Hiring a Certified Nature & Forest Therapy Guide is important because we have extensive and specialized training that teaches us how to facilitate a meaningful, ethical, and safe experience in nature. We are required to maintain currency in Wilderness First Aide. Some of us are additionally certified, like myself, in Mental Health First Aide. It is a trauma informed practice, so nothing is forced, and everything is optional. I am also required to carry liability insurance. Our training provides us with the skills and knowledge to guide participants through a standard sequence that helps the body to slowly shift from a sympathetic nervous system activation (fight or flight mode) to a parasympathetic nervous system activation (rest and digest mode). Certified guides are trained in the research behind the scientific benefits of spending time in nature, and how to incorporate that knowledge to assist in guiding participants in engaging with nature through all of their senses. Ideally, certified guides are trained to have a deep knowledge of the natural environment and local ecosystems where they guide, which allows them to further adapt to specific nature conditions as needed, further ensuring safe and relevant experiences for those that they guide. A certified guide also has an understanding of the diverse needs of those being guided, and understands how to adjust the experience to meet those needs. In some states, guides are required to be registered with the state as an Outfitter Guide.

On a personal note, my style of guiding is also informed by years of training and experience as a Wildland Fire Professional. The importance of Risk Management, Situational Awareness, and the role that restoring human relationship with fire in the west can play in restoration and regeneration, not just on the land, but also within communities. Also, my experience as a Cultural Practitioner though a lifetime of participation in traditional ways of seeing and healing in intertribal circles of learning, Danza Azteca Mexica, and sweatlodge ceremony, have enhanced my perspective on what it means to be in relationship to land and place. I have been very fortunate to receive teachings from Japanese Shinto Priest, Hiroji Seikiguchi, with whom I have shared a ceremonial partnership for more than 20 years. Each new level of training and life experience has provided me with invaluable skills and perspective. Becoming a certified guide through the Association of Nature & Forest Therapy basically gave me another context within which to further explore these understandings with others. The space is held in such a way as to welcome those coming from a broad cross section of life, with honor and respect for all languages, forms of expression, ways of being, and of seeing. Deepening connection to nature can open the door to your own re-remembering, in your own way, that this is not new knowledge, but ancient knowledge that it rooted in Ancestral Knowledge all over the world, and that has been passed down, in one form or another, by teachers and elders of the past.