Teaching team

Nicole Worrica, Suzanne Worrica, Beth Collier, Dominique Bikaba

Our courses are run by passionate and experienced teachers, who are skilled nature guides with experience of woodland living. Our therapist trainers have many nature allied client hours.  We share knowledge and skills supporting your own discovery and learning through communion with nature as co-teacher.

We provide you with immersive and experiential learning experiences, bringing to life relational practice and awareness of community in and with nature.

Beth Collier

Course Leader and Director of the Nature Therapy School

Beth Collier (M.A., MBACP), is a Nature Allied Psychotherapist and supervisor, seeing all her clients in natural settings working in allegiance with nature to explore our emotional worlds. She started to work with clients within nature in 2012 and since 2014 has only offered nature-based sessions.  Beth has theorised our relationships with nature from an applied psychotherapeutic perspective, developing Nature Allied Psychotherapy as a modality of practice for ongoing client work. Her forthcoming book Nature Allied Psychotherapy; Exploring Relationships with Self, Others and Nature will be published by Routledge. Beth has a B.A. (Joint hons.) in Comparative Religion and Social Anthropology, an M.A. in Psychotherapy and Counselling and an M.A. in Human Rights.

Beth is a naturalist and bushcraft practitioner with an interest in traditional ecological knowledge and ethnopsychology. She enjoys natural navigation, tracking and basketry and has experience of wilderness living in Scotland and Sweden. Beth has a certificate in Advanced Wilderness First Aid. She has a life long passion for nature stemming from a rural upbringing.

Beth is the Founder of Wild in the City, an organisation supporting the well-being of urban residents  through connection with nature, offering experiences in bushcraft, natural history and ecotherapy; using the skills of our ancestors to nurture a deeper connection with the natural world and a sense of belonging to communities past and present.

Beth has a particular interest in supporting people of colour in finding their place in UK natural settings and creates opportunities for the representation of black leadership in nature.

Her work has produced ethnographies of our intimate, emotional relationships with nature. This includes ethnography of disconnection and it’s impact on the development of cultural attitudes which shun nature; experiences of people of colour in nature in UK settings and white attitudes to black presence in nature.

Beth regularly speaks at conferences and seminars on nature and well-being, from psychotherapeutic and anthropological perspectives including recent presentations at the Smithsonian (Washington D.C.), Tate Modern, Association of Social Anthropologists and Friends of the Earth. Her practice and research has been featured by Therapy for Black Girls, BBC’s Cities: Nature’s New Wild – Ep3 Outcasts, BBC CountryfileBBC London News, NBC Today, BBC London Radio, ITV News, ITV Lorraine and MTV Timberland Presents Concrete Green with Loyle Carner.

Beth is a Fellow of the National Association for Environmental Educators, a Fellow of the London Environmental Educators Forum, a member of Natural England’s Nature Recovery Network management group, and a visiting lecturer at the Wellbeing Faculty of the Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education. She is a former Trustee of the National Park City Foundation.

Beth established the Nature Therapy School to provide high quality training to psychotherapists and outdoor professionals interested in collaborating with nature in their work supporting emotional health. She has run trainings in Nature Allied Psychotherapy since 2014.

Beth worked in the human rights field for 16 years, the last 8 of which she ran a research consultancy working in partnership with UNHCR and was commissioned as an international expert on gender based persecution. Between 2008 – 2010 she was Research and Policy Manager at the Mental Health Providers Forum, leading four panels of experts in a review of methodologies used by NICE in the evaluation of the effectiveness of psychological therapies from scientific, philosophical and service user perspectives.  She is co-author of Recovery and resilience: African, African Caribbean and South Asian women’s narratives of recovering from mental distress, London, 2011, Mental Health Foundation and Survivor Research and is author of Country of Origin Information and Women; Researching Gender and Persecution within the Context of Asylum and Human Rights Claims, London, 2007, Asylum Aid.

