12 Skills of Mindfulness-Based Ecotherapy
What is mindfulness-based ecotherapy? How can it help clinicians and clients alike? Today, check out our latest video blog and take a stroll through the woods with Dr. Charlton Hall as he walks through the twelve skills of mindfulness-based ecotherapy. Available both as video and as a text transcript, this video blog will help give an introduction into this refreshing topic!
Read the full transcript here:
Hi, I'm Dr. Charlton Hall the Mindful Ecotherapy Center. I'm here today to talk to you about what mindful eco therapy is.
So what is mindfulness based eco therapy? It's basically a blending of mindfulness and eco therapy. Mindfulness is just paying attention to the present moment and eco therapy is using the healing power of nature to make change in your life. So in mindfulness based eco therapy, the mindfulness is the what, and the Eco therapy is the how. So what that means is mindfulness is what you do to make change in your life, and the Eco therapy is how you achieve mindful state. By being in nature, you come into the present moment.
There are 12 skills that we teach in mindfulness based eco therapy, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about each one of those. The first is mindful awareness. Mindful awareness is just paying attention to the present moment, and the way we do that is by leaving what is called doing mode and entering into what is called being mode. Doing mode means you're trying to come up with solutions. You're trying to solve problems. Being mode is just being there with whatever you're experiencing in the moment, whether it's feelings or thoughts or just activities like being out into the woods. So one of the reasons that eco therapy is useful in establishing mindfulness is that eco therapy allows you to explore the forest with your senses. And when you're exploring the forest with your senses, you shift out of doing mode into being mode. The reason for that is because you can't experience anything through your senses in the past or in the future. You can only experience things with your senses in the present moment.
The next skill is living in the now, and it's closely related to mindful awareness. You'll see that a lot of overlap occurs in these skill sets, but living in the now is basically coming into the present moment. If you think about all the things that stress you out, how many of them have to do with the past, how many of them have to do with the future? How many of them have to do with what's going on with you right now, at this very present moment, as you're watching this video? So living in the now is the only place that you can actually make change in your life. Can't change the past, can't change the future. All you can change is what's happening right now, and that's where living in the now comes in handy.
The next skill of Mindfulness Based eco therapy is letting go. What Letting go means is just learning to accept the things that you can and change the things that you cannot. And if you can't change it, then you have to accept it. Marsha Linehan, who founded Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, said there are three ways to deal with the problem. The first is to solve it. If you can't solve it, then the next is to change the way you think about it so it's no longer a problem. And then if you can't do either one of those, the only thing left is to accept it, except that this is a problem that you can't do anything about. So Letting go means letting go of the anxiety associated with the problem that you can't solve.
The next skill is radical acceptance. And what radical acceptance is is what we talked about previously, letting go of the things that you can't change, while accepting the things that you can if you think about all the problems you've ever experienced in your life, how many of those had to do with the circumstances that you found yourself in, and how much of them had to do with what you believed about the circumstances that you found yourself in? If it's about the circumstances, then you can't always change those circumstances, so you're always going to be a victim of your problems, but if it's what you believe about those circumstances, you're always in charge of what you choose to believe about your situation. We're taught that our mind and our body are separate things, but that's not the case with mindful eco therapy, we learn how to pay attention to the signals that our body gives us so that we can. And better regulate what's going on in our minds as well.
The next skill is centering. Centering is just a matter of coming into the present moment, letting go of all thoughts about the past or the future and just allowing yourself to be in the present moment.
The last skill of all is what's called Living in true self, if you remember Carl Rogers, Carl Rogers conceived of the ideal self and the real self or the perceived self. The perceived self is how you see yourself right now, and the ideal self is how you would be if your problems were no longer bothering you. So the further apart those ideal and perceived CELS are, the more problems you tend to have, because you're asking yourself, why can't I be like the person I want to be? Centering involves getting in touch with that ideal self, or what we call the true self, so that we can accept who we are.
The first of the Eco therapy skills are skill number seven is what we call connecting. If you think about spirituality, if you took all the spiritual paths of the world and put them into a cauldron and boiled them all down to their essence, what you would come up with is a sense of connection to yourself, to others, to spiritual, the divine, however you choose to see it. But eco therapy is all about connecting. And we start by connecting with nature, and then once we do that, we're able to connect with others and eventually connect with our true selves.
