Permaculture for Health Practitioners – Supporting your practice to flourish

Are you a doctor, counsellor, therapist, or health practitioner looking to bring more natural vitality into your work and wellbeing? This course introduces permaculture design as a practical and inspiring approach to support your practice by creating nature-inspired, beautiful, diverse, sensory spaces for you to sit, talk, listen, relax, and observe.

Grounded in ecopsychology and the growing evidence for green prescriptions, we’ll explore how even the smallest outdoor space – from a window box or balcony to a roof garden, patio, small garden, or even larger grounds – can be designed to promote mental and physical health and wellbeing. 

In this course we will explore how permaculture can help us to design environments that nurture connection, resilience, and balance. For practitioners, this approach offers a way to feel supported and restore your own wellbeing as well as that of patients, clients, and colleagues.

Drawing inspiration from peace gardens, sensory gardens, herb gardens, and healing gardens to show how you can enrich your practice. We’ll explore how varied elements, such as restful seating, aromatic herbs, pollinator-friendly flowers, tasty plants, relaxing sounds, soft leaves, art, and water features, can be woven together to create a beautiful, peaceful place even in this increasingly busy world.

With a focus on low-maintenance, site-specific design, you’ll gain tools to make a bespoke space that truly reflects the needs of those who use it. There will be time to discuss the design of your site, if you have one, looking at the space through the lens of permaculture. The heart of permaculture design is observation, getting to know the space and who is in it – including the practitioners, the patients, the plants and animals – and working with nature to create the right conditions for everyone to flourish.

The current mental health crisis is rising, with 30-40% of GP visits linked to mental health. Given that nature-based interventions are proven to be effective for improving depressive mood, reducing anxiety, improving positive affect, and reducing negative affect*, it makes sense to integrate nature-based options into your practice. In addition, some people who struggle to express themselves are able to use the metaphors of nature to explain what is going on for them. 

The role of nature connection in healthcare has never been more important. This course offers a practical and inspiring way to integrate permaculture design, ecopsychology, breath, movement, and green prescriptions into your work, supporting both practitioner wellbeing and client healing.

*Source Coventry et al (2021) Nature-based outdoor activities for mental and physical health: Systematic review and meta-analysis.