Become a
NatureLed™ Practitioner
with
The Next Generation
Professional Pathway
RxOutside, LLC is an AOTA Approved Provider of Professional Development.
Individual professional development activities may be approved for AOTA CEUs.
Please refer to each course page for specific approval information.
DON'T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB!
Learn how to reignite your purpose and achieve transformative results by integrating nature connection into your current practice setting.
At a moment when technology and AI are rapidly reshaping healthcare, the NatureLed™ Approach strengthens the very things that makes OT the profession of the future: embodied presence, perceptual attunement, relational regulation, the ability to support real human participation in real environments and meaningful activity. Rather than competing with technology, NatureLed™ practice clarifies and elevates the distinct value occupational therapy brings to a wildly unknown future.
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
Motivation is the engine that makes therapy work.
The future calls for courageous guides ready to bring the soul back to evidence-based practice.
The Nature Connection Practitioner™ pathway shows you how.
Take Me To The Pathway!
What the NatureLed™ Framework Does Differently
NatureLed™ is an evidence-informed, occupation-centered framework that uses a nature-connection model to re-engage clients in relationship with the living world — fast-tracking healing by restoring the sensory, emotional, and neural conditions where therapeutic progress naturally emerges.
It helps you move from:
- Exercises → everyday function
- Isolated skills → participation that transfers
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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™ Framework
A Lifelong Focus on Nature as Essential to Human Health
My work at the intersection of OT and nature was never accidental.
In 1996, 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 use nature as a setting. 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 pathway 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.
The Next Generation Practitioner pathway shows you how to apply those same skills beyond four walls, with clear clinical rationale.
The NatureLed™ Framework 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™ Framework brings meaning and context back to intervention, making what you already do, work and feel 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 or allied health practice
- Understand how sensory processing, emotional regulation, and environment work together
- Support motor, perceptual, and functional skills in context, not isolation
- Use practical, evidence-based tools that transfer beyond the session
- Prevent burnout by restoring your own ecological and emotional baseline
NatureLed™ is where therapy becomes life again.
In theory and in practice.
Let Nature Lead You into a tomorrow you can be excited to wake up for.
EXPERIENCE
The NEXT GENERATION OT
Professional Training Pathway for OTs and Allied Health 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 free course! Once you've completed the free course, enroll in our 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 with the 9 week hybrid syncronous/asynchronous online mentorship in applied nature-connection.
9 weeks of supported online learning, combining both self-paced "Stepping Stones" modules and live group mentoring calls to integrate the NatureLed™ framework with 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.
Three Decades in the Making
The NatureLed™ Approach emerged from:
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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 daily activity 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 this profession.
And if you are here, you probably do too.
Occupational therapy was born in a time of upheaval.
From the beginning, nature was foundational.
As the treatment.
OT emerged to challenge the medicalization of human suffering, grounding healing in meaningful activity, real environments and relationship, especially during times of collective trauma.
This is what made the profession radical then and
It's what the future is asking for now.
So let’s not escape occupational therapy.
Let’s evolve it.
Reclaim a practice rooted in:
-
nervous system health
-
living systems
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meaningful occupation
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connection 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 teaches the Next Generation OT?
Who is this program for?
How is this different from other Nature-Based Trainings?
What are the learning outcomes?
I work in a traditional setting (school, clinic, rehab unit). Is this still for me?
Delivery Format and Contact Hours
OTPF Educational Categories
What is the educational level of this course?
Accessibility & Participation
Will I be competing with other NatureLed™ Practitioners??
After I finish the pathway, am I on my own?
Pathfinder Professional Recognition: Certificates & Digital Badges
Refunds and Cancellation
Results Based Learning Gaurentee
Disclosures
Burnout is a signal that the environments we practice in don't align with the conditions we need to be healthy.
During the NatureLed™ journey, 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.
