The 8th International Adventure Therapy Conference will be in Sydney, Australia this year, from the 28th of August to the 2nd of September.
I will be attending to catch up with colleagues, meet new colleagues, learn new things about my field in the international sphere, and share a presentation on the work I have been involved with walking one to one with people over the last five years, entitled: Moving Right Along – You and Me, and All of Cosmology.
I will also be co-facilitating the pre-conference workshop Bush Adventure Therapy 101. https://internationaladventuretherapy.org/8iatc/8iatc-session/bat-101/
The abstract for my presentation:
Moving Right Along – You and Me, and All of Cosmology.
One to one walk and talk adventure therapy in the outdoors, observations from five years of practice.
For the past five working years I have been exploring a modality of adventure therapy whereby I have been working with clients one to one in outdoor settings in the environs close to our local capital city of Hobart in Tasmania. These environs range from paved walkways through to genuine wilderness that is part of our South-West Wilderness that connects with the edges of our city.
This paper gives a qualitative description and discussion of my observations from working therapeutically with my clients.
In this paper I look at the influences specific to the particular landscape that we choose to walk in for the ninety minute session time we usually share together. In conjunction with this I describe the therapeutic strategies I typically employ to effectively activate a session. A key decision in the choice of strategy is how well this strategy meshes with my approach in general, and the mood of the client, the landscape, and myself on a particular day.
I describe and investigate the confluences of city and bush, land and river, client and counsellor, that are the dynamic therapyscape of these AT sessions.
I look at this work through the viewpoints of mindfulness and emersion, and the ideas and reality of right action and the transition from innocence to wisdom, not knowing to maturation.
I have included a synopsis of my clinical findings.
My conclusions are a combination of qualitative observations, the clinical findings mentioned, and a curious unexpected thread whereby my learning’s from our collective history of successful therapies seem to come spontaneously into play.
The conference will be at Stanwell Tops, near Stanwell Park, New South Wales.
Nick Hall Adventure Therapy 