortful attention rest.10 Psychologists who study nature connection also distinguish between nature contact, simply being in nature, and nature connectedness, a person’s felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer of connection with the natural world.11 Being outdoors and feeling kin to what is outdoors are not the same thing, and it is the second that shamanic work sets out to grow. See How do we reconnect with the other-than-human world and heal cultural power-loss?
What can working outdoors teach a shamanic practitioner? #
A lot of practical experience. Ecotherapists have explored what changes when therapy leaves the consulting room. The land becomes a “third space” between therapist and client, and practical, ethical and safety questions arise that the indoor room never raises. Jordan and Hinds’s collection sets out several of these, from outdoor protocols to the support of clients’ grief for the Earth.12
This meets a need shamanism has recognised. Wild practices such as vision quests can work powerfully in the short term, but their effects tend to wear off after a few weeks or months back in ordinary, domesticated life. A modern shamanism needs practices that reconnect us with nature, and also practices that help us keep that connection in largely urban, day-to-day lives: practices to find the wild in the tamed.13 Ecotherapy’s experience of regular, ordinary contact with nature, in parks, gardens and on allotments as well as in wilderness, is a rich source of ideas for that. See What is a vision quest?
Do ecopsychologists see nature as alive? #
Some come close. Fisher draws on the old idea of the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and on phenomenologists such as David Abram, to take seriously the experience of a living, expressive world.14 The Canadian psychologist John Scull, writing in Buzzell and Chalquist’s anthology, warns that the natural world “is not just a mirror in which to gaze at our own reflections, and it is not a metaphor for the human condition.”15
These writers are psychologists, not animists, and most of the field still treats nature as a setting, a medium or a source of measurable benefits. But voices like theirs offer shamanic work allies within psychology, and a language for talking about the more-than-human that therapists can recognise. What Therapeutic Shamanism adds is set out in What can shamanism offer ecotherapy and ecopsychology?
