Center For Nature Informed Therapy

For the past two weeks, CNIT has had the privilege of facilitating two Nature-Informed Therapy retreats in the Alps—one for the general public and one for students and faculty from Monmouth University.

Across both groups, participants described the experience with the same words: "once in a lifetime," "transformational," and "I'll never forget this."

Through hiking, reflection, mindfulness, community, and the healing power of nature, we witnessed meaningful growth, connection, and awe.

We're grateful to everyone who joined us and are hopeful to bring this magical experience back in Spring 2028. 🏔️💚

The body settles into a different rhythm out here — Slower mornings. Longer silences. The kind of attention you can’t buy back at the end of a week glued to a screen.

This is what we showed up for. Not a vacation, not a workshop. Six days of living a little closer to the ground, alongside people who came for the same reason.

Human. Nature. Healing.

🌿🇦🇹 The Center for Nature-Informed Therapy is honored to be facilitating a study abroad experience in the Austrian Alps for students and faculty from Monmouth University.

Over the coming days, 11 students and 2 faculty members will immerse themselves in the principles and practices of Nature-Informed Therapy through hiking, mindfulness and meditation, gratitude practices, reflective journaling, therapeutic activities, and meaningful connection with the natural world.

Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Alps, this experience invites participants to slow down, cultivate presence, explore their relationship with nature, and discover how the outdoors can support resiliency.

We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with Monmouth University and to introduce the next generation of helping professionals to the healing potential of nature.
🌲⛰️💚

The final dispatch from Payton, written from Santiago.

Three weeks of walking end in a cathedral square: old friends and new ones, tears, hugs, and the moment a Spanish priest says four words Payton has been hearing in every language for three weeks. Todos nosotros somos uno. We are all one.

This closing letter is about a pattern many Camino walkers shared with him along the way: that despite expecting the trail to be spiritually significant for its solitude, the moments that stayed with them were almost always the ones with other people. A Tennessee couple bonding with an Italian couple over charades and shared wine. A blistered foot that slows down a whole group. The one bottle that gets passed around.

Read the full letter, including a link to Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center research on the lasting benefits of small loving moments with strangers, at natureinformedtherapy.org/blog.

Thank you, Payton, for these three weeks of words and photographs. A compilation reflection drawing the journey together follows on our blog within two weeks.

When did you last share a table with someone new?

From Payton, written in the final miles before Santiago.

He calls this one An Untitled Meditation. It moves from a quiet "thank you" offered to a stretch of forested path, to Thich Nhat Hanh's reading of the Diamond Sutra, to a Spanish proverb tacked on a moss-covered tree along the trail: All the things that hurt, also made you move forward.

A passage worth sitting with:

"The more time that I have dedicated to mindfulness and gratitude, the less of myself I have found. In fact, I believe that the moments in my life when I have come closest to enlightenment are those when I have lost completely any definition of what self is or means, or what separation exists between it and the universe."

Read the full reflection at natureinformedtherapy.org/post/trail-notes-05-losing-the-self-padron

This is what nature-informed practice looks like in the wild: paying attention, letting the landscape speak, walking at the pace of your own thinking.

When have you felt least like yourself, and most at peace?

From Day 2 in the Bavarian foothills.

A circle of people. River behind us, no walls, no screens. Just a slow morning, an open sky, and the kind of quiet most of us forget exists.

We come here to remember something modern life doesn’t make room for: that healing happens in relationship with the more-than-human world.

Reciprocity, not extraction. Presence, not productivity.

Restoring balance through nature-inspired healing.

The Ground Beneath Our Work is a book about bringing nature into therapeutic practice. Therapeutic Pathways is what that looks like in action.

At Ladew Topiary Gardens, our pilot participants are walking a mapped garden loop, stopping at themed stations to practice exactly the kind of nature-informed engagement the book describes: sensory awareness, reflective journaling, mindful pause, and connection.

The book provides the framework. The garden provides the setting. Together, they’re showing us something: healing doesn’t need to happen in a room. It can happen on a path.

If you’ve read the book, Therapeutic Pathways is the next chapter, and we’re looking for parks and gardens ready to write it with us.

Available now: the book (https://www.natureinformedtherapy.org/shop) and the program (inquiries welcome).

From our community member, walking the Camino de Santiago:

A hostel night, a wall covered in notes left by previous walkers, and the lasting power of writing things down. Paradise isn't a place, it's a state of mind.

"My call to action for those reading this isn't to start a journaling habit. I know how hard that can be, or how boring it can seem to non-writers. Instead, try taking one quick moment from your day, and make it momentous. Write it down as if it was a life-changing moment (it was), as if everyone wants to know about it."

The full piece includes two of Payton's own journal entries from Redondela: one from a stream rail covered in purple flowers, the other from an unplanned conversation with a Spanish family over churros.

https://www.natureinformedtherapy.org/post/trail-notes-04-written-word-redondela

At CNIT, we train clinicians to bring this kind of slow noticing into their work. Nature has always been a teacher.

What is one small moment from your day worth writing down?