It’s a brisk November day, and I’m crying in a yurt.
This is not a regular occurrence for me – being in a yurt, that is. (However, I am easily moved by art, vulnerability, and in this case, poetry.)
There are perhaps ten other people sitting in the circle, warmed by a wood-burning stove and holding kraft paper notebooks that we each spent a shivery half hour outside filling with our observations of the world around us. Once we’ve retreated to the warmth of the stove, we debrief about our experience under the elegant white pines, and the bravest share a bit of their writing too. It’s these beautiful, opened-up moments that bring tears to my eyes.
We know each other to varying degrees, but we each receive profound glimpses into the others’ hearts and minds through this sharing process. We arrived tentatively, stretching out feelers between ourselves, the space, and the others in it, to seek the reassurance of being part of this ecosystem. After two hours together reading, writing, and reflecting, we each leave with a sense of groundedness and being seen that we didn’t quite have when we arrived.
Just two hours of intentional community can have an astounding impact on our emotions and mindsets. (This is what I experienced in the days following the Writing Your Wilderness workshop, hosted by therapist Bailey Sims and one of her collaborators.) The deliberate attention to not only individual healing, but to relationship as a conduit for it, is the foundation of Bailey’s practice. This collaborative approach is something all nature-based practitioners can learn from for the benefit of their own communities.
Bailey Sims has lived what can only be described as an original life, with a resume that includes chaperone for youth backpacking trips, builder of gardens out of shopping carts, apothecary apprentice, and most recently, mental health therapist. When you meet Bailey, you are met with a reassuring presence, supported by the clarity of her values. As she recounts to me the experiences that have molded her practice, the one thread that weaves through all of these seasons is relationship.
Six months after I “wrote my wilderness” with Bailey, we are sitting on a wooden bench in Indianapolis’ Holcomb Gardens, watching students and families mill about for spring photo shoots and taking in the new warmth of spring. The few times we have met I have always learned something from her that opens my eyes to new possibilities, and this conversation is no different as she reflects on her journey to nature-based therapy and the partnerships she has nurtured along her way.
Relationship as a key component to her work comes up early in our conversation, starting with her education. “My major was in Cross-Cultural Community Development. I made it up!” Bailey explains. “I did an integrated studies major where there was an emphasis on a multi-cultural approach and a cross-cultural approach, embedded in community. That was really important to me in life, that approach was like ‘that’s what I want to do, whatever that means.’”
This community focus was solidified when she chaperoned a Montessori school trip to West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia. The students were exploring sustainability from multiple angles and considering how coal mining country could be both economically and environmentally sustainable. “Like 8th graders thinking about this? That’s awesome!” she laughs.
“We went and visited this woman named Jeanie, in the holler, and she shared, ‘I define sustainability in one word, and it’s relationship.’ I feel like that changed the trajectory of my thinking and launched me into this new realm of life where I focused on community.”
That perspective stuck with Bailey as she moved to Indianapolis and into intentional community. “As I’ve moved about, I’ve always thought about that. Whether that’s relationship with myself, relationship with the earth, relationship with the divine, with others in my community, that is what’s going to sustain me and nothing else, which I’ve always taken with me.” Over time, her engagement with nature shifted from only backpacking and outdoor adventure to a more personal relationship with the earth. “Living with the earth, relating with the earth, knowing I am made of the earth–it was a paradigm shift for me,” she shares.
Her shift to become a therapist, unsurprisingly, was sparked due to a relationship with place. Not far from where we sit, south as you follow the smooth path of the Central Canal, the Christian Theological Seminary where she studied sits up above the waterway.
“I was nannying, and on the way I always biked past along the canal towpath. I would think, ‘What is that building?’ It looked so monastic and peaceful, so the place really drew me in. It was significant to me, like the land, the place itself drew me in. I looked it up online, and it was a seminary.” While her first reaction was that she wasn’t necessarily looking to go to seminary, Bailey noticed the school had a counseling program. When she was first accepted into the program, her aim was to combine the plant healing work she was apprenticing in with counseling, and her practice shifted as she has learned about other modalities of nature-based therapy.
While nature-based therapy hasn’t fully made its way into counseling education programs yet, Bailey found ways to connect her studies to her previous experiences in nature and community. “What I did was take every opportunity to choose a topic or theme, if there was a research paper or opportunity to choose, I was going to make it helpful for the way I wanted to work. I found outside ways of bringing nature therapy into what I was studying and I had to do the translating, which I’m still doing. The longer I’m working, the more I’m seeing that we are doing the same thing, just using different words.”
Now Bailey is a practicing therapist, providing nature-based counseling to some clients and finding ways to collaborate in creative ways with others who share her approach. She advocated to add walk and talk therapy at the practice where she completed her licensure hours, creating her own informed consent paperwork for sessions, and is excited to soon move into her own office which features more access to nature.
Until she moves into her new space, Bailey finds ways to incorporate nature indoors and through more innovative practices. Her office is full of plants, and she opens her office windows so the space interacts with the elements. “A lot of it is metaphor, analogy, working with the body as the thing that is the nature,” she shares, “or incorporating the elements and occasionally being outside, it’s kind of simple.”
