Inclusivity & healing with nature
Description
Emily’s presentation will draw on an interesting and adventurous life. Growing up on farmlands, along rivers, and in mountains of New Zealand. Walking with lions and playing with cheetahs in Africa. Humanitarian clowning with Patch Adams (the famous clown doctor) and 111 other loving clowns in the Amazon. Summer camps for kids, teenagers and youths, in a rainforest by the beach across 33 summers.
Throughout life and increasingly now Emily faces major challenges with psychical health, mental and emotional illness, financial and housing insecurity, social stigma and discrimination and various forms of abuse relating to being a transgender woman.
Experiences that help carry Emily in recent years are mental health recovery camps that are nature and adventure based. They bring together people with psychosocial disabilities and student nurses doing a mental health placement. During this time the nurses learn to see the participants as valued, interesting and diverse humans, rather than theories, diagnoses and case studies.
Emily will have you laughing and crying, with your heart touched and your spirit inspired, as you gain understanding of people who face multiple challenges and yet deeply need connection and healing in nature. Outdoor health is for everyone, not just able-bodied, well-resourced and mainstream people.
Emme Krystelle
she/her
Lived Experience Advocate
Emily lives on Awabakal Country (by Lake Macquarie, NSW) and finds nature connection with loving inclusive others very healing and nurturing. In her earlier years Emily immersed in experiential training at university and beyond in ecological psychology, eco-spirituality, deep ecology, social ecology, and transpersonal art therapy.
There are many obstacles that now inhibit her from experiencing nature connection such as illness and disabilities, age, low socio-economic status and discrimination for being a transgender woman.
Emily has found the Outdoor Health Australia events and Rainbow Group to be safe sanctuaries, and enriching, experiential learning communities of healing, involvement and belonging.