What a Rewilding Week taught me about the body, belonging, and repair

Let the land lead: somatic reflections from a Rewilding Week in Glen Affric

I met the group on the concourse of Inverness train station, volunteers with rucksacks, waterproofs, and quiet anticipation gathered alongside our two guides. We were strangers then, loosely stitched together by a shared intention: to help restore a part of the Scottish Highlands through rewilding work with Trees for Life.

What I didn’t yet know was that the week ahead would offer more than conservation. It would become a lesson in listening, in humility, in what it means to be held by land and others.

As we left the city and its roads behind, our mini bus (filled with people, luggage, plants, tools and food) eventually followed a winding single-track path through Forestry Commission land. This was part of the Affric-Kintail Way, a long-distance walk that traces some of the most remote landscapes in the UK. The road ran high above the River Affric, curling between hills that seemed to lean in, cradling the valley below, passing Loch Beinn a’ Mheadhain first and Loch Affric after, before reaching the bothy where we were going to stay for the week.

My eyes welled up. The view was like a postcard, only real, alive, held in motion by wind and water and light.

I had been meaning to visit Glen Affric back in 2019, but life took a different turn, through a pandemic, a recurring knee injury and a badly sprained ankle. And so, arriving now felt emotional. Not just a long-awaited visit, but a kind of return. To be here, not only to witness the landscape but to plant trees in it, to touch the soil and be part of its future, felt quietly significant.

This wasn’t my first time planting trees. Earlier that year, I had joined a one-day volunteer project on the Isle of Gigha, organised by the local island ranger. We planted native saplings together, our hands muddy, conversations unfolding easily between strangers. Before that, as part of my work as a wilderness therapist, I had taken young people into the Cairngorms on therapeutic journeys with the Wilderness Foundation. We always dedicated one day to conservation work alongside local rangers to give back to the land we stayed on, to learn its rhythms and stories beyond the human ones.

But this Rewilding Week in Glen Affric was different. It wasn’t just a day or a gesture. It was immersive. Communal. A full-bodied experience of living alongside land and people with a shared purpose. And as the days unfolded, it became clear that it wasn’t only about planting trees.

It became a deeper remembering of what it means to belong to a place, to be shaped by others, to let nature show us how repair truly happens.

Let Nature do what it already knows

One of the first things I learned during the week is how much of conservation is not about doing, but about undoing. We are not here to fix nature. We are here to stop interfering long enough for nature to remember what it already knows.

There’s something deeply humbling in that. So often, in both ecological and therapeutic work, we assume it’s our job to intervene, to direct, to correct, to guide things back into place. But what if our role is quieter? What if healing doesn’t come from controlling the process but from tending the conditions that make regeneration possible?

In Glen Affric, I was reminded that nature knows how to repair. It always has. What it needs from us is not mastery, but patience. Not innovation, but care. Our job is to mend the damage (pull out the invasive species, mend the fences that allow deer to overgraze, plant what was lost) and then step back. Give it space. Let the land lead.

I’ve seen something similar in somatic work. The body, like the land, holds its own intelligence. So often, when clients arrive in a state of overwhelm, freeze, or grief, the instinct is to try to make it better. But the real work, the slower work, is to be with. To make space. To trust that the body knows how to heal, if only we can stop bracing against it. Healing doesn’t mean returning to how things were. It means finding new ways to live, rooted in what’s still possible.

In this way, rewilding is not so different from therapy. Both ask us to meet what has been harmed, not with a need to control the outcome, but with a willingness to stay close. To be alongside, with patience. To believe that life wants to come back.

An ecosystem knows more than its individual parts

Every day, between planting a tree and a shared laugh, someone would shout, “Look, an eagle!” I’d tilt my head, catch the silhouette gliding above us, and nod before rushing for the pair of binoculars circulating among the group. “Amazing,” I’d say, thinking I’d seen it already in that same spot. Instead, one of the guides shared that we actually saw three different ones.

That moment stayed with me. I had looked, but I hadn’t seen. I hadn’t paid the kind of attention that can tell one thing from another, an attention that notices difference and recognises presence for what it truly is. It reminded me how much we need others to help us interpret the world. To point out what we miss. To offer the memory, the knowledge, the story behind the landscape. We need people who can say, “this used to be a pine forest,” or “the deer numbers rose when the predators disappeared.”

We need those who remember, who can pass the knowledge on until it becomes collective memory, heritage.

In the same way, the week in Glen Affric was a quiet education in interdependence. Not just ecological interdependence but human interdependence. When someone was too tired to dig, another person stepped in. When someone forgot the sunblock (in all fairness, no one would predict sunny hot days like the ones we had at the end of March in the Highlands), someone else packed extra. We also shared jokes and stories. There was care and interest, and many small, shared acts that made things possible.