Beth is a regular speaker on nature and health from psychotherapeutic and anthropological perspectives, see bethcollier.co.uk

Suzanne Worrica, UKCP Reg

Course Facilitator

Suzanne Worrica is an experienced Gestalt therapy and nature allied practitioner, trainer and facilitator. She practices psychotherapy in nature, enjoys bushcraft and is training in hike leadership with Wild in the City. She recently walked/camped the South Downs Way and enjoys getting outdoors in all weathers. Suzanne is also Gestalt trainer at Re-vision and is an independent trainer and facilitator. 

She has an interest in exploring where Nature Allied therapy meets contemporary Gestalt practice, neuroscience and the mind-body relationship. Current areas of research are relational trauma, intersections of identity and how the wider socio-political field shows up in the therapy room.  She designs and delivers workshops for counselling/psychotherapy training organisations including on themes of identity and belonging, race and difference, relational dynamics and embodied anxiety. 

Suzanne has extensive experience in the field of mental health including service delivery at Kensington & Chelsea Mind with Central & North West NHS Trust and several years working in social prescribing. She has facilitated Gestalt personal development groups at the Gestalt Centre London.

Suzanne holds a Diploma in Nature Allied Psychotherapy, a Masters and Post graduate Diploma in Gestalt Therapy and a Masters in Writing for Performance and regularly invests in continuing professional development.

  

Nicole Worrica

Course Facilitator

Nicole has extensive experience in the NHS, private practice, as a nature allied practitioner, and as a senior associate with Altum Health. She is a registered Integrative psychotherapist and supervisor with the UKCP and as an arts psychotherapist with the HCPC.

She trained as a psychotherapist with the Institute for Arts In Therapy and Education (IATE) and has a Post Graduate Diploma as a Clinical Supervisor (Minster Centre). She enjoys supervising and collaborating with students, psychotherapists, psychologists, and organisations to think about their work with clients.

Nicole completed the Nature Allied psychotherapy diploma and integrates her therapeutic work in nature with the principles of a relational, inclusive, creative, and embodied approach

Nicole values the role of nature as a non-judgmental co-therapist to support a client’s autonomous discoveries. She advocates for the regulatory and healing capacity of nature particularly when working with relational and traumatic narratives. 

Nicole is a tutor at a variety of Masters level Counselling and Psychotherapy trainings. Her work integrates the connectedness of the brain, mind, body, and spirit grounded in the wisdom of Indigenous practice and contemporary neuroscience. Nicole’s stance is active in exploring how the dynamics of power can affect our relationships in terms of our class, culture, faith, neurodiversity, gender, transgender, sexual orientation, disabilities, and age.

Her specialisms include:

  • Integrating the construct of ‘race’ within the academic curriculum – Restoring, Rupturing and Remembering (Institute for Arts In Therapy and Education). 
  • Harnessing The Imagination and Therapeutic Stories – Workshops for Women of Colour (Bespoke).
  • Eating Disorders, Relational Trauma and Attachment (The Minster Centre, Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education, Anglia Ruskin University).
  • Practical Skills for Working with Trauma (The Minster Centre).
  • Exploring the Compassionate and Critical Voice (Altum Health). 

Prior to training as a psychotherapist, Nicole worked in the field of mental health, education, and community arts for 18 years as a forum theatre director and an applied drama tutor. She enjoys working on intergenerational projects and values the role of artistic practices that document forgotten histories. Nicole is currently in the process of developing an artistic book club.

Dominique Bikaba

Associate Lecturer

Dominique Bikaba is Executive Director of Strong Roots, a conservation NGO working in the Democratic Republic of Congo to protect Great Apes and their Congo Basin Forest habitat for the benefit of humans and animals. Dominique received the Whitley Award in 2018, in recognition of his innovative community based conservation prioritising indigenous knowledge and concerns.

Dominique’s family lived in what is now Kahuzi-Biega National Park, he learnt about wildlife from his grandmother who would take him into the forest from which she was evicted in the 70’s under the banner of conservation. The area is now under threat from illegal mining, and ill judged western led conservation models which exclude the Batwa Pygmys who live there. In contrast local chiefs are providing protection by allocating their ancestral land to extend wildlife corridors which support biodiversity and the Gorillas, using traditional ecological knowledge within a model of community based conservation, which also protects humans from nature loss and emphasises the cultural value of biodiversity.