Rewilding Relationship

The Earth-human Relationship

Ecopsychology begins with the deceptively simple recognition that the human mind cannot be understood apart from the living world. Our bodies depend upon exchanges of air, water, food, sunlight, microorganisms, and the innumerable relationships that sustain life. Our psyches are shaped by places and landscapes, by other beings, by cultural stories and motifs, and by experiences of belonging and estrangement. Our communities exist within watersheds, climates, ecosystems, histories, and are shaped by the passage of generations. Throughout human history encounters with an animate world have led to deep questions of meaning, sacredness, mortality, and mystery.

Over a decade ago, in Toward an Integral Ecopsychology, I proposed an integral ecopsychological approach that centered on the study of the multileveled connection between humans and Earth [1]. Around the same period, Bioalchemy explored this life-giving connection through the lens of enchantment, highlighting transformative belonging, the idea of the in-between, and the recovery of a wider human relational spectrum [2]. Both inquiries emerged from the intuition that psychological, ecological, cultural, embodied, and spiritual life are intimately intertwined. Healing the Earth–human relationship requires attending to its multidimensional nature, while recovering ways of participating more consciously in the web of relationships that sustain us. Rewilding Relationship grows from these earlier inquiries while giving them a more focused and practice-oriented form, refined by ongoing offerings and collaborations. Rewilding is less about restoring a connection that has been lost than about tending the relational field at the core of our being.

The framework begins with the understanding that humans are not isolated selves who must somehow reconnect with nature, but participants in an intrinsically relational world. Body, Earth, Community, and Mystery describe four interwoven dimensions of this participation.[*] Through them, Rewilding Relationship traces a movement from separation to relationship, from relationship to conscious participation, and from participation to life-affirming reciprocity. These are not separate territories, nor an exhaustive map of human experience, they serve as portals into the living field of relationships we are called to tend and nurture.

Nature is increasingly recognized for its capacity to support psychological and physical wellbeing. A growing body of research associates experiences in natural environments with psychological wellbeing, restoration, and reductions of psychological distress [3]. Equally, recent systematic reviews of nature-based interventions report promising effects for depression, anxiety, stress, mood, and wellbeing, while also noting considerable variation in interventions, populations, and research quality [4,5]. These contributions are important, yet ecotherapy points at something deeper.

Ecotherapeutic practice goes beyond simply conducting conventional therapy outdoors. Nature, in this way, is not only a setting, but an active agent, entering and reshaping the therapeutic field itself [6-8]. If nature remains as resource used to improve human wellbeing, the deeper layers of our relationship with it remain largely unchanged. Forests become restorative environments, rivers become tools for regulation, and encounters with animals become therapeutic interventions. Nature turns into a kind of psycho-emotional commodity without addressing the deeper roots of both pathology and flourishing: a conscious, caring embrace of our relational belonging. Rewilding relationship hinges upon this realization.

Here, rewilding does not mean romanticizing wildness, rejecting civilization, or returning to an imagined pristine past. I use the term to point toward the recovery and expansion of our relational capacities—embodied, ecological, communal, imaginal, and spiritual. To rewild relationship is to become more available to the wider spectrum of relationships through which our lives unfold, which allows for the cultivation of more compassionate, life-affirming engagement. Seen this way, rewilding relationship is less about connecting with something outside ourselves than about awakening to the web of relationships that sustain us.

Body: Inhabit

The first doorway is the most immediate, the living body. Our lives are often imagined as something occurring at the interface between us and an external environment. Yet our bodies tell another story. They carry evolutionary histories, microbial communities, water, minerals, and ongoing exchanges energy and information that constantly transgress the human/nature binary. Breath alone unsettles any simple boundary between organism and world. Atmosphere enters the body, becomes part of us, and is returned again. Food becomes tissue; sunlight becomes warmth; water circulates through bodies, clouds, rivers, plants, and oceans. The body participates in, expresses, and belongs to the world.

To inhabit the ecological body is to become more attentive to sensation, breath, movement, affect, and the continuous exchanges through which organism and environment participate in. Somatic and body-oriented approaches to psychotherapy have similarly focused on bodily sensation, movement, and embodied awareness as significant dimensions of therapeutic experience [9]. Rewilding Relationship extends this focus to the body’s ecological participation. Somatic awareness need not lead only inward; it can also reveal the body’s intimate belonging to a wider ecology.

This understanding shifts the locus of transformation from the individual to the relational field in which embodiment takes place. In ecotherapeutic practice, the emphasis, subtle but consequential, moves from grounding the body in nature to experiencing embodiment itself as a form of ecological participation.

