The Wild Minds Podcast

In this 1st episode of Season 12, Restoring the Occupation of Childhood, I’m joined by Angela Hanscom, a paediatric occupational therapist, Author of Balanced and Barefoot.
She is also the founder of TimberNook that programmes designed to immerse children in sensory-rich, authentic play in nature and are found in over 51 locations in 4 countries!
Angela’s work invites us to look again at the rising challenges we’re seeing in children today - anxiety, attention difficulties and disconnection, and to ask a different question.
What if these aren’t problems within the child… but reflections of the environments we’ve created around them?
In this episode, we explore what children truly need to flourish - and how outdoor play, movement, and freedom are not extras, but essential foundations for healthy development.
Topics include:
In this episode, we explore what children truly need to flourish - and how outdoor play, movement, and freedom are not extras, but essential foundations for healthy development.
A “flourishing child” is not defined by academic success, but by their ability to adapt, regulate, take risks, and keep going when things are hard.
The environments children spend most of their time in are shaping their development - often more than we realise.
Outdoor environments offer rich, multi-sensory experiences that support brain organisation and sensory integration.
Uneven ground, natural sounds, and changing conditions constantly challenge balance, awareness, and attention.
Many modern children are significantly under-moving, with long periods of sitting impacting posture, attention, and overall development.
Movement - especially spinning, climbing, and going upside down - is essential for developing the vestibular system and the ability to focus.
When children are restricted from movement, they often appear fidgety or inattentive - but this may reflect unmet developmental needs rather than behavioural issues.
Risky play helps children develop internal risk assessment, confidence, and safety awareness - overprotection can have the opposite effect.
Play is the primary “occupation” of childhood and the most meaningful way children develop physically, socially, and emotionally.
Child-led, unstructured play supports executive functioning, problem-solving, emotional regulation, and social skills.
Outdoor play offers far greater therapeutic benefit than controlled indoor environments due to its complexity, freedom, and full-body engagement.
A major barrier to children’s play is adult fear - often driven more by social perception than actual risk
Reducing demands and giving children time and space outdoors can significantly support mental health and reduce anxiety.
Restoring outdoor play is not just about individual children — it has the potential to shift culture, education, and how we understand development

Shownotes:
https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-89-restoring-the-occupation-of-childhood/
Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com
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In this final episode of Season 11, Marina reflects on ceremony at a seasonal threshold, where science, spirituality and everyday life meet.
As the light shifts toward spring in the North and autumn in the South, this episode explores what keeps us well - personally and collectively - and asks whether we are living as passengers or participants in our time.
Topics include:
Living at a threshold - Spring Equinox in the North, autumn descent in the South - renewal and death side by side.
For most of human history, ceremony aligned us with cycles - watching the Pleiades (Seven Sisters) rise, noticing light, temperature, migration - remembering our place in the unfolding.
Science is not naïve materialism - it studies what we cannot see - fields, probabilities, dark matter - but it asks different questions from spirituality.
Science reduces suffering through medicine and understanding; ritual, myth, art and community help us face death, grief, forgiveness and meaning.
The real tension is not science versus spirituality, but what happens when any system claims exclusive truth.
Health requires biology, psychology, belonging and existential depth - mechanism alone is not enough, meaning alone is not enough.
The language of “energy” and “spirit” carries different meanings - measurable in physics, experiential in lived reality - clarity matters.
Ceremony as intention, beauty and invitation - not personal power, but participation
Ritual as ordinary acts infused with meaning - gratitude before eating, how we begin the day, how we hold a room, how we tend a conversation
Moving from I to We - rites of passage, maturation, community witnessing change
At seasonal thresholds something must die - a habit, a story, a way of leading, a way of consuming
In a time of climate emergency and confused leadership, we are invited not to be passengers but participants - small daily choices as a form of ceremony
Leadership without domination - strength without humiliation - integrating science without losing reverence

Show Notes:
https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-88-ceremony-science-and-the-sacred/
Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com
Please Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts
If you have enjoyed today's episode, please consider rating and reviewing my show!
This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!
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Sitting by the fire with Annie Spencer, we explore ceremony as lived relationship - with spirit, story, blood, grief, and the long arc from initiation to eldership - and what it means to keep dreaming a life-affirming world in times that feel increasingly divided.
Topics include:
Sitting by the fire together becomes a doorway into relationship - gratitude not as a nicety, but as a way of remembering life is alive, and not guaranteed.
Ceremony, for Annie, starts with intention and beauty - not “performing a ritual,” but making a space that might genuinely invite presence from beyond the purely human.
Fire is treated as a being with its own kind of aliveness - honoured, spoken to, and offered things, as a practice of not taking life for granted.
A simple daily practice can be enough: choose a time, choose a place, return again and again until something responds - an “altar” as an anchor for attention.
This way of knowing doesn’t sit easily inside modern culture - it can feel like being pulled between realities, and that tension can be exhausting.
Annie names both the fascination and the danger: exploring other realities without a well-trodden path can unground people - tradition can be a rope that helps you return.
Stories shape what we believe is possible - we live inside the story we tell about our lives, and the same event becomes different “truths” depending on who is telling it.
Dreaming isn’t escapism: in times of political fear and widening authoritarianism, Annie suggests we can either feed a reality by fighting it constantly, or step back and hold a different dream with strength.
Birth and menstruation are framed as everyday ceremonies - women making “a rich nest for life” each month, and the radical possibility of honouring life-giving blood rather than normalising bloodshed.
Rites of passage matter because adolescence is a “loose” time - when identity isn’t fixed yet - and a strong experience of belonging, mystery, and beauty can orient a young person for life.
Eldership isn’t a label you earn at menopause - it can take decades of turning toward death, letting go of dominance, and learning humility, until you can truly hold community.
The elder’s offering is presence, acceptance, and perspective - holding what others can’t bear alone, sharing stories with teachings (without “you should”), and making space for ceremony and healing.
The conversation keeps circling back to one core truth: life is relationship and reciprocity - giving and being given to — and even death is framed as the final gift back into the living system.

