Ecotherapeutic Guide Certificate

Introduction to Ecotherapy: A human authored program building confidence in leading others to go to nature to find answers to questions about life.

Would you describe yourself as a person who

• Loves nature and want to spend more time outdoors and connecting to the non-human world,

• Appreciates the healing and restorative power of being outdoors and want to find opportunities bring nature into your work and life,

• Is exploring how to incorporate nature-based therapies, coaching or counselling to enhance your offerings to clients and patients, or

• Have an interest in ecotherapy but do not know where to start?

Did you know that ecotherapy (also called nature-based therapy or green therapy) and nature-based personal development activities are growing in popularity?

• The majority of people spend 80% of their time indoors (and Vit-D deficiency is a big health issue around the world)

• People all over the world have a renewed interest nature-based personal growth and leadership training

Why I made this course

Starting off in nature-based therapy can be intimidating. It's hard to know where to start and most people think you need to go on long hikes or know the names of trees or be an expert in psychology or ecology.

In this course I will show you that its much easier to start than you think, and teach how you can bring ecotherapeutic activities into your work, home and communities.

The program emphasize short lecture videos, indoors and outdoors activities, and self-paced engagement.

Ecotherapeutic Digital Gardening Skills

A key aspect of the Ecotherapeutic Guide course is to develop your confidence in going to nature for answers. This skill is in contrast to going to digital platforms or AI.

This course was developed and published before the arrival of the big AI trend. No content that I produce here has been altered with any AI since then. This is an important promise to you in your learning experience as you connect with nature as your mentor and creativity muse.

You are also invited to a digital learning forum where you can experience and practice developing your digital ecotherapeutic skills using a regenerative digital garden approach.

I invite you to become an Ecotherapeutic Guide

This online, self-paced positive eco-psychothereutic course shows you how to connect nature-based activities with personal growth, learning and wellbeing goals.

The purpose of the program is to develop you own experiential understanding of positive ecotherapy, and articulate it in your own words based on personal insights and engagement with nature during the learning journey.

The program content integrates easily into daily life, including work, home and community -  keeping in mind the busy lifestyles and backdrop of work and studying.

This experiential program teaches simple nature-relatedness skills, using both indoors and outdoors activities to bring more nature-connected ways of thinking, relating and doing into people's lives.

What you are going to learn

• What ecotherapy is

• Why ecotherapy is becoming more popular

• The importance of biophilia (love for connecting to nature) for human wellbeing

• How to do ecotherapy (instead of just theory)

• A simple framework and repeatable and scaleable ecotherapeutic model, practice and tools

• Three cognitive skills to support attention restoration, gain more clarity, improve decision making and enhance creativity

• How to achieve goals and realize your potential learning from nature

• "Digital Gardening" skills

  
  

Benefits of completing this Introduction to Ecotherapy course

• Immersing yourself in the indoors and outdoors course activities will promote subjective, personal wellbeing and nature intelligence;

• Builds confidence by following a simple, structured process, practices, tools and content to guide others in how to integrate and cultivate personal and cultural transformations with nature as mentor;

• Restorative (including identity restoration, attention restoration, mood restoration and relationship restoration);

• A fun way for people to get together again (online and offline);

• Promotion of positive emotions;

• Building trust and hope;

• Helps to protect and restore your inner and outer life from machine influence and marketing;

• New digital skills including how to tend in a digital garden;

• Supports your future fit career development: help yourself and support your team and clients; and

• Fosters cultivating high performance cognitive skills of focused concentration, intentional mind-wandering and soft fascination.

Certification

Upon completion of this course, you will receive an Ecotherapeutic Guide certification issued by Udemy. To receive the formal Positive Ecotherapeutic Guide Certificate, you will need to complete all the formal assignments in the course.

Managing your learning expectations

Forest therapy

In this course you will learn more about many different types of nature-based therapy, with the goal of encouraging versatility in approaches, such as gardening therapy, wild swimming and more. You will be able to integrate what you learn in this course in your own forest therapy practices.

More about the style of learning design and delivery of this course:

This course design integrates applied positive psychology, the AGES neuroleadership model for adult learning, neurosequential model of education/therapy, therapeutic arts and contemplative practices.

The course content and approach is based on years of lived experience, research, including scientific papers, training with nature-based traditions, and corporate experience in designing and delivering professional leadership programs.

The course is a contemplative practice experience and personal regenerative journey, encouraging you to learn from nature and find ways to express your knowledge and understanding in your own words and visual language.

Each module in this course is designed to enable you to design a similar module to clients. This includes following the course structure as a blueprint for your services.

A consistent learning design principle in the recorded lectures: A summary with learning goals of start of a recorded lecture, then structured theory and learning activities, and finally closing the lecture with a summary of what was covered. This repetitive pattern helps with short and longer term memory recall and takes into consideration the variety of learning styles.

Tools and competencies to guide others in positive ecotherapeutic practices once the course is completed:

Many participants find each module to be rich in depth and with sufficient theory and experiential activities and tools to immediately start offering their own positive nature-therapeutic guidance of others.

They are able to do that without my assistance, using their guidebooks and going back to the course content where needed and support from the learning forum members.  For example, a student has been designing and hosting group events (including incorporating ecoart activities) for more than six months just working her way through the different modules.