Earth: Encounter

If Body reveals our organismic participation in the world, Earth foregrounds the other-than-human beings and places that allow such participation. A tree, bird, creek, stone, wind, coastline, or forest can remain an object of perception, a pleasant background, or a therapeutic resource. But sustained, careful tending of place can open into meaningful encounter, and what had been mere scenery begins to acquire presence and depth. In this way, encounter deepens into relationship.

Ecopsychology has long challenged the assumption that psychological life ends at the boundaries of the individual. Ecological selfhood, sense of place, enchantment, and other approaches to ecotherapy each point, in different ways, toward a more porous understanding of psyche and identity. This relational understanding rests on an ecocentric perspective that recognizes the inner dynamism and value of the other-than-human world and the possibility of meaningful, nourishing encounter with it. In practice, the presence of nature is fundamental to the ecotherapeutic encounter, serving as a living guide between practitioner and client [6,7].

The Earth dimension asks: What changes when nature is encountered not simply as environment or resource, but as a living presence with deep psychological import? This kind of encounter can help recover capacities for attention, intimacy, wonder, communication, and respect that are foundational in the quest for psycho-emotional resilience and development. When the more-than-human world is experienced primarily as object, commodity, or backdrop, our psychological vitality is impoverished, while relating to its animate dimensions enlivens our own creative potentials.     

Community: Contextualize

No encounter with nature is purely individual, as it’s mediated by our families, cultures, languages, histories, identities, economies, and ancestral background. Accordingly, places carry stories of migration and displacement, colonization and resistance, labor and ceremony, protection and exploitation. Relationships take place in a dynamic, eco-cultural context.

The Community dimension highlights the cultural elements of our relation to nature, alongside the histories of particular places, and the wider more-than-human community. Ecological relationship is always culturally and historically situated. This is vital, as universalized ideas of “nature” and environmental belonging are intimately connected to race, colonial histories, Indigenous relationships with land, access to green spaces, and other environmental justice issues [10,11]. Ecological belonging, then, cannot be solely understood through universal claims about humanity and nature; it must also reckon with the different cultural worlds that inform our relationships with land and place.

Bringing these cultural dimensions into the conversation helps ecotherapy resist universalizing any single experience of “nature connection” and provides a critical lens for examining anthropocentric and culturally supremacist assumptions embedded in our relationships with the living world. Community also allows ancestry, ecological justice, collective grief, and the histories carried by place to enter more fully an ecotherapeutic framework.

Mystery: Open

Nature does not only regulate, restore, or contextualize us. Sometimes the more-than-human world fills us with wonder and awe, bringing us face to face with the deeper questions of our human journey. Encountering an enchanted world and its inhabitants can either expand or dissolve familiar boundaries of identity, evoke grief, augment a capacity for symbolic experience, nurture a sense of extended kinship, and enable a revelatory kind of participation in realities beyond the individual self.

Such experiences have long occupied an important place in ecopsychology [12]. Nature-based transpersonal experiences in which reverence, sacredness, or mystical communion becomes manifest go well beyond psychological restoration and tap into the creative potentials of spiritual development. Through contemplative practice, ritual, imaginative exploration, and direct encounters with place, nature may reveal itself as a primary manifestation of the sacred, serving as source of spiritual life. In this way, nature and its broader context open onto the mystery of existence itself, situating the human journey within the unfolding life of Earth and cosmos.

In ecotherapeutic practice, Mystery allows for the transpersonal dimensions of experience to inform and nurture the therapeutic container, while a renewed sense of the sacred may provide pathways of profound healing. The task is less to explain such experiences than to create a fertile space in which they can unfold and be explored, as we remain attentive to the meanings, relationships, and possibilities that emerge through them.

Body, Earth, Community, and Mystery are not four separate practices, they are dimensions of a single relational field. Their integration suggests a movement from alienation to conscious relationship, engaged belonging, and life-affirming reciprocity. As relationship deepens, awareness of interdependence begins to affect how we conceive of ourselves and how we participate in the world. Reciprocity is not a fifth dimension of Rewilding Relationship; it is a quality of relationship that can emerge through the other four.

At its heart, reciprocity involves the possibility of mutually enhancing relationship. This does not imply an equal exchange or a transaction between separate parties. Rather, it points toward relationships in which receiving and giving, healing and caring, arise from recognizing one’s intimate belonging to life’s web.

