About us
Regenerating the land and ourselves
Our goals:
- To promote well-being, personal growth, and healing through nature-based activities and ecotherapy work.
- To increase awareness of the natural world and deepen our relationship with it using walks, talks and active learning.
- To cultivate a sense of reciprocity, respect and reverence towards the more-than-human world, recognizing our interconnectedness with nature and its sentience.
- To help regenerate natural ecosystems and biodiversity employing practical tasks on and with the land.
- To encourage that our behaviour, work, leisure, culture and society respect and honour this human-nature relationship.
Robert and Sebastiana Black cofounded Ecotherapy East in 2021 a year after Robert inherited a 12-acre Church Farm meadow in Bramfield, Suffolk, from his ancestors who used to farm the land. They brought together a team of directors and set up a Community Interest Company in order to develop and expand their work.
Robert and Sebastiana have been running ecotherapy and mindfulness in nature workshops and retreats at different venues in East Anglia since 2016, including Cambridgeshire, North Norfolk and Suffolk. They are in the process of gaining planning permission to run more events on the meadow. Given the huge benefits it can have on wellbeing, mental health as well as our relationship with the natural world, they feel a sense of urgency about offering this work more widely.
They have been regenerating and increasing biodiversity on the meadow with the help of community and volunteers since 2020. The team have planted and been looking after over 500 native trees, sown wildflower patches and nurtured a pond on site. Machinery usage on the land has been reduced by, for example, scything the grass. Robert created a land labyrinth to provide a resource for contemplation and mindful walking. Their intention has been to not only regenerate the land, but also deepen their relationship to it; renewing their sense of participation and belonging to the ecosystems. Joanna Macy’s Active Hope work has been particularly inspiring, which invites us to reconsider our place in the world.
We hold monthly communithy days days on the meadow.
Whether working with the land or developing workshops, we are informed by and integrate ways of working like:
- ecotherapy
- mindfulness and Buddhist psychology
- self-compassion
- internal family systems therapy
- expressive arts
- poetry
- depth psychology
- deep ecology
- eco-spirituality
- process oriented psychology
- Jungian dream work