I’m proud to announce that I recently graduated from a year and a half long Nature Connected Coaching program!

After three years of coaching in the consciousness and psychedelic space, I really wanted to hone my coaching skills and help people to take their microdosing and psychedelic integration to a higher level, and working with nature is the best way I know to do this.

I also knew that while I love working with psychedelics, ultimately my passion is the medicine inside of people, so I wanted to become the best coach I could possibly be in order to help my clients and students access the their own true potential.

So what is nature connected coaching?

It’s hard to describe, but one of my program colleagues, in his smooth, South African accent, describes nature connected coaching as “Using nature to help figure your shit out.”

Another wise woman I know proclaims “It’s just easier to be open minded when you’re outdoors in open spaces.”

Nature is older and wiser than we are. She has millions of years of trials and tribulations and has survived countless traumas, even abuse from naive humans.

When we connect with nature we have access to a wisdom greater than our own, and thus with some guidance we can use nature to transform our lives.

After all, nature is the original master of transformation.

I was accepted to the program, offered by Earth-Based Institute, just after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and was told shortly after that the whole program was being moved online. I was devastated. The reason I had signed up was so that I could be outside and learn. We were given the option to defer the program, but some little voice inside me told me to persist. The result was that I did much of the nature-connected training in solitude.

I had to prioritize spending time in the woods, learning to deepen my intuition and perception with the land I inhabit, and deepening my own connection with nature.

Along the way I cleared up a myth I had held my whole life. I had always thought that being indoors or using technology meant I was disconnected with nature. It wasn’t true.

Really, everything is nature.

My clients, me, my house, and even the technology we use to connect — all nature. Like the mycelium and the roots of the trees, we are inherently designed to connect to others and we find ways to do so. Nature Connected Coaching is not always about getting into the wilderness. Instead, it’s about returning to the knowledge that we ARE nature, and learning to live our lives this way.

So not only did I learn that I could learn Nature Connected Coaching online, but also that I could coach this way even from a great distance.

This was the gift of seeing it through and trusting my inner voice.

Finally, after more than a year online, the very last intensive had an in-person option. It was at the beautiful, cosmically aligned Starthouse outside of Boulder, Colorado. I went for it! Finally a chance to practice all that I had learned with my instructors and colleagues in person. Words are hardly adequate to describe my joy.

On the last day of the program we were tasked with finding an object from nature to represent our experience with nature-based coaching.

I searched and searched in the woods looking for the most magical thing to bring back to our final ceremony. Running out of time, I looked to the ground and saw an ordinary pinecone at my feet. I felt drawn to it so I picked it up. It spoke to me in the way that nature does, with signs, symbols, energy, sudden bursts of intuition.

I looked at the pinecone and around me saw the thousands of others just like it on the forest floor.

I realized this:

Not every pinecone would open, in fact most would not, but if they did, they could undergo one of nature’s most profound transformations. They would grow deep roots, and spectacular branches. They’d become a whole ecosystem, and provide shelter and food for the many animals of the forest. This little pinecone could become one of earth’s greatest assets.

People’s minds and hearts, I thought, are like this little pinecone. Not all of them will open. It takes several forces of nature to open a pinecone. Nature Connected Coaches are like that force of nature that can open the pinecone and release its potential and transform them into the magical and powerful thing that was inside them all along.