If the natural world is primarily a therapeutic resource, as can be the case with a narrow understanding of ecotherapy, the central question concerns the potential benefits of encountering the other-than-human world. Yet nurturing a more balanced and dynamic relationship with the rest of nature introduces the following query: What does this relationship ask of me? A life-affirming engagement may involve tending a place, changing a habit, participating in ecological restoration, grieving, creating ritual, teaching, or simply learning to pay better attention. Reciprocity, in this way, is the ethical maturation of caring participation in the web of life.

Rewilding Relationship brings into conversation several streams that are often practiced separately: ecopsychology and ecotherapy, somatic and embodied approaches, cultural and systemic perspectives, contemplative practice, and transpersonal understandings of the human experience. The purpose of the project is not to replace existing ecotherapeutic approaches, but to offer a multidimensional map for noticing what may be present, absent, emphasized, or forgotten in our work.

Each dimension can be approached through a guiding inquiry that orients ecotherapeutic practice:

Body: Inhabit
In what ways do I recognize my body as an expression of the living body of Earth?

Earth: Encounter
What changes when I cherish the depth of the other-than-human world?

Community: Contextualize
How can I better honor the cultures and communities that shape this place?

Mystery: Open
What becomes possible when I venture beyond the threshold of my understanding?

Reciprocity: Engage
How might this, too, become mutually life-enhancing?

The framework can inform psychotherapy and counseling, coaching, education, facilitation, community work, retreats and workshops, and experiential nature-based programs. Rewilding’s practices can range from sensory and somatic awareness to sustained encounters with place, ecocultural inquiries, groupwork, contemplative, transpersonal, and ritual practices, and life-affirming forms of engagement with nature.

Two decades ago, Bioalchemy emerged through working closely with the cycles of decay and composting. What began as an ecological project gradually became a lesson about reciprocal transformation, where organic matter, microorganisms, bodily labor, psyche, and place became increasingly difficult to regard as independent processes. Transformation seemed to connect self and world. I came to understand this experience as a relational wisdom arising from consciously participating in nature’s cycles [2]. Rewilding Relationship continues that inquiry in another form.

The task is not merely to take the human psyche into nature, nor is it simply to reconnect two things that were never truly separate. The invitation is to recover and cultivate our capacity to more fully inhabit the relationships already sustaining us, to recognize Body, Earth, Community, and Mystery as dimensions of an animate world. Rewilding relationship does not begin with connection as goal, but with relationship as a given; not simply with what the living world can offer us, but with how we learn to more consciously participate with it. And from that participation, we’re called to engage in relationships that are mutually life-enhancing.

---

References

1. Villaseñor-Galarza, A. (2013). Toward an integral ecopsychology: In service of Earth, psyche, and spirit. Integral Review, 9(3), 25–39.
2. Villaseñor-Galarza, A. (2015). Bioalchemy: On the transformative belonging of nature, humans, and soul. CreateSpace.
3. Bratman, G. N., Anderson, C. B., Berman, M. G., et al. (2019). Nature and mental health: An ecosystem service perspective. Science Advances, 5(7), eaax0903. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax0903
4. Coventry, P. A., Brown, J. V. E., Pervin, J., et al. (2021). Nature-based outdoor activities for mental and physical health: Systematic review and meta-analysis. SSM – Population Health, 16, 100934. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100934
5. Jessen, N. H., Løvschall, C., Skejø, S. D., et al. (2025). Effect of nature-based health interventions for individuals diagnosed with anxiety, depression and/or experiencing stress—a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Open, 15, e098598. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2024-098598
6. Jordan, M. (2015). Nature and therapy: Understanding counselling and psychotherapy in outdoor spaces. Routledge.
7. Hasbach, P. H. (2018). Using nature as a therapeutic partner. Counseling Today.
8. Rust, M. J. (2006). Creating psychotherapy for a sustainable future. Psychotherapy and Politics International. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppi.69
9. Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton.
10. Finney, C. (2014). Black faces, white spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the great outdoors. University of North Carolina Press.
11. Whyte, K. P. (2018). Settler colonialism, ecology, and environmental injustice. Environment and Society, 9(1), 125–144.
12. Davis, J. V. (1998). The transpersonal dimensions of ecopsychology: Nature, nonduality, and spiritual practice. The Humanistic Psychologist, 26(1–3), 69–100.

---

[*] Rewilding Relationship grows out of my ongoing work in transpersonal and integral ecopsychology and represents a more recent articulation in the context of ecotherapeutic theory and practice.