DON'T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB!
With the Next Generation OT training for professionals, learn how to reignite your purpose and achieve transformative results by integrating the NatureLed™ Approach into your current practice setting.
Ready for a Practice That Clients Want to Engage In?
If you’re longing for work that feels meaningful, effective, and alive again, this is your invitation.
Many modern models unintentionally strip therapy of what motivates humans most —
purposeful activity, sensory richness, and connection to the living world.
Nature-connection changes that.
Nature is so much more than a backdrop for therapy.
Connecting with nature is a highly meaningful occupation that motivates participation across the lifespan.
When clients are engaged with nature, they naturally:
- Move more
- Coordinate more
- Attend longer
- Persist through challenge
- Care about what they’re doing
That motivation is the engine that makes therapy work.
The future calls for courageous guides ready to bring the soul back to evidence-based practice.
NatureLed™ shows you the path forward.
What the NatureLed™ Approach Does Differently
NatureLed™ is an evidence-based, occupation-centered approach that re-engages humans in relationship with the living world — fast-tracking healing by restoring the sensory, emotional, and neural conditions where therapeutic goals naturally emerge.
It helps you move from:
- Exercises → everyday function
- Isolated skills → participation that transfers
-
Forced engagement → intrinsic motivation
Clients engage more fully because the activity matters to them.
Therapists work more sustainably because the environment shares the load.
The Story Behind the NatureLed™ Approach
A Lifelong Focus on Nature as Essential to Human Health
My work at the intersection of OT and nature was never accidental.
In 1995, while still in occupational therapy school, my senior thesis was titled
“The Loss of Biodiversity and Its Impact on Human Health.”
From the very beginning of my education, I was focused on one core belief:
Nature is not a therapeutic tool — it is a necessary condition for human health.
By 2003, I co-founded a nonprofit dedicated to helping families raise skillful, resilient children through nature-connection. Long before “nature-based therapy” entered common language, we were teaching parents how sensory engagement, movement, curiosity, and outdoor exploration support development, regulation, and participation across daily life.
Over the next three decades, I carried these principles into modern systems — early intervention, public schools, clinics, home health, nursing homes, and community programs.
Across ages and environments, the pattern was consistent:
Interventions are trying to support human development in systems that separate people from their bodies, their senses, and the natural world — and then wonder why engagement, regulation, and participation are so hard to sustain.
Many frameworks stop with using nature as a strategy. NatureLed™ goes further.
NatureLed™ restores nature as a meaningful, motivating, and relational part of our human experience —
because nature is where people have developed, healed, and participated for a million years.
NatureLed™ exists so you don’t have to choose between evidence, ethics, and what you intuitively know works.
It gives language, structure, and clinical grounding to what many practitioners already sense —
that reconnecting people with the living world isn’t extra.
It’s foundational.
NatureLed™ creates the conditions for healing to emerge.
.
Join the Next Generation OTs!Say Yes to a More Meaningful Way of Practicing, Leading, and Living.
Stepping beyond traditional systems requires a broader lens. If you’re hesitating, it’s likely because you’re thinking responsibly.
How do I meet goals without it looking unstructured?
How do I manage safety, risk, and liability responsibly?
How do I explain this clearly to supervisors or administrators?
How do I do this without adding more complexity to an already full workload?
You need clear frameworks, clinical reasoning, and practical systems that make this work ethical, effective, and defensible in real-world settings.
That’s exactly what the Next Generation OT professional training was built to provide.
You don't need to be an outdoor expert
to get started.
You already know how to assess risk, document goals, and create safety.
NatureLed™ shows you how to apply those same skills beyond four walls, with clear clinical rationale.
NatureLed™ is designed for real constraints — limited gear, tight schedules, changing conditions — and often reduces effort by letting the environment do more of the work.
The NatureLed™ Approach brings meaning and context back to intervention, making what you already do, work better.
Reminding you why you became an OT in the first place.
A Return To Our Neural-Nature Networks
For too long, systems shaped by behaviorism and disconnection have narrowed our work—
dulling the senses, fragmenting experience, and separating therapy from real life.
NatureLed™ restores what humans evolved to depend on:
the sensory, emotional, and neural networks shaped not in clinics or classrooms, but in forests, grasslands, and living landscapes.
This Training Is for You If You Want To:
- Integrate nature-connection skillfully into sessions, programs, and real-world OT practice
- Understand how sensory processing, emotional regulation, and environment work together
- Support motor, perceptual, and functional skills in context, not isolation
- Use practical, research-backed tools that transfer beyond the session
- Prevent burnout by restoring your own ecological and emotional baseline
NatureLed™ is where therapy becomes life again.
Not someday. Not in theory.
In practice.
Let Nature Lead You into a tomorrow you can be excited to wake up for.
EXPERIENCE
The NEXT GENERATION OT
A Training program for Professionals*
When you know better, you do better.
In the blink of an evolutionary eye everything about how we live has changed.
You can build bridges between the past and present for a better future.
The journey begins with a transformative three-day, live-online immersive workshop, where you will experience firsthand the core NatureLed™ practices. This powerful gathering lays the foundation for deep personal and professional growth over the next 11 weeks.