The next skill of Mindfulness Based eco therapy is nature as metaphor. If you think about all the fairy tales you grew up with, Aesop's, fables, things like that, how many of them had elements of nature in them? When you walk in the woods, do you find yourself making up stories about the things that you see? I was once on a walk and I saw a hawk and a raven having a fight. The Raven was defending its territory against the Hawk, and while I sat there watching it, I was making up personalities and names and back stories for both of the birds. I eventually realized that it had nothing to do with what I was witnessing, that was all coming up in my own mind, that I was creating a scene and a story based on my own inner experiences. So nature's metaphor is a way of using nature as a metaphor for making change in our lives. We do a lot of that with things like wilderness adventures, where completing some sort of task like white water rafting or climbing a mountain or completing a ropes course is a metaphor for completing your own inner spiritual or cognitive or psychological journey. It's a goal to be achieved. So we use nature and metaphor in that way. Another way we can do it is also with something called Eco art therapy, where you create an art piece using materials that you find in nature, and each piece in the art represents an aspect of what's going on with the individual. So that's another way that we can use nature as metaphor.
The next mindful eco therapy skill is nature his teacher? Have you ever learned anything from nature? You have pets? Have your pets ever taught you anything? If you think about it, there's all sorts of lessons to be learned in nature. My daughter is an expert in healing plants. She has learned from nature what plants heal and what plants are beneficial to people who are suffering from illnesses. So there's all sorts of things that you can learn from nature, if you open your mind to it, and if we use that with the skill of nature as metaphor, nature can teach us as a symbolic representation of any struggles that we might be going through in our own lives as well.
The next skill is nature as nurture. Do you feel nurtured when you go into the woods? Is there some rejuvenating property that you find in nature? If you look around, you can see evidence of nurturing in nature, new plants, mother of birds taking care of their young. All throughout nature, we have examples of how nature nurtures.
The next skill is nature's healer. And if you think about that, this kind of eco therapy, in a nutshell, nature has the power to heal us all. Environments communicate. I'm here in the woods, and I'm listening to the birds and to the water and to all the life around me that is giving me some healing aspects. City streets can also communicate a message. If you think about a polluted, crowded city street with all the honking horns and all the noise. Is in the traffic that communicates as well. But nature has the power to heal that when we incorporate green spaces into our living spaces, we incorporate healing into our environment, even if it's an urban environment, and when we come out into the woods, into nature,we rejuvenate. There's a thing called soft focus. And what soft focus is is that when you enter into our natural environment, you're no longer forced to pay attention to shut out distractions like noisy city streets or things like that. You're able to focus your attention without a lot of mental effort, because you're surrounded by nature, you're surrounded by things that we evolved to live in, and that's what soft focus is. So that's the 11th skill of mindful eco therapy.
That brings us to the 12th and final skill of mindful eco therapy, living in true self, already briefly touched on the work of Carl Rogers with the idea of the ideal self. The true self is who you would be if you could get out of your own way to set aside your limitations and be the person you were meant to be. Jung called it individuation. And the idea here is that you accept who you are fully and you're happy with it. So living in true self means accepting the totality of who you are, changing the things you want to change, and accepting the things you can't change or don't want to change, and becoming that true self. So when you're able to live in true self, you've achieved the final objective of Mindfulness Based eco therapy.
So that's it. The 12 skills of mindful eco therapy are Mindfulness Based eco therapy. If you're interested in adding that to your practice, you can look for trainings online. You can also look at the mindful eco therapy center. You all have to have access to an outdoor space to be able to do eco therapy, or mindfulness based eco therapy in your own office. We can do a sand tray. You can have your clients find materials in nature as homework for assignments, and then bring them into the office and create eco art pieces during the session. Or you can just assign eco therapy activities as homework for them to complete on their own, so you don't have to have access to an outdoor space. Of course, if you do that's even better, then you can do eco therapy activities with your clients with access. Thanks for listening and thanks for watching.