Psychological Counselling/Nature Coaching

Many people today have the feeling that their lives are determined by others, far removed from their own wishes and needs. ‘You’ have to function, at school, at university, as a partner, as a father, mother, child, at work. As a result, there is an increasing feeling of burnout, exhaustion and alienation in our own lives; we lose our connection to ourselves, to others and also to nature and our own living environment. Or, as the wonderful Erich Kästner so aptly put it in his poem ‘Die Wälder schweigen’: ‘The soul becomes crooked from treading on the pavement.’
 
Psychological counselling and coaching sessions that take place in natural spaces offer participants a gentle setting in which they can immerse themselves in nature and their own vitality. Various natural spaces such as forests, meadows, mountains, lakes etc. serve as ‘green counselling rooms’ where stress and the pressure to perform are no longer an issue and your mind can calm down. Experiencing and perceiving nature for yourself, with targeted stimuli and mindfulness exercises allow you to feel alive and self-effective again, to trust your gut feeling and to hear your own inner voice, which, although not completely lost, has been silenced far too often.  Nature offers the space to reflect on your own life and previous life decisions and to find creative solutions. She offers us the space to relax, to feel, smell, see and hear the elements, so that in the end we also hear and feel ourselves again.
 
As a psychological counsellor/nature coach, I use other methods in addition to the various conversation techniques, for example walk-and-talk, meditations with certain tree species, the inclusion of the seasons and key points of a year (the so-called annual cycle), ritual work, creative impulses such as land art and forest art, aromatherapy (especially with incense), writing in nature, texts with a reference to nature as well as physically activating and relaxing exercises.