Mid-July. I am standing in a forest that has just reached the peak of its year. There is so much dense, pulsing green here that the boundaries between individual trees dissolve. The forest feels like one huge, breathing organism…
…As I stand here, listening to the steady rush of the leaves, a question comes back to me — one I have heard for years, in all kinds of forms:
Where did this project actually come from?
Why ecotherapy?
I could tell you about gaps in the market, about trends in psychology, about the search for new methods. But that wouldn’t be the truth.
Today I will answer with complete honesty. This path did not begin with a carefully planned business strategy, nor with academic research. It began the moment my own private world suddenly came to a stop. It began with the rebellion of my body, which one day flatly refused to cooperate.
A diagnosis that wasn’t part of the plan
The diagnosis hit me suddenly and brutally. A rare inflammatory liver disease. Progressing, with no existing treatments for it. A condition so unusual, that it affects fewer than a hundred people in a million — most of them men. I found myself inside a fraction of a statistic.
As a psychotherapist and psychogastroenterologist, I had trusted the power of conversation my entire professional life. I believed that whatever we become aware of and put into words loses its power over us. So I did what seemed like the only logical step — I carried my fear and my pain into the therapy room. I worked on myself honestly, bravely, for many long months.
And talking really did help me. Step by step, I understood myself better — I untangled the knots of my past, named my patterns, mapped my inner tensions. My mind was growing calmer.
And yet . . . my body kept (still keeps!) burning . . .
The inflammation consuming me from the inside couldn’t have cared less about my beautiful intellectual insights! Then came a moment of terrifying helplessness. The moment I had to stand in front of myself and admit something that is exceptionally painful for a professional to say:
Talk alone is not enough. . .
My exhausted, overstimulated nervous system had no intention of regulating itself just because I had “understood” the problem. I found myself in a dead end. I had crashed into a wall and shattered into a million pieces. My body was begging for something I kept denying it — a language it could understand.
Escape to the forest
The first step didn’t look like any method. It looked like an escape.
I started running away to the forest — not because I had read about it in the research, but because it was the only place where my body would let go for a while. I would leave the therapy room, where I analyzed myself in every possible way, and walk in among the trees, where I didn’t have to analyze anything. And that’s when I noticed the first thing that gave me hope: after an hour in the forest, my breath was different. Deeper, slower — as if someone had lifted an invisible weight off my chest.
I decided to take that signal seriously. Since medicine was looking at my test results and therapy at my thoughts, I began looking at my body. I turned it into a laboratory. I watched what happened to my sleep, my gut, my tension — after a day in the city and after an hour among trees, after a conversation about my illness and after a moment of real silence. I took notes. I tested. I kept what worked and set aside what turned out to be nothing more than a pretty theory.
At the same time, I reached for body-based work. After years of treating my body like a broken machine that needed fixing, I was learning to listen to it — to feel tension before it became pain, to catch signals before they became symptoms. It was the hardest lesson of my life. No one had ever taught me to feel. I had been taught to understand.
There was nothing linear about it. There were weeks of improvement, and there were relapses that cut me down. But the direction grew clearer and clearer: everything that truly helped came through the body, not through the head.
What my own body taught me
Back then I still lacked the right concepts for all this. Today I have them — and behind me stand years of clinical research and hard science.
Conversation, though essential to healing, happens in the cerebral cortex. But chronic inflammation, dysregulation, the dramatic signals of the gut–brain axis — all of that happens one floor down. In the autonomic nervous system. And that system does not speak our language. It doesn’t understand our rational arguments or our brilliant metaphors.
It speaks the oldest language there is. It understands breath, movement, temperature, touch, and the rhythm of a heartbeat. It also understands the environment we are in, because for hundreds of thousands of years it was the natural world around us that sent the signal: “You are safe. You can stop fighting.”
In science we call this interoception — the ability to sense the internal states of the body. Today we know it is an absolute foundation of emotional regulation. You cannot train it with your intellect. You have to practice it with your body.
