The Wild Minds Podcast

In this final episode of Season 13, Marina looks at how the endings of autumn invite us to slow down, honour our ancestors and grieve together, and why sharing our feelings in community, human and more-than-human, can help us feel more alive and connected.

• Why being busy keeps us from feeling (“you can’t hit a moving target”), and why slowing down is one of the keys to connection
• The end of October as the close of the Celtic year: a natural time for endings, reflection and asking “what can I let go of so that new things can grow?”
• Endings in nature are not really endings. They are change and transformation.
• Remembering our ancestors: making an ancestor table, lighting a candle, and noticing the patterns and unresolved grief we inherit
• What stays unreconciled in our lives and cultures, and what we might be passing on to future generations
• The problem with “connecting with nature”: how the phrase assumes we are separate, and the move towards feeling that we belong
• Arne Naess, deep ecology and the ecological self, plus John Seed’s idea of experiencing yourself as “the forest protecting itself”
• How feeling deeply connected changes the way we feel loss, and grief as an expression of our capacity to care, not a weakness
• Therapy, ecotherapy and wider healing: where trained professionals are needed, and where communities can hold therapeutic space
• Being listened to without being fixed: the healing power of groups gathered by a river or in a woodland, and of rituals and ceremony
• Elders at the centre of the village, and a culture that hides away ageing and death
• Modelling for children and peers: how we handle fear, disagreement, sadness, anger and repair teaches more than our words do

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/104-the-grief-that-connects-us

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this tender and wide-ranging conversation, Grief Walker Aralyn Doiron joins Marina to explore how facing death, feeling our grief and remembering our ancestors can bring us more fully alive.

Topics include:

• First encounters with death: Aralyn and Marina share childhood memories of loss, from standing at the casket of an eight-year-old neighbour to being kept away from a grandparent’s funeral.
• Why death became hidden: removing death from everyday life, and handing it to professionals, removes part of our nature. Avoiding death separates us from nature, because everything in nature dies, even mountains.
• Death contemplation as a path to aliveness: two decades of Buddhist practice taught Aralyn that accepting impermanence isn’t morbid. It makes everything more precious.
• Elders at the centre of the village: in many Indigenous cultures it’s the elders, not the children, who are at the centre, the ancestors remain a living presence, and death can be an advisor, as in Mexican tradition.
• From Deathwalker to Grief walker: grief is the doorway to full aliveness, and the undefended heart, the one that can be broken by life, may be what saves us. Why “keep calm and carry on” costs us so much.
• Emotional literacy starts with adults: children learn from our behaviour, not our words. Aralyn explains feelings as energy and information, the difference between present-moment feelings and old emotional stories, and anger as pure life force (including her local “Rage Club”).
• One minute a day: a simple practice of being 100% okay with whatever you feel, and the story of a dying mother’s words: “For my whole life I thought there was something wrong with me. What a waste.”
• Art that comes through the back door: Aralyn’s image of the guarded front door and the open kitchen, how art and grief reach the heart, and her new project, Grievolution – not yet created!!
• A Knock on the Door: inside Aralyn’s four-day immersion where participants rehearse their death, including a Last Supper shared with an ancestor and ten minutes spent with a single olive.
• Aloneness and loneliness: David Whyte’s poem Everything Is Waiting for You, and remembering that the tree you lean on is leaning back.
• Passengers or participants: guilt versus remorse, the Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono, stepping into Brené Brown’s “arena”, and valuing honest feedback from the people who have your back.
• Rites of passage for our times: Aralyn’s work with Tides in New Zealand, and why marking thresholds such as birth, death, the seasons and friendships helps us live more consciously

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-103-elders-at-the-centre-with-aralyn-doiron/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this episode I'm looking back on our Circle of Life Rediscovery 'Green Health Virtual Gathering, Embedding Nature in Practice – From Vision to Delivery'. It brought together psychiatrists, a GP, psychotherapists, nurses and NHS teams to explore one idea: nature is a co-healer alongside people, and the healing happens in relationship, with each other and with the land.

Topics include:

• Reflection on the gathering and what happens within the Health service!

