What is 'Green Prescribing'?
These images are both photos I took when I allowed myself a 'moment'. The tree is in Kingley Vale ancient woods & the rose & bee were in my garden.
https://youtu.be/vudmHPMyPV4?is=3m_0jSyrH_zRd2Rf
The healing power of nature always fascinated me & I referred myself to a woman only therapeutic allotment group several years ago. I turned up, checked who the participants were & then sadly & reluctantly walked away without entering the allotment gates. It transpired there was a lady I worked with attending it, a lady I knew as a service user. A year or 2 later I had really grappled with the frustration of how I'd really wanted to experience nature therapy & not have to worry about privacy or boundaries or awkwardness. I worked in Brighton & Hove community mental health teams for over 10 years & worked out I probably knew about 500-700 service users. It wasn't that I didn't wish to see them but I knew it would be a boundary & privacy issue for them as well as for me.
I visited Plot 22 & had a chat with the wonderful woman who founded it, she gave me some great advice, if I wanted to look further into nature therapy I should attend a course & "meet people where they're at".
I then decided to apply to Grow. I was stressed out at work & had other issues in my life & had heard so many good things about them. I applied & I got on their Autumn season 6 week programme. One day a week of being collected in a minibus with a group of 12 others to spend a day outdoors, learning new skills, visiting new plces & making new connections. It was one of the most healing things I ever did for myself & was healing 'beyond language'. Grow was an amazing charity which became connected to the National Trust. We would meet at the beautiful learning barn & gather round it's lovely log burner. We meditated in the rain, got a tour of the sheep farm, did green wood working on shave horses. We visited Sheffield Park & experienced it's glorious colours & sat on the South Downs doing mindful sketches. By the end of the first day something striking happened to me & as I hopped off at my stop & said goodbye & was waved at by the troops on the minibus, I felt seen & valued & part of something. I actually felt a physical leap in my body of my self esteem jolting off the floor & in an upward trajectory. And from then on (that was October 2019) I made it my mission to learn as much as I could about nature facilitation, connection & Green Prescribing & how to offer it & look into why it worked. (I later discovered the benefit of my curiosity. As if you look into & gather together evidence around how certain therapeutic offerings are effective at enhancing wellbeing it comes in very handy when you're asked to help write a bid to set up a co-produced project with a green initiative. I helped write such one such bid & a £25000 fund pot was secured to fund the project with the NHS & Grow. I also helped organise & fundraise for 'Voyage of Recovery', which was an amazing blue wellbeing project. 'Blue wellbeing' being water related nature therapy). So here's a summary and beneath it are the courses & experiences I have chosen to take part in in my spare time, in order to spread the benefits of nature to an even wider audience.
- Being outdoors encourages physical activity.
- Being around greenery improves feelings of wellbeing. (Findings show even having fake plants or pictures of greenery & watching nature programmes improves wellbeing).
- Nature activities encourage equality & boost confidence & self esteem.
- Accessing nature encourages people to continue to look after it, e.g. pursue conservation work.
- Connecting to nature helps regulate emotion.
- Nature Connectedness fosters feelings of belonging.
- Nature feeds in to all Five Ways to Wellbeing: Connecting, Learning, Activity, Noticing & Giving.
- These are just some benefits off the top of my head ... there are so many more.
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