A training with the Somatic Wilderness Therapy Institute also opened Bailey’s eyes to opportunities for nature connection when folks are in different spaces. As she called in to workshops over Zoom, she noticed how another participant was joining from a Manhattan skyrise apartment and still making the program work.
“Sometimes I’ll even practice over Zoom with clients and I’m like ‘find your cat,’ you know? Or your houseplant, or your wooden desk.” Bringing in examples of everyday nature helps her clients expand and define connection their to the built environment as well.
Bailey has experienced the impacts of this mindset shift in her own life and observed it in others as well. “You protect what you love. If we’re connected and showing compassion and loving ourselves, we’ll show up and protect ourselves. And same with the earth, if we can cultivate love and connection, we’ll want to protect that and preserve that and hold it as sacred.” Again, relationship proves to be essential to the practice.
As Bailey and I dig into how these transformations can happen, we talk about how her essentials of self-compassion, mental wellbeing, and holistic nourishment relate not only with deepening our relationships with nature, but also give us tools to face the climate crisis in a responsible and responsive way.
“I do feel like the self-compassion and nourishment piece is connected [to climate action]. I used to use words like health and wellness, which are good words, but nourishment is what really landed. When we are nourishing something or ourselves, that’s not just baseline health, that’s going above and beyond and saying I love myself, I’m going to nourish myself.” We can do the same for our communities and our habitats.
Before long our conversation comes back to the yurt, and to the origin of Bailey’s different community practices. “I think it started with a very practical need for diverse income streams as a business owner…I did not want to burn out, the agency model of seeing 30-40 clients a week was not gonna do it for me…I didn’t want the burden of that on myself and the quality of care I could give people by cramming a ton of clients in, but I also didn’t want to raise fees. It’s important to me that this is accessible and affordable, so I want to maintain my sliding scale fees. I’m trying to think from the beginning, how can I build something sustainable for my business, myself, and my family?”
“But it wasn’t just diversity of income, there’s that nourishment piece,” Bailey reflects. “I incorporate yoga in my work with clients and realized, I want to do yoga, I can’t really afford to go to a studio in terms of time or money, so what if I held some yoga and invited people to do it with me?” This has led to outdoor yoga practices, along with collaborations like leading yoga for “g-art-en party,” a day-long summer wellness practice with art therapist Allie Bishop.
“Even the Writing Your Wilderness workshop–writing in community does something to me on a spiritual level, so yes I’m facilitating it, but I also get to do it and participate! It’s a very mutually beneficial and nourishing way of shaping my business model or ecosystem.”
Bailey expands on her unique role as a facilitator of community practices: “I was talking with a friend recently who had gone on a silent retreat. She shared, ‘I’ll tell you a little bit, but you should really just experience it yourself.’ A year later she held one and I went, and I thought ‘You’re right, you told me what it was like but I didn’t actually know it until I did it myself.’ I think that shift for me helped me view my work as a therapist differently. People can find all of this information online, but the real work is done in safe trusting relationship with one another. The real work is done when you experience it yourself. I’m trying to view myself as a container of actual experience.”
As a former participant I know that these practices move the participants just as deeply as they move the facilitator. “I think the need it’s filling is a need of community,” Bailey says. “That’s what this is. We’re writing, but people want community. The writing piece, in my experience, helps extrapolate the thoughts and feelings in the body, the abstract, and puts them into real time, on paper, so that you can share and work with them; dissect and explore. Writing makes the experience tangible, makes the feelings shareable. I heard that some members of the group who have come a few times exchanged phone numbers and are talking about meeting up and sharing their writing ongoingly, so [the practice] is sustaining itself because of the relationships.”
Bailey’s Writing Your Wilderness workshops are hosted with non-fiction writer and director of the Butler University Creative Writing for Wellness program, Emma Hudelson, which brings us to the topic of collaboration. “Partnership and collaboration is how I find the language. To me [ecotherapy] all makes sense, I see all the connections. Talking about it outwardly I get a little more nervous–is this what people are looking for? Is it going to make sense? Practicing talking about those things is one benefit of collaboration.” Bailey describes her partnerships with other practitioners as very organic and relational, rather than transactional. She even has a standing agreement to barter her services in exchange for use of the aforementioned yurt.
As the sun drifts west behind us, Bailey reflects on the key ingredients of nature therapy and psychotherapy. “Sometimes I wonder, am I really doing ecotherapy? The ecotherapy [I practice] might not be intensive adventure therapy, but it takes its own shape because of who I am and all the lineages and teachers I’ve learned from. I don’t feel like I really talked about ‘ecotherapy’ that much [in our conversation], but I don’t know if I need to because I’m doing it in my own way and living it in my own way.”
Bailey’s work is a model for how therapists can cultivate ecosystems of care. As mental health needs continue to rise in our changing world, therapists can expand their impact by incorporating community-focused practices as part of their offerings. (If you’re curious what this could look like for you, check out the reflection questions at the end of this previous blog post.) When we find the intersection of our talents and what our community is longing for, we can create nourishing spaces together.
Invitations for Consideration:
- What is your current capacity for collaboration? What aspects of your current work and practice could facilitate this?
- What type of community are you longing for? How could you begin to create this yourself?
- Are there areas of your work and practice you can “translate” or incorporate ecotherapy into?
Ecotherapy for All 
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