• Why "just go outside" isn't enough. The outdoors isn't the intervention; it's a partner in it.

• Person-centred practice built on invitations rather than prescriptions, and why no two sessions should look the same.

• Dr Hannah Sherbersky on how we already are nature, and why the work has to respect people's different histories with the land.

• Contributions from Dr Shuo Zhang!

• Roger Duncan's three gateways to deep nature connection, and his warning against the "green pill".

• Can relational, person-centred work be evaluated? (Yes. Here's how.)

Find out more about the speakers

Dr Hannah Sherbersky, family and systemic psychotherapist, University of Exeter:

https://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/therapist/Hannah-Sherbersky-iAgk6AAC

Hannah and Roger's programme at Exeter:

https://store.exeter.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-health-and-life-sciences/psychology/cedar-create-eco-systemic-psychotherapy-deep-nature-connection

Dr Shuo Zhang, child and adolescent psychiatrist, King's College London:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/clinic-to-research-tackling-mental-health-disparities

https://www.acamh.org/author/dr-shuo-zhang/

Dr Ralph Mortimer Roome, Brighton GP:

https://www.greenerpractice.co.uk/

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/nature-as-healer-in-health-and-care/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this episode, Marina looks back at the questions that came up at the *Outside for Everyone* webinar and asks why we adults find it so hard to take learning outdoors, and what we can do about it.

In this episode:

• Why experiential learning sticks, and why we still find it so hard to take education outside
• "Backlinking": Juliet Robertson's idea of offering hands-on outdoor activities and linking them to the curriculum afterwards
• How outdoor learning fits the early years, primary and secondary curriculum, from mud kitchens and story stones to measuring trees with trigonometry
• Climate education in practice: soil tests, watching the weather with the Beaufort scale, plant surveys and growing food
• Tool use, vocational skills and confidence, and why hands-on skills matter for future careers
• Contribution as a core part of belonging and wellbeing
• What research on autistic children at Forest School tells us: the adults' attitudes can make or break a session
• Why our practice is about relationship, not activity: consent-based practice, mutual dignity and humility
• Do you need a qualification to take learning outdoors? (No, but you do need to be competent, reflect on your practice and carry out risk-benefit assessments)
• Worried about losing control? How routines, rituals and clear boundaries help, and how to help children explain their thinking
• Shaping the session around the learner, not the learner around the session, with nature as the "third actor"
• Starting small with five-minute activities, managing large class ratios and giving teenagers real-life experiences (including the new Natural History GCSE)

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-101-the-children-are-ready-are-we

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this 100th episode of The Wild Minds Podcast, I'm in discussion with Michael James and Stefania Donzelli. We explore what Forest School and autism can teach us about difference, belonging, relationship and the ways we create environments where people can genuinely be themselves.

We discuss:

• Why autism is far more than a diagnostic category, and what changes when we listen to autistic people’s own experiences and perspectives.
• Moving beyond the deficit model and questioning the assumptions of neuro-normativity.
• Forest School as a micro-community where relationships, trust, autonomy and belonging can create different possibilities.
• The triangle of trust between practitioner, participant and environment and why all three matter.
• The social model of disability and how barriers can sometimes sit in our environments, communication and expectations rather than in the individual.
• Sensory differences and the outdoor environment, including why nature itself may need to be adapted rather than treated as something fixed and untouchable.
• The importance of flexibility, communication and listening - recognising that the participant may be the greatest expert in their own experience.
• Power and authority in Forest School, and what happens when we create spaces where people can question, negotiate and do things differently.
• Intersectionality and Universal Design for Learning, and the value of anticipating different ways of participating, communicating and expressing ourselves.
• Nature as an active participant, including a beautiful story about a non-speaking child, a wisteria and the possibility of seeing behaviour differently.
• The importance of place, repeated encounters and embodied experience, and what the woods can offer beyond a prescribed programme of activities.
• Curiosity, disagreement and connection in a polarised world, and why sometimes the answer might be to go to the woods, light a fire, have a cuppa and talk.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-100-forest-school-and-autism/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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Welcome to episode 99 which was recorded in the middle of a sleepless night.

