Standing under a 1000 year old yew tree at dawn, Rachel Cottam sees the birds waking up, the owls heading home, the mist rising out of the valley, and the vast expanse of sky slowly changing colour. She takes in the beauty of nature and reflects on its transformative powers—“the ‘healing’ that can come through connecting with ourselves, with nature, and with each other, which so easily becomes buried as we’re funnelled into the biomedical model,” she says.
Cottam, a GP, is a co-leader of mindfulness-nature connection retreats at the Coach House at the Sharpham Trust, near Totnes in Devon. Mindfulness is the cognitive act of being aware of the present moment: mindfulness practices might include mindful movement, mindfulness meditation, mindful walking, and extending mindfulness into everyday activities—for example, mindful gardening.
Time and time again Cottam has seen how nature’s powers have helped others, including clinicians. “Lots of doctors come to the retreat, some of whom have experienced very difficult issues in their lives, and it’s wonderful to watch how they let go of all that stress and exhaustion during their stay,” she says.
Back in 2019, Cottam was one of those doctors. She arrived at the 550 acre Sharpham estate for a short break from her work as a GP at St Peter’s Medical Centre in Brighton—serving a patient population with high levels of poverty, depression, and addiction. She hadn’t realised that her break would involve mindfulness practice and a day of silence.
“I texted my husband to say I’d made a terrible mistake,” she recalls. “But 24 hours later I was blown away by my experience at the retreat. It was all so powerful: the nature, the mindfulness, meditating, and living with the other people on the retreat.”
Her experience was so transformative that she took a course to teach mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT). In January she took on the role of a retreat leader for a year, returning to her family and the surgery in Brighton every third week, having annualised her hours. The role is unpaid (“a gift of service,” she says), but accommodation and food are provided, and she also receives dana—which comes from the Pali word for generosity, and which at the retreat means that people give what they can.
Rediscovering motivation
Cottam co-leads two types of retreats: one focused on nature and mindfulness, the other on wildlife discovery, which features foraging, as well as night and dawn walks. Numbers at the retreats vary from 12 to 18 people, who stay for four to six nights.
This November she led a nature and mindfulness focused retreat specifically for doctors—and she hopes to run more. She says, “It’s a cliché but true: doctors heal others and yet so often neglect themselves. I was moved to do this because it’s not only an offering of self-care to doctors who give so much, but also these retreats can add so much to a doctor’s clinical skills.”
The doctors’ retreats are about “rediscovering our deep motivation for what we do through connection with ourselves and each other,” she explains. “After working under the artificial light of hospitals and GP consulting rooms, they’re also an opportunity to reconnect with our relationship with nature. They’re about reclaiming the experience of joy and of being alive, which have so often been drained away by the pressures of our work. These retreats are basically a green prescription for ourselves.”
When holding the retreats, Cottam sometimes draws on her own clinical skills. “People who come on retreat often arrive carrying not insignificant levels of distress,” she says—“so the training I’ve had in psychiatry and in general practice is helpful, as well as my familiarity with the clinical side of mental health difficulties.” The skills she’s learnt from the retreats also benefit her patient consultations, as mindfulness helps her to “connect with patients’ humanity, to be able to hear and hold their stories.”
Lastly, she’s benefited personally from being “immersed in the most beautiful landscape for a whole year, seeing the four seasons play out” and having time to develop her own meditation practice. She says, “I’m able to hold difficulties when they arise—both personal and professional—in a calmer way.”
How to make the change
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Book a retreat somewhere beautiful to give you the opportunity to just “be” in nature.
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Online courses in mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) or mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) are available in the evenings if this is easier for you.
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Find a nearby tree that you can return to. Sit under it and really notice nature, such as the feel of the wind and the sounds of the birds.
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Try a brief “three step breathing space” exercise at the start of the day (or at the beginning or end of a clinic), on your own or with colleagues. This guided breathing space is one example: www.sharphamtrust.org/doctors