There were moments when I couldn’t do it all. Moments my body ached or I felt far from myself. But the community picked up the pieces for me. In that, I remembered something I often say to clients: you don’t have to do this alone. And maybe that’s what ecosystems teach us most clearly: no one part holds the whole. It’s the relationships between things that make the system thrive.

Memory is a form of restoration

To restore a landscape, we need more than labour. We need memory.

Our guides didn’t just show us tree-planting techniques. They showed us how to listen. To look beyond the surface. They could stand on a hillside and tell us why some trees had stopped growing at a certain height due to deer feasting on young shoots before they had a chance to grow taller. They could predict the arrival of ticks by noticing the presence of centipeds in the area. They could see and recognise the stool of small mammals on rocks, lichens growing everywhere, where I would have only just walked by without giving it a second look. What sounded like “just a forest” to me became a layered narrative in their presence: of wildfires, of regrowth, of restoration shaped by many hands over many years. 

I lost so many fascinating stories because I did not pay attention.

They reminded us of volunteers who came before, of the bare hillsides they once worked on, of the slow shifts that add up over time. Their knowledge didn’t live in textbooks, it lived in the land and in their stories. That kind of memory anchors us. It allows us to understand not just where we are, but who we’re standing alongside, and what we’re carrying forward.

I was reminded of this again during an online workshop I attended a few weeks before, Preserving a Place: Gaelic Place Names & Climate Change, run by Glasgow Zine Library. There, I learnt that traces of ecological knowledge still live in place names through the Gaelic language, one of Scotland’s indigenous tongues. Place names, passed down over generations, hold stories of the land’s features, its uses, and its transformations. They remind us that memory isn’t always linear or visible, it can be embedded in language, in culture, in the very way we name what surrounds us.

In somatic work, memory lives in the body in a similar way. Sometimes, it shows up as a tension, a sensation, a tear that rises unexpectedly. We may not always have words, but the body remembers. And like the land, those memories can become part of a healing process, not erased, but re-integrated, reshaped through relationship, presence, and time.

Just as the forest holds the imprint of those who walked there before, so do we. The memory of care, of attention, of being met in our vulnerability. These become our heritage, too.

Hope is a communal act

We cooked together, cleaned together, paddled canoes together. We shared the cold of evening plunges and the warmth of tea brewed on the stove, a pizza night to celebrate my fortieth that will pass in history as one of the most disastrous and fun ones! There was something quietly radical about it all. Not just the work we were doing but the way we were doing it: side by side, without fanfare, with the understanding that if one person couldn’t do it, someone else would. Not out of obligation but care.

The human body works like this, too. When one part is injured or tired, others adapt, compensate, hold the weight for a while. It’s not about perfection, it’s about the system supporting itself through relationship. A collective regulation. An embodied form of resilience.

That week, conservation began to feel like a kind of somatic activism. Not the noisy kind, but the felt kind, the kind you do with your hands in the soil, with shared meals, with presence. The kind that acknowledges: I can’t do it all, but I can be part of something that does.

After four days, I learned I might not be the best at planting, but maybe I was better at screeffing soil. Clearing and loosening the ground, preparing it for roots to take hold. It’s not the main act and it’s not pretty or wholesome (it’s definitely quite hard core and sweaty), but essential. And it reminded me that sometimes, finding your place takes patience. Sometimes the role that fits you isn’t the one you expect, but it’s there, waiting to be discovered.

Hope, then, is not just an individual feeling, it’s a communal act. Something we create in motion, in companionship, in rhythm with others.

You don’t have to join a cause to fix it. You can join because it helps you remember what it feels like to be alive and connected. Because it allows you to practice a kind of hope that has roots. Not abstract or idealised, but muddy, real, and shared.

Conclusion

I went to Glen Affric to plant trees. I came back with something less tangible but equally rooted: a felt sense of being part of a living system. Not just ecologically, but emotionally, relationally, somatically.

These landscapes, the ones we walk, the ones we carry inside, don’t thrive in isolation. They require care, memory, attention. They regenerate through relationship. And so do we.

In therapy, as in rewilding, healing isn’t something we impose. It’s something we make space for. We repair what’s been damaged, we notice what’s already growing, and we protect the conditions that allow life to return. Sometimes that means doing the work, sometimes it means resting while others do it for us.

What I felt most strongly, as I left the bothy and returned to the train station where it all began, was not a sense of completion, but continuity. Like the land itself, I was still in process. Still learning. Still softening to the truth that we heal, like ecosystems do, in connection.

This is how I understand mental health, too. Not as a fixed state or destination, but as something relational, responsive, alive. A system shaped by care, memory, attention. A landscape that can be tended, not alone, but together.

As you reflect on your own relationship with nature, I invite you to take a small step toward creating your own community. Join a local gardening or horticulture project, organise self-led walks in urban parks to observe the world around you, or perhaps digest articles about nature (I recommend Resurgence and Ecology). These small acts of connection can help us remember that we are part of something much larger, something that heals together.