A quiet, unscripted reflection on gratitude, grief, wildness and the autumn question of what needs pruning and what is ready to be harvested.

In this episode:

• Begins with a gratitude practice for the stillness of the night, for time, and for simply being present.
• Reads Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese and reflects on letting “the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
• Marina sits with grief and unease about the climate crisis, noticing dry ground, stressed trees and early leaf-drop in the woods.
• Explores the autumn equinox as a moment of balance between light and dark, and what that might mirror in our own lives.
• Shares a simple woodland practice using rowan berries to notice where life feels in balance and where it does not.
• Reflects on grounding through the senses, including getting to know the soil while imagining a future forest garden.
• Uses the image of pruning an apple tree to ask what habits, patterns or inherited ways of being may need cutting back.
• Considers wildness not as chaos, but as something that can liberate us while still asking for care, attention and tending.
• Looks ahead to Episode 100, a conversation with Michael and Stefania on inclusion, neurodivergence and autism in Forest School practice.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-99-what-needs-pruning/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this episode, I’m joined by Dr Ralph Mortimer-Roome, a GP based in Brighton and Chair of the Kent, Surrey and Sussex regional group of Greener Practice.

We discuss what changes when we stop seeing health as something that sits only inside the individual body, and begin to include climate, community, relationship and the living world in how we understand healing.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why the climate crisis is also a health crisis — and why solutions for planetary health can also support human health.
• What older medical traditions can teach us about health as balance, rather than simply the absence of disease.
• The idea that illness has not only biological causes, but also social, political and environmental dimensions.
• The tension between the transactional and relational sides of medicine — treating illness while also helping people feel heard and understood.
• David Abram’s influence on Ralph’s thinking, particularly the idea of the healer as an intermediary between the human and more-than-human world.
• Why mental distress can be understood through multiple lenses — biomedical, psychological, social, trauma-informed and spiritual.
• How loneliness and social isolation can contribute to ill health, and whether nature disconnection may operate in a similar way.
• Why doctors may need to recognise their own relationship with nature before they can notice nature disconnection in others.
• What a green prescription can actually look like — from signposting and access to green spaces, to walking groups and supported outdoor care.
• Why simply moving healthcare outdoors is not enough — and the difference between being outside and developing a relationship with nature.
• What a more embedded nature-based care pathway in Sussex could look like, including outdoor consultations, local sites, social prescribing and primary care.
• Ralph’s closing idea of nature as a gift rather than something to consume — rooted in reciprocity, care and the possibility of healing.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-98-what-if-nature-is-part-of-medicine/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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For this episode, I’m joined by my husband Geoff Robb - musician, composer and co-director of The Outdoor Teacher, to explore his lifelong relationship with music and nature, and the story behind The Music of Trees.

We discuss....

• Geoff’s journey from classical guitar and years of busking to becoming a professional musician, composer and creator of The Music of Trees.
• How his early experiences with Reiki and healing opened questions about music, creativity and where inspiration might come from.
• Geoff’s lifelong relationship with the outdoors, from Forest School Camps as a teenager to the deeper nature-connection practices we later explored together.
• What it means to listen to nature, ask permission and build a relationship with individual trees - without needing to claim certainty about what is happening.
• How the willow became a turning point in Geoff’s composing, and how music sometimes seems to arrive unexpectedly rather than being consciously created.
• The story behind The Music of Trees - combining original guitar music with folklore, ecology, storytelling and the remarkable lives of trees.
• Ancient yews, tree protectors, Julia Butterfly Hill and the people who have stood up for trees when trees cannot speak for themselves.
• How COVID brought Geoff’s work as a musician almost to a standstill, but also gave him time in the woods to write more music than he had written in the previous several years - much of which became Music of Trees.
• How that period also brought Geoff into The Outdoor Teacher, combining his technical and business experience with our shared commitment to helping more people access nature.
• The changing reality of being a musician in the age of Spotify, streaming and AI and why supporting live music and independent artists matters more than ever.