So I went looking for a new path. I entered somatic work. I began building regular, deliberate contact with nature — no longer a walk with a podcast in my ears, but a radical, deep presence. I was learning, from scratch, how to manage my own nervous system. Step by step. Month by month.
I won’t tell you a Hollywood tale about a miraculous overnight cure — that would insult both the science and my own story. Also- it’s not over yet.
I will tell you something far more important: my body finally began to respond. Where intellectual work had stopped, working through the body and nature led me further. I could no longer unsee that knowledge. It changed me for good — as a patient and as a therapist.
2020: therapy sessions from the forest
This project began to take root in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
I was spending most of my time in the forest back then — a forest which, by the way, we were at times officially banned from entering. I was working at the Feminoteka foundation. It was a dramatic time for women: lockdown had shut many of them inside four walls with their abusers.
I began running the hardest sessions from the forest. At first for a simple reason — that was where I had the strength to carry them. But before long I felt something I hadn’t expected. The forest was not just supporting me. The nature around me was becoming part of the therapeutic process.
From the therapy room to the project
When I returned to working with patients, carrying a new set of tools, I noticed a pattern that squeezed my heart.
The people sitting across from me were just like the person I had been not long before. With screaming somatic symptoms, with gut–brain axis disorders, with bodies locked in permanent fight mode. People who had been through excellent talk-based therapies and slammed into the very same wall. Not because their therapy was bad. Because it was incomplete.
When I added somatic elements and nature-based work to our sessions, their bodies confirmed — with relief — what had earlier saved me.
At some point it hit me that one-on-one work was not enough. An hour in the therapy room helps one person. But an hour in which I pass this knowledge on to other professionals will help hundreds of their patients. That is how this educational project was born. Out of cold arithmetic — and a burning conviction that tools which bring relief must not remain secret knowledge for the few. Today I teach what has passed the hardest test there is: the test of my own body, and of the bodies of my clients.
What ecotherapy is — and what it isn’t
At this point I need to clear up one misunderstanding that keeps coming back.
Ecotherapy is not pretty “forest bathing.” Reducing it to a weekend walk among the trees is like claiming that psychotherapy consists of sitting in a comfortable armchair.
Ecotherapy is a fundamental shift in the paradigm of health. It grows out of a hard fact: a human being is a living system, inseparably immersed in other living systems. Your nervous system, your microbiome, your closest relationships, and the forest outside your window are not separate fields. They are one mechanism, breathing together. If you treat only one fragment and ignore the rest, you get exactly what I got at the beginning: a partial effect, nothing more.
Think of a river. A river doesn’t flow because it “decided” to. It flows because the shape of the land, the rainfall, and gravity create conditions in which that movement is inevitable. Healing works exactly the same way. You cannot force it by decision. What you can do — with patience and knowledge — is create the conditions, in your body and in your environment, in which healing becomes possible again.
The Cascade Effect
If I had to put the mission of this whole project into a single sentence, I would call it the Cascade Effect:
The presence of one person sets off the healing of her relationships — and healed, regulated relationships become a force that heals our environment.
This is not a catchy marketing slogan. It is the principle behind every decision I make here. A person with a regulated nervous system finally has room to give, instead of spending all their energy on survival. And people living in healthy relationships treat the world around them completely differently. So I don’t teach simple “relaxation techniques.” I teach professionals and patients a way of living in which the health of one person and the health of the planet finally meet at a single point.
Why am I sharing this story with you?
Because I have grown ready to take it beyond the walls of the therapy room and the training hall.
If you are a professional who senses, deep down, that words are sometimes not enough — this project was born precisely out of that longing. If you are a patient whose body is screaming with pain while diagnoses bring no relief — I want you to know that your symptoms are not a verdict. They are an extremely important piece of information.
An experiment for this week
I want to leave you today with an invitation to a simple experiment. Do it this week. Go out to the nearest patch of green — a park, the edge of a forest, a single tree in the city. Leave your phone behind. Stay there for 15 minutes, in silence. You don’t have to fix anything. Just notice what your own breath is doing after that time.
This is not ecotherapy yet. But it is that first moment when your body starts to remember the way home.
Sylwia