Following the live weekend experience, you will engage in 11 weeks of online learning, combining both self-paced "Stepping Stones" modules and live group mentoring calls to integrate the NatureLed™ framework into your work and your life.
*Participants report side effects of inspiration, positivity, improved health, a more joyful outlook, and a new perspective in life - seeing through NatureLed™ eyes.
What is the program layout?
LIVE ONLINE WORKSHOP
A weekend to restore and build a foundation
Begin your NatureLed™ practice by letting nature lead! The training begins with embodying the core practices of the NatureLed™ Approach. Your understanding of our sensory-nature will grow exponentially in this immersion weekend.
CORE NATURELED TOOLS AND FRAMEWORK
Handouts, templates and workbook
Receive powerful, ready-to-use templates, handouts, and a practical workbook designed to guide and deepen your work.
Examples: AEIOU Framework, SOS Process, and IIL (Invitational Insight Language) for client communication
8 STEPPING STONES
Eight Learn at your own pace modules
Digestible, self-paced training videos structured to build your skills one step at a time.
Explore foundational practices and tools you won't find anywhere else, grounded in the NatureLed™ Approach.
LIVE GROUP MENTORING CALLS
Ten 60-minute video based calls
Discussion, support and Q&A.
These 60-minute sessions are like tending a shared fire — where your journey is witnessed, your questions become kindling, and your growth is fed by the sparks of a community learning together. In these calls wisdom deepens, inspiration flows, and transformation takes root.
Applied Practice Activities
"Do" NatureLed™ in your setting
Each week you will have an assignment to practice integrating the principles of NatureLed™ where you work.
Certificate of Completion
The NatureLed™ Certification Program is a 31-hour training over 12 weeks.
After meeting all course requirements and completing a final project to demonstrate understanding, participants receive a certificate of completion. (AOTA course accreditation is pending).
Three Decades in the Making
The NatureLed™ Approach emerged from:
-
30 years of occupational therapy practice
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Early academic focus on biodiversity and health
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Nonprofit leadership and program development
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Clinical work across the lifespan
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Ongoing integration of neuroscience, sensory science, trauma recovery, and developmental research
Nature Connection isn't a trend or a technique for me.
It is a return to coherence — for our clients, our profession, and ourselves.
Nature has always led the way.
I help people remember how to listen.
Even though we have moved inside for 97% of our lives, our brains and bodies are still operating with the same neurology as our 10,000 year old cousins.
But, regardless of the setting you work in, nature, your nature, is right outside the door.
You don't have to go to the deep wilds.
What Makes NatureLed™ Different?
NatureLed™ is a complete, science-backed framework that realigns human health with how we evolved to function — through reciprocal relationship with nature, with others, and with our own embodied intelligence.
Rather than treating nature as an add-on or intervention tool, the NatureLed™ Approach recognizes nature-connection as a highly meaningful, motivating occupation that:
Drives
functional participation across the lifespan
Facilitates
motor, sensory, perceptual, and emotional development in context
Restores
regulation through engagement, not compliance
Improves
life for both the client and the practitioner
Integrating Nature-Connection into interventions
makes your work sustainable, transferable, and deeply effective.
Professional Confidence and Scope.
“NatureLed gave me the confidence to really be the OT in the room — to expand beyond just handwriting and feel certain about my role as an occupational therapist.”
Claire W. OTD
A foundational framework
“NatureLed completely shifted how I see nature in my practice. I used to think of it as a tool or resource, but now I see it as a foundational part of who we are as humans. That shift has been so influential in how I practice today. I feel much more confident advocating for nature as a primary part of occupational therapy, because I see its impact on regulation, connection, and participation every single day.”
Elizabeth D. OTD
I love our profession. And I hope you do too.
So let’s not escape it.
Let’s evolve it.
Reclaim occupational therapy as a practice rooted in:
- Meaningful activity
- Living systems
- Nervous system health
- And the deep human need to connect with the natural world and each other
Not someday.
Not in an ideal setting.
But now, right where you are.
Let’s go!
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is this retreat/program for?
How is this different from Forest School training or other outdoor training and franchise programs?
What does my investment include?
What will I learn in the training?
How does the distance part work?
Do I have to create my own curriculum?
Will I need insurance?
Will I be competing with other NatureLed™ Certified Providers?
I'm an occupational therapist. How will this help me?
I work in a traditional setting (school, clinic, rehab unit). Is this still for me?
I already work with kids in nature. Will I learn anything new?
Do I need camping gear? And will I have help setting up?
Do I have to camp? Really?
Accessibility & Participation: What to Know
What if I come and don't love it.
After I finish the mentorship, am I on my own?
After the retreat, can I advertise that I am a NatureLed™ Practitioner?
Can I get CEUs for this course?
Burnout is't a personal failing. It is a signal that the environments we practice in no longer align with human neurobiology, occupational meaning, or the ecological foundations of regulation and learning.
During the weekend workshop, be ready to decompress, feel alive, and learn powerful practices that will re-energize and inspire you to evolve your career- while relighting your own fire.
NatureLed™ restores relationship — creating the conditions where healing accelerates and therapeutic goals unfold through meaningful participation.