Shownotes:
https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-87-ceremony-and-eldership
Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com
Please Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts
If you have enjoyed today's episode, please consider rating and reviewing my show!
This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!
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In this episode, I step into what I’m calling the season of the amateur - asking big questions without claiming expertise. I explore how medicine is shaped by culture and worldview, what “evidence” really means, and how different systems - from biomedicine to Ayurveda - understand causation, illness and health.
This isn’t a rejection of modern medicine - it’s an attempt to widen the lens. To ask what keeps us well, not only what makes us ill. And to consider whether we can hold scientific rigour and relational depth in the same conversation - without collapsing into superstition, and without dismissing mystery.
Topics include:
Gratitude for what keeps us well: walking, breathing, rest, friendship, safety, purpose and for the years of disciplined study that form a psychiatrist: medical school, clinical rotations, exams, and over six years of specialist training.
What counts as knowledge in medicine - and who decides? Holding expertise and personal sovereignty in the same frame.
Medicine across civilisations - Babylon, Egypt, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Greece - each emerging from a worldview, none “primitive,” all culturally shaped.
The rise of the biomedical model - anatomy, cells, pathogens, biochemistry and its extraordinary success in acute care and life-saving intervention.
Evidence-based medicine and the power of Randomised Controlled Trials - what they measure brilliantly and what they struggle to capture.
Psychiatry’s measurement dilemma - symptom clusters, self-reported scales, and the question of whether symptom reduction equals flourishing.
The placebo effect, expectation, relationship and meaning - what actually creates change?
Ayurveda as the “science of life” - balance, prevention, daily rhythms, and cultivating health rather than only treating disease.
Green prescriptions and nature-based practice - bridging biomedical legitimacy with relational, ecological models of wellbeing.
Safeguarding, discernment and humility - widening causation without abandoning rigour, and asking what it truly means to be well.

Shownotes:
https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-86-saving-lives-and-cultivating-health/
Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com
Please Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts
If you have enjoyed today's episode, please consider rating and reviewing my show!
This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!
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In this episode I’m joined by Dr Kanchan, an Ayurvedic doctor trained in India, to explore a radically different way of understanding health, not only as something we fix when it breaks, but as a lifelong relationship between body, mind, senses, environment, and meaning.
This is a conversation about prevention rather than crisis, and about what becomes possible when health is understood as a living, relational process rather than a purely medical one.
Topics include:
Ayurveda is described as a “science of life,” concerned with the whole arc of living - from conception to death - not just the treatment of disease
Health is understood as balance within the body, the mind, and the environment, while illness is a sign that something has fallen out of sync
Western allopathic medicine and Ayurveda are not in conflict; they serve different purposes, with acute medicine vital in emergencies and Ayurveda focused on prevention and long-term wellbeing
The body is seen as intelligent, with healing emerging when the right conditions are restored rather than imposed from outside
Ayurveda treats people as individuals, not categories, taking into account constitution, diet, climate, place, habits, and family patterns
The five elements and three doshas are not rigid “types,” but ways of understanding movement, digestion, transformation, and stability within a person
Ayurveda is framed as a life science rather than only a medical science, with protecting the health of the healthy as its first priority
Humans are not placed above nature but understood as part of it, with personal health inseparable from the health of the living world
The senses are described as powerful gateways shaping the mind, with overuse, underuse, or misuse contributing to imbalance and anxiety
Daily and seasonal rhythms — how we eat, rest, move, and attend — are presented as foundations for mental steadiness and resilience
Purpose and inner alignment matter, with illness sometimes arising when actions drift away from a person’s deeper values or moral compass
The invitation is not to adopt another system wholesale, but to widen our understanding of health, hold multiple ways of knowing, and remember that care, balance, and relationship sit at the heart of wellbeing

Shownotes:
https://theoutdoorteacher.com/podcasts/episode-85-what-ayurveda-can-teach-us/
Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com
Please Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts
If you have enjoyed today's episode, please consider rating and reviewing my show!
This really helps me to spread the word to more people like you, and to empower more people to take their practice outdoors!
Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then let me know what you loved most about the episode!
Also, if you haven’t done so already, "follow" the podcast, as if you’re not following, there’s a good chance you’ll miss out.