Read on or listen to this post:
Hello,
If this is the first time you’re hearing my voice, I’m genuinely glad you’re here. And if we’ve already met – whether that’s been out in the wild, beside water, in a village hall, in a Land Rover, or curled up somewhere warm with a cup of tea and a book – hello again. It’s lovely to have you listening.
I wanted to add this audio option to my blog posts because several of you asked for it, and when someone tells me they need something different, I listen. Feral Therapy is Disability Confident Registered, and that commitment runs through everything I do. It means meeting people where they are – truly where they are – in the way that works for them. Some of us prefer to read. Some of us need to listen. Some of us want both, or neither, or something else entirely. And all of that is welcome here.
So from now on, you’ll find this audio at the beginning of each post. You can listen whilst you’re walking, resting, cooking dinner, staring out the window, or simply letting words wash over you in whatever way feels right today.
For those of you who are new, let me tell you how this all began. Several years ago, I spent a year living wild – truly wild – and something shifted in me during that time. Something I didn’t fully understand until much later. That year is becoming a book, one I’m still writing, still piecing together, still trying to find the words for. And through that process, I started speaking to people who felt the same pull towards wildness that I did. People who wanted to remember something they’d lost or never quite found. People who needed to get back to their nature – not the polished, acceptable version, but the real, untamed, gloriously messy truth of who they actually are.
And so this work grew. Not as therapy in the clinical sense, but as something else. As held space. As opportunity. As someone walking beside you saying, “Yes, you can do this. Let’s try.”
Feral Therapy is bespoke because it has to be. I work with clients who want to push every limit – who climb, wild swim in January, bivvy on mountainsides, test themselves against wind and weather and their own edges. And I work with clients who cannot access a chair without support, who need gentleness and patience and a different kind of courage entirely. I love that. They love that. Because wildness isn’t about how far you can walk or how cold you can bear. It’s about coming home to yourself, however that looks for you.
And here’s the thing – when I talk about nature, I’m not always talking about something green and leafy and external. I’m talking about nature as everything. Including us. Including you. We are nature, even when we’ve forgotten it. Especially when we’ve forgotten it.
What I do here is help people get back to their nature through natural means. Not by adding more – more practices, more protocols, more things to achieve or master or tick off a list. I wrote about this recently, about the tyranny of more. How we’re constantly told we need to add and be and do more to be whole. But you’re already whole. You always were.
My work is about stripping away the unnecessary. Revealing what’s beneath. Peeling back all the extra layers we thought we needed to add, all the masks we thought we had to wear, all the shoulds and musts and have-tos that buried the real you somewhere underneath. Sometimes that happens by walking in wild places. Sometimes it happens by lying still on a yoga mat. But it always happens through subtraction, not addition. Through returning, not reaching.
Sometimes that happens out on the trails. Sometimes it happens in village halls, where we practice yoga, breathwork, the deep rest of yoga nidra – yogic sleep, that profound stillness where transformation happens without you even realising it. Sometimes it’s coastal rambles, while greenlaning, or sitting beside a river. Sometimes it’s just being witnessed, exactly as you are, without needing to perform or explain or shrink yourself down.
I hold space for all of it. For the big adventures and the quiet moments. For the days you want to climb and the days you can barely get out of bed. For the version of you that’s here right now, not the version you think you should be.
There’s something honest about the wild places, something that doesn’t pretend. They don’t ask you to be different or better or more palatable. They simply are, and in being around them, we remember that we can simply be too. And sometimes – not always, but sometimes – that’s quietly, powerfully transformative.
I don’t have all the answers. I’m still learning, still listening, still finding my own way back to wildness again and again. But I do know these places. I know how to hold space in them and in the quiet corners of village halls where healing can happen just as profoundly. And I know, absolutely, that you’re welcome here.
Exactly as you are. Right now.
Thank you for listening.
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