Ecotherapy: How Nature-based Therapy Supports Mental Health

As part of our celebration of Mental Health Awareness Day, we are pleased to offer a webinar with Dr. Amy Balentine entitled "Ecotherapy: How Nature-based Therapy Supports Mental Health”.  The webinar is a great opportunity to learn the many reasons we get a mental health boost when we spend time connecting with nature, and to find out ways counselors can incorporate nature into therapy to offer even more mental health support to both children to adults.

Dr. Balentine is a clinical psychologist and owner of Memphis Center for Mindful Living, LLC. The center offers therapy to children, teens, and adults who are looking for holistic, evidenced-based treatment of anxiety, depression, trauma, loss, relationship challenges, and dysregulation. It’s the perfect place for people willing to step into nature-based and mindfulness work,

She is also a mindfulness teacher and has trained at UCSD Center for Mindfulness, where she also teaches a mindful self-compassion program for children she co-developed with fellow teacher Lorraine Hobbs. They are the co-authors of The Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids.

She is passionate about addressing the mind-body within the ecology of the local landscape. She has found mindfulness to be a healing, grounding, and connecting way of relating to herself and the world and shares mindfulness practices both in therapy and in mindfulness meditation classes, retreats, and trainings for teachers and students at area schools.

She volunteers at local parks as a Tennessee Naturalist in training and looks for every opportunity to spend time birding, gardening, walking her dog, hiking, and kayaking with friends, her husband and two teenage children.