About Eco-Sessions

Tyler is working as an Intern at Sea to Tree while he is completing his master’s in counselling psychology. Tyler has spent the last eight years serving families in the Sooke community in the capacity of a nature playschool teacher, urban farmer, and teacher-mentor with the Sooke Heartwood learning community. Tyler’s deep connection to the soil, all living things, and Zen Buddhism deeply inspires his counselling practice.

Here is Tyler’s blog about the ‘Walk and Talk’.

I thought I’d take a moment today to talk a little bit about eco-sessions, and one in particular, the Walk and Talk.

Now, just as the Walk and Talk sounds, it’s a chance to get out of the counselling office and take a walk with your counselor. You can head out and go for a stroll around a park, you can head down the Galloping Goose or a bike trail, or you can head off into the woods. You need to consider how you’re feeling that day, and your ability needs, and what you need in terms of privacy. Some people are happy having their counseling sessions out in the public while others might be looking for a little bit more of a private setting. 

Why would someone want to go for an eco-session or a walk and talk? Sometimes it can be as simple as just wanting to get out of the counseling office and shake things up a little. One of the great things of the ‘Walk and Talk’ is that you are not sitting staring at each other. You’re looking forward, you’re walking around, you’re hearing birds chirping, you can look up in the trees or sky, and it can give you a chance to process everything in a different way.

Another benefit of the walk and talk is that simply the act of going for a walk actually has benefits. So as we’re walking, we’re going from left to right, left to right, we’re actually doing something called activating bilateral stimulation. As we walk, we’re activating one side of our brain and then the other. As we move back and forth, it’s bouncing back and forth between the hemispheres. Why does this matter? Well, as it turns out, that activation, bilateral stimulation, has been researched and proven to contribute a lot to processing emotions, processing trauma, and it’s the cornerstone of a really amazing modality called EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing.

Bilateral stimulation in walking is just a piece of EMDR. If you’ve heard of EMDR and you’re interested, you’re lucky because at Sea to Tree we have a number of counselors who are fully trained and certified for EMDR. So you can head to seatotree.ca, check out the counselors there. I haven’t done my certification for that yet, but when we’re out on our walk and talk, we just naturally get benefits as we go. And when you think about it, this is not terribly surprising because one of the great ways that we’ve naturally processed challenging times as humans, is to get out and get moving. We feel better after a walk; that’s because there is benefit to the bilateral stimulation that walking provides.

All right, friends, I hope you have enjoyed this blog and have a little bit more knowledge about what an eco session or a walk and talk could mean for you. If you are interested in trying this, you can head to seatotree.ca/tyler, book a free 20 minute consultation, and we can chat. If the mention of EMDR sparked some interest, you can always head to seatotree.ca. We’ve have several EMDR certified practitioners and they can give you a lot more information about how it all works, and what it can do to support you.

Anyway, I hope you get a chance to get outside today, maybe go for a walk?

May you be well, may you be happy, and I hope to see you soon.