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Increasingly creative arts therapists are working in nature-based ways, creating a link to the first artists who drew with ochre and ash in caves, as well as to shamans as the first healers and arts therapists. Our ancestors’ art and healing work was based on their close reciprocity with the world around them – listening, communicating, receiving and giving thanks. Colonialisation has disrupted this close connection through land grabbing and destruction, destroying the land’s mauri/life force and its life-giving taonga/gifts of food and resources, which impacted heavily on the peoples living on this land. The challenge and invitation for arts therapists working in a nature-based way is to do so in collaboration and with support of the original guardians/kaitiaki of the land, to honour their ancestral rights and avoid cultural appropriation.

Western people often have claimed the living world as a ‘resource’, as ‘dead’ material that can be used. Nature-based arts therapists recognise the interdependence and interconnectedness of all life as well as the sentience of all beings. The respect offered towards a client is extended also to spaces outdoors and permission is gained from the land before entering and in every stage of building relationship.

Nature-based arts therapy is suitable for most clients as we are all born of the earth. Connecting to it through art, ritual, presence practices and mindfulness is necessary for humans’ mental health and for a planet deeply in need of our loving attention and supportive action. Working outside with a client can help foster and strengthen the client’s and therapist’s connection to their local natural environment, leading to an enhanced sense of belonging and the establishment of a mutually supportive relationship between the land the client/therapist.