Our nature therapy groups operate through various practices:

Life Skills of Earth Cultures

During the hunter-gatherer period, humands developed life skills that enabled attentive, rich, safe, and healing connections with nature. These ancient practices provide the foundation and inspiration for our group excursions, which focus on teaching survival tools and fostering healthy tribal group dynamics. Through shelter building, we explore questions of place, belonging, and home. Through survival skills, we address questions of existence, resilience, and cooperation.

Skills taught include: fire making, wild plant foraging for food and medicine, camping and natural building, navigation and orientation, shelter construction, camouflage techniques, water collection and purification, earth building, cooking and baking over campfires, field food preservation, carving wooden eating utensils, hunting tool production, and more.

Art in Nature

The intersection of art’s healing power with natural spaces create opportunities for groups to create together in the open, connecting deeply with both individual personal nature and the group’s collective embrace. Art in nature groups facilitate meaningful interaction while participants learn various artistic techniques and create with materials gathered on-site.

ODT – Outdoor Training

This group activity uses task-oriented and game-based approaches to examine and improve teamwork in natural settings. Participants navigate a mission arena with multiple stations, each presenting a unique challenge.

On the personal level, the activities reveal skills such as responsibility, initiative, self-image, leadership ability, and teamwork capacity. On the group level, participants develop cooperation, planning, time management, inclusivity, patience, mutual support, trust, and respect.

The supportive group atmosphere encourages effort and personal growth, providing opportunities for participants to discover their potential, experience success, and develop a sense of capability alongside group skills. Each activity concludes with a reflection circle for sharing experiences, internalizing lessons, and learning from the process.

Therapeutic Agriculture

Handcraft and working the land create a deep, healthy connection to Mother Earth, reflecting cycles of growth and change while preserving the ancient practice of agriculture. The Ye’elim Center, in partnership with the Community Gardens Project, facilitates agricultural work groups for people with special needs at Ein Yael, with the philosophy of “planting in order to grow.”

These handicraft activities encourage personal empowerment and independence as part of holistic body-mind healing. The process emphasizes materials recycling and water conservation for growing organic food and medicinal plants, while teaching participants about their special properties and uses.