Key Takeways
There is a way of thinking about therapy that begins with the quiet fact that you are not separate from where you are. The room you are sitting in, the air you are breathing, the temperature of your skin, the light reaching your eyes right now. None of this is background. All of it is part of the thinking, the feeling, and the noticing that happens in a session.
This is the ecological lens in our practice. It is not a separate modality I switch on and off. It sits under everything I do, whether the session is about grief, identity, a complicated parent, or a body that has been carrying too much for too long. I am a Vancouver-based therapist working online across Canada, and what I want to write about here is how body and land actually show up in the therapy room, even when the therapy room is on a screen.
How our practice thinks about body, land, and therapy
The body is not separate from where it is
If you have ever noticed that your shoulders drop slightly when you step out onto a porch, or that your breath changes at a treeline, or that some places make you more legible to yourself than others, you already know what this section is about.
The body is in constant conversation with its surroundings. Temperature, light, sound, movement of air, the proximity of other living things, all of it reaches the nervous system before it reaches language. We feel places. The question is whether therapy takes that seriously enough to actually work with it.
Most therapy as it has been taught in professional training does not. It treats the body as a container, the mind as a thing happening inside the body, and the environment as furniture. The ecological lens asks a different question. It assumes that cognition, feeling, and body state are already distributed across you and where you are, and that the therapy room is part of what we are doing together, not a neutral setting for it.
What this actually changes in a session
The change is mostly one of attention, not technique.
In a session, when a strong feeling rises, I might ask where in your body you feel it. That is a standard somatic move. I might also ask what is around you right now. Is there a window in the room you are in. Is the light warm or cool. Are you sitting on something soft or hard. Is there a tree or a plant visible. What does your breath do when you look at it.
These are not filler questions. They are a way of noticing that the nervous system is regulating itself with information from the room at the same time that you are thinking with me. Pulling that information into the session, instead of pretending it is not there, often lets the work land faster, because we are working with what the body is already doing rather than ignoring it. Writers like Cheryl Pallant, in the field of ecosomatics, put it more directly: the body is part of the global ecosystem, not a small thing inside it.
The place I am working from, and what that means
I want to name where I am.
I live and work on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, on what is currently called Vancouver. I am a settler. I am not Indigenous, and I do not practise therapy from Indigenous traditions or frameworks. Where the ecological lens in my work resonates with Indigenous knowledge systems, the resonance belongs to those traditions, not to the Western psychology lineages I was trained in. I do not draw on Indigenous teachings as a way to authenticate what I do.
What I can say honestly is that this coast has shaped the therapy I offer. I work from a body that has been formed by this rain, this light, the particular quality of a Pacific winter afternoon. My nervous system carries it. When I sit with a client and something shifts in the room, some of what is moving is not only what each of us brings. It is also where we are, and the long living histories of those places. Naming that, for me, is part of not pretending therapy is a neutral space.
Online therapy and what it makes possible
Something quietly remarkable about online therapy, for this kind of work, is that you stay in your own place. You are in your body in your home, your yard, your car in a parking lot, a trail, a cabin. For a lot of people that means the therapy is happening in a space your nervous system already knows something about.
Sometimes that is a gift. A familiar couch, a cat on the lap, a particular chair by the window, a plant you have watered for years. All of it is resource. Sometimes it is complicated. The room where something hard happened is the room you are doing therapy in. That is information too. We work with it.
Some clients take sessions from outside when they can. A porch. A garden. A forest clearing they can drive to. A park bench. A fire road. There is something about having ground under the body and sky overhead that lets certain things become sayable. I do not prescribe this. I mention it.
Some things we might actually do together
An ecological lens does not look like a particular exercise. It looks like a way of paying attention that is present in whatever we are doing. Some things it can include:
- Short pauses to notice what is around you and how your body is responding to it before we continue.
- Naming the felt sense of the space you are in during a session, as part of the work rather than as an aside.
- Working with a specific place that matters to you, visually, somatically, imaginally. A childhood yard, a river, a home you no longer live in.
- Noticing when the body is asking for movement, air, water, ground, and treating those as real requests rather than distractions.
- Bringing attention to seasonality, weather, and light as part of what you are carrying on any given week.
None of this is a program. It is attention, held consistently, over time.
If this way of working speaks to you
Not every reader who lands on a post about ecological psychology is looking for the same thing. Some are curious about a specific tradition. Some are looking for outdoor therapy. Some are wondering whether there is a therapist who does not pretend the land under our feet and the seasons around us are irrelevant to mental health.
For the last group, which is probably most people who read this far, this is the version I can offer. It is somatic therapy online that holds the body-land relationship as part of the work, not an add-on. If you want to go deeper into what contact with the living world does for mental and physical health, the Greater Good Science Center's research on nature and wellbeing is a good non-commercial place to read further. If you want to work together from here, a short consult is the way in.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ecological psychology in plain language?
Ecological psychology, as an academic term, is a specific tradition within cognitive science that looks at how people perceive and act in their environments. As most people use the phrase, though, it usually means therapy or psychology that takes the relationship between a person and their surroundings seriously, including the natural world. That broader meaning is closer to what my practice offers, under the umbrella of ecosomatics and ecotherapy.
Is this the same as ecotherapy?
There is overlap. Ecotherapy often refers to therapy that happens outside, or therapy that works explicitly with nature contact as part of the intervention. My practice is mostly online, but the orientation is compatible. We work with the body-land relationship whether or not you are physically outdoors during the session.
Do we have to do sessions outside for this to work?
No. Some clients take sessions from outside when they can, and I am glad when that is available to you. It is not required. Most of this work happens indoors, online, in whatever room you happen to be in, and the ecological lens is present in how we attend to that room.
Do you use Indigenous teachings in your therapy?
No. I am a settler therapist practising on unceded Coast Salish territory. I do not draw on Indigenous frameworks or teachings in my therapy. Where the ecological orientation in my work resonates with Indigenous knowledge systems, that resonance belongs to those traditions, not to me.
Is this a kind of environmentalism?
It is related. I think a practice that takes seriously the fact that we are part of a living world will naturally develop some care for that world. Therapy is not the place where I am trying to hand you a political position, though. Therapy is the place where we are noticing, together, what is already true about how your body is doing.