Shownotes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/97-the-music-of-trees

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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As I record this onthe Summer Solstice - a moment when nature stands in its fullest expression, it feels like the perfect time to reflect on a season of conversations that, in different ways, have all pointed towards one essential human need: belonging.

• At the Summer Solstice, when the light reaches its fullest expression, we are invited to pause and ask what has ripened in us, what is ready to bear fruit, and what kind of power we wish to carry into the darker half of the year.
• The shift from Oak King to Holly King reminds us that true strength is not domination but stewardship - how can the warrior within us create the conditions for feeling, tenderness and relationship?
• Belonging begins with safety. Before we can feel deeply, we need to feel held. Yet the natural world offers a remarkable invitation: trees, rivers, birds and plants ask nothing of us before we speak.
• Angela Hanscom reminded us that children belong through their bodies first. Movement, risk, balance, play and sensory experience are not extras; they are part of how we come to know ourselves and our place in the world.
• Children often meet the world as a community of living subjects rather than objects. Perhaps part of adulthood is remembering that capacity for relationship with the more-than-human world.
• Jessica Newberry Le Vay challenged the idea that climate anxiety is something to be fixed. Grief, worry, anger and sadness may be healthy responses to a world under pressure - evidence not of pathology, but of care.
• Emotional resilience does not come from avoiding difficult feelings but from learning how to hold them together, in community, with purpose and agency.
• Mo Wilde brought us back to ancient relationships between people, plants, food and seasons, reminding us that health has always been rooted in reciprocity with the living world.
• Many people arrive at the GP with symptoms that cannot be neatly explained or measured. Sometimes what hurts is not simply the body, but loneliness, grief, burnout, disconnection or the absence of belonging.
• Health may not exist solely within the individual. It may also live in relationships, communities, purpose, access to nature, and our connection to something larger than ourselves.
• Outdoor consultations, walking groups, community gardens, shared fires and time in nature are not soft alternatives to healthcare. They may be part of the medicine itself - helping people regulate, connect and remember they are not alone.
• This season has returned again and again to one simple truth: health is more than the absence of illness. It is connection. It is movement. It is meaning. It is relationship. It is belonging.

Show Notes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-96-the-medicine-of-belonging

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

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In this conversation, GP Dr Tim Rigg explores how nature, community and healthcare might come together to create a more humane, preventative and scalable model of wellbeing.

• Tim speaks from his experience as a GP, bringing together clinical practice, social prescribing, nature connection and a wider understanding of what helps people become well
• He explains that around 90–95% of healthcare contact happens in primary care, showing just how important GPs are in shaping the first conversation about health, care and prevention
• He suggests that a very large proportion of people coming to GPs are living with chronic disease, stress, anxiety, depression, isolation or other conditions shaped by the environments and systems they live within
• The conversation explores the strengths of Western medicine, especially in acute illness, trauma and emergency care, while also asking whether it is less equipped to address root causes, prevention and the conditions of a healthy life
• Tim shares how the pioneering social prescribing work in Frome helped reveal the importance of community, belonging and purpose in supporting people’s health
• One striking statistic from Frome was a reported 40% relative reduction in hospital admissions compared with a neighbouring area, suggesting that community-based approaches may have a significant role to play in reducing pressure on the system
• The episode looks at green prescribing not as simply telling people to “go for a walk”, but as a structured, supported and clinically credible pathway from the GP consultation room into nature-based wellbeing programmes
• A key part of the emerging model is making it easy and safe for GPs to signpost patients, while trained nature-based practitioners manage screening, safeguarding, delivery and ongoing support
• The conversation explores why nature-based work may help through regulation of the nervous system, sensory connection, beauty, awe, movement, stillness, meaning, community and relationship with the more-than-human world
• Tim’s work is also about collaboration, bringing together GPs, Primary Care Networks, nature-based practitioners, social prescribing link workers, universities, funders and local green providers
• At the heart of the episode is a hopeful question about scale - how do we move from inspiring local projects to a joined-up, evidence-informed, nationally accessible pathway that supports people, practitioners, communities and the NHS?

Shownotes:

https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-95-what-if-your-gp-could-prescribe-nature/

Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com

Please Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts

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