Natural Health and Wellbeing

Who We Are

Lorraine Trowers

While supporting women in recovery from trauma based addiction, it became apparent nature connection could really allow time out of the recovery process to not only support mental wellbeing and promote holistic balance, but also to adopt a supportive reciprocal relationship with nature. This inspired Lorraine to set up The Place Outside CIC, to support people to connect with themselves, each other and the natural environment.She has spent time in nature to support her own healing journey through Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind Map of the Psyche and has her own ongoing practice to support her own wellbeing

Lorraine qualified as a Nature Based Practitioner/ Ecotherapist , after studying Ecopsychology with the Natural Academy https://www.naturalacademy.org/practitioners/

Lorraine enjoys being out on the land being immersed in nature and supporting people in their own personal healing exploration through the natural environment and witnessing how transformative this can be.

Alice Goodenough: an environmental educator and researcher. She is interested in how people’s relationships with natural space contribute to their health and well-being. She coordinated the Good from Woods scheme in partnership with Plymouth University and recently researched girl’s perceptions of forestry, for the Timber Girls project. She qualified as a Forest School teacher in 2015.

Alison Cockcroft is an artist and community arts practitioner. Her art practise explores relationship, including the human relationship to nature. She is drawn to natural and outdoor settings as spaces that provide a rich sensory and immersive experience in which to explore creativity and connection. Alison works with an awareness of the Five Ways to Nature Well-Being framework by gently guiding participants with activities that encourage looking and noticing, emotional responses and empathy. Art based practises of looking, recording and making, support participants to deepen their knowing of a place and to build a relationship with it. Art processes also support the making of meaning by engaging people with imaginative speculation, narrative, metaphor and ritual. Any methods and art materials used are environmentally sensitive and the emphasis is on experience and process rather than specific outcomes.

Katie Rowan has led groups of children, teens and adults in nature and land based education for over 10 years. Training as a forest school leader in 2005 she went on to deliver transformational land based programmes for four years at Embercombe in Devon and more recently spent three years as a therapeutic educator at Ruskin Mill college in Gloucestershire. Katie works as a mentor for teenage girls in her local community witnessing the challenges faced by young women as they navigate the adolescent journey and the immense power and potential held in this stage of life.

Matt Meadows

Matt left full-time teaching in 2018 to set up Into The Green Forest School.  In a world where we increasingly find ourselves connected via hand held devices and the internet many of us feel like we have lost our connection with the natural world around us. His aim was to reintroduce nature and the outdoors into people’s lives and find their reconnection.

Over the past 5 years, he has provided opportunities for participants, of all ages, to spend quality time in nature.  Matt has worked with family groups, undergraduate students, school children and home-schooled groups. 

Over the past year he has trained for a certificate in Eco-psychology and Nature Based Practice https://www.naturalacademy.org/.  He has worked with individuals and facilitated groups in nature with the aim to help people increase their health and wellbeing through nature connection and nature based practice.  This can help those with anxiety, depression, life limiting illnesses and PTSD by helping them to re-establish their own relationship with nature, as part of nature, and develop their ability to resource themselves through nature based activities.